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bitedownme · 2 months ago

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Pt 1: Dumb and Horny

So, as a basis: I don't think there would've been much, if any, information on Dragonic descendants or hybrids by the time Yharim came to be.

It would've been information that the dragon's would've kept to themselves, out of justifiable fear of someone taking advantage of their kin. This, unfortunately, had the unintended side effect of Yharim not knowing he has heats.

Yharon would know. By scent more than anything else. To the outside, it simply seemed as a period of a few weeks where the Godseeker was more violent and reactive. Both in the thumb he had over his city, and the sword he kept pointed in the direction of the gods he sought to annihilate.

And even if Yharon wouldn't have necessarily approved he would've understood that it was more productive to turn that energy into something useful.

Conveniently, Yharon would've assumed that not only did Yharim know he had heats (because what adult dragon descendant didn't?) but that he already had everything sorted out.

Yharim did not. He was under the assumption that the once or twice a year where he was inexplicably more pissed off at everyone and everything was some sort of hellish lovechild between his grief surfacing again, his normal anxiety, and whatever was going wrong on the front lines or in his city.

Whatever it was, it aided his reputation at the time, so he paid no mind to the medics trying to do more tests because more than a few of his levels were wonky.

(Side note, but related: I do think Yharim has NASTY dysmorphia a la other-kin. The longer the war goes on, the smaller and frailer he feels. It's nonsensical, really. He knows he's one of the strongest in the world. But... he keeps finding himself wanting to stretch limbs he doesn't have. Wanting to puff up and spread wings to silence a chamber full of arrogant diplomats; wanting to grab something falling with a lashing tail. He yearns, with a part of his soul and mind that knows he should be bigger, for flight. To spit fire. He might even try to defang or declaw himself if he stares at himself for too long. It's an instinctive, all consuming sense of duress. Something is wrong with his body, and maybe, just maybe, if he tear off the broken pieces, they'll regrow as they should be instead of as they are. It's then he decides to alter his armor to make it easier to wear at all times- to silence such thoughts.)

This continues for more than a century. Until blood he's spilled begins to fill his chest and root in his ribs, weighing heavier and heavier. But he's built such a routine, such a reputation, that he simply alters the direction of his monstrous attention and energy.

And, for a moment, it works. Then, from the dust, ash, and blood of his conquest, rises someone new. Someone different.

Someone who, unlike him, is still blessed with the capacity for change. Blessed to have options; to see where his path leads, so that she might not fall down the same route.

Ire translates, almost directly, to wrath. And she is wrathful. She is violent. She is capable of strength and so much more and because she is strong, people flock to her. For protection, because there are few things she can't kill. For guidance, because even if she doesn't know, she will find someone who does.

In many ways, Ire succeeded where he immediately failed. For while she is angry, and while she is, admittedly, mostly teeth, there's still immense room inside her for love, and compassion, and that gentle nature that the Tyrant abandoned so very long ago.

He guides her, to the best of his abilities, and he finds himself desperate to know her. What makes her tick, what makes her think. How she thinks and how she decides how to act.

She doesn't think but he thinks too much so he assigned that another blessing in disguise and moved on.

Yharim, for the longest time, doesn't know why her. He's starved himself of what he needed for so long it takes several years post their battle for him to actually manage to figure it out: she ticks enough of the boxes for his dragonic impulses and habits to read as a good partner.

More than that, the dragonic part of him seems to be under the assumption that they're already bonded, even if he's able to rationally think of a dozen and a half steps they both need to take before even considering that.

Unfortunately, when you spend so long running on fumes and are suddenly met with times of plenty, one's body does some... interesting and unexpected things. He's able to sleep better; his body doesn't ache as much or as often. He's hungry in ways he's never known before and most of his anxieties are gradually bleeding into the background instead of trapping him in his skin.

His body assumes he's just gotten done fighting for his life, seeing that he's actually eating, sleeping, and socializing as he needs to, and promptly hits him with a heat so intense it puts the surface of the sun to shame.

For the first day or two, he yet again assumes his anxiety and grief are just acting up. It's normal for him, after all, with the life he's lived.

That's what Yharim tells himself. It's normal to get annoyed easily with Jharim- who doesn't want to tear out his throat every now and then? It's normal to feel uneasy whenever someone else's hand lingers on Ire's shoulders, especially if it's a stranger- who knows their intent?

It's him snapping teeth at Guide after the poor fool tapped his arm to get his attention that earns him an unwilling inspection by Nurse. Which tbh would be a funny conversation.

"Alright, the labs are back." "And?" Yharim doesn't know what to think of her expression, as she looks from the top line of the page with slightly raised brows to him, and back again. "You're in the early stages of heat." "What?" The woman leaned against her desk. She seemed to be recalling a previous conversation as she stated, "Well, it's nothing bad per say. With what little I was taught about dragons, it's possible the changes in location and routines caused the sudden increase of aggression, but with no real studies done, I can't say for sure." "No, what do you mean I'm in heat?" Maybe it was his tone, or however his expression was betraying him that gave away his bewildered panic. It shouldn't be possible- even for a hybrid like Yharim, he didn't think it- Wait. Always the middle of autumn. Maybe the beginning of spring... "You've-" The woman pressed her hands together in an almost prayer like gesture, just in front of her mouth, as she took a deep breath in. "You have spent the past, what, hundred and thirty years using your hormonal rage to win battles, and you didn't even know?"

Despite the heavy advise (see: threat) of the medical professional after a way too detailed conversation about the theoretical reproductive habits of a dead race, Yharim would've listened to his inner warlord and fled.

If not for his safety, then for the safety of everyone at the base. He nearly took off Guide's hands with his teeth and he still had his entire mind about him- who knew what he'd do once the supposed haze actually set in?

He didn't want to find out. He did have the foresight to at least make a letter to Ire, coming up with some half baked excuse about needing to check on something and needing to do it alone.

Yharim just hoped she'd buy it- hoped that no one would mention anything.

Knowing the Jester? The Tyrant wouldn't get that lucky.

-🍁

(at least one more part once I wrestle with God's Favorite -20 Perception Dumbass for a moment. Maybe two, depending on how comfy you are with me just sending straight up smut in your inbox on a fucking monday afternoon)

LAKLkjdlkasjdLDSFIJSLGKLJFDLGJL Ok first of all I need to address the fact that I AGREE SO MUCH that he has this otherkind type of dysphoria/dysmorphia/whatever, I just didn't expand on it ever (though I think I did mention it once or twice???). I love that his draconic heritage goes beyond just his mindset, which is obvious it would, idk, can't have a need to bite without wanting sharp teeth or something like that.

Now, Oh my GOD. He failed his perception check every single fucking time. "You've spent past hundred and thirty years and you didn't even know?" I ALREADY REACTED ON MY MAIN BUT THIS JUST THREW ME OFF, LMAOOOOOOO. Oh he's poor soul, that's definitely not the way he would've wanted these draconic urges to show up (IF HE EVEN WANTED ANY IN THE FIRST PLACE). A VERY awkward way to learn about the heat and all.

#I SEE THE SECOND PART I AM READING IT NEXT #not art #asks #hcs #is that hcs?#also don't you worry about “smut” I am as comfy with almost anything as I can be #this is a wild monday omfg #🍁 anon #suggestive #??????????????????????#because YK

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cobragardens · 2 years ago

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In the first essay in this post Maya Gittelman articulates something that I think is really important: it's not just the gender(fuck) of the characters' coding that makes Good Omens a queer story, it's that the story is about queerness itself.

Gittelman's essay:

The thing is, this is the shit I’ve been waiting for my whole life.

Before I knew the words, I was impacted by how every epic romance, every classic adventure, every story I had access to and enjoyed was cishet. I needed to translate either the story or myself to find myself in it—every single time. I grew up in the oughts, in the days of the Tumblr fandoms you’re thinking of. I wrote about this a bit more in my essay on the first season of Our Flag Means Death last year, and that first line applies here—queer heartache has never felt this good.

I’ve been able to consume a lot of queer storytelling lately—mostly white cis m/m, but not exclusively and more than I’ve ever been able to in my life, because I’ve been searching for it for a long time. Yet as we know, there are a lot of mainstream stories with queer “rep” that at their core about what marginalized queer people have been cautioning around for generations—normalization. Assimilation. Respectability. See, we can be just like you. We too desire to marry, participate as cogs in the violent machine of imperialism. We too want the right to give you our service, our allegiance. We too want to join your armies. I certainly can enjoy plenty of that media, but I’m still desperate for queer storytelling that’s not sanitized, not flattened out to fit cishet beats, something that tells a good story that’s queer on every level. And that means we deserve to see queer characters who are messy, who hurt each other, because sometimes, love isn’t enough.

While Good Omens in some ways still white cis m/m, it’s also not entirely, and what works for me is that it actually delves into asking the damned question: What if this love is a threat, actually?

What if this love is something that does disrupt your norms, your ways of life? What if it’s an open danger to the systems you’re used to? What if this love could disrupt everything? What if it goes against God’s will and Satan’s too, what if it flies in the face of the ineffable plan?

What I’m saying is, I’ve wanted stories that let queer people be characters, with all the nuance and complexity that entails. Stories that are queer, intentionally, in both subtext and text, that aren’t asking an audience to justify their right to exist. Instead, they’re giving voice to the specifics of queer experience that don’t typically get mainstream care, multi-season tenderness. We deserve queer love stories that are wistful, epic, tragic not because they’re of the “same gender” but because the tangled truths of safety and trauma are inextricable from queer love. We deserve stories that are queer as subtext and text, metaphor and central plot and side plot too. We deserve queer stories that explore how queer love is infinite variety. We deserve genre stories that explore what immortality or something close to it does to pining, to longing, for wanting the one person in the universe you can’t have.

We deserve queer stories without homophobia that still explore the traumas of marginalized desire, in which neither party is truly the villain, just victims of the same system, at different stages of knowing it.

Show me what it looks like beyond the happily ever after, the will they/won’t they, the beats of a privileged cis white coming out. Breathe arcs of nuance and poetry and history into it. We deserve that epic romance, and we deserve to see how much it can hurt, because the depths of that wound evidence the ferocity of that love.

Growing up queer can feel monstrous, and I need to see that on screen. When you get preached at that people like you go to Hell for what you are and the ways you want, you start to relate to the demons. When you’re taught the truest, most joyful parts of you are unholy, it’s fair to ask—why should I respect the authority of a system that hates me for reasons I can’t control?

You learn to disguise your desire, and it changes you. It changes you to choke down your feelings, to deny them, to believe that they are sin. You learn to pour them into the hidden language of love that arises between you and whoever you’re lucky enough to share it with, so you don’t learn how to say them aloud. (Their arrangement, “little demonic miracle of my own,” the fourth alternative rendezvous. This is what queer love has looked like for millennia: something beautiful and true, despite, despite, despite.) Unlike those whose love has only ever been legal, permitted, “normal,” “holy”—your relationship is inescapably shaped by the threat behind it. You don’t get to see them as often as you like. You don’t get to talk, either to them or about them, because it might disturb the precious existence you have carved out together. You have to make up excuses, you can’t admit to anyone exactly why you can’t stop going back, and in this way you don’t always have to confront it yourself.

At the same time, that’s why queer love can be one of the most powerful forces in the universe—it saved the world last time, even if they didn’t call it that, yet. Aziraphale and Crowley don’t know so many details about each other’s lives and yet they know nearly everything important.

This is love—this natural state of slipping into the truth, until you awaken to it, inevitable and encompassing, all around you.

You might find yourself almost helpless to the magnetism. You can’t stop going back, finding your way to them, taking the risk, basking in the thrill of the comfort of their company.

And that’s why this finale, this story, this couple works so well for me—it’s queer in the telling, and while it always has been, this season literalized it on a new level and that matters.

#good omens #good omens meta #good omens as a queer story about queerness #christianity #ineffable husbands #the christian world is a dystopian horror #christianity is authoritarianism from the spirit outwards

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stitchheadforeheadkisser · 1 year ago

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🌈(meant to post this earlier but i fell asleep !!)

🌈this picture is going to live in my brain forevers i think. !!!!! look at them !!!!!! :[ <3

🌈well, that’s the end of the book…now i need to write a review !!

🌈okay, first of all, the art ? AMAZING !!!!! i LOVED the art in the original books, but this is incredible !!! and so many drawings of my boy too !!! it’s amazing !!!

🌈now, i DO feel like some parts of the story were missing since they couldn’t be put into a visual format, but for the most part things were translated great !! heck, even some of the emotional parts felt even MORE emotional, the execution really sold it !! at least, it did for me, but i might be biased as a fan and as someone REALLY invested in the relationship between stitch head and the professor and stitch head’s struggle to move on.

🌈there were also a lot of story changes, minor ones though for the most part. they fit the graphic novel format better i think, even if the old parts were fun in the books !! they were changes that needed to be made, i suppose. i feel like some parts would’ve been better for the emotional parts, like the part in the books where stitch head goes to sleep for the first time, but i guess it would’ve been difficult to explain.

🌈there’s also less talk about stitch head’s low self esteem, since there wasn’t any way to describe his thoughts without him saying it, which would probably take some of the punch away without context from reading the originals. his struggle to see himself as being a worthwile, significant person is something i’ve related to in the past and still struggle with, and a lot of people do, so that part of him being a bit lost makes the story a little weaker, but that doesn’t make it bad by any means !! maybe it’ll be explored more in the second graphic novel !!

🌈speaking of the pirate’s eye graphic novel, i’m wondering how they’re gonna do things in that one, since he was shown looking at his reflection in this one. like i said in one of my posts before, in the books he hadn’t really looked at his reflection until the pirate’s eye - he didn’t like looking at himself and being reminded he was “unimpressive”. he had no idea one of his eyes was ice blue, one of the most striking things about him - so what does that mean for the second graphic novel ? how will he come to the realization there ? will it mostly be the same when he finds the diary of captain flashpowder, where he just thinks he has his ice blue eye ? what does being able to look at his reflection mean for how his self esteem is in the graphic novels going forward ? is he going to be less overly self-critical in the graphic novels ? or will he show it more in the second one ?

🌈i’m also wondering, since the timeline is kindsa vague and confusing in the original books (i’m working on a full analysis of the timeline), if they’re going to make it more solid or not. i won’t go into too much detail here, but there’s a lot of things that seem to contradict each other and leave a lot of questions in the books. though, one thing i noticed in the graphic novel is that the professor definately looks younger when stitch head finally comes out after 40 years locked in his old room. this would imply stitch head has been out for a WHILE at least (unless the professor’s appearance rapidly changed) in the present but in book 3, the spider’s lair, erasmus’ brother edmund visited the castle 10 years before the present. stitch head in book 1, and in the graphic novel, says no one has visited castle grotteskew for 100 years - what does this mean for the timeline ? if stitch head was still locked away when this happened, that’d mean stitch head has only been out for <10 years, and must’ve heard “no one has been here for (some number) years” from either young erasmus or his father. if he WAS out when this happened, then that’d mean he somehow didn’t notice both edmund going to ask erasmus for help AND the professor working on veronique. i can’t tell which one is more likely, i’ll probably figure something out when i’m done with the timeline analysis.

🌈i think it’d be good for them to show him being more outwardly self-loathing in the second one. obviously, it’s bad he feels that way, but showing him struggling with it and having friends that care and want to help him can be wonderful and could probably help a lot of people, especially people who’ve been in his situation before. his struggle and slow recovery really helped me personally, seeing a character that’s still learning. the point is that he IS getting better, even if it’s slowly, and he still deserves care and frienship and to be appreciated. he’s not a bad person for still struggling, which is an important message to send. i see so many people demonizing people for struggling with recovery, for not instantly being cured when they have a support group. a lot of people say ‘recovery is a bumpy road’, but then get angry when someone takes a long time to recover and relapses on harmful behaviors, since it’s repeatedly been pushed to people that you’re “allowed” to be angry at people for still struggling if it’s “starting to get annoying”.

🌈stitch head still feels attatched to the professor, still cries over him, even after getting mad at him and realizing he needs to move on. he struggles. i can relate to that. it’s hard to let go of the past, of a person you used to have great times with, even if they hurt you. they might have completely moved on, doing just fine without you, but you still feel like you’re younger, trapped in those memories, and don’t get why you don’t click anymore. you’re mentally trapped in the past - even if the world’s moved on, your brain won’t let you. stitch head struggles to fully accept the fact erasmus won’t remember him and doesn’t care about him anymore. even after at least a century, he still feels like it all happened only yesterday. it’s only now that he’s finally learning to move on - and it’s NEVER too late to recover !! him finally getting to grow is one of the most beautiful parts about the story. you can really see him start to get happier by the end of the series. things are FINALLY changing for the better for him.

🌈if you couldn’t already tell by all of my rambling, this series means a whole whole lot to me !!! it makes me so happy and it’s so comforting and helpful !!! stitch head is a BRILLIANT series and i’m so happy things are finally kicking off for it again !! i definately reccomend the graphic novel !! and also the whole series if you haven’t read it !!! it might be a children’s series, but that doesn’t matter !! it’s an amazingly written fun story and a great depition of someone recovering !! PLEASE read stitch head !!! and if you do, please talk to me about it !!!!

#stitch head book #stitch head #stitch head guy bass #stitch head graphic novel spoilers #book review #special interest #tw abuse implied #partial vent #queerplatonic f/o #f/o #selfship #proship dni

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tremendouskoalachild · 8 months ago

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hey. wanna see me write a call-out post for a shitty board game brand manager you've never heard of, and recap some tangentially mass effect-related local forum drama? i was tempted to censor who this guy is, but he does literally get into internet fights under his legal name and while declaring his work title and company, so...

first, a bit of context. in October 2024 Mass Effect: The Boardgame - Priority: Hagalaz (the title is reported inconsistently and i find the number of colons funny) goes up for pre-orders. it features beloved characters from the original ME trilogy, specifically those introduced in the first game, and is set during ME3.

video game discourse and culture war nonsense being what they are, people immediately notice the characters have their pronoun sets on their cards, and get mad. some fanboys get more specific, taking issue with Liara T'Soni's pronouns reported as she/they, and accusing the boardgame designer of not knowing original game's lore (never mind that Liara literally says she is not a woman in a key conversation in the first game, and that her first pronoun is still she).

the game gets review-bombed on boardgamegeek.com, its rating dismal and constantly changing (currently under 5/10 - very low for the site). the website tries to fight back, some fake reviews get deleted, long-time forum members get banned and bitch about it on twitter, it's a whole thing. the creator calls out the "anti-woke" bullshit on twitter and asks people who actually played the game to legitimately rate it, gets hate.

the biggest czech boardgaming site, zatrolene-hry.cz, also has discussion threads for upcoming games, and an article about the drama gets linked there. the discussion is mostly about how silly the whole thing is, plus BGG.com's response, with a couple self-identified "anti-DEI" movement members complaining about being oppressed by minorities. until:

an employee of the Czech branch of Asmodée (which has been announced to eventually publish the translated version in Czechia) weighs in, saying that the Czech version will absolutely not have pronouns if he can help it. translation by me bellow:

Well, we find it absolutely pointless, so there will be no pronouns on the Czech version of character sheets (we won't put them there and we're willing to argue with the publisher about it). It would make no sense to put them there.

if you're familiar with Slavic languages, you might think he's saying the pronouns are redundant information in a heavily gendered language, where the character's pronouns can be inferred from basically any statement made about them, or maybe that he knows from experience translations often need to condense the text to fit the same information on a card the same size as the original. nope!

he doubles down when questioned by other users, quickly devolving into overt transphobia, including a remixed attack helicopter joke (which most users don't get and mock the person who calls it out).

Could you please elaborate on what led to this decision? Is it an attempt to appease, or fear of upsetting someone, or some kind of power play, or what? As in, "We are Asmodee CZ and if you insist on it, we won't publish it. Don't you know, we know best what makes sense for your product and what does not." Do I get it or am I missing something? The pronouns make sense to me, because if I'm unfamiliar with the source material, then by just looking at images of aliens I won't easily recognize whether they're a he, she, it, or they.

I don't understand the question. Just as thousands of board games across the world over the last X years managed without pronouns, Mass Effect will too. The pronouns have absolutely no purpose there. Liara is a female-looking character, why should there be anything written under her? If you want, play the game with the feeling she identifies as a tram.

in reaction to someone assuming the decision carries over from the video game's localization (i don't see how? not like there's an in-game codex of characters with their pronouns?):

The translation is done by the PC game's translator. He pointed out the pronouns long before the internet shitstorm and we immediately agreed not to use them. So if anybody here is concerned about some kind of political decision, this was a purely practical one, quite a while ago. And it has been shown to be correct. Careful with the (lore-justifiable) identification of Liara as a woman, someone could have an aneurysm.

Slovak user Daqan, who criticized the transphobia on display, got a now-deleted response (the comment allegedly recommended seeking mental help, though i don't have the original text):

This comment earned you a complaint for inappropriate conduct sent to your parent company Asmodee.com

[This post broke the rules of the forum and was thus deleted. The reason was, in our view, verbally attacking (mocking, denigrating, etc.) a person or group of people.]

Now that's what I call a Brand Manager :-)

after this, two different site admins weigh in. Michal gets mad about the deleted comment, declares he is "ending his 17 years of cooperation, with immediate effect" with zatrolene-hry.cz, and doesn't participate in any site discussion since. (he has last logged on today, though.)

the forum then turns into a long, day+ spanning discussion about censorship, and whether Daqan is the real villain in all this. also arguing about whether the character who says, out loud, at multiple points, that she is not a woman, is actually a woman because she is referred to as "she" in a 2007 video game.

to top it all off, machine-translated screenshots of Michal's original comments show up on r/boardgames.

#also: i didn't look into this but it has been alleged that asmodee cz has also previously censored a game they localized #specifically mention of a gay relationship in a card's text #also also i didn't think it was relevant to the post but of course you should have pronouns on the character sheets!#there's a character whose pronouns you pick. two aliens of unknowable gender if you aren't familiar with them.#a person whose face is hidden 100% of the time. and a feminine-looking person who is not a woman. come on

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ivanmkt100kirara · 9 months ago

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Post #6 - Competition

In the world of magazines, Manga Time Kirara’s main competitors aren’t too notable given the rather specific model that Kirara’s work inherits to, but one that does stick out is Comic Cune. First founded in August 2015 by Kadokawa Corporation and published via the Media Factory brand, which itself is a rival to the larger Houbunsha name, Comic Cune was designed to be another four-panel “cute girl” magazine in the vein of Kirara, but with some key differences. There are no-sub magazines, just the standard Comic Cune edition that is published monthly at the end of each month. The magazine’s content is less generally appealing then the rather friendly appearance of most of Kirara’s catalog, and really, it’s not that interesting to talk about it. There’s a reason why Manga Time Kirara is the market leader in a mostly empty landscape when it’s competition is just not that strong or compelling to look into. In contrast to how friendly Kirara is with translating their work into animation or hosting yearly events, Cune lacks even a quarter of that. At most, just an event every once and a while, and that’s about it.

The way I wrestled to talk about this was a challenge, given the real lack of Kirara’s overall meaningful competition. Other Japanese magazines, like the much more famous Shonen Jump to the wider world, don’t quite interfere with Kirara’s niche. In terms of if I like Kirara or Cune better, absolutely the former, by a landslide. Their library and style is just more appealing to me, even as someone who doesn’t live in Japan. The only other magazine that comes to mind that could come across as competition is one that actually predates Manga Time Kirara by nearly a decade earlier; Dengeki Daioh. Best known as the magazine which published Kiyohiko Azuma’s timeless classics Azumanga Daioh and Yotsuba&!, credited as the pioneers for the boom of “cute girl doing cute things” stuff at the turn of the century, Daioh also has a fair amount of cute girl stuff, but it’s not exactly the main focus of the magazine. It’s more of a secondary than a primary with them. What else is there? The people who published YuruYuri? I suppose, but really, it’s Kirara’s to lose with the rest. It’s easy to tell this is the part of this project that finding sources and references for I struggled with, but I think I can tell who has the highest revenue.

In theory, the easy competitive advantage that Kirara has is likely a crucial reason they are still living on. If I had to guess how big their market share is, when taken into account when technically counts as a “cute girl” magazine fully or not, it’s high. I’m going to take a guess and it’s somewhere between 80% and 90% because of their presence in other markets with animation and merchandise, with Comic Cune being in a far distant second place, and the rest having a minor percentage.That might seem high, but I suspect it may actually be that high. There's a lot of cute girls out there to view.

Sources:

Natalie (28, June 2015) Four-Panel Magazines in Comic Alive Are Launched Independently, and Comic Alive Was Born in August. Natalie. Retrieved October 9th, 2024. https://natalie.mu/comic/news/152016

Daioh Dengeki (30, May 2009) Memories Related to the First Issue (Dengeki Daioh Editor-in-Chief Nakayama Benz). Daioh Dengeki. Retrieved October 9th, 2024. https://web.archive.org/web/20090530095209/http://daioh.dengeki.com/info/15th/column02.html

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kaisertheadvisor · 1 year ago

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CONTINUED FROM LAST POST

#6 Highest Quality Sprites.

Not only does this mean we could get uncropped sprites...

But also the full body sprites used during the menus and the credits...

Some rare expressions (like Aigis's All Out Attack window face)

And maybe the eliusive "Clipboard Chihiro"...

#7 Renders of Kaneko Persona designs

Since P3 reused lots of Kaneko's established Demon Designs, they were bound to have their art featured in the game. However, they mostly seem to differ from their released renders, primarily in the shading department. While some have their highest quality renders uncropped, others do.

And of course, let's not forget that the 4 Devas have art EXCLUSIVE to the original versions of P3 and only those versions (P3, P3FES, P3P) before Devil Survivor redesigned them, with those designs carrying over to Reload.

Again, Portable has really good sprite rips so far, but we'll have to wait and see if there's more.

#8 Atlus West Press Kits

Around the time P3, P3FES and P3P would release in the US, Atlus West put out these sales kits for any website to use so they can market the game.

So far, many press materials seem to not be on the Internet Archive. If someone did download them back then, I would like to see all those materials online again.

#9 Audio Messages on P3 FES site

In order to help drum up hype for P3 FES, Atlus would put out these developer messages to Japanese fans. So far, they exist as broken .swf files that I can't seem to get to work properly. If anyone could fix them and/or provide good quality versions of them, I'd be more than happy to.

#10 The Mobile/Promotional Games.

Good news! Aigis The First Mission is thankfully getting a rerelease after being lost for so many years! So far, the only P3 related promotional games that are still lost are: -Persona 3: The Night Before -Persona Ain Soph -Persona 3 Social -Persona 3 Escape -Persona 3 Illust Puzzle -Persona 3 Broken Shadow -Persona 3 Qix -Persona 3 Chaining Soul -Persona 3 Em

G-Mode Archives, you better do your thing.

#11 Novel Translations So far, a fan translation exists for Velvet Blue, but we still don't have translations for Shadow Cry, Fragment Of The End and Alternative Heart.

That's all I can say so far, but again, who knows? Maybe someone may have all these high quality assets on a DVD or hard drive somewhere? It's too early to tell. What other lost Persona 3 holy grails would you like to see? Let me know if given the chance.

Alright, I'd thought I'd share with you all my "Persona 3 Holy Grails" of media that I'd like to see show up someday. Who knows? Maybe one day we'll get some of these high quality assets. But for now, we'll have to rely on scans, Internet Archive, upscales, and various social media posts till then. But let's get started!

#1. The high quality, uncompressed cutscenes.

While fan upscales do exist for the OG cutscenes, and people were generous enough to extract many of the Reload cutscenes and post them in high quality (thank you PC version), I would like to see the original masters for many of these cutscenes. We know they do exist, since Atlus has used them in promotional material, but when we will see them, is unknown. (If they ever do an English release of the P3 Movies, they better include these cutscenes as a bonus feature, just saying.)

#2. Highest quality character renders.

In order to promote Persona 3 on various material, Atlus would use various renders of the characters that I'm sure many P3 fans are familiar with.

However, there are some characters that don't currently have such high quality versions of their character renders. So far, high quality scans of Elizabeth's render and a rare Ikutsuki render (used on the original version of the P3 website, the games OST booklet, the manual, several trading cards, magazine articles, print ads and the booklet for "A Certain Day Of Summer") have been preserved for example, but I'd kill for the high quality assets to be found one day.

However, the most notorious case of characters not having high quality render assets are the entirety of Strega. The renders do exist online, it's just that, their quality is much to be desired.

Again, would kill to see high quality assets release someday.

#3. Unreleased character sheets for cutscenes.

If you have the P3 Artbook, they have the model sheets for the Protagonist, Yukari, Junpei, Mitsuru, Akihiko, Fuuka, Aigis, Koromaru, Ken, Shinjiro, Ikutsuki, Takaya, Pharos and Ryoji used in the anime cutscenes.

However, we don't have the model sheets for the characters casual wear (used in the Yakushima trip cutscene and several scenes in The Answer), Kotone (for the P3P opening as well as several in game CG's), Aigis's Answer armor, blue dress, and school uniform, Elizabeth and Theodore, Metis, Igor, Natsuki (used during Fuuka's awakening, albeit VERY brief), and Takeharu (used during 11/4's events). Granted, since those characters were sparingly used in the anime cutscenes, they may have not had their model sheets published, but again, who knows?

It should be noted that some frames and drawings from the anime cutscenes were used in some promotional material (for example, the P3 website used silhouettes of Yukari, Junpei, Akihiko, Mitsuru and Fuuka taken straight from the opening), so we'll have to wait and see what comes forth.

#4. Original Persona Assets

So far, Atlus managed to give us the high quality assets for the initial Persona's that were used in FES and were reused again for Reload's promo's.

Not only that, but many of the high quality assets for the ultimate Persona's were also preserved online, thankfully.

However, there is also the "original shading" versions of the Persona's, which last I checked, were used in the 2023 port of Persona 3 Portable, and so far, the high quailty rips of them are cropped.

I'm also hoping we can get even higher quality versions of the renders of Polydeuces (promotional pose), Juno, Messiah and Psyche. (though I am betting we're gonna get a high quality Psyche render for The Answer DLC, mark my words)

And of course, we still need the high quality official art for Strega's Personas as well.

#5 Ad Scans (or even better, high quailty digital versions of this material)

If anyone has some Japanese magazines, I'd love to see high quality scans of many a Persona 3 Ad.

CONTINUED IN REBLOG

#persona 3 #lost media #i love archiving so much history regarding a specific game #its a niche subject but its so fun

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baeddel · 4 years ago

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Please. Please can you tell me what a baeddel is and why people (terfs?) used it in a derogatory manner on this website for a hot minute but now no one ever uses it at all

you asked for it, fucker

[2k words; philology and drama]

baeddel is an Old English word. i have no idea where it actually occurs in the Old English written corpus, but it occurs in a few placenames. its diminuitive form, baedling, is much better documented. it appears in the (untranslated) Canons of Theodore, a penitential handbook, a sort of guidebook for priests offering advice on what penances should be recommended for which sins. in a passage devoted to sexual transgressions it gives the penances suggested for a man who sleeps with a woman, a man who sleeps with another man, and then a man who sleeps with a baedling. so you have this construction of a baedling as something other than a man or a woman. and then it gives the penance for a baedling who sleeps with another baedling (a ludicrous one-year fast). then, by way of an explaination, Theodore delivers us one of the most enigmatic phrases in the Old English corpus: "for she is soft, like an adulturess."

the -ling suffix in baedling is masculine. but Theodore uses feminine pronouns and suffixes to describe baedlings. as we said, it's also used separately from male and female. but it's also used separately from their words for intersex and it never appears in this context. all of this means that you have this word that denotes a subject who is, as Christopher Monk put it, "of problematic gender." interested historians have typically interpreted it as referring to some category of homosexual male, such as Wayne R. Dines in his two-volume Encyclopedia of Homosexuality who discusses it in the context of an Old English glossary which works a bit like an Old English-Latin dictionary, giving Old English words and their Latin counterparts. the Latin words the Anglo-Saxon lexicographer chose to correspond with baedling were effeminatus and mollis, and Lang concludes that it refers to an "effeminate homosexual" (pg 60, Anglo Saxon). this same glossary gives as an Old English synonym the word waepenwifstere which literally means "woman with a penis," and which Dines gives the approximate translation (hold on tight) male wife.

R. D. Fulk, a philologist and medievalist, made a separate analysis of the term in his study on the Canons of Theodore 'Male Homoeroticism in the Old English Canons of Theodore', collected in Sex and Sexuality in Medieval England, 2004. he analysed it as a 'sexual category' (sexual as in sexuality), owing to the context of sexual transgressions in the Canons. he decides that it refers to a man who bottoms in sexual relationships with another man. i don't have the article on hand so i'm not sure what his reasoning was, but this seems obviously inadequate given what we know from the glossary described by Dines. Latin has a word for bottom, pathica, and the lexicographer did not use this in their translation, preferring words that emphasized the baedling's femininity like effeminatus, and doesn't address the sexual context at all. Dines, however, only reading this glossary, seems to decide that it refers to a type of male homosexual too hastily, considering the Canons explicitly treat them separately. both Dines and Fulk immediately reduce the baedling to a subcategory of homosexual when neither of the sources to hand actually do so themselves.

by now it should be obvious why, seven or so years ago, we interpreted it as an equivalent to trans woman. I mean come on - a woman with a penis! these days I tend to add a bit of a caution to this understanding, which is that trans woman is the translation of baedling which seems most adequate to us, just as baedling was the translation of effeminatus that seemed most adequate to our lexicographer. but the term cannot translate perfectly; its sense was derived from some minimal context; a legal context, a doctrinal context, and so forth... the way Anglo-Saxons understood sex/gender is complicated but it has been argued that they had a 'one sex model' and didn't regard men and women as biologically separate types, which is obviously quite different from the sexual model accepted today; in any case they didn't have access to the karyotype and so on. the basic categories they used to understand gender and sexuality were different from ours. in particular, Hirschfield et al. should be understood as a particularly revolutionary moment in the genealogy of transsexuality; the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft essentially invented the concept of the 'sex change', the 'transition', conceived as a biological passage from one sex to the other. even in other contexts where (forgive me) #girlslikeus changed their bodies in some way, like the castration of the priestesses of Cybele, or those belonging to the various historical societies which we believe used premarin for feminization [disputed; see this post], there is no record that they were ever considered men at any stage or had some kind of male biology that preceded their 'gender identity.' the concept of the trans woman requires the minimal context of the coercive assignment at birth and its subsequent (civil and bio-technological) rejection. i have never encountered evidence that this has ever been true in any previous society. nonetheless, these societies still had gendered relations, and essentially wherever we find these gendered relations we also find some subject which is omitted or for whom it has been necessary to note exceptions. what is of chief interest to us is not so much that there was such a subject here or there in history (and whatever propagandistic uses this fact might have), but understanding why these regularities exist.

a very parsimonious explanation is that gender is a biological reality, and there is some particular biological subject which a whole host of words have been conjured to denote. if this were the case then we would expect that, no matter what gender/sexual system we encounter in a given society, it will inevitably find some linguistic expression. if, like me, you find this idea revolting, then you should busy yourself trying to come up with an alternative explanation which is not just plausible, but more plausible. my best guesses are outside the scope of this answer...

anyway, all of this must be very interesting to the five or six people invested in the confluence of philology and gender studies. but why on earth did it become so widely used, in so many strange and unusual contexts, in the 2010s? we're very sorry, but yes, it's our fault. you see apart from all of this, there is also a little piece of information which goes along with the word baeddel, which is that it's the root of the Modern English word bad. by way of, no less, the word baedan, 'to defile'. how this defiled historical subject came to bear responsibility for everything bad to English-speakers doesn't seem to be known from linguistic evidence. however, it makes for a very pithy little remark on transmisogyny. my dear friend [REDACTED] made a playful little post making this point and, good Lord, had we only known...

it went like this. its such a funny little idea that we all start changing our urls to include the word baeddel. in those days it was common to make puns with your url (we always did halloween and christmas ones); i was baeddelaire, a play on the French poet Baudelaire. while we all still had these urls a series of events which everyone would like to forget happened, and we became Enemies of Everyone in the Whole World. because of the url thing people started to call us "the baeddels." then there was "a cult" called "the baeddels" and so forth. this cult had various infamies attatched to it and a constellation of indefensible political positions. ultimately we faced a metric fucking shit ton of harassment, including, for some of my friends, really serious and bad irl harassment that had long-term bad awful consequences relating to stable housing and physical safety and i basically never want to talk about that part of my life ever again. and i never have to, because i've come to realize that for most people, when they use the word baeddel, they don't know about that stuff. it doesn't mean that anymore.

so what does it mean? you'll see it in a few contexts. TERFs do use it, as you guessed. i am not quite sure what they really mean by it and how it differs from other TERF barbs. i think being a baeddel invovles being politically active or at least having a political consciousness, but in a way thats distinct from just any 'TRA' or trans activist. so perhaps 'militant' trans women, but perhaps also just any trans woman with any opinions at all. how this was transmitted from tumblr/west coast tranny drama to TERF vocabulary i have no idea. but you will also find - or, could have found a few years ago - i would say 'copycat' groups who didn't know us or what we believed but heard the rumours, and established their own (generously) organizations (usually facebook groups) dedicated to putting those principles into practice. they considered themselves trans lesbian separatists and did things like doxx and harass trans women who dated cafabs. if you don't know about this, yes, there really were such groups. they mostly collapsed and disappeared because they were evildoers who based their ideology on a caricature. i knew a black trans woman who was treated very badly by one of these groups, for predictable reasons. so long-time readers: if you see people talking about their bad experiences with 'baeddels', you can't necessarily relate it to the 2014 context and assume they're carrying around old baggage. there are other dreams in the nightmare.

the most common way you'll see it today, in my experience, is in this form: people will say that it was a "slur" for trans women. they might bring up that it's the root of the word bad, and they might even think that you shouldn't use the word bad because of it, or that you shouldn't use the word baeddel because it's a slur. all of this is a silly game of internet telephone and not worth addressing. except to say that it's by no means clear that baeddel, or baedling, were slurs, or even insulting at all. while Theodore doesn't provide us with a description of how we can have sex with a baedling without sinning, and it may be the case that any sexual relations with a baedling was considered sinful, sexuality-based transgressions were not taken all that seriously in those days. there was a period where homosexuality within the Church was almost sanctioned, and it wasn't until much later that homosexuality became so harshly proscribed, to the extent that it was thought to represent a threat to society, etc. and as i mentioned, there are places in England named after baedlings. there is a little parish near Kent which is called Badlesmere, Baeddel's Lake, which was recorded in the Anglo-Saxon Domesday Book (as having a lord, a handful of villagers and a few slaves; perhaps only one or two households). it's not unheard of, but i just don't know very many places called Faggot Town or some such. it's possible that baedlings had some role in Anglo-Saxon society which we are not aware of; it could even have been a prestigious one, as it was in other societies. there is just no evidence other than a couple of passing references in the literature and we'll probably never have a complete picture.

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061890 · 4 years ago

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Asougi and Naruhodou’s speeches and localization

A while back when the Great Ace Attorney was first released, I made a post on my DGS Twitter on some… Not great localization changes made in the first Escapade in the game's DLC. Namely, the topic of Asougi's speech.

In the Dai Gyakuten Saiban subtitles channel's translation of the DLC, Asougi's speech excerpt is this:

"Now's the time to make a stand! All you young and elderly, gentlemen and ladyfolk of the downtrodden classes!"

In Japanese: 「さあ！今こそ立ち上がれ！低所得者層の老若男女よ!」

While the translation uses the phrase "downtrodden classes", the original text uses 「低所得者層」 specifically, referring to low-income working class people. This is relevant due to the fact that, in the late 1800s and early 1900s, rapid modernization and changes in Japanese labor relations led to the mistreatment of the working class. The emphasis on social harmony, along with censorship and restricting the right to assembly (which would later become criminalized in 1900), made it difficult to organize labor strikes.

And yes, while this DLC episode was very much a slice-of-life thing compared to the rest of the Great Ace Attorney, the original topics of both Asougi and Naruhodou's speeches are very informative of their characters and political views; Asougi especially, which makes the changes made in the localization even more confusing.

See, at the time, rapid industrialization was done in order to bolster the military, as the government believed back then that doing so was necessary at the threat of European imperialism; however, as real-life history shows, this directly led to Japan doing irreparable damage in its own imperialist conquest.

So, for Asougi to have given a speech explicitly in support of low-income working class people was not just him being anti-capitalist, it also very much had to do with him being anti-militarist and anti-imperialist as well.

Him planning to say 「老若男女」 ("men and women of all ages") —specifically, him mentioning women of low-income in the working class— also references how labor relations for female workers in the textile industry were mostly girls from poor families that worked in wealthy households in preparation for marriage. Similarly, Asougi acknowledging workers of all ages references how at the time, Japanese labor unions were more inclusive than that of the United States', as apprentices could join regardless of age and skill level.

Kazuma Asougi is, to the surprise of few, an incredibly political person. In fact, his actions here and generally recalcitrant treatment of authority figures, parallel left-wing socialist views at the time:

"One ideological faction [of the early labor leaders] favored discussion and cooperation with management, avoided strikes and political issues, and tried to win higher wages through improved productivity. These were moderates who favored harmony between labor and capital. The other major faction favored confrontation with management, thrived on political issues, and embraced the strike weapon. These were the left-wing socialists." — The Birth of the Japanese Labor Movement by Stephen E. Marsland

Even the year wherein he gave his speech, namely, the summer of 1897 is relevant to Japan's labor movement and how Asougi's character is rooted in exploitation by Western powers. This is because in April of 1897, Takano Fusataro, a Japanese labor activist, wrote "A Summons to the Workers", calling for the workers of Japan to organize at the threat of being exploited by foreign capitalist powers. Asougi's speech even parallels some of it, but notably, advocates for confrontation now while Fusataro discouraged revolution and radicalization, instead advocating for gradual change.

From "A Summons to the Workers":

「立て職工諸君、立つて組合を組織し、以てその重大なる責務とそのの男子たる面目を保つを務めよ。」

"Stand up, you workers! Stand up and organize unions!"

Asougi's speech:

「さあ！今こそ立ち上がれ！低所得者層の老若男女よ!」

"Now's the time to make a stand! All you young and elderly, gentlemen and ladyfolk of the downtrodden classes!"

Note: Fusataro references men due to "Summons" being directed towards factory workers at the time, but Asougi's speech generally references workers of all ages due to having a different audience.

In sharp contrast, Naruhodou's speech is about filial piety:

"Let's all cherish our mothers and fathers!"

Asougi losing all support for what was considered a very gutsy and controversial speech when he made a single slip-up —that being the infamous tongue twister— where Naruhodou wins for a very simple, even boring, speech tells us a lot about how they're seen by society.

Asougi in canon is considered arrogant and annoying by multiple authority figures —namely, Auchi— because he's outspoken about current events and politics; and while being 23 years old is very much an adult by our standards, in Meiji era Japan, one couldn't vote unless they were male, over the age of 25, and paid taxes of at least 15 yen per year. This was something that mainly landowners and ex-samurai could do.

Naruhodou, on the other hand, is initially a typical Japanese young man that conforms to the status quo. He dislikes going against his parents' wishes, and as his speech shows, advocates for an idea that's the standard in Japanese society. He's also notably apolitical, as originally, when he claims he and Asougi talked about politics over lunch, Asougi corrects him stating he only ever talked about comedy theatre.

Note: While Naruhodou uses the term 「愛国」 (あいこく, lit. love of one's country, basically patriotism) when talking about he and Asougi's "debates", from literally everything we know about Asougi's political views, I seriously doubt Asougi was being patriotic when he criticizes the government as often as he does. That, and the fact that Naruhodou is already a very unreliable narrator and doesn’t even remember what actually happened.

Similarly, in the Japan-only DLC episode for Dai Gyakuten Saiban 2, he chides Naruhodou for not keeping up with current events:

Asougi: "It sounds like you haven't been reading the papers, Naruhodou."

Naruhodou: "N-No, not so much lately..."

Asougi: [...] "Defence attorneys didn't exist in our country until only recently. Our reputations are still as low as mud, being called shysters who make underhanded deals. It's stuff like this which makes us have to claw back the people's trust. You should read at least this much, Naruhodou."

Naruhodou: "Urghhh… Newspapers are too complicated…"

Now, to return to the topic of the Great Ace Attorney, Asougi in the localization instead gives this speech:

Asougi: "So arise, ladies and gentlemen, and applaud our forefathers' plight and the fight for filial piety!"

...Thus, making him losing to Naruhodou a matter of skill and verbal articulation rather than that of politics. While again, yes, the DLC episodes are very much just extra content, the fact of the localization changing this not only weakens Asougi's character due to him being a very political person, but goes directly against his character.

After all, his original speech was a call to action for laborers in a time where labor relations were based in a parent-child (oyataka and kokata) dynamic for employers and employees respectively. To have him say that when he originally challenged this authority is just plain wrong, especially when Japanese society expects one to defer to their elders and authority.

Not only that, but Asougi's motivations for traveling to London had to do with how he and his immediate family were killed or harmed because of the Professor ordeal. He makes no mention of being obligated by his family name, even when he tells Naruhodou and Susato about them, nor the idea of clearing Genshin's name of wrongdoing. After all, while Genshin supposedly being the Professor was concealed from the public, it still would have brought him and his family shame in the wider Asougi family as a result.

While the Great Ace Attorney being localized certainly brings many great things —accessibility, directors' commentary, etc.— to the Ace Attorney's audience, it has several flaws in its localization, and this speech thing is just one of them; one particularly egregious example being Megundal being made Irish in a time where they were racially discriminated against, not to mention the antisemitism in DGS1-3, but that's a post for another day.

In the meantime, I can only wonder why this change was made to a character whose story is inherently rooted in questioning authority, and speaking out regarding Japanese politics and current events at the time.

#dgs #dai gyatuken saiban #meta #the great ace attorney #tgaa #kazuma asougi #tgaa2 spoilers #tgaa spoilers #dgs2 spoilers #this one's... a long one. my god.#localization unfortunately opening the floodgates for more super not great historically insensitive choices #i'll most likely write on megundal/mcgilded next since there's also a lot of stuff to unpack there

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mysmestranscripts · 2 years ago

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Hello and welcome to MysMesTranscripts!

The Ultimate Master List can be found here!

What is this?

This is a blog where I will be compiling and posting full transcripts related to Mystic Messenger, including but not limited to chat rooms, phone calls, text messages, and emails. I may also reblog various Mystic Messenger content, including translations.

Images from the game (Including CGs, title screens, and seasonal images) will be posted with image descriptions. I will do my best but since I myself don't use alt text, feel free to DM me or send an ask with tips/advice on how to improve them.

This is not a guide or walk through. Earned and broken hearts may be listed next to answer choices, but that does not automatically mean it is the "right" answer. Hearts can get you closer to a Bad Story Ending as much as a Good Ending. Emails will have the correct choice marked.

This blog is completely unofficial and is run by a fan. I couldn't find any full transcripts, just guides, so the idea wouldn't leave me alone. Everything is currently IN PROGRESS.

So who are you?

You can call me Luc, they/them. I am a very tired graduate student from the U.S. who definitely doesn't have enough free time for this. But hey, Seven makes fire-breathing robots, Jaehee watches musicals, Yoosung plays LOLOL, and I... commit to transcribing the entirety of an otome game that's almost seven years old. Listen--the hyperfixation demands tribute. My main blog is @pastelsapphy. Right now it's mostly Mystic Messenger but that can change at the drop of a hat depending on what I'm hyperfocusing on.

What do you mean by "[X] box"?

I note when special textboxes are used during chats. I try to keep the "description" as brief as possible so each post doesn't get too crazy. While most are self-explanatory ("cloud text box") others may not be as obvious ("droopy text box"). If you're unsure of what I mean, you can look at examples of each here.

What order are you posting in?

Honestly? Whatever I feel like. Route chats I'll probably do as I play them, emails and calls may come more randomly, as well as DLC content. You can probably expect Another Story content first since I unlocked it not long ago and I've been replaying both routes over and over lol.

Non-participant versions of chats are likely to come out faster than those MC participates in. I want to mark which choices give which hearts, if any, which gives me a smaller window of time to work on them.

Bro, your typos

I'm transcribing things exactly as written. This means there will be some typos, odd sentence structure, incorrect your/you're and the like, etc. that is sometimes found in the game. Blame the game not me. If you find a legitimate typo, let me know and I'll check it out.

Why is Zen orange?

Tell tumblr to add grey text.

#mystic messenger #mysme #mod luc

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cqlfeels · 4 years ago

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@lansplaining encouraged me to finish this random meta nobody asked for, so let's talk about Meng Yao, Meng Shi, and 孟母三遷 (mèng mǔ sān qiān), a proverb about good parenting.

A warning: this is super long (even for me!) and is less quality meta and more my ADHD brain jumping around a maze of loosely related ideas. Proceed with caution!

Let me start by briefly going through why I decided to write this, because it’s important. In haunting Meng Shi’s tag in my starvation for Meng Shi content, I’ve multiple times come across the idea that Meng Shi pushed Meng Yao too hard, that she should’ve been more careful with teaching him to seek his father’s approval at any cost, and that she was too naïve. I’ve never reblogged this kind of post because 1) I personally think it’s rude to go out of your way to ramble about how much you disagree with someone on their own post and 2) if this was an isolated incident I wouldn't care either way, so I didn’t want to direct this rant at anyone in particular. It’s more to do with a tendency, primarily (as far as I can tell) from fans who haven’t had much contact with Chinese culture, to oversimplify Meng Shi and make her relationship with Meng Yao slightly disturbing, and I think part of it is due to CQL basically cutting out her entire storyline (so fans simply don’t have info about her to assess her fairly) and part is due to misunderstanding what a good parent is supposed to act like in the context of Ancient China.

[Of course, Ancient China is not a very useful historical concept, not any more than “ye olde Europe” - things change a lot based on time and place - but you know. It’s fantasy. Extremely broad trends are okay in this case.]

Anyway, the idea behind the posts I mentioned is, basically, that Meng Shi (usually through no fault of her own) is to blame for Meng Yao’s obsession with power, since his desire for approval was inherited from lessons she taught him. Just to start with, I’d argue that Meng Yao isn’t power-hungry as much as he craves security and respect, but that’s a different meta. Let’s assume that she really did teach him to be Like That. Was she wrong to do so? I’m not looking for “does that make for a happy, well-adjusted childhood?” or “would you raise your own son as Meng Shi did?” - I’m trying to figure out, would she have been considered a bad mother in the context of the society she lived in? I don’t think she would’ve.

It is surprisingly hard to find texts about the obligations of parents in Ancient China. Their main obligation is to raise filial children, but I feel like that’s not very useful: whether or not parents are good parents, children are expected to be filial, so a child being filial really says more about the child than about the parent. Maybe the parent completely missed the mark and society at large was what taught the child to be filial!

We can assume, of course, that parents were to raise good people, and that by learning what a good person looked like, we could figure out whether the parent was successful, but once again, I feel like that’s pinning things on the outcome, not on the process - the best of parents can end up with an awful kid and vice versa.

While thinking about all this, it took me a frankly embarrassing amount of time to remember the story of Mother Meng and Meng Zi, but once I did, it wouldn’t leave my mind - in part because the Meng here is the exact same Meng of Meng Shi and Meng Yao (yay! fun if useless parallel!), and in part because this is a story about how a woman can successfully raise a son by herself.

Okay, so important note: one of the most influential ancient Chinese thinkers is Meng Zi (孟子 Mèng Zǐ), who is known in the West as Mencius. If you've never heard of him - he's perhaps second in importance only to Confucius. When Mencius was still a young child, his father died, so he was raised by his mother, who is usually known only as Mother Meng (in Chinese, 孟母 Mèng Mǔ.)

Mother Meng's story is told in Biographies of Exemplary Women (列女傳 Liènǚ Zhuàn), which for around 2000 years beginning around the 18th century BCE, was the most commonly used book used to educate women. The book is divided into sections, each one showing a different way women could be honorable and good. Mother Meng's story is told in the Maternal Models section (母儀傳 Mǔ Yí Zhuàn.) The story has a few parts, some of which I'll quote, always from Kinney's 2014 translation.

Before I go on to quote it, though, I'd like to establish that Mother Meng's story is so, so famous that even if Meng Shi had never read this particular book, I'm almost certain she would've been familiar with at least the outlines of Mother Meng's story. I'm not cherry picking a suitable chapter from the book, I'm literally going with the most famous story in it because Meng Shi would be most likely to know this one if she knew no other story.

Okay, the first part of the tale takes place when Mencius is a young boy and Mother Meng is a widow raising him.

The mother of Meng Ke of Zou [a different name for Mencius] was called Mother Meng. She lived near a graveyard. During Mencius’ youth, he enjoyed playing among the tombs, romping about pretending to prepare the ground for burials. Mother Meng said, “This is not the place to raise my son.” She therefore moved away and settled beside the marketplace. But there he liked to play at displaying and selling wares like a merchant. Again Mother Meng said, “This is not the place to raise my son,” and once more left and settled beside a school. There, however, he played at setting out sacrificial vessels, bowing, yielding, entering, and withdrawing. His mother said, “This, indeed, is where I can raise my son!” and settled there. When Mencius grew up, he studied the Six Arts, and finally became known as a great classicist. A man of discernment would say, “Mother Meng was good at gradual transformation.”

According to the translator's footnote, "gradual transformation" is "a childrearing technique, whereby a child is morally formed through daily exposure to correct models of behavior."

From this story comes the proverb 孟母三遷 (Mèng Mǔ sān qiān) - "Mother Meng moved three times." It's come to mean that a parent - especially the mother of a male child - should spare no efforts to provide an environment that will give their child a good education, paying particular attention to what models are surrounding them.

I'm sure I don't need to say if Meng Shi was at all familiar with this proverb (and she would probably be), she must have been very stressed out over literally raising her son in a brothel. (Here I must mention sex workers in ancient China were often essentially owned by the brothels, so literally "moving three times" wasn't really an option for Meng Shi even if she could miraculously pick up another trade.) Meng Shi did however at least try to surround Meng Yao with the accomplishments appropriate for the son of a cultivator:

Xiao-Meng, are you still learning those things lately? [...] The things your mom wants you to learn, things like calligraphy, etiquette, swordsmanship, meditation… How are those things going? [...] His mom’s raising him as a young master of a wealthy family. She taught him how to read and write, bought him all those swordsmanship pamphlets, and even wants to send him to school.

Meng Yao actually talks a little bit about “those swordsmanship pamphlets” in the only time in canon he directly shares memories about this mother:

Lan XiChen, “Your [guqin] skills are also considered quite fine outside of Gusu. Were they taught by your mother?”

Jin GuangYao, “No. I taught myself by watching others. She never taught me such things. She only taught me reading and writing, and bought a handful of expensive sword and cultivation guides for me to practice.”

Lan XiChen seemed surprised, “Sword and cultivation guides?”

Jin GuangYao, “Brother, you haven’t seen them before, have you? Those small booklets sold by the common folk. First jumbled sketches of human figures, then deliberately mystified captions.”

Lan XiChen shook his head, smiling. Jin GuangYao shook his head as well, “All of them are scams, especially to fool women like my mother and ignorant children. You won’t lose anything by practicing them, but you definitely won’t gain anything either.”

He sighed in a rueful way, “But how could my mother have known this? She bought them no matter how expensive they were, saying that if I returned to see my father in the future, I had to see him with as much competence as possible so that I don’t fall behind. All of the money was spent on this.”

See what’s happening? Meng Shi cannot physically take Meng Yao to cultivators, but she spares no efforts in giving him the closest thing she possibly can -- figuratively, we might say she moved three times.

Of course, these booklets don’t work, but as Meng Yao says, how could she have known this? The cultivation world is very closed off - think of how the entire Mo household gathers to see Lan juniors, and how Wei Wuxian mentions once that “Cultivation families, in the eyes of common folk, are like people favored by God, mysterious yet noble.” Not just noble, but mysterious. That tracks, too - I mean, they live in inaccessible households and mostly leave to night hunt or visit each other, neither of which is an activity that would allow commoners to get much more than an occasional glimpse of them.

Now, if Meng Shi doesn’t even know that a pearl for Jin Guangshan was just a trinket, if she doesn’t know even the wealth of a major sect, how can she read booklets and decide whether that’s genuine cultivation or not? All that she sees is a chance for Meng Yao to be surrounded by the ideas and skills of the people she wants him to emulate - cultivators - and therefore she does everything she can to get him that chance. Mother Meng moved three times.

Okay, but maybe the argument is not “Meng Shi shouldn’t have pushed Meng Yao to cultivation” but rather “she should’ve pushed him, just not too hard." To that, I present another tale from Mencius' childhood:

Once, when Mencius was young, he returned home after finishing his lessons and found his mother spinning. She asked him, “How far did you get in your studies today?” Mencius replied, “I’m in about the same place as I was before.” Mother Meng thereupon took up a knife and cut her weaving. Mencius was alarmed and asked her to explain. Mother Meng said, “Your abandoning your study is like my cutting this weaving. A man of discernment studies in order to establish a name and inquires to become broadly knowledgeable. By this means, when he is at rest, he can maintain tranquility and when he is active, he can keep trouble at a distance. If now you abandon your studies, you will not escape a life of menial servitude and will lack the means to keep yourself from misfortune. How is this different from weaving and spinning to eat? If one abandons these tasks midway, how can one clothe one’s husband and child and avoid being perpetually short of food? If a woman abandons that with which she nourishes others and a man is careless about cultivating his virtue, if they don’t become brigands or thieves, then they will end up as slaves or servants.” Mencius was afraid. Morning and evening he studied hard without ceasing. He served Zisi [a great scholar whose grandfather was Confucius] as his teacher and then became one of the most renowned classicists in the world.

Notice that Mother Meng moved three times to ensure Mencius would have the highest of aspirations - to become a scholar. But just aspiration isn’t enough. Not by any means. Now that Mencius is actually studying, Mother Meng is willing to take an extreme action to ensure he's taking it seriously. Mencius doesn't have a father to smooth his path to success. He has to learn that aspiring to greatness isn't enough. He'll have to put in the effort as if his life depended on it. And if he doesn't persist in his hard work, everything he's done thus far will be useless. Sounds like a lesson imparted on young Meng Yao, doesn’t it?

A lot of fandom rage towards Meng Shi would apply to China's Best Mom Contender, Mother Meng. She gives her son big dreams, and teaches him how to go about achieving them in a society where failing is easier than succeeding. Yes, it's fair to say that Meng Shi taught Meng Yao to refuse to settle for anything less than being “Jin Guangshan's son, a respected cultivator.” Yes, it's also fair to say that she probably didn't allow him much time to play like children his age did. But unfortunately, in the world of MDZS, poor children probably wouldn't get to play anyhow, the difference is that they'd usually be working, not studying. Studying is a privilege! It’s a privilege Meng Yao could not afford but was given to him anyway, through his mother’s many sacrifices. We can even say that while she was alive, Meng Shi was trying to ensure Meng Yao would one day have a better life, at the expense of a fun childhood - and that's very Mother Meng of her, whatever our modern Western sensibilities might have to say about that.

Finally, I’d skip other tales (which show Mother Meng and an adult Mencius) and go straight to the poem that ends the Mother Meng section:

The mother of Mencius

Was able to teach, transform, judge, and discriminate.

With skill she selected a place to raise her son,

Prompting him to accord with the great principles.

When her son’s studies did not advance,

She cut her weaving to illustrate her point.

Her son then perfected his virtue;

His achievements rank as the crowning glory of his generation.

I’d like to focus on the last verse - “His achievements rank as the crowning glory of his generation.” All that Mother Meng wanted was for Mencius to not completely ruin his life, but he became great. You can so very easily see a parallel with how Meng Shi hoped Meng Yao would be a cultivator but he became Jin Guangyao, Chief Cultivator, styled Lianfang-zun, one of the Three Venerable, hero of the Sunshot Campaign.

Of course you can say “Jin Guangyao did many Very Wrong Things to get there, though!” Which, sure, okay, fair point. How many and how wrong depends on which canon we're discussing, and your own interpretation, but there’s no version of the story in which Jin Guangyao is 100% an innocent child uwu. But blaming that on Meng Shi is just... straight up weird? I don’t see anyone going “If Jiang Fengmian hadn’t adopted Wei Wuxian, he’d never have dared become Yiling Laozu!” and that’s pretty much the same logic. Would street kid Wei Wuxian have invented a new type of cultivation if he had never been taken in by the Jiang? Probably not, but raising undead armies is very much not something Jiang Fengmian could’ve predicted. In the same way, how could Meng Shi have predicted that teaching her pre-adolescent son “You are the son of a cultivator, act like one and earn your place in society” would’ve ultimately resulted in innocent deaths? How could she predict “You’re not destined to having the same horrible life I did, you can get something better than this” was a bad thing to teach? I quite honestly don’t know.

Finally, I'd like to point towards a much flimsier evidence that Meng Shi did great as a parent. And that is Meng Yao’s love. Nie Huaisang at some point comments Meng Shi is someone who Meng Yao "cherishes more than his life," and I think his assessment is correct.

Even putting aside the fact he built a whole temple to get his mother to reincarnate into a better life, and even putting aside how he refuses to flee the country without her remains, there's still crystal clear evidence that Meng Shi must've done something right. Because a lifetime of people using his mother to bully him doesn't seem to have made Meng Yao resent her. Had their relationship not have been very strong, odds are he'd feel bitter and/or ashamed of her. That doesn't seem to be the case. He's attached to her even decades after her death.

I want to be very careful with equating mutual affection with good parenting, though. When I was a rather rebellious teenager, my mother (in typical Chinese fashion) used to say that parents and children don't have to love each other as long as they're dutiful to each other, by which she meant that a parent-child relationship isn't informed by warm and fuzzy feelings, but by whether you'd be willing to do anything for each other. Specific to my case, she meant "I don't care if it makes you hate me, you will do as you're told because that's what's best for you." (That may also be the reason why people more familiar with Chinese culture see the Jiang family less as outright abusive and more as #complicated, but that's another meta.)

Whether your kid wants to hug you every time they see you is of no consequence to traditional Chinese thought - raising them to be the best they can is all that matters, because at the end of the day, you won't be around forever, but you can definitely set up your kid's life so that it goes smoothly and virtuously. How that's accomplished varies depending on many factors, but to have the goal be "I want my child to love me" rather than "I want to raise my child right" would've been considered selfish as hell.

So even if all that Meng Shi had given Meng Yao had been stern lessons about the need to go get his birthright, she would've still have been considered a good mother!! In fact, she would've been doing everything she was supposed to do, under extremely difficult conditions! (Remember the importance of environment? That Meng Yao grew up to want to be a cultivator despite having probably never even met one speaks wonders about Meng Shi's childrearing powers!!)

But just based off how over the top Meng Yao's filal dutifulness is, I'd go a step further and say that even as she did the impossible, she was also loving enough to inspire genuine affection. This is complicated because children who have present fathers could expect their mothers to be tender with them. The first century BCE text 禮記 Lǐ Jì or The Classic of Rites says that:

Here now is the affection of a father for his sons - he loves the worthy among them, and places on a lower level those who do not show ability; but that of a mother for them is such, that while she loves the worthy, she pities those who do not show ability - the mother deals with them on the ground of affection and not of showing them honour; the father, on the ground of showing them honour and not of affection.

But when the father figure is lacking for any reason, the mother must abandon her tenderness because someone must guide the child, and without a father, the role falls to the mother. A single or widowed mother had to be very careful to not smother their children with affection and raise useless, spoiled kids, or so it was thought. (The presence of Qingheng-jun and Lan Qiren is why Madame Lan can be so affectionate with the Lan boys, by the way - if she was raising them by herself she would've been expected to be much more practical. AUs where she just gets her kids and runs away could do very cool things with this idea. But I digress!)

Where was I? Oh, okay. Because Meng Yao seems to not just respect, but actively miss her, it seems that Meng Shi somehow managed to deal with her son on the ground of both honor and affection, to paraphrase.

So basically, all things considered, it seems not only would Meng Shi have been considered a great mom (if people could look past her being a prostitute, anyway) but she also went above and beyond the bare minimum. She truly spared no efforts on any front to make sure her son had everything your average gongzi would have - someone to teach him and someone to love him, access to education and confidence in his birthright. That she couldn't actually make him a cultivator, that she couldn't actually raise him in a proper home with no one being cruel to herself or him - that's immaterial. Even Mother Meng couldn't control what her neighbors did, only what she taught her son! The key point is Meng Shi tried. She did everything she could to educate her son right. You couldn't ask more of her, and quite honestly, you should probably be asking less.

Of course we can't err on the other extreme and say she was Perfect. Given MXTX only ever writes flawed characters, we can safely assume that if we'd known more about Meng Shi, we would've seen many flaws. Indeed, just the fact she didn't teach Meng Yao the guqin when he apparently wanted to learn it might point to some conflict we don't know enough to speculate about (maybe she focused too much on cultivation when Meng Yao's interests lay elsewhere? Maybe she wasn't able to sufficiently shelter him and he felt it'd be a burden to ask her to teach him anything? Maybe maybe maybe, go wild with your fics.) Nevertheless, I would never hold a female character to a higher ideal than a male character - if the male cast of MDZS can be a hot mess and still be admirable for what they're trying to do, then so can Meng Shi.

At the end of the day, when I look at Meng Shi - and I've made myself a document with all the references to her in the novel canon so I could easily contemplate her life and character - all I see is a woman every bit as determined and resourceful as her son, willing to do everything it took to raise her little boy into the sophisticated and ambitious man he became.

Finally, here's a fun little parallel that I'm 100% sure was unintentional but I still love. I said Meng Shi couldn't have moved three times. She couldn't, but I think maybe she taught her son he was worth moving three times for. Qinghe Nie. Qishan Wen. Lanling Jin. Isn't that super fun to think about?

Alternatively, tl;dr: Oh My God I Can't Believe We're Blaming Women For The Actions Of Their Adult Children In The Year Of Our Lord 2k21, Meng Shi Was Doing Her Best, Chill!

#drinking game #take a shot every time i say 'finally'#this post refused to let me get to the end of it lol #i think because i'm extremely salty about fanon stage mom meng shi #(to not say tiger mom meng shi which crosses into outright racism. but i'm giving people the benefit of the doubt)

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dduane · 4 years ago

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Hair

It’s nice to win an argument with an artistic medium once in a while... or at least fight it to a draw. Since I think I’ve just pulled that off, I can now safely do a post about it, put the whole business (pretty much) to bed, and get on with other aspects of life.

What I’m about to discuss here, at length, is a long stubborn struggle with the hairstyle(s) of the current Sejant of the Throne of Arlen, Holder of the White Stave, Lord of the lands east of Arlid, blah de blah de blah through five or six more phrases’ worth of formalities... in short, King [that being the best translation of his job title...] Freelorn stareiln Ferrant stai-Héalhrästi: or as his friends, spouses and other associates usually call him, Lorn.

...Don’t know (or care) who this guy is? It’d hardly be a hanging offense. He’s one of the major characters in the Middle Kingdoms books. Among many characters I’ve worked with over four decades, he’s something of a favorite for me... possibly because he’s so very flawed, but over the course of the core trilogy still manages to get his job done despite those flaws (or sometimes because of them). Lorn is a potential poster boy for Characters Who Learn Better—though at the auctorial end you might want to slap them around a little, sometimes, as regards how long it takes.

Not very self-examining at first (until shocked into it), initially way too expectant that others will enable him and his needs, and way too short on agency—except for the wrong kinds of it—until events nudge him toward better behavior, Freelorn has unquestionably sustained some damage from the vicissitudes of his life (the loss of both parents, outlawry and exile, years spent on the run). But he always keeps managing to grow through or around the damaged areas. Becoming more and more sensitive to previous bad choices (as he’s confronted first-hand by their results), Lorn starts trying to put right the things he’s gotten wrong as his lurking destiny drags him into increasingly awful places. He does his best to try to make the burden of his increasingly-unavoidable future fall on him, instead of the people he loves and the people he ought to. And finally Lorn puts his head down and wades straight into the final acts of heroism that will save the world even if they kill him. (Which they do.) His arc, to sum up, makes a King out of some very raw princely “raw material”; but his own hands have been as deep in the modeling clay as the Goddess’s have.

So, as I said, I’m rather fond of Lorn. Which is why it bothers me that he’s been suffering from an unending series of bad hair days over the last half-decade or so.

What follows here is an occasionally fairly technical discussion of the challenges of digital art and media in relation to the never-ending struggle to get your character to actually look like what you’re seeing in your head. This record is intended mostly for fellow digital artists who may be suffering through the same agonies and looking for possible solutions. My tribulations may possibly throw up some useful suggestions for people working in the same medium or on the same kind of thing.

I need to warn just about everybody else that what follows will probably strike you as excruciatingly boring, so most of you should probably look away now. If you continue reading this and get bored, I assume no responsibility. I’ll even put a break here. And a picture of what this is all about: that problematic hair.

Above: When somebody has to tell the King that his hair is sh*t

So: let’s take this from the top, as it’s likely enough that some folks will come across this [screed] and have no idea what the hell I’m going on about.

Writers now live in a publishing ecosystem where one’s backlist is no longer just a sort of annoying albatross hung around your neck, about which you have no power to do anything unless a (traditional) publisher thinks they can make some money out of it. A writer can now manage their own backlist (insofar as their publication-rights situation allows them) and keep it in print, or not, as they please.

Deepest in my own backlist lies my first novel, The Door Into Fire, which kicked off the LGBTQ-friendly Middle Kingdoms universe and got me a fair bit of attention (back in the day) and some award nominations. With this in mind—and encouraged by people who found its early representation of queer characters in fantasy settings positive, or enjoyable, or both—it seemed like a good idea to get Fire and its immediate sequels back into print. So I started looking into this.

One thing became obvious right away. In this marketplace, there’s no launching a series (or re-launching one) without a website. But also... for a website, you need graphics. And there were never any graphics for the Middle Kingdoms books except what appeared on their (originally pretty dodgy) covers and in the occasional magazine where various pieces of MK short fiction were published. Leaving their general sketchiness aside, those graphics—being copyright to the publishers—weren’t something I could use in new-edition web pages or promotional material. It would’ve been nice if there was other art I could have used, but there wasn’t any. And stock photography isn’t that much use for illustrating a world full of magic-users, 747-sized Dragons, and fire elementals that look like somebody just torched a horse.

So I said, “Fine... I’ll just have to do the graphics myself.”

The only problem with this is that I can’t draw. ...But these days, there are ways around that... particularly digital art. It’s come a long way in the last decade or two.

Therefore in the 20-teens I started experimenting with 3D-art creation software—initially with a program called Poser. I was disappointed to find it nowhere near as intuitive as I’d hoped (as a long hard learning curve was the last thing I was interested in: I’ve got enough other stuff on my plate).

Then I came across Poser’s main competition in the commercial digital-art marketplace, Daz 3D. It didn’t take too much experimentation for me to realize that this was more like what I needed—simpler to get to grips with (especially in terms of dressing and moving characters), and with a far larger product base to draw on.

...Because this isn’t a drawing program as such. It’s probably most helpful to think of Daz as a platform for working with digital “paper dolls” of the kind kids used to play with back in the day. You start with a basic figure, and then cut out “clothes” and attach them to the figure. Don’t like those clothes? Pull them off and attach others. (The one below comes from Paper Thin Personas.)

Working in Daz Studio is like that... except in 3D. (Below, a view of the basic dashboard, with a Genesis 8 male figure in the basic “ready to be dressed and posed” position.)

And (because naturally the image-building-and-handling platform is the overlay on a business), there’s a financial component involved. Some basic starter figures do come free. But if you want better ones, you buy them. Want clothes for them? You buy them. Need sets? Props? Character poses? You can buy all of those. They come (mostly) from independent digital artists, who sell their work through the Daz3D website sort of the way independent sellers work through Etsy.

So you can see that this can run into serious money if you’re not careful. (In fact it can run into serious money if you are careful. The wise digital artist hangs onto their receipts, as all this is stuff is potentially deductible if you’re using it for business purposes.)

I spent some time experimenting and finally decided that Daz was probably my best bet. So in sort of 2015 or thereabouts I started the (still ongoing...) business of learning the platform and acquiring character assets and clothes.

My first job at the Middle Kingdoms end (because I was also using Daz to create Young Wizards material, specifically the covers for the New Millennium Editions) was to find 3D figures that looked at least something like the characters I saw in my head. In one case I got lucky straight out of the box. Daz’s in-house-created Leo 7 figure, with the Jonas hair offered with it in the same starter bundle, was so nearly a dead ringer for the way I’d always seen one of the protagonists—Herewiss—that I was frankly kind of astounded.

Similarly, the Gianni 7 figure (with its facial hair in place) was quite close, facially, to the look I’d always imagined for the other half of the original protagonist pair, Freelorn. But there the easy ride stopped... because Lorn’s relatively fair hair, during the years when he was outlawed and on the run, I’d imagined as being worn fairly long. And when I started working on the 3D version of his character, there just wasn’t that much middle-length male-character hair to work with on the Daz platform. There would be various reasons for this, but let’s lean in on one of them in particular.

Daz is an unabashed hotbed of the Male Gaze. There are many, many more available ways to sex up female characters than there are the same for males. Oh GOD so many. Much more flesh-exposing clothing, much more clothing held up by good intentions alone against the depredations of gravity, much more desperately stupid female armor (don’t get me started...!), many more overly-sexualized (or -sexualizable...) female figures. (Could this be because the majority of content creators are (cis) male? As Spock would say, “Insufficient data.” But I have my suspicions.) Only now have same-sex pose packages and gender-fluid figures begun to creep in. (ETA: Particularly with the relatively newly-released Genesis 9 generation of figures.)

It’s also noticeable that the majority of Daz male figures lean toward Hard Tough Types: warriors, space warriors, urban warriors, cowboys, knights (in too many variants of Male Stupid Armor to even begin discussing here, and again, if I get started I won’t stop, so: some other time...), Vikings, et al and ad infinitum. A lot of these seem to be viewed as inherently short-haired types. Mid-length hair is surprisingly more difficult to find, even when the figures are portrayed as fantasy-universe natives. (Outliers to this analysis would be elves. All the elves seem to be assumed to have quite long hair.)

The best of the relatively few mid-length hair props available when I started working with digital!Freelorn was one called Dorian. (Mostly content creators give their hairstyles and characters names [in the IKEA manner], though I know at least one of the most prolific hair-makers who’s given up and simply started assigning month-and-year numbers to theirs.).

The Dorian hair prop was... all right to be going on with, if not really what I’d been hoping for. I looked high and low and found nothing better. Finally I sighed and said to myself, Yeah, fine, whatever, let’s get on with it... and got busy with creating concept art for the MK site.

Five years went by, and Daz’s platform program, Daz Studio, began to de-emphasize the older rendering engine it was using (3Delight) in favor of an Nvidia-chip-enabled and much more photorealistic rendering engine called Iray. Most things looked way better when rendered using Iray. Some, alas, looked way worse, and cheesier. Chief among these was a lot of character hair... including Lorn’s Dorian hair.

So I began looking around for a better equivalent, and sure enough... there wasn’t one.

(cue here image of frustrated digital artist collapsed on one of the various “away” versions of her desk) After FIVE YEARS? REALLY?

(sigh) Yeah.

...For the sanity of everybody involved, I’m now going to compress a prolonged spell of Desultorily Hunting For Better Hair into the shortest period possible. Every now and then, between sort of 2018 and now, when working on one project or another, I’d pick up one hairstyle or another (ideally ones that were on sale, and usable on other characters) with an eye to seeing if they’d work better on Lorn than the Dorian hair. In the meantime I converted Freelorn’s Gianni 7 figure into a newer version based on the newest Daz “basic male” figure, the so-called Genesis 8 Male. This conversion meant (among many other things) that I could put hairstyles on it that had been designed for earlier/different figures… even styles that had been designed for female characters. (Unisex hair has also been starting to become more of a Thing on the platform of late, so the G8M figure could use those as well.)

Finally—specifically, last month, when I got into a chat on Twitter with another Daz user that turned into a prolonged whinge about this problem—I realized that enough time had been spent on it. I was going to need to stop dithering and make some choices... because the renders weren’t looking any better. Local hair technology had improved enough to make Freelorn’s present hair look far worse than it had before.

...And in this case, it was “choices” plural I needed to make... because further (prose) work on Lorn’s character had led me to some realizations about his character arc that I hadn’t previously had. More about that in a bit. ...In any case, when chatting with that Twitter user I’d decided to produce a series of renders in which I tried out all the candidate hairstyles I’d piled up. The intention was to use these for concrete comparisons in situ and work out which hairstyles were at least usable for something on this character, and which (in Peter’s favorite phrase for this kind of operation) should be “flung high and far.”

So that I’d have decent lighting to work with, I stuck Lorn and Dusty into this excellent and beautifully detailed set—rightly voted by people in the Daz user forums as one of the best-made sets on the platform: the ROG Red Crow Inn set. Its indoor daylight is terrific. (This has been turning up in various of my MK-oriented renders for a while now.)

What you need to know about the hairstyles that follow here is that in all cases I had a look at their product descriptions to determine (or attempt to determine...) how adjustable they were “under the hood”. Some styles have so many controls you can barely wrap your brains around them. (See the image right up at the top for the controls on the Dorian hairstyle.) Alternately, some have hardly any adjustability at all. Some styles look terrible until you’ve spent hours adjusting them to work correctly for your character; but some will look fine right out of the box, with little or no adjustment. Some that look good in the demo shots refuse ever to look that good on your character, no matter what you do to them. And some that might initially seem unpromising, turn out to work really well.

The main problem: usually you have to buy them first to find out for sure… and you are not going to be able to get a refund just because “this hair didn’t work on my character”. So this whole operation is something of a crapshoot.

...So that’s one set of conditionals affecting the choice(s). Here’s another, more story-driven.

During the seven-or-so years he was on the run across the Kingdoms as an outlaw, the length and/or style of Freelorn’s hair was hardly any kind of political issue. (At least, nothing compared to the one involved with keeping the head that grew the hair attached to Lorn’s body, and not packed into a bucket of brine to be sent home to Arlen by someone collecting the reward on it.) As it’d generally have been stupid for Lorn to go to the barber—because when you’ve got a dead-or-alive price on your head, do you really want to take the chance of being recognized by someone with a razor in their hand?—he’d routinely have just hacked it off with whatever sharp implement came to hand. And (as we know from canon) he often dyed it as an extra layer of disguise.

Immediately after the events of the great War, no one thought twice about Freelorn resuming his normal hair color and growing it long again... until some people did start thinking twice about it. Everybody knows that the new King was not exactly a model of good behavior in his princely days. And despite the War’s resolution making it plain that Lorn’s demigodly ancestor the White Lion approved of Lorn’s succession to the Throne, there remain quite a lot of people who would have preferred some other ruler, and who think taking Freelorn down a peg (at the very least) would be politically smart.

Notice was also taken, in the aftermath of the War, of how Lorn almost always carries Hergótha the Great, the Lion’s sword, everywhere he goes. Some people talk about this in terms of Lorn “overcompensating” for his past mistakes and using the sword to try to increase the appearance of his legitimacy. (And this of course is garbage. Lorn has his own reasons for this, and by and large ignores the comments.) But when the same people who’ve looked askance at his behavior regarding Hergótha then also start passing comment about his hair, and the fact that he’s growing it out long and “mane-like” again, Lorn quietly and gradually starts wearing his hair shorter.

The more politically astute of his enemies, noting this, mutter under their breaths and turn their attention to finding other, more effective ways to discredit the new King. ...And Freelorn’s out-of-universe chronicler, on “discovering” this piece of business, abruptly realizes that she now has to find him two new hairstyles: a pre-War one and a post-War one.

(mutters) Great.

(then, helpless laughter) ...Okay. The one note of cheer regarding the post-War hair is that I’m never going to have to worry about how it’s going to look with a crown on it. This is because the rulers of Arlen don’t go in for crowns. It’s the right to sit on the Throne (and your political/spiritual ability to stay there) and the possession of the Arlene scepter, the White Stave, that imply and confer Arlene kingship. Which is just as well, because dealing with hats and headpieces as regards hair in the Daz 3D platform is a huge fecking nuisance. I won’t get technical about this. I’m just glad there’s no need.

...So let’s get the damn hair dealt with.

To begin with: here, using the present updated-to-Genesis-8 version of Freelorn’s Gianni 7 figure, is the Dorian hair that’s been in use for him until now.

Not optimal, as you can see. As it always has, this prop looks awfully 80s and too blowdried, and makes it look like Lorn’s preferred hair product is library paste. So, time for it to go.

Next up: a hairstyle I picked up along the way called “Deckhand.”

At first it looked like if it was adjustable enough, it could be made to work. Unfortunately this turned out not to be the case. It does nothing but make the King of Arlen look like the Knave of Hearts. (Or like he’s been dragged backwards through a hedge. Or both.) So: nope.

Next... a hair prop called “Grayson.”

...It has pretty good length adjustability, but there’s something weird going on with the colors. Also not sure about the complete lack of bangs. Kind of an Errol Flynn-ish look to this, but... Not convinced.

Next... A prop that’s enabled for the Daz3D dForce routine that allows materials to be made to custom-drape naturally for a character, and to be animated. This is called “Rogue Waves”. Here it’s been through the dForce routine with very simple instructions: “just fall downwards, don’t get fancy.” ...Unfortunately these hair props often wind up looking clumpy in a different way from older hairstyles. Not sure about this one either.

(sigh) Next: a prop called “Classic Side Part”.

Uhh... no. (It might have worked a little better if it was possible to change the side the part is on. But it’s not. So: pass.

Next: a prop called “Fallow.” This is a ladies’ style, but because this new improved version of Freelorn is a Genesis 8 character, that doesn’t matter. Here I just slapped it onto him to see what would happen.

It’s... not optimal. Never mind.

Next, a prop called “Thomas.” Again, had it lying around as a leftover from another project: slapped it onto Lorn on a whim.

This is... a bit interesting, but even after an hour or so of wrestling with it, it refuses to lie the fuck down on top. In back, in particular, it looks very odd when his back is turned. (sigh) So: nope.

Next up: a style called Jai. In terms of the Daz product universe this would be a very old style, going back to, oh, 2015 or so… meaning it probably won’t work all that well in Iray renders.

...And sure enough, it’s not great in terms of its texture or its adjustability. So: byebye.

Next: a style called “Varun.”

This one looks kind of messy and unshaped at the moment, but it’s very adjustable and has enough possibilities to warrant playing with it for a bit. The strands are kind of coarse, but depending on the setup of a given shot, that may not matter so much. This one, I think, is a likely candidate for the pre-War hairstyle (and as that’s the hair that Lorn is wearing for the first three books, I’ve got a fair number of renders to redo that will need it).

...And finally: a style called “Zoren”.

This one also looks fairly out of control at the moment, but like the Varun hair, it has possibilities if it can be quieted the hell down and flattened out. This would be a good candidate for Lorn’s post-War hair, once it’s been disciplined. (Which may require a whip and a chair, but whatever: nobody ever said this was going to be easy.)

What convinced me nine-tenths of the way about the usability of this one was a render that came out of the pre-Halloween “dduane is an anagram for Undead” business:

...That’s the Zoren hair, and it looks surprisingly good on Lorn there. I think I can make that work. (Leaving aside the more amusing aspects of this “crossing the streams” moment. I suspect that [in his position as adept/mage-in-training] Herewiss would be having to violently restrain himself from making MK!GrabbyHands at a wizard’s manual. Lorn, meanwhile, in his position as Master of the National Library of Arlen, would mostly be interested because a book was behaving like that.)

Anyway, after a day or three of mulling over those results and doing some experiments, I’ve decided that those last two hair props are going to be the ones I’ll be using for Freelorn going forward. Both of them are handy in that their colors can be adjusted without too much difficulty. Pre-War, Lorn is pretty much a fairly standard honey blond. But as general stress and ensuing events (natural and supernatural) take their toll, this starts to shift, and he begins going lighter, toward what we’d think of as an ashen or platinum blond: a change that becomes more noticeable when he starts wearing his hair shorter, and more noticeable still when the less natural side of his work is affecting him.

Like this, for example. (The working caption is “This is not a good time.”)

..Anyway. Some art’s already been re-rendered, with pretty fair results. Post-War...

...pre-War (or during, actually...)

...post-War...

...pre-War again...

...post-War...

...All not too bad.

So now begins the work of re-rendering all the other images of him on the website, to reflect where in the (hair-)timeline Lorn was at any given moment. (Some of that work is here already.)

But at least Lorn’ hair issue is finally dealt with. (Do NOT get me started about Segnbora’s.)

...Now where was I?

Oh yeah. :)

#Middle Kingdoms #Freelorn #Freelorn of Arlen #Daz Studio #Daz3D #digital art issues #hair #Middle Kingdoms meta

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blindbeta · 4 years ago

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I just saw someone asked about making a character blind in their novel and you responded about ways to avoid it being portrayed poorly. I wanted to ask, could it also help if part of the arc is the character accepting becoming blind?

Like, even if it happens in some kind of accident, or like them becoming blinded as a sacrifice for the team, would it be a bad portrayal for part of the character's story to be realizing it's not the end of the world, that being disabled doesn't make them completely useless, etc?

Or is that sort of arc also ableist?

[Note: I used the words non-disabled and abled interchangeably here. Both refer to people with no disabilities. After a conversation with some of my followers, I decided to make an effort to be clearer about who I referred to when I used words like able-bodied, because able-bodied may, for some people, refer to people without physical disabilities or without any disabilities at all. There are times when the distinction matters, even when people said they can usually tell based on context whether or not able-bodied is meant to include them.]

Writing About A Character Accepting Being Blind After Going Blind - When You Aren’t Blind Yourself

An arc about a character accepting becoming blind doesn’t feel good to me and I’ll try to explain why.

I’d rather read a story about a character who happens to be blind, in whatever way that happened, than read a story where a writer who isn’t blind tries to write about a blind character accepting being blind. I just finished a similar book and it did not go well. There are some things that research cannot teach you. There are some stories that aren’t yours to tell.

I don’t want to read about a non-blind author, especially a non-disabled author, writing negative things about my disability.

A character starting out feeling overly negative toward their blindness already feels bad to me. Why? Because the author has to write negative, sometimes completely wrong things about being blind. When I read stories like this, I am bombarded with stereotypes or myths which are rarely corrected by the narrator, who is usually traumatized and somewhat isolated as they heal. Many of the things they think or say are not checked or revisited. Mean things other characters say or think about them are often internalized by the narrator. Things that, in real life, are said to blind and otherwise disabled people as truths. As tough-love. As part of the supposed -Real World-. As bullying. As ignorant, innocent questions. As rude comments.

All of these things are not even coming from a personal place. The author writing these things- while they probably don’t agree with them, of course- is still not blind at the end of the day.

Readers who aren’t blind may not understand the nuance of why some of the things they read were ableist if it isn’t called out in the narrative in some way, which can sometimes happen when the narrator says something negative about their new disability. This isn’t to say readers shouldn’t do their own research or examine the story more closely. This isn’t to say the author is at fault for the interpretations of readers who refuse to think beyond what is laid out for them. When I say this, I am being realistic. Not all readers are going to be proactive. Not all readers are going to approach a book about a person going blind from a good place.

Most of the time, this is just something the author needs to accept. It is impossible to anticipate the strange interpretations of every reader. However, this narrative can be dangerous to a reader who has never met a blind person. Keep in mind, most people aren’t doing what you all are doing. They just read what is given to them. And if what is given to them is a helpless or self-loathing blind person, they might believe in that image. That book may be the only expirience they have with a blind person and they may not read any other books with blind characters.

Another thing I thought of was that non-blind authors sometimes don’t understand how hobbies and skills translate to blind people. For example, in a story I read once, a character who was going blind practiced playing piano and typing on a keyboard blindfolded so they could learn how to do without sight. However, blind people can already play instruments even if they were born blind. Blind people can also easily type on regular keyboards and, technically, correct keyboard technique means typing without needing to look at the keyboard.

Authors who don’t understand what it is like to go blind often don’t get the nuances of what that person is losing and not losing. And it often shows. They also don’t often include the aspects of blindness that are actually challenging. Why focus your worry on typing on a keyboard when you can learn how to use assistive devices in the kitchen or learn to cope with anxiety you anticipate will get worse after losing vision? Why not try to find accessible copies of books you have or scan or Braille sentimental letters? Why not organize your closet so you can find things more easily?

Obviously this is related to characters who know they’re going blind, though.

It favors non-disabled readers, which is ableist.

Another reason this type of story bothers me is because it is so common. Or at least people expect it. This type of story is one abled / non-disabled people can swallow and feel inspired by. Showing the blind person accepting their blindness also favors non-disabled readers in ways I may not be able to articulate well.

Accepting disability is an arc non-disabled people are comfortable with. It is a feel-good type of story that usually doesn’t challenge people too much, other than to remind them not to bully people. Already, this story is not even for disabled people, or in this case, blind people. It exists to introduce people who aren’t blind to the idea of becoming blind, to blind technology, to inspirational ideas about how blind people actually can do things. Stories like this guide abled people along and prioritize their ideas about blindness. Because the narrator is almost always previously abled, the story is about adjusting to blindness in a way that caters to non-disabled people.

How does a story with this angle benefit blind readers? Even if a blind person has also recently gone blind and wants to see a character who on that journey with them, what can a writer who isn’t blind say that blind writer couldn’t say? Or say better? Or say with more power? With more nuancel? With more personal experience?

And it may seem like saying this arc is ableist is too much. Keep in mind, ableism isn’t just about being rude to or excluding disabled people. Ableism favors those who are able-bodied or neurotypical over those who are not. It favors those who are not disabled over those who are. This story is just another way of doing that. Often, people are ableist through what they consider kindnes. Authors are not exempt from that.

Disabled authors should tell their own stories

This is where I will get some pushback. (I already received some here if you think it will be helpful to know what this is like.)

There are a few parts to this.

First, I want everyone to know I am not telling you what not to write or that this type of story, at least with elements of this narrative, can never be done well. However, the more care you take when writing it and the more you know about why it can be ableist, the better you will be able to write it. I’m still not sure I would want to read a book that is dedicated to this topic of accepting blindness, but who knows?

I also might feel more open to this narrative from a writer who experienced becoming disabled in some other way and was open about it. While they would still need to research blindness, some of the issues I named here could be avoided through having prior personal experience that non-disabled people simply don’t have.

If, however, you find yourself upset or feeling excluded by this post, consider what I wrote again. Consider why you think you are the best person to tell such a story with this particular arc.

I am also not saying that non-disabled writers could never write this topic well. I just question, again, what they can add to the topic of accepting blindness that blind people can’t already add. This is also assuming they were able to avoid some of the issues I listed above that might come up. Which would be difficult on top of doing all the other research they need to do in order to write a book. Why make it harder for themselves?

Now that I’m done with the disclaimers, accepting blindness should be something mostly left up to blind writers. This narrative is so closely tied to the trauma-based / incident-based blindness that it can be hard to separate them, but I feel like the readers of the blog have thought hard to suggest ways to improve or subvert that trope and the problems that go with it. Maybe they can do the same here. Maybe not.

Anyway, the reason I think it should be left to blind writers is because of the personal experience I mentioned previously. Acceptance will come from a more authentic place. Anything that comes before the acceptance will also come from an authentic place and blind writers will know how to deal these issues a little better.

Blind writers will know how to write this topic well. They can center blind readers in a way that many arcs like this don’t.

As a side note, blind writers also need more recognition and attention. This arc is specifically about or mostly about accepting blindness, which blind writers are intimately familiar with. Their stories should be prioritized in this area, at the very least.

If a non-disabled writer decided to do this topic, I think it would help to read and public ally promote books and other works by blind people.

Thank you for asking this question.

This was a really great question and I want to thank the anon for asking. I really appreciate the chance to discuss this topic. If anyone wants to expand on this question or figure out ways to subvert this arc, feel free to ask. Also, remember that I am not authority on stories about blind people, but I feel this opinion in shared by many of us and it should be known so writers can be aware.

Suggestions for alternatives.

1. Include only brief instances of acceptance and / or make it only related to blindness instead of accepting blindness as a character arc.

It will depend on how you do it, but brief, less direct instances of acceptance could be done well. One thing I’m thinking of is Toph challenging her father in The Blind Bandit. This could be seen as a form of self-acceptance for Toph, one which is related to her blindness without being the entirety of her need to accept part of herself, which gives her the courage to disrupt the view her parents have of her. Toph doesn’t struggle with being blind. She struggles with something related to being blind, which her parents being over-protective, limiting her freedom and expression, and putting her a gender role box.

The rest of Toph’s story wasn’t completely about being blind either. The writers, who weren’t blind as far as I can gather, handled this part well, and so I wanted to include it as an example.

Obviously, this can also be done badly, but that’s what beta readers are for. I personally would prefer the acceptance arc only be tangentially related to blindness, especially when combined with the trope about going blind through trauma / incidents / accidents.

2. Start in a different place.

You could start the story or character arc in a different place, rather than starting directly after going blind. This could be years later. After they already adjusted to the bigger parts of being blind. This saves you the need to figure out how to get around it.

Some parts of this ask might help.

3. Focus mostly on the practical stuff rather than the emotional side.

Focus on things like cane skills, adjusting to using screen-readers or needing to increase font sizes to read. Focus on learning to cook. Make the arc less about emotional stuff and more achieving goals. While I can understand how this might bother some blind people, I think it can work if blind readers are consulted, especially readers who went blind later in life. I wanted to include this as an option just in case people are determined to include going blind in the story. I think, if the author is careful, it could go well. A few narrative justifications for not writing the typical acceptance arc include:

-the character was already blind in some way first

-the character has a blind sibling, parent, or friend they grew up with

-the character got counseling or the story mentions they are getting counseling

Alternatively, you could also focus emotional difficulties on the traumatic incident, if there is one, and not the resulting blindness.

4. Write different stories - expand what stories about blind characters look like.

Writers have so many opportunities! I don’t see why they would feel the need to write a story primarily about going blind and learning you aren’t useless now after all, when they could be writing about a blind mermaid challenging the Mer Queen and falling in love with her instead. When they could be writing about blind space pirates creating new technology for other blind people. When they could be writing about a blind witch reclaiming their sexuality and also learning to dance to make their coven less worried about their social life after going blind.

See this post for more ideas about expanding the typical stories.

If you are creative enough, none of my claims that certain topics being best left to blind writers should stop you. If you feel limited, you might be trapped in the idea that blind people only have one narrative: trauma, sadness, helplessness, and just maybe, acceptance. If you don’t feel limited, you are in a good place.

Blind readers want other types of stories, too.

I hope this helps some of my followers. Thanks for the interesting question, anon. If anyone has any questions or would like me to clarify something, feel free to ask. I wrote this at night when I was tired. I have missed some things.

-BlindBeta

P.S. The ideas I pitched at the end are free to use if you feel inspired by any of them.

#writing blind characters #blind characters #blind people #ask #anon #acceptance narrative #trauma narrative

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felassan · 4 years ago

Text

DA4 Lead Producer Scylla Costa’s BIG Festival talk, “Challenges of Dragon Age production during the pandemic”, can currently be rewatched on YouTube here starting roughly at timestamp 8:57:02 after a lil presenter blurb/intro. It’s 1 hour long. When it was streamed live, there was an English translation ‘voiceover’. There isn’t in this vid, however I want to post the link for Portuguese speakers, and also it’s neat for everyone to be able to see all the slides he presented with for themselves in context.

I don’t know if an English-language version will get put up so I’m sharing the notes I took during the talk below, in case anyone’s interested and because I might as well since I wrote them. The rest of this post is under a cut due to length.

Edit: Found a place to re-watch the English version of the talk

(Quick note: I didn’t note down everything, mostly things that caught my interest, so this isn’t exhaustive, and when I was watching I was real tired, so pls bear that in mind and don’t take these notes as bullet-proof 100% accurate gospel or direct quotes. If you watched it and think I’ve written down something wrong/misunderstood, let me know and I’ll fix. Also if you’re a Portuguese speaker and I’ve gotten something incorrect or missed something important etc, again just let me know.) **

** Edit: I’ve now gone through my notes while watching the talk again. I’ve filled in some of the gaps (although they still don’t cover everything said) and so forth, and now I’m no longer worried about there being possible errors in this post.

-----

For some context, this slide contained the breakdown of the talk’s structure. Bear in mind there are other slides present in the talk than the ones I’ve posted here, I didn’t include caps of all of them, just ones which were of note to me.

In the talk, chief Producer Scylla goes over challenges of DA4 production during the pandemic. He discusses the adaptations - necessary skills and learning from remote work - and he ponders on the future of teamwork.

After the launch of ME3 he became a producer, all his MMO and other experience helped a lot. He was on DAI for 3 years and MEA for 9 months, then Anthem. Today, on DA4, Scylla and another Lead Producer were the heads of the whole project, and there is his boss is the Executive Producer Christian Dailey.

^ the usual AAA game development cycle (brief introduction)

AAA games are games that are launched for several platforms simultaneously.

In BioWare’s case, the pre-production phase of the game development cycle can have from 5 - 30 people, and up to almost 60 people when they’re just about to go through the gate to production.

In the pre-production phase, they go through the game’s concepts and prototypes and start developing systems. They seek the game’s concept and focus, and its key features. They do lots of market research. In the case of BioWare, all their games are strong in narrative, so they have lots of tools related to game narratives and supporting the development of a narrative (cinematic design, dialogue system etc) that get focused on in this phase. Other parts of the team such as writers and cinematic design need these systems to do their own roles.

In BioWare’s case, the pre-production phase through to launch can take 4 - 6 years, but it does depend on the size of the team during development.

With regards to Dragon Age 4, they were coming close to the time when they would shift from pre-production to the production stage when the pandemic hit.

During the production phase is when the development of content and features takes place, with the systems mostly already existing from the pre-production phase. A few new systems may be developed in this phase. In the production phase is when things start escalating, and the team really starts growing, to like 2- or 3-fold the prior pre-production phase size.

(DA4 is currently in the production phase.)

In the alpha phase, features have to be fully implemented and systems all have to be running / working. All the game features should already be in the game by now. They test from pre-production onwards, but this phase is when they run heavy technical tests with lots of players trying to play at the same time. In the beta phase, the idea is that you should now have full content and that now you’re balancing it and running more and lots of different tests with players before launch. There are final tweaks and then the final launch, when in the weeks prior to launch, all the different business units and areas e.g. marketing team, technology team, publishing team, get together once a day and all of the game’s issues are reported and brought to the table to be prioritized. Then they decide the next steps re: these issues (this is known as ‘the war room’).

After the launch there are usually patches like day zero patches and other patches, this being standard industry practise. The last stage is the new content stage where there are DLCs and a game with more content.

On March 12th 2020, the team gathered to review the DA4 story in the new office. Everyone was very excited. (They had spent over 10 years in their last building and had noticed that with the team growing they needed more space. In August 2019 they found the new studio in the city center.)

Anyway that evening, they got an email from the CEO which contained instructions and said that due to the pandemic, they should from now all start working remotely. They had known that this happening was a possibility so they had been planning on how to have all the devs working from home, but initially less than 50% of the devs were able to work from home successfully/efficiently due to various issues e.g. you need a VPN to be able to log in remotely to do your job normally, varying home office setups. The day after this, the office was basically deserted, except for Scylla, the IT infrastructure people and one or two odd devs.

Scylla was part of the team that was working on allowing the devs to work from home. They first started looking at the short-term changes they needed to make to allow this.

“First, take care of our developers”.

When the pandemic first hit, their and Scylla’s [as Lead Producer] first priority was to look after the devs. Many of them are parents (schools and day-cares were shut, children were studying from home), others have relatives living with them, others have other personal circumstances which of course need to be taken into account when it comes to assessing what needs to be taken into consideration for this new scenario. So, they looked at each dev on a case-by-case basis in order to evaluate, speaking to each one and asking them what they could do to support them.

One of the first changes/adaptations they could implement was flexible working hours and flexibility around deadlines. Generally speaking the devs got a lot of support, EA was really good and really supported the devs especially in the first months of the pandemic (and they are still supporting them). Initially not all devs had suitable office spaces at home, some were working from the living room from laptops or at the kitchen table. The whole covid situation basically just happened over night and nobody was really ready to deal with that change. So their first step was to enable their devs to work remotely. As a producer, Scylla’s main task is to communicate with the team such as via a number of daily meetings. He doesn’t depend so much on powerful hardware.

“Enable developers to work remotely”.

This slide shows some of a BioWare audio team. Different teams have varying and specific needs in order to do their jobs and therefore in order to do them remotely. For example, the audio team need good-quality speakers and amplifiers, while the lighting and art teams need other specific equipment such as tablets and large screens. So there was a lot of work they had to do to go through each dev to understand their individual needs and what needed to be done for them. ‘Could they download the builds? Did they have the right performance [tech-wise]? Could they submit their changelists, their codes to the server?’

Some devs needed a more powerful internet connection as it would take 6-8 hours to download a build (some devs live rurally). Some needed a lot of cable, as they were working far away from their routers (sometimes up to 50m). As time went by things got better and better.

The chair devs work from is also important; a kitchen able chair etc is not suitable to sit in for long-term desk work, possibly leading to health issues like back ache and blood circulation problems in the legs.

Every 3 months they had money given to help devs buy new mice, keyboards, monitors - anything they needed really in order for their office setting at home to be improved. For a while, because lots of people [generally, in society] were needing and buying them, it was quite hard to buy things like webcams and microphones.

On mid- and long-term changes:

In terms of DA, we have to look at this from 2 perspectives, the change in the personal and the professional environments.

As a consequence of working from home, people tend to be less active during the day (even in an office, you go between meeting rooms, up and down stairs etc). Physical activity supports life quality and therefore work quality. Scylla noticed that he began to feel listless and such, and found that he needed to change his routine that he had initially developed when he started working from home, for example; having a normal start time (as in, have a semblance of structure in your day as if you were still working in the office site), get dressed at the normal time, not having meetings over lunch etc. This wasn’t just him, lots of other devs encountered this and had this experience too. Devs which adapted faster had better productivity and became more productive faster.

Scylla bought a stand-up desk which he can raise up and down, and at meetings he would be delivering a talk while standing or even while walking on a treadmill. Other devs also got stand-up desks. He tracked his body’s data on a Fitbit. These sorts of things helped improve physical and mental wellbeing. Other devs did similar things, like starting going out for jogs or began practising yoga. Essentially, everyone needed to make changes to their daily routine in comparison to what they had been doing prior to the pandemic.

The pandemic has been a thing for over a year now. In their location, every couple of weeks a new restriction is put into place or a rule is changed, and every two weeks there’s a new thing that you can and can’t do. Scylla also started moving around his property. He worked on his desk, fixed it up and painted - taking up a new hobby. Other devs picked up new hobbies too. These are good ways to be active and also to be somewhere else, i.e. to break up the working day and not be spending it all in one home office-type location. Scylla found that when he made these sorts of changes to his routine to improve his lifestyle, the data output by his Fitbit as indicators of his health/wellbeing etc improved, e.g. number of steps taken in a day, heartbeats per minute while at rest. As stated many of the other devs went through a similar process.

On the professional side of things:

They had to improve remote delivery of builds. Accessing things from home as a dev requires a VPN. They need to download a build every day and then upload it to the server after making their changes to the game. They had to work with infrastructure and research other tech, such as streaming tech to allow remote console access, in order to better facilitate this process. For remote access, they also had to work on adapting communications channels.

“Adapting channels of communication.”

In this slide, the team are working on the storyboards. Before you can implement motion capture & performance capture, you have to ‘run the storyboards’ like this. These are small illustrating drawings which reflect the drafts and are meant to quickly reflect the intention of the scenes that are to be built. Before the pandemic, the team would go to meeting rooms like this, sit down, talk and interact in person. After the pandemic, the question became ‘How do you do this over Zoom?’ You can, but it’s not quite the same; it’s harder to see peoples’ expressions, some people are embarrassed speaking over Zoom etc. Therefore they had to adapt their communications systems, and unlearn the ways in which they developed before in order to relearn and learn new ways of communicating.

Slack was a tool that they adopted on this front. Communications channels can be confusing on Slack, so there was a need to develop structure. For example, how quickly should someone reply (as a recommended convention for the purposes of work)? They had to define the process/procedures for the channels so it was clear for the team as a whole how it would all flow (this is important especially if you have a team with say 30 people or as a whole hundreds of people). Before the pandemic, they had stand-up meetings where they’d go around in a circle every morning and talk about their activities - what they’re going to be working on, any roadblocks they had encountered etc. The question arose ‘How do you replace these?’ They ended up doing Slack messages at a certain time of day and updating their statuses with some details on what they’re working on and color-coding (green - fine, yellow - need help, red - busy/blocked out).

Another issue that they faced was unforeseen - the number of meetings that devs were having really shot through the roof. When there wasn’t a good structure of communications channels, any conversation would become a meeting. Everybody began scheduling meetings left and right, and at the end of the day they would have little time left in which to actually work on their to-do lists. Hence, they had to work with the team to really analyze and be very pragmatic. ‘Which meetings needed to happen? Which didn’t? Is a specific meeting really necessary? Which meetings should be recurring? What can be done over Slack?’ This guideline had to be given to the team to help, and it improved things a lot. The number of meetings decreased a lot and they got more effective. For example, by making sure to set an agenda for meetings beforehand, and by having meeting notes (then a dev who didn’t really need to be at a meeting could skip attending and just quickly review the notes output after instead). They also decreased the standard length of meeting times from the default Outlook blocks of 1 hour and 30 mins to 55 mins and 25 mins respectively. This 5 minute change gave devs time for things like bio breaks (also 4 hours in a row at a computer in a home office with one meeting after another just isn’t good for a person).

“Adapting p-cap and mocap”.

On content:

From a content point of view, the most difficult thing in terms of the pandemic was adapting p-cap and mocap (performance capture and motion capture). They hire actors and it’s a large studio. The pandemic meant big limits to what they could and couldn’t do. The actors had to be masked and 5 meters apart in distance (although it doesn’t look like it in some of these shots due to angles). Also there could be no other person around in the studio - only the actors. The directors instead would ‘patch’ in remotely on big screens (you can see this in the second photo in the top right).

Before the pandemic, they felt that they wouldn’t be able to do p-cap or mocap properly remotely, as the directors would usually stand right next to actors giving guidance on their performance. The techs would also usually be near. But they adapted! The keyword is adapting, changing process. It’s harder and it’s different, but it is possible, and people start rethinking what is possible. What was said to be impossible before now is possible.

P-cap differs to mocap in that it also captures voice and facial expressions.

On the future of work after covid:

There will probably be more working from home and more flexibility for workers e.g. being able to work say 3 out of 5 days from home. It does depend on what a dev’s specific job is however. For example, the audio engineers require lots of specialist equipment and said equipment is of higher quality and quantity in the office. So, depending on role, devs might be working more often or less often from home.

Another development is that lots of devs are moving house. In lockdown etc people started reassessing what’s most important in life. Some are moving further away from the studio to get a cheaper rent or for example couples who both needed an office space to work from home from but their current place only had one area. Others are moving closer to nature for a better quality of life, and still others have other different reasons for doing so. Over 10 devs that he knows in fact have recently moved, including Scylla himself.

The pandemic changed certain skills being used by people on a daily basis. Scylla used as an example of this one of his soft skills, being able to tell from looking/interacting in-person with someone if they are stressed out. Obviously it’s less easy to tell if someone is stressed out when you’re remote, so you adapt different ways of checking in with people in the new situation. To continue carrying out his role as Lead Producer, he began checking in with his team pro-actively on the new comms channels and asking how they were doing.

Also, now that companies are more open to working remotely, there is going to be increased competition for hiring devs. They saw both sides of this coin at BioWare. They were able to hire devs from many places that they couldn’t hire from before e.g. Montreal, Vancouver, the US, as there’s less need for devs to relocate to Edmonton or Austin. This opens up opportunities to hire really intelligent and skilled people that they would not have had access to before.

Question and answer segment:

The pre-production phase has been concluded. They’re in the production phase.

They are not giving out a lot of details yet but Scylla is really excited as a big fan of the whole series. He thinks that with DA4, they will have the opportunity/possibility to launch the best story out of all DA games. He feels that the characters they’re making are amazing. He’s dying to say more but can’t.

When you work from home you need to keep your team as productive as possible. During the pandemic, when people started working from home, they noticed that some people became more productive and some people became less productive. They were analyzing it on a case-by-case basis so as not to make assumptions. They were interested in seeing what they could do to help. At the beginning of the pandemic, they were looking at the devs as people and seeing what they needed.

Production of DA4 still needed to continue during the pandemic because they want to be able to launch the game.

This slide shows a writer. Writing is an example of a role which is more able to work from home easily.

Their productivity did go down in the first month of the pandemic. After adaptations, some people then became more productive than they were before (this was role and personal situation-dependent, examples of this being artists and coders who were able to art and code at home without being interrupted, thereby being able to produce more). Covid has affected productivity in general, but this is part of our new reality. They have adapted and adjusted some deadlines. They have enough data (Scylla LOVES data) now to understand how long it will take them/how long they’ll need to launch the game. They have always had historical data for this purpose, but they’re doing more of this sort of thing now to ensure that they are doing things at the right time.

Remote hiring opens up the door to more talent joining, so if someone has talent geography will hold them back less. Some companies though may choose not to hire people from other countries due to labor issues, cumbersome legal aspects, time zones. But even in such cases there are activities for example that can be carried out while the rest of the team is asleep such as testing or working on the build, or there are cases where those companies still will want to hire a specifically/highly talented person even in spite of the potential legal aspects and so on.

On mental health: People were affected. There is the mental, physical and social impacts of the pandemic situation on people. EA supported them during the pandemic in terms of their mental wellbeing, there are specific companies (services offered, speaking to a therapist) that they can contact if they need something or help. EA had always been good at supporting them with this sort of thing but this has improved further during the pandemic. Another change was that they could/can take a couple of days off if they needed/need to because of the pandemic e.g. to take care of children, who were obviously not at school at the time. As a producer he had to be very mindful of all of this. How much they were monitoring peoples’ wellbeing really went up during the pandemic.

A question that was asked - in terms of DA4′s storybeats, is there anything in there that they decided to change due to the pandemic as it wouldn’t be sensitive or appropriate to include anymore, for example a plague plotline or something? Scylla’s answer is that DA and ME are games in which they try to have narratives that are relatable, which include things which people will identify with, so that players understand what characters are going through etc. Nothing in DA4′s plotline/storybeats has been changed (in the frame of this question, relating to the pandemic), as it didn’t have anything in it that could be specifically or a directly connected to a pandemic-type situation or anything. Of course the DA story has Blights and the Taint, but these are different & fantastical things and existed long before the pandemic situation. So this wasn’t the case with DA4 and there was no need to change anything, but this has happened to other games where they decided to change a storyline due to a strong correlation with something in the real world.

There were then concluding/closing remarks. The message he wants to send is that a crisis will always spark opportunities. Look at a crisis and try to see how you can grow.

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#dragon age 4 #the dread wolf rises #da4 #dragon age #bioware #video games #covid mention #long post #longpost #wanted to write these up properly and post them yesterday but wasn't able to #mass effect #anthem

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