#complex theme

[zevranunderstander]

i dont think i will ever be over dragon age 2. like. bioware made an epic fantasy story about a chosen one having to save a country and stop the apocalypse and then they made the second installment of the series be about the sociopolitical climate in ONE city through the lens of a family of refugees fleeing from the war of the first game and just. made it about political tensions and class dynamics and the influences of living in a church-mandated state and the growing tension over an occupied piece of the city and political killings and interpersonal conflict and power and its story is ENTIRELY character-driven. it has easily the most iconic set of companion characters. the premise of living through a story told over the course of ten years and knowing from the start that something really bad will happen in the end was so fresh and exciting. the fact that the acts really built on top of each other andhow much the city changed over time. and the game was so mature in terms of the topic of fighting against oppression in so many ways (im usually generous and say that the short development time left some things a bit wanting), and as much as some people say that the game treats mages and templars as being equally bad, i don't think that that is actually true about the game and it very earnestly tries to grapple with some pretty complex political dynamics.

and then the game completely flopped financially and was almost universally hated for its queer themes and its sympathy for "terrorism" and a lot of the things that stemmed from basically having no production time at all and then the studio just made another epic fantasy story about a chosen one that has to save the world from the apocalypse

[anteomnia]

just endlessly thinking about blue eye samurai.

thinking about how akemi, taigen, and mizu are if a coin had three sides or maybe just the two and mizu is the bridge of metal between them.

akemi being the ideal image for women, for the life they endure. she was simultaneously a princess, a prostitute, and a prisoner. her entire life was men making decisions for her, even the ones that had good intentions, and she believed her deepest desire was freedom. it still is, but she has been revealed to this heinous predicament of her gender, and she’s realized that to reach true freedom as a woman is to be the bird in the cage, to play nice and to earn the love of a man until he buys her a bigger cage and a bigger cage until he trusts her not to fly away. and it'll never be true freedom, but it will come with power. it'll come with the freedom of only one master rather than many.

taigen being the ideal image of a man. not all powerful, but not weak. he had a taste of what it'd be to succeed, and when it was taken from him, that easy success, he mistook it for his honor. he hunted mizu down to kill him, and instead he saved him. he saved him and saved him and he came closer to killing mizu when they were on the cliff's edge, and just when he gets to the point where he may actually fight mizu, he's tortured for information on him. he is tortured. Literally tortured within an inch of his life, enduring such a heinous violence, and he refuses to break. this man was a fight, was the torturer, and the victim of his torturing could've been his salvation from pain but he refused. mizu gave back taigen's honor but not by fighting him.

akemi wanted freedom and learned she would need power to have it.

taigen wanted power and learned that the violence that came with it was infinite and dishonorable.

and then there's mizu. mizu who wants revenge, wants acceptance. arguably the same things as them both. mizu wants acceptance, the freedom of living and the freedom to love and be loved. mizu wants revenge, which follows after violence and power, to get said acceptance. she thinks she must do both, have both, to live peacefully, and she's blatant about how she will not live without either.

she's given acceptance with the blacksmith, her "mother," her husband, but she sees the flecks of avoidance in it.

the blacksmith will not hear of her true gender. her "mother" will not acknowledge the crime of her birth. her husband can't find tolerance for the violence within her, the man of her.

and so she has to balance the woman and man of her, the ronin and the bride. taigen and akemi. and it's meeting mizu that they start to unravel their own identities.

mizu, who is both, and akemi and taigen who thought themselves one but turned out to be neither.

god.

[artfulacrostic]

the original series of star trek is absolutely my favorite thing bc every episode is like:

-kirk manhandles a penis shaped rock prop for a very long time

-spock dances flamenco

-sulu fences down the hallway shirtless

-episode plot is kirk v massive sentient lump

-kirk tries to explain spock's ears as a childhood accident where he got his head caught in a mechanical rice picker

-on an unrelated note, spock starts wearing a beanie

-redshirts get turned into like. cubes of salt

-uhura defeats a giant green hand by hotwiring the entire comms console

-spock and kirk hold hands

-scotty stops chekov from starting a bar fight with klingons only to immediately start one himself bc the love of his life (the enterprise) gets insulted

-mccoy's fantasies involve meeting characters from alice in wonderland, including a giant anthropomorphic rabbit

-spock's alien sex drive episode

-kirk gets bodyswapped

-gladiator fight episode (1)

-gladiator fight episode (2)

-gladiator fight episode (3)

AND YET, every episode is ALSO like:

-war cannot be reduced to numbers from an outside perspective, because that makes it easier to stomach without change; the horror that is war must be acknowledged in order to make room for peace

-more types of life can be extant than we can conceive, and just because they are different forms of life doesn't make them incapable of prospering

-love cannot be programmed or controlled, and discriminatory hatred is a tool only for death and pain

-cultures that are different than our own are valuable and can be vibrantly rich with history, and judging them before we try to understand and empathize is not only reductive but contemptible

-happiness is something that we have to allow ourselves, and actively seek out, because it can't come to us without work and acknowledgement of our own state of being

-genocide can never be justified, and certainly not even to supposedly save the people that are more "valuable" by any given metric over those who are not, because all lives have worth

anyway the balance of absurdity and meaningfulness gives me life, and we haven't even gotten started on the whale movie lmao

[sigmahimejoshi]

forcefully fucking a little god-devoted slut and noticing that cute, shiny little crucifix necklace around their neck. Then, using that useless necklace to choke them, whispering, "That false religious leader is not going to save you. Your true lord and savior is right here, deep inside of you." 

[blueskittlesart]

at a certain point i think we need to acknowledge that art is very rarely created accidentally. if you can see a theme in a work than that theme was, more likely than not, at least somewhat intentional on behalf of the creator. you don't put a piece of yourself out into the world without thinking about what it means at least a little bit.

[caligvlasaqvarivm]

I used to despise Eridan and think he was the absolute worst character (barring Cronus ig) but you have shown me the light and completely turned my opinion around and now I think he is such an endearing little freak <3 I read your whole blog already but if you've got any more thoughts on eri or anyone else then I hope you post them bc I'd love to hear more abt it!

i have sooo many controversial opinions about the dancestors you have noooooo idea

[thejasontoddarchives]

Gotham War is really playing out like God’s plan, ain’t it now

Task Force Z #4 (2022)

[visenyaism]

yeah i understand these books

[fishyartist]

Ui idea tests, thrown together bc im eepy. Was planning on doing more but I spent all my days energy on the second one oops

[sidsinning]

Mylene in “Derision”: “Having bad mom doesn’t excuse your behaviour”

Felix in “Emotion”: “uwu I committed a world genocide because I had a bad dad”

Me: ???

I will say Felix is a lot more complex and sympathetic in his circumstances, bc the harm he causes LB and Paris is in service to those he cares about- his fellow sentibeings. He believes he is doing something GOOD (ofc still enjoying sweet revenge against Bad Adults™ - which they are so, fair LOL), while everything Chloe sets out to do is to make herself feel good with absolutely no benefit to anybody- and she fully understands that.

I will give Felix props for apologizing to Kagami and Adrien after Mari seemingly disappears forever because of him at least

I guess the only "solace" the show wants us to be satisfied with is their own actions biting them in the ass in the end but

eh

(Mari deserves like 100000x apologizes from you Felix like holy shit you made her have a panic attack and worse)

(Also sidenote rewatching Emotion Felix's entire plot was heavy as hell, I feel like they fumbled the bag with him going from breaking down in tears from having to kill one of his own kind that he made himself, to making him Kagami's boyfriend the very next ep he appears??? idk focus became wack besides his weird theater kid backstory scene after🥴🥴🥴)

[fujii-draws]

I LEFT THIS IN MY DRAFTS LIKE A YEAR AGO. I SHOULDVE SPOKEN MY TRUTH

[yourhighness6]

I've been thinking a lot lately about how so many people miss the point of TSR completely. Like Katara did forgive Zuko because forgiveness is earned and no Katara didn't forgive Yon Rha because she can choose who to forgive/ who not to forgive and no Katara shouldn't have killed Yon Rha because the whole point of the episode is that you don't have to forgive someone to show them mercy. That's why Bryke insisting that Katara "forgave Yon Rha" after the fact is not only fucking stupid because she literally says something exactly to the contrary in the episode and it doesn't just remove her agency it removes the complicated moral theme

[nydescynt]

Thematic Analysis of Hades II: Why You Can Never Go Home

(At some point I might make a video on this, but for now sharing my thoughts via textpost. Spoilers ahead!)

So the text of the story of Hades and Hades 2 are Zagreus breaking out of the House, and Melinoë breaking in.

But the wild thing (and the reason Hades 2 is much more interesting to me) is that both games actually have almost inverted themes from that text. Zagreus is intent on uniting a household; Melinoë is discovering the home she's fought to return to is rotten to the core.

Zagreus, despite his entire textual goal being to leave his home and family, is narratively & thematically working to bring the family and household together. His mother comes back and is reunited not just with him but her husband, mother, and entire extended family. Achilles and Patrocles, Orpheus and Eurydice, Asterion and Theseus: Hades is a story of people metaphorically coming home and making peace with where they are (Sisyphus, Thanatos, Orpheus). Everyone basically gets a happy ending, credits roll, problems all resolved or en route to be solved. Everyone is home.

(Important to note: we never see a human in the first game. We see shades, and gods, and monsters, and the closest you get to a mortal living thing is the satyrs. This is a story concerned with the realm of the gods.)

In contrast, Melinoë has no home - besides being estranged from her childhood home, she literally lives in a tent. In case the theme was too subtle, presumably.

Now, she has been fighting her entire life to become powerful enough to return home and reclaim her family - that seems Zagreus-adjacent on its face. However, there isn't a home to return to- Hades is in shackles, the rest of her family trapped in time. At this point in Early Access, on both a metatextual & diegetic level she quite literally can neither make it to Mt Olympus or into Zagreus' room - she cannot go home, she cannot meet her family.

Consider the others: Odysseus' presence seems to tie into the idea of a long journey home, but this is an Odysseus who lived and died and now has other (inhuman) priorities. He loves them, but has no interest in reuniting with Penelope and Telemachus at this point. Nemesis dislikes her siblings, and is more concerned with the equal application of "justice" than whether it has any reforming effect. Narcissus and Echo eventually talk and part more amicably, but that's the best that can be said about their relationship.

Hecate refuses to be called Melinoë's mother: she will not distract from the "true" family that Melinoë has no memory of ever meeting.

Instead of Ares and Dionysus (enjoyers of chaos and least affected by the toxicity of the family in Hades 1) we have Hestia and Hephaestaus- a goddess who helped murder her father and a god constantly belittled by his own family. Their tense and frequently bitter interactions with the other Olympians are evocative of the central theme being explored: what if there isn't a home to go back to? What if your family is unforgivable? (What if you want to forgive them anyways? What if you need to?)

This theme is why Arachne is in the game, and Athena is not: likeable, first-helper-of-Zagreus Athena turned Arachne into a spider out of petty anger. How do you reconcile that?

Moros (lovely, kind Moros, who gushes at Odysseus like a fanboy) and his sisters the Fates did horrible things to mortals out of boredom. The same mortals whose bodies you can see stacked up like cordwood in Ephyra, who you repeatedly claim you are fighting to protect from Chronos. Moros can neither confirm nor deny that the current events could have been set in motion by the Fates. How do you reconcile that?

Polyphemus raises sheep. He genuinely loves and cares for them, is protective of them. He also eats them, and is confused when Melinoë implies a contradiction.

How can you love someone and be willing to kill them? For survival? For fleeting satisfaction? For vengeance?

Is Chronos' willingness to eat his children so morally heinous that it makes him worse than every cruelty the gods have wrought? Worse for who?

[averlym]

litany of the martyrs (click for better resolution!)

[aspiringxfires]

Watching weirdos on twitter miss the point of RGU so hard they actually start thinking BACKWARDS about it is so insane to me like did we watch the same fucking show how r u gonna sit there and say with your whole chest that ANTHY is the problem and that what happened to her and Utena wasn't assault and abuse how are you going to look me in my big gay eyes and say that Utena CONSENTED to everything Akio put her through? SHE'S A CHILD? THOSE ARE CHILDREN? How did you miss the entire point of the show how did you look at a show that gives you victims who act morally grey for their own survival due to their circumstances under the patriarchy that harbors a systemic cycle of abuse and go "actually THEY ARE THE BAD GUYS" instead of realizing that the entire point is that the cycle should be broken and everything that's been occurring to these characters was detrimental to their health and perception of healthy and prosperous relationships. How did you look at Akio fucking Ohtori and go "he was right and good actually" did you just have your eyes fucking closed for the last five episodes or something are you fucking stupid be honest

[shiveringsoldier]

Lawrence of Arabia (1962) dir. David Lean