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pikapeppa · 4 years

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Year-end Writer’s Round-Up: the 2020 edition

Tagged a million years ago by @mythicaitt and @lostinfantasies38 - thanks friends! I have finally put aside a chunk of time for this, since I am a nerd who likes to get accurate calculations.

I will preface this by saying it’s been an insane year, and I know many people’s creativity was sucked dry by, well, everything. I find my emotional escape/comfort in writing fic, so I just... I dunno, went nuts with writing this year. To that end, I’ll keep most of this post below a cut for those who don’t want to see my “stats”, but with an open invitation to participate for ANYONE who does want to share their writing achievements for the year, and a tag for those writers that I know for sure were active this year: @crackinglamb @barbex @solas-disapproves @elveny @alyssalenko @nug-juggler @musetta3 @cartadwarfwithaheartofgold @iarollane @in-arlathan @charlatron @queen-kass-the-writer - NO PRESSURE TO PARTICIPATE OR TO READ THIS AT ALL, THOUGH.

Word count and smut count table (i.e. NERD ALERT):

(Here’s a masterlist of all my fic, if any of the fics in that list strike anyone’s fancy and they want to find and check ‘em out.)

There are a couple of things missing from this word count that I only posted on Tumblr, a couple of Solas/Nare drabbles and a piece of Orsino/Hawke smut, but I’m too lazy to track those down right now. And I have another unposted chapter of Inadvisable that’s about 10k words… ANYWAY, MOVING ON.

New things I tried this year:

I jumped headfirst into a few Dragon Age rarepairs this year! I’ve always loved rarepairs and have particularly enjoyed writing them for Horizon Zero Dawn in the past, so it was a pleasure to take on a few this year:

Felassan x Lavellan in The Love That Grows From Violence

Sten x Yara Mahariel in Fall Into The Tide

Samson x Roman Hawke for my soulmate @schoute - a ship that I never even saw coming and that hit me like a ton of bricks in the feels.

I also took the plunge into theorizing and sorting through Big Lore this year for Dragon Age — something I’ve avoided doing for years. I usually don’t like doing very deep dives because I’m a canon-compliant sort of girl, and the idea of getting attached to a theory that might end up being wrong makes me feel itchy. But when I started writing a Felassan-centered fic, I had no choice but to try and figure out the big lore since YA BARK-EATING BOYFRIEND KNOWS THINGS. I spent 10+ hours sorting through DA meta, both canon and fanon, to try and come up with something cohesive for that fic that feels as canon-compliant as possible, so that was definitely a cliff I didn’t mean to jump off of, LOL.

I also took a jump into writing a fic with three simultaneous and interconnected relationships in Inadvisable, my modern university AU with @elbenherzart, which includes relationships for Solas, Abelas and Felassan. I was super excited but SCARED to do this: how to keep all three relationships interesting and exciting when the narrative keeps moving and flowing between the three relationships and the six characters who all know each other in different ways? Luckily, I had the wonderful Elbenherzart cheering me on and encouraging me with all the BEAUTIFUL ART she’s done for the fic, and I’ve been really enjoying it!

Fic I spent the most time on:

Um, it’s probably a tie between two fics: The Love That Grows From Violence (Felassan x Lavellan) just because of that Big Lore deep dive, or Lovers In A Dangerous Time (Fenris the Inquisitor), which I finished earlier this year and took a long time just by virtue of the fic length and THE AMOUNT OF FEELINGS I HAVE FOR FENRIS AND RYNNE HAWKE.

Fic I spent the least time on:

Wake Up, a quick oneshot featuring Varric and Solas, which I keysmashed in a couple of hours after the most recent DA4 trailer was released.

Favourite thing I wrote:

Oh my god. Everything?? Writing is my escape and my pride and joy, so I love everything I write. All my rarepairs were absolute delights this year. Finishing Lovers In A Dangerous Time was bittersweet since I now kind of feel like I can’t write any further Fenris/Rynne until DA4 comes out. But Felassan has become my darling toward the end of this year and I’m thrilled to have brought a handful of wonderful readers down the Felassan rabbit hole with me.

Favourite thing I read:

… I… have once again failed and read basically nothing this year. I started to read Pressure Point by 17734 on AO3 and really enjoyed it for a few chapters before I just… ran out of steam. Not because of the fic, because it genuinely was great — the smut in the first chapter just about killed me, STG — but because I realized this year that, with very few exceptions, I don’t have enough emotional space to invest in fics with long intricate plots. I’m a fucking goblin who just likes to read smut, so I lose interest quickly if the fic isn’t strongly smut/romance-centered.

TO THAT END, I do have a couple of smutfic recs:

Force of Nature, a Stenwarden oneshot by @minionripley: Maker save me, this was soOoOoO good and in-character for StennySten.

Provided It Tied You Down First by JadeLavellan on AO3: Solas and Trevelyan go to a Tevinter sex party for recon reasons. Oh my god, guys, IT’S SO GOOD.

Writing goals for next year:

Honestly? I’m not gonna make any. I’ll just go where the winds of inspiration take me, and where the winds of others’ whispered suggestions take me as well.

To that end, I have to make a few shoutouts to people who have inspired me this year, either with their art or suggestions or encouragement (read: ENTHUSIASTIC SCREAMING): @schoute @elbenherzart @whatomen, without whom a huge chunk of my fic this year would not exist; and @lethendralis-paints @ashalle-art @slushrottweiler-blog who gifted me with beautiful fan art this year and made me want to weep. LOVE YOU GUYS SO MUCH.

Wishing everyone a safe and happy new year filled with love, warmth, and most of all, with hope. If anyone else wants to join in and share their achivements, please do and tag me so I can see what you’ve been up to!

- Love from your friendly neighbourhood Pikapeppa xoxo

#fanfic writer's life #pikapeppa writes #roundup 2020

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katieskarlette · 3 years

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I got the Folk and Fairy Tales of Azeroth book today and have read over half of it, through the one about the Forsaken soldiers.

It’s an entertaining read, but aside from the Tuskarr one (and maybe the Earth Mother one) the stories have been kind of depressing. Maybe it’s just me.

I don’t like creepy ghost stories, so the Vulpera and Goblin stories, while well-written, just weren’t my cup of tea. The Forsaken one had an amusing ending but was pretty damn dark otherwise--which is fitting, of course, but didn’t change the overall tone of gloominess.

Both the Vereesa and Uther ones were so full of symbolism and veiled allusions that I feel like I need to read them at least twice more before I can begin to wrap my mind around them. I had read spoilers so I knew what they were about in broad strokes, but I was still left confused about what I should take away from them.

More spoilery (and not particularly positive) comments below.

Is it weird that the most interesting conversation Zovaal has had so far was with Vereesa Windrunner in a story that’s basically a fever dream of dubious canonicity, in a book that costs over $30 and thus will be read by a fraction of the playerbase? And by “weird” I mean “a shame.” He’s genuinely wounded by what he sees as his siblings’ betrayal, and is a textbook case of “I got burned once so I’m never ever ever letting anyone close enough to hurt me again.” Which isn’t groundbreaking, but it’s more characterization than he’s gotten in-game so far. He even had the tiniest glimmer of a sense of humor when he commented that everyone has a hole in their heart, but they’re usually not visible like his. I want him to be a good villain, damn it, but there’s so little to work with, so I’ll take what I can get.

The Sisters story definitely gives credence to the theory that Sylvanas’ soul was split like Uther’s upon her death to Frostmourne. We still don’t know exactly what that means, or if it’s fixable, but it’s definitely something Blizzard is teasing. I’ve said it before, but I don’t like the possible implications about culpability (or lack thereof) for deeds performed after one’s soul is split. I don’t want a convenient “oh, this character’s soul was broken, so nothing they did is really their fault” kind of end to the stories of characters like Sylvanas, Arthas, and Uther. But neither do I think they should be condemned with the same severity as someone like Kil’jaeden, Gul’dan, or Adelas Blackmoore. I wrote a piece about that back in November so I’ll just link to it and move on.

If Vereesa was so broken up about her sister’s death to the point where she had a mental breakdown and wandered the wilderness on some kind of near-suicidal vision quest, maaaaaaaaaaaybe we should have heard about it before, like, you know, in the game? Because now either Vereesa is not going to be part of Sylvanas’ destiny in 9.1 (and beyond?), which won’t feel right, or she is going to have a significant role, in which case the majority of the playerbase will be in the dark because once again a lore development happened in supplementary media.

I’m generally supportive of the idea of retroactively fleshing out lore, but something about this didn’t quite sit right with me for some reason. I might be too nitpicky, though. I am glad they chose to focus on the love between sisters, as that’s a topic that almost never gets addressed in WoW lore. I just wish it hadn’t been in the context of, “Oh, you want to know more about the fate of Sylvanas’ soul? The thing we’ve been teasing you about back and forth, over and over for years? The thing we’ve been deliberately obtuse about in order to rile up the fandom? Okay, read this surreal story that may or may not even have happened in canon and be even more confused!”

Sigh. Moving on.

The Uther story was weird. Really weird. Uther is a father figure to Arthas, so having him be attracted to the AU!fem!Arthas was uncomfortable. (And stumbling upon maidens bathing in the forest? Could that be more of a cliché?) Was the minstrel supposed to be genderbent Jaina? He was described more like Kel’thuzzad, but that doesn’t really make sense, either. I know, it’s a fairy tale AU, it’s not supposed to be a perfect one-for-one parallel, but I felt like the story could have gotten the same message across without some of the extraneous details cluttering the scenes. Was the young man in green and gold supposed to be Nathanos? The warrior woman with red hair was...who, exactly? Every time Uther met a character my brain came to a screeching halt trying to figure out if it was supposed to be a familiar character from the main universe, and if so what (if anything) that meant.

And, I mean, the message is okay, I guess. I’m a huge fan of empathy. But it seems like there could have been a better way to express that moral than a slightly-creepy Rule 63 AU full of distracting maybe-cameos.

Maybe I’ll like it better upon re-reading, but as I said I’d already been spoiled about the basic plot and the name anagrams, so I knew what I was getting into when I started reading.

Maybe there’s an appendix telling how both Vereesa and Uther stumbled upon some funny mushrooms. That would explain a lot.

#folk and fairy tales of azeroth #rambling about wow

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aion-rsa · 3 years

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The Lord of the Rings Almost Killed Off One of the Hobbits

https://ift.tt/2THdh6D

The Lord of the Rings Trilogy’s $2.9 billion collective worldwide gross and 17 Academy Award wins (one of which was for Best Picture,) certainly make a case for the 2001-2003 films being the product of a winning formula, both production-wise and plot-wise. However, the process of getting the grandiose, once-unfathomable project off the ground naturally involved producers pressuring director Peter Jackson to implement ideas often contradictory to the source material. Apparently, one such idea would have seen one of the film’s four hobbits die!

While the more loquacious half of Lord of the Rings’ onscreen hobbits, Dominic Monaghan and Billy Boyd—Meriadoc “Merry” Brandybuck and Peregrin “Pippin” Took, respectively—have told myriad stories about life on the set across the past few decades through interviews and the films’ insightfully entertaining DVD commentary, the duo brought new anecdotes in an interview with IGN promoting their recently launched, Rings-heavy podcast, The Friendship Onion. According to them, there was a brief period in production during which Jackson was being “pressured from above” (presumably New Line Cinema,) to sacrifice at least one of the film’s four hobbits—of course, with the other two being Elijah Wood’s Frodo Baggins and Sean Astin’s Samwise Gamgee—for a development that would clearly contradict the text of J.R.R. Tolkien’s novels.

While the identity of the specific hobbit producers wished to see relegated to taking second breakfast in the great beyond was not revealed, Monaghan offers a theory, stating, “It’s a good job that didn’t happen, because it would have been me,” he laughed. “It definitely would have. There’s no way they are killing Frodo and Sam, and the only ones that would be left would be Merry and Pippin. They wouldn’t kill Pippin because Pippin has a really strong story with Gandalf. It would have definitely been me. I think Pete quite rightly was like, ‘This is a luminary piece of written work, and we need to stick close to the text.’ So, he stuck by his guns. Yeah, I’m thankful that didn’t happen.”

Amazon’s The Lord of the Rings Series is Focusing its Massive Budget on Huge World-Building

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Much to the gratitude of Monaghan and Tolkien purists everywhere, Jackson won that particular battle in the end, thereby leaving the trilogy as a more authentic take on the text. However, while the notion of actually making a casualty of one of the beloved hobbits might seem outrageous to moviegoers, especially those with intimate knowledge of the Middle Earth mythos, it was actually a sound suggestion from a purely dramatic standpoint. After all, as with Bilbo Baggins in preceding story The Hobbit, the diminutive hole-dwellers from the Shire were meant to represent average people, unprepared for the travails of life away from home, who, during times of war, find bravery within themselves when thrust into overwhelming circumstances. Pertinently, with strong bonds having been forged amongst comrades during said circumstances, the loss of one yields a dramatic payoff that’s hard to resist from a narrative perspective. Notwithstanding The Fellowship of the Rings‘ fateful death of Boromir, such a death wouldn’t even be without precedence, since, in adhering to the literary lore, 2014’s The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies famously featured the deaths of the party’s two youngest, most energetic dwarves, Kili and Fili, in the climactic moments of Jackson’s prequel trilogy.

If, as Monaghan theorizes, Merry was set to be sacrificed in the name of plot pathos, then it likely would have occurred during Return of the King’s Battle of the Pelennor Fields, during which Merry—after being forbade by King Théoden—secretly joined a disguised Éowyn to participate in the Kingdom of Rohan’s horseback counter-attack against the siege forces of Mordor orcs—and later the oliphaunt-riding humans of the Haradrim—outside of Gondor. Merry’s role in the battle was the clear culmination of an arc that saw him go from a crop-thieving ne’er-do-well to sword-wielding battlefield hero, and highlighted him at his highest point. He also proved integral to the victory when he stabbed the Witch King of Angmar in the back—injuring himself in the process—which allowed Éowyn to make the iconic “I am no man” deathblow to the head, taking the enemy’s most powerful player off the board. Yet, Merry was left in bad shape by the end of the battle, found barely cognizant by a wandering Pippin in the aftermath, facilitating one of the film’s many emotional reunions. This moment could have been repurposed into Merry’s death scene, after which a perturbed Pippin would be motivated for vengeance in the ensuing, trilogy-climactic Battle at the Black Gate, thereby completing his own arc.

New Line Cinema

While Jackson had to make several changes from the source material—mostly regarding the timeframe and segments that detracted from the main plot—to make The Lord of the Rings’s chronicle-styled prose work on the big screen, he also knew that the understated narrative in the periphery from Tolkien’s extensive lore was an intangible quality that separated this mythos from other fantasy offerings. Indeed, the appendices included at the end of the novel trilogy were a consistent source of context-setting backstories that Jackson wove into the main narrative of the movies. Case in point, in the novels, the movie-prominent romance of Aragorn and Arwen was primarily told in the appendices, outside the main content. Likewise, Tolkien crafted full fates for our foursome of hobbits, including Merry, who ended up marrying Estella Bolger and becoming a key member of the Shire’s leadership as the Master of Buckland. The backstory is so extensive that it also reveals when Merry and Pippin died, after which they were entombed with honor over in Gondor, later joined by King Aragorn Elessar himself. Consequently, it would have seemed disrespectful to dismiss such extensive stories by Tolkien.

cnx.cmd.push(function() { cnx({ playerId: "106e33c0-3911-473c-b599-b1426db57530", }).render("0270c398a82f44f49c23c16122516796"); });

Regardless, fans of The Lord of the Rings will soon have no shortage of new onscreen content, with Amazon’s untitled prequel series—set thousands of years before the main story—currently in production and possibly set to premiere either by the end of 2021 or sometime into 2022. Moreover, an anime feature focused on the namesake of famous fortress Helm’s Deep, titled The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim, is also in development from Warner Bros. and New Line. Given the eras in which these offerings take place, fans can likely breathe a sigh of relief for poor Merry.

The post The Lord of the Rings Almost Killed Off One of the Hobbits appeared first on Den of Geek.

from Den of Geek https://ift.tt/3l810TY

#aion-rsa #Den of Geek

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ardenttheories · 5 years

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Could you do an analysis for Witch of Void and Thief of Hope?

Witch of Void

The Witch of Void is someone who Controls Void, which is Doubt, Confusion, Nothingness, Lies, Hidden Things, the actual Void itself, Indifference and Irrelevance.

Witches have a habit of exerting such control over their Aspect that they just break its rules entirely. They can, in essence, decide that works and what doesn’t, and this makes a Witch of Void a very interesting thing.

In personality, they’d likely be a bit of a connundrum. Void Players tend to be quiet, withdrawn, a little unsure; they seem wholly Unimportant and like to stay that way, and are more than happy to let other people take the stage.

The Witch of Void is not like this. They decide what is and isn’t Irrelevant, what should be Hidden and what should be Seen. They’re vocal and loud; brash and fervent. You WILL look at this thing, but you don’t look at this other thing, no, you won’t even know that it exists.

They like Obscure things, and probably work to try and keep those things purposefully Obscure, because they like the sense of Mystery it brings. Oh, you’ve never heard of this thing? It’s okay, it is pretty rare. You wouldn’t get it if you tried, but they can totally explain it to you - while leaving out all the main details, of course.

They take centre stage and expect to be heard. Of course, they then fade away when they want to be Hidden, and that can make them horrendously annoying. They’re too there and too gone, hard to ignore and then outright impossible to find.

They like to decide which parts of their lives are Hidden and which are in view, and that might not always be what people expect. For instance, they might happily show off that they goddamn adore My Little Pony, but only the really old generations that aren’t as well known anymore, and then Hide away an even bigger love, such as an Obscure anime series or videogame.

They like their own privacy, but then invade others. There’s no Secrets around the Witch of Void, and that can make them very oblivious and sometimes upsetting. They might Reveal something you didn’t want being Known, or might confront you about something you thought you’d kept closely Hidden against your chest. They can come off as very upfront and rude because of it, but it isn’t intentional; they don’t often mean to hurt, and pointing out that they dislike people knowing their own Secrets is likely enough to get them to snap up shut again.

They have the ability to decide what can be Hidden and what must face the Light, what should amount to Nothing and what is allowed Importance. They can turn the most Important in the entire game - such as the Narrative Construct - into absolutely Nothing at all. It would become completely Irrelevant, and as such, would never work - or they would simply hide it away so well that even the most determined of Light Players would never know of its existence.

They can erase the concept of Importance entirely, and replace it with an overarching sense of Irrelevancy. See how Important Vriska is to the storyline that she literally makes Jack Noir? The Witch of Void could completely counteract that by making Jack Noir have no actual effect on the Plot - or even by changing the concept of the Plot altogether.

They’d be able to create Loopholes, Blackouts, missing Plot Pieces, and they’d be able to find them where they already exist. They could Control these things and guide them into something that suitably benefits the Witch - such as by hiding from view a very Important character until it’s completely vital that they appear. They could even use Loopholes to ensure that certain events never come to be, or create them from Nothing just because they damn well said so.

This thing doesn’t make sense? The Witch of Void probably did that. Even the most basic concept could become completely impossible to understand if the Witch gets their hands on it, and they can spin you in circles around it until you just can’t stand to think on it anymore. They can, of course, also use these things that don’t make sense to their benefit; any part of SBURB lore that’s vague is a plaything for Witch, who can fill up those spaces with anything they so desire.

The Witch gets to decide if the Void should be there or not. They get to take it away and replace it with something else, get to fill it up with whatever they desire - and they can even just remove the Void without putting it anywhere else, or fill it up with things that didn’t already exist.

For instance, that cupboard is empty? Not anymore! Now it’s filled with berries! Where did the berries come from? Nowhere! They just exist now!

On a more serious note, though, this means that Witches of Void can fill Voids in the plot with anything they want. If there’s a Plothole that’s completely Irrelevant and has no effect on the Plot as a whole, they can just… take it away. They can get rid of anything relating to the Plothole entirely - such as by erasing the confusion over the Alpha Trolls’ whereabouts by erasing them from the story - or they can fill it in with something so Important it’ll blindside you - such as by revealling that actually the Alpha Trolls were the key to defeating LE all along.

They can conjure things out of thin air and Hide them away just as quickly, quite literally from nothing - and might even have the ability to Alchemise without using any Grist as a basis.

Hell, if we go far enough, a Witch of Void can screw up the entire concept of Alchemy altogether. You can’t grab “Nothing” and turn it into “something” - you have to convert that one thing into something else, like a sort of sacrifice - but the Witch of Void quite literally can. They can ignore this very basic law entirely and just make things without having to sacrifice anything in the process.

They can walk through the Void with ease, and traverse even the most Unknown paths as if they were paved out clear as day, like a map just exists in their mind of anything that’s Hidden. In fact, nothing is truly Hidden from them at all; Lies and Truths are clear as day to them, so long as they actually feel like focusing on them - and they can make sure that some Lies or Truths stay completely Irrelevant if that’s what benefits them best.

Of course, they can cause huge Blackouts, too - like most Void Players, except with actual purpose. It’d be like a giant ink splot over the Timeline; nobody would be able to see in it, even if the Witch was never there for the event itself. People might even just forget that the event happened at all, as if they suffered from acute amnesia. Their memories would either skip right over it or have a definite hole that they can’t dig into no matter how hard they try.

If it was a person or thing that they wanted to Blackout then it would remain unseen long after the Witch is gone - as long as they needed it to be Irrelevant and unseen.

Maybe that would mean that it physically LOOKS like a void - like you’d covered it in the blackest black known to man, and it just looks like a giant hole - and maybe that would mean a Players eyes just can’t comprehend it - that they see it, but they don’t register that it exists.

When they become Realised, there’s nothing they can’t do. While a lot of their initial powers would be pretty harmless and basic - like just being Really Good at finding hidden things or just Arguing A Lot against what Nothingness and Irrelevancy means - all the things I stated above would come into play pretty much as soon as they Godtier.

They’d become much more responsible. Whereas before they were brash and loud, bursting through like a bulldozer and then sinking back into the shadows as they pleased, the Realised Witch of Void would slowly come to understand that there’s a time and a place for everything.

They’d become a little more calculating, a little softer. They’d still hold that bright, out-there personality at times, but they’d be a little more somber and quiet. They might be so quiet at times that you even forget they’re in the room, and come off towards the end of the journey as a little shy and reserved.

In truth, they’re just watching and waiting. Void Players can be patient when they need to be, and the Witch of Void will eventually come to understand that. It won’t be a complete 180, but it will be evident enough that they’ve grown, matured, and realised that there’s just a certain way to act that isn’t totally out there.

Still a bit of a hipster douche, though. Just a little less blunt about it.

Thief of Hope

The Thief of Hope is someone who Steals Hope for their own benefit, which is Positivity, Belief, Acceptance, Naivety/Gullibility, Euphoria, and the idea of a Stubborn Yes.

Thieves tend to genuinely Lack their Aspect. They’re one of the few Classes that really does suffer from an inate void of their Aspect from the get-go, and their Stealing ways often stems from a desperation to fill this void. They also tend to represent what their session has too much of, so they act as a sort of balancing feature for the people around them.

Thieves of Hope, therefore, tend to suffer a lack of Hope. Deep inside, they are likely terrified and unsure, incapable of Believing in anything - most of all themselves - and suffer from a deep-seated Doubt of anything or anyone around them. They think they’re wrong, that everything is wrong, that there’s this innate wrongness about their very existence - and they desperately try to escape that by stealing the Positivity and Belief from other people.

You can imagine them as a sort of amalgamation of sorts. They snatch up bits and pieces of Belief from other people and make it their own, likely turning it into something entirely new or using it to emphasise their own Beliefs more. They might have a very specific ideology that they focus on, and Steal the core concepts of others to belittle anything that goes against their Belief, simultaneously powering it.

They Steal the Euphoria people feel in various situations to gain that sense of Wonder for themself, siphoning it into the things they feel like they should enjoy. I guess in a way you can imagine that a Thief of Hope would steal the high someone gets from doing something like mild drugs (such as weed) or adrenaline-fuelled sports and use it to power themselves forward. They may even become a little reliant on it, because the crash that they feel when all of the good feelings are gone would be… catastrophic.

That said, they would be boundless and filled with Optimism. Nothing could get them down, not even a little bit, and they would be horrifically stubborn. They just wouldn’t listen if something went against their way of thinking, and they’d Steal the Belief of the person they’re talking to in order to ensure that their way of thinking can’t be questioned. It’s their way or the highway, and they expect people to listen.

They might also be a little… narcassistic. They’re so overly confident in their own powers and abilities and fuelled by Positive thinking and feelings that they might overdo it a bit. After all, nothing ever seems to go wrong when they’re around (because they Steal everything good from their enemies), so clearly that means nothing will EVER go wrong!

The lack they feel also means that they just desperately want to feel loved and validated. They might take this to mean that they have to be the bestest buddy ever with everyone, or it might mean that they want to be elevated to god-like status. They want to be worshiped because that’s the absolute opposite of how they feel when they’re not on their Hope high - and they are incredibly powerful, so they deserve it, anyway.

Naturally, Stealing Hope means a lot of things.

They can Steal the Belief from something or something, rendering them useless; a highly cherished and worshipped object would have no actual power, even if it originally did, and mircles surrounding it would cease to exist. A worshipped figure would fall out of favour, and people would begin to Doubt them even though there’s no evidence to suggest that they’re wrong - be that a person of value in a community, a religious figure, or a well-loved scientist.

In turn, the Thief would take all that Belief and Reality for themselves. Everything they think and Believe in would magically come true, further validating the idea that they’re Right while everyone else is Wrong. They create their own fantasy and build it up with what they Steal, until it becomes Genuine and True.

This can, of course, be very bad. For instance, if they don’t Believe that Quest Beds work… then nobody will be able to Godtier at all. They’d literally Steal that Reality and make it False - and when someone died on the Quest Bed and didn’t revive on Skaia, they’d just take that as confirmation that they were Right (because they must naturally always be Right).

In fact, they can probably steal Rightness from people, too. If they are Right, then someone else must be Wrong - which would probably infuriate Light Players who know they’re Right, have evidence that they’re Right, have seen that they’re Right, and then suddenly the Thief shows up and they’re Wrong.

They can Steal the Positivity from people, leaving behind Fear and Anger and Doubt, while making themselves feel absolutely Wonderful. The Thief could literally make themself high on feelings, on good vibes, and go headlong into danger because Nothing Can Get Them Down! Of course, the fact that their enemies are now terrified of them helps - some may even be completely frozen in fear.

This can, of course, be used for good. If their foes start to question and Doubt themselves, their role in life, their actions and abilities, then taking them down gets much easier. If something was dangerous and Real - such as the Black King literally just starting the Reckoning - then the Thief can Steal that to make sure it’s not - thereby, for instance, making it so that the Black King’s unable to use the White King’s scepter.

To become Realised, the Thief of Hope has to accept that they can’t just blindly Steal things. They have to come down from that high eventually, to let go of their overzealous Confidence. It’ll be hard, and it’ll actively go against everything they Believe in - and, honestly, this is the Thief that will struggle with this transition most - but they must eventually give in.

Reality is harsh and it sucks, and they’re still allowed to change it, but they have to simmer down a little. Let their allies keep some Hope, let them Believe in things and let go of that chokehold around their own fervent Beliefs, and allow other people to feel Confident. It’s all well and good for the Thief to feel Brave if literally all of their allies have to struggle with Fear as a result.

On top of that, they have to accept that lack within them. They need to recognise that it isn’t a bad thing, that their fears are unwarranted, that they can get to that point without Stealing absolutely everything they can get their hands on.

In other words, instead of Stealing the Belief that everything is okay, they have to actually Believe it. They have to recognise that some of their Belief has to come from within, that they have to make it feel Real, without using their powers to MAKE it real. Once they do that, they’ll be much happier as people, much calmer, and much more likely to only Steal what needs to be Stolen.

#Anonymous #long post//#witch of void #thief of hope #classpect analysis #ardenttheories

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fusselmietz · 5 years

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The sad part about Eldarya

Eldarya could've been a great game. I remember the teasers for it and was pretty hyped. A fantastic world that needs saving and is falling apart? A destined heroine with a mysterious lineage with a connection to an powerful oracle? Hostile creatures and problems within the world with moraly Grey characters? I was on board! The first few episodes give me some wierd vibes, but I thought: "Well its just the Frist three episodes. Maybe I need time to get into it. Maybe the story is more of a slow burn." I was pretty annoyed withe the treatment of Guardy aka Erika. Most of the guards treated her like shit, wich was tolerable at first because they didn't trust her yet. I was confused that everyone except Jamon has mostly human features and yet they bullied Erika for being human, but I just write at of as a conventional attractive character design choice. I mean Ez and Nevra have pointy ears, Miiko has a tail and fox ears, but Valkyon (whose route I followed at first) looks like a regular, muscular human. So I don't really get it? However, that was just a dumb little thing that only bothered me. After 8 episodes or so the story didn't really go anywhere. I thought the focus would lie on finding the crystal pieces, like in Inuyasha of some sorts, and we had two of them in the first episodes. Then the focus shifted more on helping the people of eldarya wich was fine to me. But the longer I played the more problems came up. I haven't warmed up to any of the LIs by now, since I follow the cute shy boy route in other games, so I hoped that Kero would have been an option. But even if I didn't really enjoy the LIs I could enjoy the would of EL right? Well, as many people wrote much more detailed as I ever could: The lore of El is complicated, confusing and broken. Especially the food issue and the stuff with the humans. It got so bad, that the players have to ignore this stuff so that the world and story could still function. In its defense: Harry Potter had his fair share of plot holes too, but the story and characters where so enjoyable and awesome that everyone, including me, looked past it. I was willing to do it for EL, but it wasn't so easy. Instead of ignoring the dumb stuff they wrote themselves into a corner with, they bring it up again and again, twitching it slightly trying to make sense. However, this can not work. EL, as a world, has to be coherent and functioning in itself. You can't retcon the rules in the universe, like in SpongeBob or another silly feel good cartoon, it takes more of an Last Airbender approach to story telling. If you establish a rule in this universe, you have to follow through with it. It is there. One thing plays into the other. If they would ignore it, maybe the players would forget about it and if it had been just a one time thing, I wouldn't be so harsh in it. However, the plot holes are so extreme, that the world is completely broken. Many people wrote essays about it, better than I ever could, so I won't repeat how stupid the whole food issue is. The worst problem, however, started in the now infamous episode 13. I was actually excited after learning what happened. What a horrible, yet brave move from the writers! I've never seen something like this in an otome before and was totally on board for the drama. I remembered thinking: "Oh God! What will Erika do now? Will she go Rouge and betray the guard? Will she join the humans and find a way home? Will she ever reverse the potion effect? Will she explore this hostile world and gain new LIs and allies? Will she join the masked man? Will there be a civil war in El? Is all lost?!" But then she just slapped some characters and locked herself into her room, later reluctanty forgiving anyone. I can't describe my disappointment and that was the reason why I stopped playing and just watch let's plays or reading post on tumblr. The writers had such an interesting concept with many possible plot threads and they choose the most boring one. Until this day I'm convinced that they thought the potion thing wouldn't be a big deal and they weren't prepared for the backslash that lasts until today. They could retconned it if they want to. Bringing up some kind of antidote or maybe it turns out it was all a bluff. It wouldn't been great, but it's something. I don't understand why they couldn't make Erika travel between those worlds or why she has to be a human in the first place. Why not make her a citizen of EL with an unclear heritage, maybe an orphan, who wants to join the guard? So many problems could've been avoided. Now it seems the story goes nowhere, the pacing is all over the place. Either everything happens at once or nothing at all happens (except for Erika and her LI doing the devils tango ~). It seems the writers wanted everything at once. They wanted a destined heroine with a connection to ELs version of a deity, yet they constantly set her up to fail. They wanted a rich world with detailed lore, yet they didn't bother to check their own work and be coherent with their own rules. They wanted a huge cast of characters, yet they couldn't handle all of them and now kill them off one by one. They wanted moraly Grey characters, yet they write them despicable with no real redemption arc. They wanted a dark and mature world, yet they abdone the most interesting story threads and focus an shock value and sex. This game could have been so good and unlike most otome games on the market, but now it's just an generic fantasy game, that confuses players more that it entertains them. I really wanted to like this game, honestly. And if you like it, that's great! I'm happy you can enjoy it and I don't want to take the fun away from you. However, I couldn't hold my disappointment in after learning what the new episode has to offer and needed to get this off my chest.

#Eldarya #eldarya rants #eldarya rambles #Beemoov #eldarya spoilers #long post #eldarya Erika

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chrismerle · 5 years

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ANOTHER ONE BITES THE DUST

yeah I finished the game

and for all of my mockery, I did like it! a bit railroad-y for an RPG, but eh, that’s not necessarily a bad thing

what I mean by that is, you could make your own choices (within reason) when it came to who lived or died, but that was basically it. for plot-related decisions, you could ask all the questions in the world but there was only one option to actually proceed. even your Mesmerize level only went up at specific points, to make sure you couldn’t mesmerize and ~embrace~ a plot-critical character too soon. but that’s all okay! none of that is actually a complaint.

it’s a very talky game. which is also not a complaint. I liked the characters, I liked the hint system, I liked the fact that Jonny Boy could just barge up to people and they’d think nothing of it, and I liked the fact that you had to talk to people in order to have the broadest amount of options. however, cinematically, it sort of...lacked. most cutscenes in this game are just Jonny Boy standing and talking to someone. cutscenes feel almost entirely static. no one walks around. no one really talks with their hands. no one fidgets. even in plot-related cutscenes, it still usually just the camera focusing on someone from just behind Jonny Boy’s ear. it’s a very talky game, and no one moves when they’re talking.

the map’s a little ‘eh.’ the markers on it were huge, which made it a little hard to tell where you were, and instead of a proper minimap there was a little compass thing that was bloody fucking awful.

gameplay itself was actually pretty good, though. moving around was easy, combat was pretty intuitive, and you could pick and choose your blood abilities (personally, I had spring, claws, shadow veil, autophagy, and blood cauldron). it’s also pretty adaptable. if you want to brute force your way through, you can do that. if you want to dance in circles around your enemies and paper cut them to death, you can do that, too.

while I loved the teleportation in concept, in practice it was a little, um...overly convenient? or overly inconvenient, I guess. Jonathan Reid, powerful vampire of a near ageless lineage, is frequently stopped by locked doors, locked gates, and three foot high barriers. like, I get it, it’s not actual teleportation, he’s just moving really fast, but if Jonny Boy had bodychecked a gate at that speed, I’m willing to bet it would open. but whatever, that’s just standard invisible wall stuff. a little eye roll-worthy and a little annoying, but pretty standard.

I liked the...for lack of a better phrase, day/night cycle. nights could go one for as long as you wanted so you never had to break off halfway through a quest to avoid dawn, but you were still encouraged to actually proceed to the next night because that’s how you level up.

the writing is...clumsy. except for the really important ones, boss fights come out of nowhere with no warning, no build up, no excitement, and no real conclusion; you just walk into a room, and whoops, that’s a boss. vulkods exist just to exist, and have no purpose in the story, unlike the skals and ekons. there are werewolves wandering around and no one ever says a word about them. no one acknowledges when your appearance changes after you kill people. King Arthur was an ekon and drinking an ekon’s blood makes another vampire, but McCullum spends his boss fight drinking King Arthur’s blood and he’s fine. nothing really has an consequences after you make a decision. most important information is just dumped on you in conversations that can sometimes go on for too long. the dialogue wheel is pretty inelegant and it’s generally apparent your stitching a conversation together from other pieces. while I thought it was cute because I liked both characters, the romance was still pretty hamfisted. and even as the credits were rolling, I had no real clue what the Morrigan, Myrrdin, and the blood of hate were.

don’t get me wrong, part of it is probably my fault because I got almost none of the collectibles, but if your lore isn’t at least intelligible without dozens of side articles, then you need to do some pruning.

and let’s just acknowledge it: Mary’s plot detour is straight up a plot hole. when she first showed up after the funeral, I assumed she was a chatty skal, like Sean or Old Bridget, but then she was explicitly stated to be an ekon. and then I kinda figured ‘well, okay, maybe she was only mostly dead and another vampire conveniently found her,’ but then she was explicitly stated to be Reid’s progeny. and it was also explicitly stated that the way to make an ekon is to drink another ekon’s blood. you cannot accidentally make an ekon. Jonny Boy drained her dry in a ravening delirium and then fled. he did not her give her any blood. I’m calling bullshit on that one.

(and this is more just a ‘personal preference’ sort of gripe, but there was sort of a to-do about how it was cruel that Jonny Boy’s maker fucked off without teaching him how to be a proper vampire, but you’re free to up and fuck off into the aether on two progeny, if that’s how you play your cards, like two days after you make them. [not counting Dawson because Redgrave can deal with him.])

but it was still fun to play, which is arguably the most important thing, and you know what? I’m perfectly willing to look past the writing stumbles just for Jonny Boy. he’s a genuinely likable character and I kind of adore him. equal parts exasperated and resignedly morbidly amused, like he can’t quite decide if he’d rather go ‘fuck my life’ or ‘this may as well be my life,’ so he took both options. blunt as a sledgehammer and actively annoyed by people talking in circles. generally pretty clever and quick on the uptake. and yet, somehow, still kind of lovably blockheaded.

(and his voice is very soothing. like, I didn’t have a ‘I’m gay but I’d make an exception’ moment, but I had a ‘I’d listen to him read the phone book as ASMR’ moment.)

the rest of the cast is nothing to sneeze at either. they’re all a little stock (you have the vampire hunter, you have the nightmare fetishist, you have the noblewoman, you have dracula lite...), but they serve the plot well and none of them grated on my nerves unless they were supposed to.

and this is like eight pages long now, so I’m gonna assume I’ve made my point pretty well and be done with this.

like my nonsense here? Support Me on Ko-fi!

#elsa liveblogs nonsense #vampyr

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love-takes-work · 7 years

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Steven Universe Podcast: Volume 2, Episode 7: Earth Gems

Season 2, Episode 7 of the Steven Universe Podcast, released March 8, 2018, is about the so-called Earth Gems, and it covers Jasper, Bismuth, and Rose Quartz. The official description:

Rose Quartz, Bismuth, and Jasper are the focus of this episode of the Steven Universe Podcast as take a closer look at Earth Gems! Steven Universe creator Rebecca Sugar, former EP, Ian Jones-Quartey, Director Joe Johnston, and Supervising Director Kat Morris detail Bismuth's origins (including how she came to be in Lion's mane), Jasper's personality development, and Steven's complicated view of his mother, Rose Quartz. Discover which characters have been around since the pilot days, who was added as the series developed, and how Rose's storyline gets factored into each episode's planning.

Since as usual my summary is long, I will provide a highlights list followed by a cut which you can follow for a more in-depth narrative. Enjoy!

Highlights:

Jasper's main root as a character is her identity as a decorated soldier from humble origins.

Jasper, a so-called "perfect" Quartz from a Kindergarten known to produce flawed Gems, won't accept help from others because she's so determined to prove she's capable. She may be the best Gem from Earth, but she's still from Earth.

Joe Johnston was the artist who drew Bismuth's Gem bubbled in Lion's mane, but at that point they did not yet have the story of who she was figured out, though they did know there would be a "lost Crystal Gem."

Steven Sugar's tendency to add Gem artifacts into the world, most notably weapons, gave rise to the writers' need to give the Crystal Gems a weaponsmith, so Bismuth as a character grew out of that hole needing to be filled.

Bismuth adored Rose Quartz and was never allowed to understand why her leader rejected her contribution, which Rebecca and Ian compare to the trope of a villain mistreating her subordinates.

Bismuth, in Rebecca Sugar's words, was "screwed over" epically by Rose Quartz.

Rebecca and Ian specify that Rose was wrong to do what she did to Bismuth, and that it was significant because it's so clear for the first time that Rose could have made such a clear mistake.

Rebecca makes a lot of charts to help understand what story elements need to be doled out when.

Ian loves that Pearl tells us Rose has LOTS of secrets.

Rebecca loves that all of Steven's compassion actually comes from Greg. Steven is described as a compassionate warrior, with "compassionate" coming from Greg and "warrior" coming from Rose.

Jasper is a corny anime villain at first, and we can credit Paul Villeco's love of shonen anime and manga for this.

Joe Johnston finds it refreshing that Steven couldn't turn Jasper's alignment around, and says it's because Jasper held onto her anger and couldn't be forced to be someone else.

Jasper's tendency toward bullying is rooted in feeling heartbroken over the loss of Pink Diamond. She identified very strongly as a servant of her Diamond.

Joe and Kat are pretty sure that Lapis was Jasper's first fusion experience ever.

Joe Johnston often puts "breadcrumbs" in his episodes; he puts in stuff he doesn't have plans for and figures maybe it will be something later. Bismuth's Gem in Lion's Mane was not dictated by Rebecca Sugar like the tee shirt or Rose's flag; it was a Joe breadcrumb.

Twenty-two-minute episodes were the network's idea, not something the Crew specifically wanted to do.

Joe Johnston can't say enough good things about Uzo Aduba's voice acting as Bismuth; every read was "perfect," according to him.

Early character designs of Bismuth included black eyes (to indicate her Gem's inverted state) and some early designs had her with very skinny legs. She always had dreadlocks.

Kat emphasizes that Bismuth is not and was never intended to be "a bad guy." She has different ideology, and her episode shows a situation where the audience is meant to see the value of her point and nobody's 100% right.

Jasper and Bismuth are more different than similar, despite both being big and strong and partial to bludgeoning weapons. Jasper is highly respected and wants to preserve the order of the Diamonds, while Bismuth is a low-class blue-collar worker who has realized things don't have to be this way and dedicates herself to destroying that order.

You can read the detailed summary below!

[Archive of Steven Universe Podcast Summaries]

McKenzie Atwood opens the podcast by explaining this episode's title: "Earth Gems" refers to three very different characters who are connected through the Gem War on Earth.

Rebecca Sugar and Ian Jones-Quartey on Jasper:

McKenzie asks Rebecca and Ian what effect they intended Jasper's arc to have on the audience. Rebecca says she really wanted Jasper to SEEM one-dimensional even though she isn't; her behavior has a "root" and we at first only get the foliage. We don't realize at first that Jasper has become involved in this plot due to her connection to Rose Quartz, feeling that she has unfinished business on Earth. Obviously her connection is quite personal even though she really doesn't show anyone those feelings.

McKenzie mentions Jasper being described on a previous podcast as a decorated soldier with humble origins, and Rebecca claims that description is Jasper's "everything." She's from Earth, but very different from Amethyst--Amethyst was from a pretty successful Kindergarten, while Jasper is from the worst Kindergarten on this awful failure of a planet. Jasper burns to prove her worth because everyone around her knows she's from Earth's Beta Kindergarten and therefore must be flawed on some level. Jasper feels she can never escape being associated with Rose Quartz even though she was supposedly the best thing that came out of Earth.

Ian remarks that Jasper chooses her words to show off pride and bravado, with no hint of the emotions beneath--that she feels she's fundamentally wrong and that she doesn't deserve the reputation she has. She thinks she's horrible, but Rebecca and Ian say they love her. Ian says Jasper is an example of how the system on Homeworld can fail Gems who don't quite fit the mold; externally she is a model Gem, but she never internally feels she deserves her reputation.

Rebecca Sugar and Ian Jones-Quartey on Bismuth:

McKenzie asks her guests to discuss when they started talking about introducing Bismuth. She mentions seeing the bubbled Gem in Season 1 (in "Lion 3: Straight to Video") and how fans recall that first exposure. Joe Johnston was the one who drew that in, knowing later they'd do SOMETHING with it, and then also there were early talks about a lost Crystal Gem. An early idea included Bismuth being not fully conscious, but they decided not to use it. They did figure out Bismuth pretty early on. Ian says Steven Sugar was always dropping weapons around the backgrounds, and they figured they needed a weaponsmith to explain where these things came from. From there, Bismuth was easy to develop. She's described as a "gooey center of the team."

McKenzie wants to know why they decided to unbubble Bismuth in Season 3. Rebecca says everyone's feelings about Rose Quartz were being examined at that point, and a turning point included the perspective that Rose could be a "really awful person." Ian likes the trope about a villain mistreating their subordinates, and wanted to show Rose as the person who was bad to Bismuth. Rebecca says Rose did such wrong to Bismuth--that Bismuth would have done anything for Rose, and when she came up with a weapon that supposedly served her agenda, she rejected it and rejected Bismuth for reasons she never understood.

Unlike Jasper's history with Rose being built on their being enemies from the start, Bismuth IDOLIZED Rose and was, as Rebecca says, totally "screwed over" by her. It breaks Rebecca's heart that Bismuth still speaks of Rose with such love, still crediting her for changing her life in such a positive way. Rebecca loves giving Bismuth "little triangular eyelashes" during the scene when she talks about what a difference Rose made for her.

Ian says Season 3 was the best time to include Bismuth's arc representing a break from the lore they've been establishing regarding the Crystal Gems' mission. From a writing standpoint, you have to build up the status quo for a while before you break from it. It would have had no meaning to reveal Bismuth earlier if you didn't already have an understanding of what it would mean to be a lost Crystal Gem and didn't already have some feelings about who Rose has been drawn up to be. Ian thinks of it as being one of the first "Rose wasn't perfect at all" stories. Rose was WRONG.

Rebecca also feels that this is a huge turning point for Steven because he is so confused and guilty over Bismuth, balanced against what he's been taught about his mother by his family. In "Mindful Education," he's shown to still be devastated by how he's failed Bismuth--he isn't afraid of her attacking him, he's disappointed in himself for being unable to help her. He knows he needs to carry baggage from a former life he didn't really live, but Bismuth was the first indication that he has inherited something "wrong with the Crystal Gems." McKenzie thinks it's interesting for a character who isn't present to have a character arc.

Rebecca Sugar and Ian Jones-Quartey on Rose Quartz:

When discussing pacing of all these story elements attached to who Rose Quartz was, Rebecca describes writing it like building a tower; they have to have given you all the pieces when they decide to reveal something so it will make sense when they tell that story, so they have to be very careful about the order in which they reveal the pieces. Rebecca makes a lot of charts. General ideas had to be developed into specific pieces of information they have to show us. The viewer doesn't get the story about Rose in order, either. Steven is told what he is "supposed to" think, but he slowly realizes how many revelations there are out there that revise his perceptions. This is complicated, Rebecca says, by the fact that half the people giving him information think he IS his mother.

Rebecca loves that everyone is SINCERE about how they talk to Steven about Rose, too; no one is actively trying to trick him, even though they may have incomplete information. Ian specifies that he loves that Pearl reveals Rose has a LOT of secrets. Rebecca specifies that Steven's compassion is all coming from GREG. Rose was interested in that; she knows she didn't understand it, but you see how she fails at compassion during "We Need to Talk." Steven is a compassionate warrior. The compassion is Greg's. The warrior is Rose.

Joe Johnston and Kat Morris on Jasper:

McKenzie was wondering about how animation is like acting with regards to writing dialogue or choosing expressions, and asks Joe and Kat to discuss this in relation to Jasper. Joe says they'd never had a traditional villain before Jasper, and despite that she is NOT really a traditional villain, she comes off as "menacing" and "corny" at the beginning. This is credited to Paul Villeco's love of shonen manga and anime--she's sort of a JoJo-inspired bad guy. (This refers to JoJo's Bizarre Adventure.)

McKenzie thinks it's interesting that Jasper is the first antagonist who has not been traditionally redeemed and converted to the other side. Joe thinks it's refreshing to have someone Steven wasn't able to recruit in his traditional way, and suggests it's because Jasper wanted to hold onto her anger. She didn't want to change, and couldn't be forced. Jasper has been told since she emerged that she was perfect, and that's what she wants to be--not Steven's band of uplifted flawed Gems. McKenzie asks if it was impactful for Steven to see Jasper refuse to be reached, and Paul thinks he didn't really get to process that since he also had a Pink Diamond-related reveal to deal with. Joe points out that Lars also stubbornly resisted Steven's influence for a very long time, though at least Lars hasn't tried to kill Steven. (Yet! No, that was a joke.)

McKenzie brings up how Jasper gets a lot of love from fans because she has so much beneath the surface, even though she isn't onscreen often. Kat says that's done by treating her like a person; no one is 100% evil all the time, and Jasper isn't evil so much as having a set of values that are not shared by the protagonists. Jasper bullies others because of her pent-up feelings, and she expresses her heartbreak over Pink Diamond's shattering through acting aggressively toward others. It made her relationship with Lapis really complicated, too.

McKenzie brings up "Jailbreak" and asks Joe to discuss his first time drawing Jasper in action. Joe says he was really ready to do it; there had been no "main antagonist" until Jasper and he really looked forward to it. He thinks they started boarding "Jailbreak" before "The Return." Kat thinks Jasper had been written some before they began work on "Jailbreak," but since Rebecca had pretty clear ideas about who she was, it was possible to board out of order. Some work had been done on Jasper before Paul had to board her introduction in "The Return." Rebecca sometimes writes a sheet with some character points and drawings for each new character.

McKenzie then brings up "Alone at Sea," asking Kat to discuss how different that was from "Jailbreak" where Jasper was a physical threat versus how she presented more as an emotional threat to Lapis in this later episode. Kat says she consulted with Rebecca and Hilary a lot to push this story out. Jasper has had a lot of time to think since hanging out in the ocean after her Fusion broke up, and now she's concluded she has a different perspective than she used to about fusion. Jasper realized she could become more powerful through fusion and became "addicted to it." In "Jailbreak" they just needed her to present as an uncomplicated villain (and they didn't have room for much more), but in "Alone at Sea" they could show the why, the how, of her actions.

Kat boarded acts 1 and 3--"the boat stuff," she says. She says there were many versions of the episode. They initially called the episode "Boat Murderer." The boat was supposed to keep breaking down and eventually you find out Jasper was doing it. The episode kept shifting until it became what it finally was. Kat usually doesn't board--"Alone at Sea" was, as she describes it, her stepping in as a pinch hitter. McKenzie asks about whether she had any issues with drawing Jasper, and she says she draws on every episode so it wasn't really anything new for her, especially since she was in charge of the arc associated with Amethyst's season 3 arc. Kat felt that Amethyst was due for some development after they'd already tackled some Pearl and Garnet stuff in the Sardonyx arc. Jasper was a great opposite to Amethyst in that arc because Jasper was big, strong, and a soldier--what Amethyst was supposed to be. She thought she was okay with not being what she was made to be, but then she gets "annihilated" in "Crack the Whip" and realizes maybe she's not okay with any of it. Steven helps bring her through that rough personal place.

Joe Johnston and Kat Morris on Bismuth:

Everyone agrees that they loved Bismuth on first sight. Joe brings up throwing Bismuth's bubble into Lion's mane in "Lion 3: Straight to Video." He had no plan at that point. Kat says Joe LOVES to do stuff like that, and calls them "breadcrumbs." He initially thought maybe it would have been a Gem device or a portable warp. They agree he didn't need such a thing because Steven is pretty OP actually. Rebecca wanted "pieces of lore thrown about the living room," so this was part of it. Rebecca then developed who Bismuth would be. McKenzie loves how before Bismuth's reveal, fans would wonder about who Bismuth might be whenever they'd see her Gem in Lion.

When prompted to discuss what they love about Bismuth, Kat says she loves how much Bismuth loves the Crystal Gems, and Joe loves how Bismuth and Jasper are both "patriotic" for their side. Joe likes to play with how Jasper and Bismuth are both so dedicated to their cause. (It is agreed that a shouting match between them would be very loud and not end well.) McKenzie wonders how difficult it is to develop such a big character, and Joe describes having a chance to all have a pass at the character to finalize new characters. They credit Lamar with her humor and how her voice is delivered, and Kat thinks it's really cute when Bismuth was getting emotional.

McKenzie brings up "Bismuth" being the first 22-minute episode and the 99th/100th episode, and asks how that's different from the usual 11-minute episodes. Kat says there's more post to do. Joe thinks it's twice as hard. Kat says there are more board artists to "wrangle" and more picture to lock, sound effects to add, etc. Joe felt it was harder to adjust to the flow of 22 minutes after being used to squeezing for 11 minutes, and that sometimes it almost seemed like too much time, but Kat also likes that it could "breathe" a little and have some important quiet moments. They think the little bumpers were Joe's idea, but he says he won't take credit for the idea--just for drawing them.

McKenzie wants to know about the decision to do a 22-minute episode, and Joe and Kat said it was the network's idea; they wanted at least two half-hour specials, maybe three but they only got to do two. (The other was "Gem Harvest.") They then discuss having a special guest voice actor for an episode like this. Joe heaps praise on Bismuth's voice actor Uzo Aduba, saying every read she gave was perfect. Kat says it's disappointing when they can't meet great voice actors like her because their involvement is so brief.

Kat remembers Bismuth's initial character design having black eyes, intending to reflect the style of her inverted Gem, but they scrapped the design because it looked too suspicious. Joe says Bismuth was written to be very aggressive and gung-ho and got "put away" for how she expressed that. They recall Bismuth always having dreadlocks (they may not have always been rainbow), but some designs having very skinny legs early on. (Same with Smoky Quartz.)

Kat wants to specify that Bismuth is NOT a bad guy whatsoever; she just has a different ideology. Her ideology is relatable, actually; she thinks half the audience probably agrees with Bismuth. Rose, being a "gray" character, punished Bismuth for not aligning with her own philosophy, but Kat and Joe think nobody was clearly right or wrong in the episode and that was the point of telling that story in the first place. Moral ambiguity is very important, and Rose isn't All Things Pure. Joe thinks Steven believed there was one "right" way to see the situation, but wasn't willing to fight Bismuth over it.

McKenzie asks Kat and Joe to say what is similar between Bismuth and Jasper. "Size," says Kat. Joe adds, "Muscles. Bludgeoning weapons." They're more different than the same; Bismuth is basically a blue-collar construction worker, in the dirt, while Jasper is a super-respected warrior. Bismuth rebelled when she found out she didn't have to be that way and wants anarchy, while Jasper wants the order to remain forever. Joe expresses that Bismuth's anarchist tendencies are cool, and Kat jokingly scolds him for inciting anarchy. But the Rule of Cool indicates that if something's cool, it's just cool, and it stays.

[Archive of Steven Universe Podcast Summaries]

#steven universe podcast #jasper #bismuth #rose quartz #mckenzie atwood #rebecca sugar #ian jones-quartey #kat morris #joe johnston #myblog

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isuzukuretsuki · 6 years

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Welp I finished Psychedelica of the Ashen Hawk and my biggest comment is that this game has more plot holes than swiss cheese.

*insert more shifty eye uncomfortable emojis*

What was...... that convoluted mess of a game I just played? Like this is reaching Zero Escape level of plot holes and “wow the writer clearly has no idea what the hell they are doing”. I don’t even know where I’m gonna start breaking down the amount of issues. Lots of spoilers beneath.

My favourite order is prob Levi > Elric > Lugus > Hugh > Eiar > Aria > Tee > Lord > Olgar > Lawrence >>>> Lavan >>>>>>>>>> Francisca

For starters, this felt like less of an otome game and more of a gang bang 5p fuck pile orgy. Seriously. One moment, Eiar is making out with Lavan, the next moment, Eiar is dreaming of sleeping with Lugus and wakes up panicking because “oh no! I think I’m in love with Lugus!”. If the romance is “the heroine being passed among all the guys”, I’d rather there be no romance at all. It felt more like a fucking badly written reverse harem anime than an otome. I had this problem with PBB but boy it was not this level of bad.

None of the characters really develop, none of the relationships really develop. Let’s not even get started on the fact that 2/4 of your love interests are your adopted brothers who are actually your blood cousins. At first I enjoyed Lugus’s enchantment with Eiar but it doesn’t develop beyond that. Why is Lugus even in love with Eiar? His feelings never felt like anything beyond captivation, and the same applied for Eiar. Why is Lavan in love with Eiar? Because he’s some gross nii-chan lusty pervert who’s in love with his adopted sister??? IDK.

The only one who genuinely felt like he loved Eiar was Levi, and even Levi’s character was butchered with the whole “yeah I’m a serial killer who enjoys inflicting pain onto other people”. Even if you blame it on the ~magical stone~, the revelation was like a slap in the face and it was so disconnected w everything we knew of Levi. The writers clearly didn’t know if they wanted to write him as a character who’s sadistic and ruthless, or if they wanted to write him as a character who was manipulated by his mother into becoming her assassin through abuse + gaslighting. The writers aimed for both, and failed miserably at both.

Speaking of Francisca, the fact that Francisca is an evil bitch is literally NEVER brought up lol???? Like when Levi admits that Francisca was using him as an assassin, Eiar and Lavan are shocked but.......... that’s it. Especially in Levi’s ending, the fact that there’s never a hint of acknowledgement that Francisca was abusing him is jarring to say the least. There’s never any real discussion of how Eiar and the Wolf brothers feel about Francisca after they find out what she did to Aria and Olgar. Like wow we just found out our mom is a piece of shit, let us NEVER DISCUSS THIS or have ANY heart to heart talk about this EVER. Because that will give our characters perfect closure! The fact that Eiar never returns to her real name, the name given to her by her mother, also kind of bothers me.

Francisca’s character was honestly butchered along with Levi after everything she did to Aria was revealed. "That evil slut is taking away all the men in my life!” is not a good enough motive to burn a completely innocent woman to death, sorry. Her love for her sons felt shallow and her love for Eiar felt like she was just trying to show up Aria. I can’t find any redeemable thing about her and her character just ended up being at to the bottom of the barrel along with Rika and Mejojo. The only emotion I got out of the whole dumpster fire between the parents was “wow Aria deserved so much fucking better”.

Now lets get started with all the fucking plot holes this game has.

For starters, if the whole town is actually Psychedelica and everyone lost their memories, it makes no sense for Francisca to be the only one who remembers killing Aria, and there’s never any indication to confirm whether or not Francisca is actually aware the fact that everyone is in Psychedelica.

Speaking of Aria, that scene where Aria is shown to be slumbering in the abyss and stops the kids from completing the Kaleido Via makes no sense either. For starters, why is Aria even in the abyss? She died in the real world, so her soul should have moved onto the afterlife, or she should have been trapped in the Psychedelica town too. Actually, the fact that she isn’t trapped makes no sense. Olgar activated the Kaleido Via with a desire to see Aria again (similar to Hikage with Usagi), so it makes no sense for Aria’s soul to not be drawn to the town if the town was created through Aprus and Olgar’s collective desires.

I don’t really understand why tf Aria would want to stop the kids from completing the Kaleido Via when that’s literally the only method to free the souls of the town so they continue into the afterlife? It’d make sense for Aria to stop them if their souls would go into the abyss, but again, it’s explicitly stated that your soul will only end up in the abyss if you die in Psychedelica. And again, the fact that Aria is supposedly in the abyss makes no sense in the first place. The scene with the kids and the kaleido via was so out of place it was ridiculous. How do you not remember a scene where a shard flew into your friend’s eye and caused her to bleed everywhere?

Moving on, it’s literally never explained what the hell is up with Eiar’s red eye. It can be assumed that Eiar inherited it from Aria who really was a witch, but then that doesn’t explain why only one of Eiar’s eyes glow red and not both.

MOVING ON, who the fuck is Hugh and literally what is his damn role in the story. Like I looove character types like him bc and I’m a huge sucker for “mysterious observer characters who act as the story’s narrator” not to mention he’s beautiful but Hugh’s origins and role remains wishy washy from start to end and his character ends up being a plot device to give 30 minute info dumps on the plot. Like, he’s the dumb dead bird that lived with Ashen Witch (whom I assume is Aria’s mother), and after he’s killed by Aprus, Ashen Witch... releases his... soul? So he becomes... a mindless traveler traveling between the different Psychedelica worlds...? I guess??? It’s implied that Hugh is the one who gave Hikage the kaleidoscope but again, how or why he did so is never explained either. I also dunno wtf is up with his ending where Eiar just magically turns into a butterfly and whooshes away with Hugh.

I still have no idea what was with that scene where he chats with Aria about the stories in the Links ending, and I definitely don’t know what was with that scene where Aria talks with Eiar and decides to name her non born child off of her (who is the same Eiar). Like what?? are dreams and timelines converging or something??? No clue.

Also. What the fuck is the deal with Lawrence and Elric??? THAT’S NEVER EXPLAINED? Like yes, I know that much that they’re Kagiha and Hikage respectively but literally wtf is Kagiha and Hikage doing in Aprus/Olgar’s Psychedelica. Lawrence clearly retains his memories as Kagiha, but Hikage never does and it’s like ??? why?? Also why is Usagi in a form of a rabbit in this world? WHO KNOWS. I was just so tired of this game that by the time I was half way done all the endings I just wanted it to be over already.

No joke, I seriously thought that PAA took place in the real world where Hikage was born and raised because of the medieval/historical setting and we’d learn more about the lore of the manor and the kaleidoscope. Honestly though, I wish it was because it prob would have made this game a million times better. If the game was split between a “wolves” and “hawks” path like BWS, it probably would have fixed some of the problems with the terrible romance.

The one good thing I will say about this game is that it’s the first otome game localization from Aksys I’ve played that didn’t give me a migraine because of no proof readers. There were some issues with wrong tenses being used but other than that it wasn't littered with typos like literally EVERY OTHER otome they’ve localized so far lmao.

Presentation wise, this game is beautiful. The sprite work is beautiful and the cgs are amazing. I loved the character designs for all the guys like A++ pretty boys. Unfortunately, the OST really lacked in comparison to PBB this time around. This game had so much potential but everything just fell apart the further and further you go and that’s what makes it even more disappointing. It’s setting and premise were a million times more interesting than PBB. Like medieval setting? Check. Feud between two clans with the heroine caught in between? Check. It had everything I loved and I was confident I was going to love it but the execution was just so terribad that I don’t love it. I can’t love it. I do love all the characters sans Lavan and Francisca though and I think they all deserved better. They deserved better writing. They deserved better development. I wish I could just rework this entire game from the ground up because that’s how frustrated I am with it lmao.

TLDR; I am very very disappointed with this game and it’s such a shame because I loved Black Butterfly to bits and pieces but this game ended up being a convoluted mess of bad and inconsistent writing. PBB had a rather weak premise with an uninteresting and incredibly cliche “all childhood friends in love w the heroine and there’s ~tragedy~!”. However, it had a very interesting and well written lore and universe while simultaneously being clean and easy to understand so it didn’t make any unnecessary loop holes for itself. PAA was the complete opposite. I enjoyed the connections this game made to the first game, but that was pretty much it.

anyway wow that was long, this is the first time I’ve played a game where all I can do is go on a tangent about all the problems I’ve had with it. Hopefully other people enjoyed this game more than I did HAHA.

#ellie plays psychedelica terribly #ellie plays

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breath0ftheglacian · 7 years

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Re: royal edition

Sorry guys... but let me be the one to poop on your parade once more. I'm happy for anyone who still manages to feel excited for this random cluster of minor shit that SE is throwing at us, while meekly asking for more gil.

I cannot summon an iota of joy for this new DLC, mainly because it really does nothing to address the huge gaping holes in the story, not to mention all this extra content that's been released has hardly made the replay value of the actual original game go up at all. You still see none of the major plot points if you were to play the game again from start - no, you'll have to replay a separate episode to get to a important scene or to put the pieces of the narrative together again. What about the build-up? What about the reward after grimacing through dozens of fetch-quests and leveling up, driving through deserts and tallying exp and gil, after customizing and getting attached to your characters, to finally sit back and enjoy the epic story as it unravels?

FFXV offers none of that. It's either the main game with all the tedium and 'wtf' moments, or two hours of intense battles in a separate DLC to get a few lines of essential dialogue.

I have to admit I'm really losing all interest, and not only that but I'm beginning to get slightly offended as a long-time FF-fan. How is it acceptable that over a year after the launch of the game, we still know virtually nothing of the main villain (and arguably one of the main characters), hardly anything of the lore, Luna still isn't a real character, and - this one REALLY irks me - whenever we do get a DLC with some character interaction, it's mainly just empty posing not to mention they're too lazy to come up with fresh dialogue I MEAN THEY LITERALLY RECYCLE ARDYN'S LINES FROM THE MAIN GAME. That has got to be one of the lamest gimmicks ever. Are we to think that he's gone so senile he can only remember a handful of catch-phrases that he robotically repeats to whomever happens to be present?

I literally facepalm every time SE announces another update, and even though I am mildly jealous of people who seem genuinely excited, I cannot relate at all.

If you wanna put your money towards the royal edition by all means, follow your heart, but may I suggest that we, the gamers, the consumers, the FF lovers (and Trashlord harem) save our pennies, show SE in the numbers that this is not what we're looking for. Instant noodle doesn't really grab me, today I need something more substantial.

#ffxv #ffxv royal edition #square enix #final fantasy #ardyn izunia #give us a fucking story already #old rant new rant

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midnightwind · 7 years

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So I’m going to preface this entire thing with a few key points: I am running on no sleep, I am biased, and my initial reaction was pure anger. I am not a fan of the Varus rework because of the writing, and I want to make this a valid argument so bear with me. (If you very much enjoy the new lore, you probably won’t like this post at all, sorry. I just want to vent.)

I’m going to start with the old lore; what I liked and didn’t like about it. The first lines of Varus’ old lore literally opens with a scene of him teaching his son to use a bow, just like him. It’s not a crazy detailed scene, which is a theme throughout the whole piece because really it could’ve benefited from more details in every sense. It is enough to establish that he has a family, he has a son he loves and a son he will be missing precious time with for his new position. It goes to his duty from there, his confusion with his job, the incessant temptation of the entity he is guarding. This is a good introduction of a lot of the doubt that his role supplies him. The thing he’s watching isn’t what he thought it was, he doesn’t understand it or really his purpose, but he has his faith and he sticks to it.

And then Noxus comes. He has to chose between family and duty. There isn’t a lot of details here either, they could have gone into a lovely scene of him struggling to make the decision, of the entity tempting him the whole time. They didn’t, maybe they cut it or just didn’t bother. The lore back then wasn’t as encompassing and as well received as it is now. I don’t have the answer to why they didn’t delve further, but at least from here they start embracing a more raw emotional viewpoint.

You get glimpses of Varus seeing the devastation of his home, of him finding his son broken on the ground, of his people ripped to shreds. You hear the poisoned whispers of Pallas, and you get his soul wrenching collapse into despair. He gives in. You witness the things he lives for: his family, his duty, and his home. You see him watch them burn. Anger and grief and frustration are suddenly breaking his duty to pieces and he embraces the thing that most likely brought the Noxians to his home in the first place. (A giant pit of power is sure to draw a very power hungry kingdom to your door.)

You see it begin to consume him, you see it drive him forward as only a thing for revenge. His caricature is a being of profound sadness and fury, and he murders so apathetically with it. The whole piece just boils down to the raw emotion of a man who lost everything and has nothing left to live for but destruction.

I love his old lore. Yes, I’m nostalgic for it. Varus was the first champ I got to see being made and the first champ I bought the bundle for the day he was out. I enjoy him a lot, but I also acknowledge this lore is lacking and out dated. He needed a good polish. This lore was vague on a lot of important points, it included concepts that Riot had removed, it left a lot of questions. It is far from perfect. This lore was from 2012 and the League still existed as an establishment. It is severely outdated, it needed to be redone.

When I heard they released new lore for him I was excited. I saw a few snippets on my dash about how now Varus was somehow incorporated with gays and I was ecstatic! Riot was expanding its horizons! And then I read the bio.

Varus being a Darkin makes enough sense, it actually does fill in a lot of plot holes. I like the idea that Varus and this weapon have a mutual pact much like Aatrox’s relationship was hinted at. (I don’t remember where I heard this, so I may be wrong here.) I read that first line and I was like ‘Oh! Maybe they made a deal, maybe Varus gets helps from Pallas for his revenge and in return gives Pallas a body to use afterwards to enact his own.’ But I was wrong.

Instead, I was given an odd amalgamation of very flat characters. Val and Rei don’t seem to have much to them. They are Ionian and they are in love. We get a very short glimpse of them hunting a monster, so we can incur that they have bonded through their many battles, and we see a bit of teasing between them. But that’s it. We don’t really get any personality, no emotional connection. We’re supposed to like them because they’re in love and nothing more.

We barely see their home before suddenly they’re on death’s door and hurling themselves into this pit their people watch. We don’t even get much of an explanation for why his people watch it, I can only assume because it holds a Darkin, but then Varus says the world has forgotten the Darkin. So maybe they guard it because it is tradition. I don’t know, it isn’t stated. Suddenly three souls are merged into one, and in the short story we see them vying for control. Except that Val and Rei don’t seem to have any influence beyond making a shaky hand. This is expanded upon more in the last comic where they actual gain full control of the body, but that seems to have escaped their capabilities by the time they make it to the tomb in the short story.

If this is supposed to be about love fighting evil, I feel like there be more of a fight. If two forces are fighting for control, make it violent. Give me mental battles, give me whoever is in control of the body throwing themselves against walls as they fight for domination. Give me more than a shaking aim and passing words. Make me believe they’re struggling for every second of power. The last comic did a better job of this, but everything still seems very vague. It seems flat. It seems generic.

They could have melded the idea of a Darkin very easily into Varus’ old lore. You can remove the League from it in a simple way. Make the flashback a tool the weapon is using to break Varus and gain full control of the body. Give me mental anguish at being forced to relive this nightmare over and over, give me a will forged in revenge pressing back against the demon, give me a man fighting for his right to avenge every precious thing he lost. Give me a man being consumed by this need and twisted into the very monster he believes himself exterminating.

I don’t know what this new Darkin Varus is doing. We get hints of him trying to find his brothers and sisters to do.... something. Kill all of humanity, sure, but if they couldn’t do it with their whole armies I wonder how they think they can do it now with only 5 of them left. I don’t see the two lovers having this huge impact they’re supposed to have when their whole being is just two people in love. People are complex, and love is a strong emotion, but it is not the only emotion. Give them depth, give the Darkin more, give me emotional investment. Build me their world, their hopes and aspirations, and tear it down before my eyes as well as theirs.

I wanted to be pulled into this new world of demons and humanity battling for domination, or compromising and fighting. But that world isn’t what I found. The new lore left a sour taste in my mouth, I just couldn’t connect with it in any way. It felt very lazy to me, and generic in so many ways. They were a lot of fantastic ideas in it, but the execution just left me wanting.

Granted, this is my opinion. I’m going to miss the tragic Varus who was a man who lost everything. Maybe more Darkin lore will fill in and expand the issues I found in this new lore for him. I hope it will, anyways...

#very long post #I was just really disappointed in the new lore #a lot of potential just seemed wasted to me #Varus #League of Legends #again just my opinion though I just wanted to vent

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nautilusopus · 7 years

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I’m feeling angry today so here are all the entries of the Compilation listed from least terrible to “Nojima and Nomura are incompetent hacks and should be fired”.

8. The Case of Denzel OVA is the most bearable entry in the Compilation, because it does what a sequel is supposed to do: expand upon the lore of the established setting while showing us more about the characters in it. It's a shame, because I think this also might be the least acknowledged entry in it, apart from maybe Before Crisis, perhaps partially because it has no official English dub. In this case, we get to see Denzel finally fleshed out beyond "the littlest geostigma patient that Cloud needs to win the big game for!" He joins up with a group of salvagers, and we see everyone trying to piece the world back together following the complete collapse of the government, the economy, their primary energy source, and the deaths of millions, where they're immediately set upon by disease and societal tensions between what used to be the "upper class" and the slum dwellers that have always had it this way, more or less.

What the fuck, this is what Advent Children should have been entirely. Except with Cloud and his friends, and not Denzel, because screw Denzel, I wanna see what Avalanche has been up to. (We never get to see what Avalanche has been up to, and we never will.)

That being said, even Case of Denzel didn't manage to not fuck up royally, and it has a giant huge plothole in the form of forgetting to account for an entire goddamn year because it forgot Advent Children was set two years after the OG and not one. Whoops.

7. Advent Children Complete, which I'm treating as a separate entry from Advent Children -- Advent Children is a fucking mess with a nonsensical plot and wonky character motivations that, word of god, were literally just there because they figured it's how the fans wanted to be pandered to the best and not because they thought the motivations would be good or interesting (nothing like a content creator that openly states he thinks his target audience are morons!). It's slightly lower on the list than Advent Children vanilla because A) it looks slightly less ugly due to the Bluray release, B) Denzel's and Marlene's child actors got too old and they had to find younger ones for the redub, and these newer actors are actually better and significantly less obnoxious, and C) it has My Chemical Romance doing the theme song.

These are all very shallow reasons, admittedly. You'd think it'd be lower because the added scenes help fill in some plot holes, but they were badly added scenes that meshed very poorly with the story at large, and because of that they actually created about as many new plot holes as they filled in. Shite movie.

6. Advent Children vanilla. This is a good place to discuss why they're both on the bottom of the list, since they're pretty much the same movie. Shitty plot, characters are a sad shadow of what they used to be, and they did some weird thing with Cloud where he unlearns everything from the original game for the sake of cheap conflict and the fans try and defend it like it's actually deep and coherent. Not to mention some more bad decisions: Renu and Rude are good guys now and friends with Cloud and Tifa despite murdering their friends along with everyone else in Sector 7, Marlene is no longer Barret's daughter because ewwww, black people, and Tseng and Rufus are retconned back to life for literally no damn reason at all (they contribute nothing to the movie. Nothing. They even waste the dramatic reveal with the sheet by having him say "yeah it's me Rufus but I'm gonna wear this sheet for no reason and rip it off dramatically revealing ME, RUFUS SHINRA"). As far as I'm concerned they both just died again right after this movie.

Basically, Advent Children was bad and stupid, but it was pointless as well, which in this case works to its advantage: we relearn the exact same lessons but in a shittier, more juvenile way, wind up at the exact same point we started at by the movie's conclusion, and get confirmation that there were, in fact, zero fucking stakes. At least it didn't take a scalpel to the franchise lore at large, like everything else on this list.

5. The Last Order OVA is basically Square Enix frantically trying to save face after they've realised that, "Oh shit, our complete inability to proofread the first drafts of the scrips we've been running with have resulted in every single bit of VII lore introduced in these things wildly contradicting one another!" Basically, Last Order is a very pretty fight scene with Zack in it animated by Madhouse that occasionally tries to have a plot. This is the entry that began the handwave of "oh, all the entries in the Compilation are different because they're all told from a difrerent point of view! It's up to you do decide what really happened!" Lazy, bad, the beginning of the end. It looked nice, but I can't even enjoy the fight scene in the reactor properly because Zack doesn't immediately get bodied like he should've, which wouldn't have been very much fun to watch but at least would've made more sense; as well as the weird bit where they tried to imply Cloud was always infected with Jenova and mako-enhanced from birth? Somehow?

Also, the "Last Order" in question seems to be Zack telling Cloud to run. Cloud, who is in a vegetative state, and even if he weren't, can't even walk. Sure, he'll get right on that.

4. Case of Novels. These things suck and are terrible and look like they were written by a third grader. That's not just a "lol these are terrible" jab, either. I mean they literally read like they were written by a child with a very basic grasp of how to put sentences together. All of them are structured like so:

Tifa was very sad, because Cloud wasn't talking to her. Tifa thought that maybe Cloud felt sad because his friends were dead. Then Tifa thought about her adventures with her friends from Avalanche, the friends that she was best friends with two years ago. Cloud and Tifa had lots of adventures with them, but they were sad by the end of it because Aeris died, and then Tifa thought that Cloud was probably thinking about that too. Tifa felt bad about that.

They are bad to look at, just objectively, regardless of the content in them. Case of Barret's is by far the worst in that regard, to the point where I'm not entirely certain I didn't read a bootleg fake version of it, because there is no way Square Enix would charge actual money for a product that was meant to be released to the masses and presented as canon to Final Fantasy VII. Except that they did. (I can also believe it because it further works towards the goal of erasing Barret from the story entirely, more on this later.)

As far as the actual story content, I'd probably have to say Case of Lifestream White/Black are the worst, due to some weird nonsense where Aeris just hangs out in the Lifestream and watches people like it's a spectral break room, and Sephiroth grumbles and pines over Cloud like a jilted ex-boyfriend because Nojima forgot there was anything else to his character. These, like Advent Children, are pointless, but they’re pointless to the extent that it’s absurd they even exist -- there's apparently an entire third Shinra bastard running around out there, and he has zero bearing on anything ever, and never will again. What Shinra bastard? Who? Kadaj murdered a whole town offscreen or something, but I guess it wasn’t relevant, don’t know why we brought it up.

3. Before Crisis. Japan-exclusive mobile game where Square stops even bothering trying to hide their contempt for anyone not in the "marketable niche" (i.e: all the white male characters ages 16-27) and begins writing them out of the story. It's not enough that they take his goddamn daughter away from him on the basis that he's prospecting oil, which is fucking stupid in and of itself -- this is the story that decides Avalanche, the group Barret founded in response to Shinra murdering everyone in his hometown because they didn't want any competition in the form of coal, wasn't actually even Barret's. It was some other guy's, and grrrr he was a terrorist even more terroristier than OG Avalanche was because moral ambiguity is gonna go over our audience’s heads so let’s just make it nice and cleanly black and white for them. I've ranted about this before, but it's even worse that the fans seem to have no problem incorporating these changes into everything, because who gives a rat's ass about Barret, right? There was some dumb thing about Nanaki finding a girl catdog to have those babies he has in the epilogue, and the Ravens, but it's all just more of the same introducing samefaced teeny boppers that the fans love so much at the expense of everything else.

2. SPEAKING OF WHICH, Crisis Core, the king of samefaced teeny boppers consuming the franchise. I flipflop a lot on whether this one is the worst or not, but in addition to having the same problem as Before Crisis times fifty, I consider it as bad as it was because you could tell it could have been really good, and that's honestly heartbreaking. The first hour or so kicks things off with a really good start, introducing Zack as this cocksure jackass trying to make a name for himself, and his mentor Catchphrase Man. Then around the point where Banora gets firebombed it all sort of goes downhill, and you realise a lot of the credit you were giving it wasn't actually due. Zack being a gloryhound for Shinra and believing Soldier to be a bastion of good wasn't supposed to be a character flaw like it should've. Genesis almost singlehandedly ruins the entire thing by eating all the screentime in the word with his obnoxious motivations that made zero sense, and in a flashback we see he was always a fucking tool so there's no reason to feel sorry for him in the first place. He's actually secretly responsible for the iconic Nibelheim scene, of all fucking things (GENESIS DID NIBELHEIM would make a good bumper sticker). Tifa gets thirty seconds of screentime. Cloud doesn't fare much better, which is a seriously huge problem considering he's the goddamn protagonist of the entire franchise. He gets a single 49 second cutscene of them establishing "okay he's best friends with Zack" and then nothing else, ever, unless you want to count the three emails he sends him that you could tell were supposed to lead to more bonding cutscenes that were ultimately cut for more GENESIS, YOU LOVE HIM SO MUCH RIGHT GUYS??? Aeris fares even worse than Cloud and Tifa combined, being barely in it, and Square having decided that Zack actually made all her life decisions for her. That's right -- literally everything about her character? Zack did it. Fuck you.

It's also this high up for what it represents, I suppose -- in the fanbase, you see a whole lot of "Well, Cloud lost Zack and Aeris so now he has no friends and nothing else to live for in this world because he didn't really care about anyone else besides them". It seems everyone forgot that not only was there more to Cloud’s character than "his friends are dead so he’s sad” and his friends being dead was only a small part of it, but that there were seven other people we spent about sixty hours establishing in no uncertain terms that they loved him unconditionally and that he felt the same way. Crisis Core is what finally got people to start disregarding the rest of the main fucking cast from the OG, and it was very, very deliberate. An old unwashed man in his late thirties jaded about his future in spaceflight, a catdog with daddy issues, a black man with a character arc revolving around fatherhood, a triple agent paper-pusher that had a furry phase right in the middle of his midlife crisis, two women that are both alive and have agency of their own, and hell, even a young man with severe psychological issues that had a very strong bond with all of these people even though most of them aren't young and attractive white people and realises he can count on them all for support, are not as marketable as the cast of Crisis Core. Square knows this. You can't wring any sex appeal out of "happy supportive environment" or "female characters", since most of the fanbase tends to be straight women in their late teens and early twenties. So, everyone in both those categories gets shafted. And, as mentioned, the fans seem all to happy to run with this, given the overwhelming amount of material that seems to disregard everyone else in Cloud's life that wasn't Zack (and sometimes Aeris gets acknowledged because all she's good for anymore is a corpse to motivate Cloud) as unimportant, and not really his friends.

The fact that the entire game seems to undermine the original's tone very badly almost seems like a nitpick at this point next to very intentional racism and sexism and pandering, but I'm gonna bring that up too. The new version of Zack's death scene flies directly in the face with how they were handled in the original game, and is more in line with Cait Sith's than anything else's -- that death isn't heroic, or glorious, or profound. It's just sad and fucking hurts, and it's something that happens. They made that pretty clear the first time around when he just gets gunned down on a cliff in complete silence. You can practically hear the "so it goes" in the background. Naturally, this time around they gave him an entire speech about dreams an honour and then when he dies he goes to heaven (on a planet with no heaven) and he's successfully become a hero. Fucking bravo. Or the bit where, as has been pointed out, you have a wacky scene where Zack meets a young Yuffie, and she skips off amongst the corpses of her people that Zack himself just finished making in the name of glory and imperialism (not a character flaw, though! He’s a good guy!). There's an astounding lack of self-awareness in everything the game does.

AND IT COULD HAVE BEEN SO GOOD, and that's why I still debate whether or not it belongs in the Worst spot or not. It could have been great to see a non 49-second version of the friendship that eventually motivated Zack to die for Cloud, but then they forgot to write it, because why write that when you could have these four cutscenes with Genesis? It would've been great to see Aeris and her relationship with running from Shinra that caused her to grow up street smart and how that caused Zack to maybe question Shinra's motivations, but them they forgot to write it because HEY LOOK HERE'S SOME MORE WING SYMBOLISM WITH ANGEAL DO YOU GET IT THERE'S ONLY ONE OF THEM AND HIS NAME IS SPELLED ALMOST LIKE ANGEL, I'M WORKING WITH GENESIS NOW HIS NAME MEANS BEGINNING LOL. It could have been great to see Tifa getting her start with Avalanche, but after her obligatory cameo in Nibelheim she's swallowed into the void again because they forgot she was ever anything besides Cloud's love interest, and fuck you we gotta show you this Genesis scene in Modeoheim. It could have been great to meet a younger Barret, and wonder how at odds he would've been with Zack, a man who's been drinking the Soldier kool-aid for years, but instead we got Genesis reciting poetry. It could have been great to see the workings of Soldier before it all went to shit, but instead we got fucking goddamn Genesis. Genesis Genesis Genesis. 90% of the screentime in this game that should've gone to developing Zack's character for one fucking second, let alone other things, just gets eaten up by Genesis. God I hate Genesis.

1. Dirge of Cerberus.

I'll try and keep this brief because I can go on about Dirge of Cerberus all fucking day if you let me.

If Crisis Core is terrible because it had the shadows of great ideas that were terribly mishandled in the name of turning a profit, Dirge is sort of its opposite, in that at no point did anything even remotely resembling a good idea come anywhere near the building this was being written in during the entirety of its production. It's bad. Thoroughly bad. There are no redeeming qualities. It's ugly, it plays badly, 90% of it is cutscenes* and the remaining 10% is invisible walls, the plot is a fucking mess by anyone's standards whether you're familiar with the franchise or not, it is the reigning fucking king of tone issues, the design choices are the worst of what Nomura has to offer by a country mile, and the characters are the worst Square has ever made in the Final Fantasy series.

Vincent is the protagonist, and since he just wants a nap and is too cool to care that means you don't really give a rat's ass about what's going on either, which you wouldn't have anyway, because Dirge's plot isn't so much rife with plot holes as it is a giant, gaping hole, where bits of plot occasionally drift by, mangled beyond recognition by the plane crash in 1976 that claimed their lives. Did you know there was an even more secreter army living under Midgar that somehow survived the entire city being demolished with cosmic hellfire, a pandemic with no cure, and a giant sword battle dropping more debris on them? Did you know Hojo actually didn't die, he invented the internet in 30 seconds in his death throes and then invented the technology to upload minds to computers, AKA created a fucking goddamn technological singularity, and then uploaded himself in a .zip file until he could blow up the world for shits and giggles completely unrelated to anything even remotely having to do with Jenova? Did you know Lucrecia wasn't actually a terrible person that willingly carried Hojo's child and injected it with science juice for the sake of their careers, but was actually a really nice lady and is really sorry you guys, and was just an unwilling womb for Sephiroth to be birthed from, and was pretty much the Madonna? Did you know that apparently the Actual Goddamn Apocalypse wasn't enough to convince the Planet it was dying, but someone stabbing a few thousand people was? Did you know Reeve decided to call the events of the main game the "Jenova Wars" because he doesn't actually know what a war is? Did you know mako actually makes you live forever instead of giving you brain damage and killing you? Did you know the Lifestream is pretty much the same thing as the internet? Did you know Vincent was a paedophile? Did you know someone decided Genesis still needed to be fucking alive?

Oh yeah, and also there are such stellar characters such as Red the Red, Blue the Blue, White the Clean, Black the I-Have-A-Jockstrap-Taped-Over-My-Mouth-Because-Fuck-You-Why-Not, and Orange the Clear, who is physically 9 years old but mentally 19 so it's totally not paedophilia if we have a weird romance between her and Vincent (never mind that if we're going by that logic, you now have a 19 year-old dating a 61 year-old, which is... not a whole lot better.)

And hey, remember that one scene where Shalua completely unnecessarily died by holding a door she could've easily ducked through, and then she pissed herself upon death, and the game took the time to show the piss puddle, and Yuffie was super upset about it despite the fact that they never interacted even once but the writers forgot about that, and then after all that shit she didn't even die in her own melodramatic death scene, and then she did die anyway at the end of the game and all you can think about is the piss and god Shalua is so fucking pointless and looks so fucking stupid. Look at this hot mess:

She’s a scientist! Or something.

Even by Final Fantasy standards these designs are fucking ridiculous.

There is nothing redeeming about this game. It's like a gift that keeps on giving -- every time I look back at it, I discover a new plothole that I didn't catch the first time before. It's easier to hate than Crisis Core, though, which just makes me sad. At least Dirge never had anything going for it in the first place. I paid two bucks for my copy and I still feel ripped off.

* Okay, that’s an exaggeration -- 50% of it is cutscenes. Four hours out of an eight hour game is cutscenes. Do you realise how fucking many cutscenes that is? It’s a lot. (And yet not one of them has any plot in them HEYOOOO)

#forfdorfsorf #Squid Alienates VII Fans #man fuck dirge

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butidontlikebagels · 5 years

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Plot Holes and Nit Picks

So before I start this rant let’s get something straight. I love this show and this movie I think it’s presentation is great, animation is solid, voice acting and pacing are nice. This is meant to highlight the major problems that the story has and how it’s problematic to the lore and canon already established. Plus some pretty baffling things I noticed that people hand wave off as cute but if you sit and think about it. It’s pretty fucked up and disgusting. So I decided to make a numbered list

1. You can’t convince me Spinel found the injector, reengineered it to travel at the speed of regular era 2 ships, while also having it only be controlled via sound horn, found this old relic scythe that’s been discontinued that’s has the ability to reset gems back to factory setting with one slice, and anti life water. Plus the ability to find Earth and travel to it within the span of roughly an a couple hours and capable of fighting off the crystal gems who have had years of experience in battles despite not being created to fight or trained to fight at all. You can argue that amethyst said they were rusty but really? Do you think I believe pearl who is meticulous would let herself stop training or garnet. You just can’t convince me that all happened that fast.

2. That scythe that’s capable of factory resetting gems. Do you realize that there was no reason to discontinue this weapon? They could’ve used it during the war to use fallen gems to fight back against their allies returning them back to home worlds side. I know the diamonds wanted to make an example of the gems by making the cluster. Although it’s even more devastating to force an already small group into submission by making them fight their own friends. Why would they substitute it for a weapon that practically does less. Why would White Diamond who only valued perfection settle for anything less than mindless perfect soldiers and builders. Even the upper echelons weren’t safe, having a personality was a privilege not a right. It’s baffling that we’re just seeing this weapon now. If anything the one Jasper used should be the discontinued one and the scythe should be the new era 2 replacement.

3. So is no one gonna talk about how Steven gets hit by the anti organic goo and starts bleeding even though he was wearing a jacket and Greg takes a huge glob to the arm and it only turns grey?

4. So are we also gonna talk about Steven fusing with his dad. While it did work in restoring pearl’s memories, is the most baffling thing to have happened. Like according to garnet fusion should only be performed by consenting parties who have a deep bond, according to the diamonds it’s only used to have a tactical advantage but every person who is showed fusing has a bond that’s either out of love romantically or mutual respect an outlier case being Lapis and Jasper. Jesus Pearl even even went as far as to lie to Garnet to feel the rush of fusion with her. They also tried to really tone down the sexual aspect of the fusion dance too, unless it’s garnet because their married and even in the movie you can’t tell me garnet reforming wasn’t erotic in some way. They were literally becoming one piece by piece. It’s crazy how they didn’t do that for stevens fusion or alexandrite. Am I missing something here??? Am I supposed to think this is non-sexual or sexual?? They keep changing it on a dime because I saw them fusing as incest. Idk that’s my nitpick I felt pretty weird about it. Also his design is hyper buff masculine despite their body types not matching that??

5. This movie was just a recap of the entire series if you missed anything. You don’t even need to watch like half the beach city episodes. Ronaldo, Keke, Dewey, corrupted gems, and even bismuth. All of them didn’t need to be in this movie, they didn’t contribute to the plot except to give the stakes some impact of which they don’t even do that one thing well to begin with. Hell even Ronaldo was used as a gag and doesn’t even speak. Useless throw away characters who weren’t even thrown away.

6. There’s a lot of wasted potential that gets set up but nothing is done with it. Remember Greg getting hit by that anti organic life goo yea so he gets his arm healed. That scene was literally for nothing with no long lasting consequences, all set up and no pay off. The earth looked a little destroyed. Cool. Steven just kissed it back to normal. Beach city destroyed? People losing their homes? Valuables that held sentimental value if not monetary value? Oh it’s fine they aren’t mad at Steven and his space aliens who keep invading and causing problems, kidnapping their friends and family members. Nope all is fine in the world.

I love SU but you can’t deny how crazy these things are for me to just wave off. It’s like at face value it’s a good movie but when you connect it to the series the issues pop up immediately. I think the problem is that Steven sent that message out at the beginning of the movie if Steven sent it out at the end of the show and there was like a montage of him helping the gem society instead of us being told that. Then two years went by it would’ve been a good set up for the movie and made the plot more believable. Also take out the crazy op scythe.

#steven universe #movie plot #story plot #cartoon #network

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vorthosjay · 7 years

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Let’s Talk about The Hand That Moves

Today’s story, The Hand That Moves, is written by Ken Troop and has a LOT for us to unpack. You might remember that Ken also wrote The Promised End last year, and there are certainly some callbacks to that story! This one is DEEP, so let’s dive in.

Winds of Rebuke by Matthias Kollros

This story is all about Nissa, who has decided to seek out Kefnet and find the answers she seeks. But first, a moment of self-reflection.

Perhaps I bring the blight with me.

The thought startled. Always before she had framed the corruption she fought on Zendikar, on Innistrad, here, as enemies without. Darkness from the outside, to be vanquished. But what if the darkness was within?

This is meaningful in a few different ways. The dark power she is hinted at once possessing (a reference to her affinity for black magic once upon a time). It also reference both Lorywn (the eyeblights) and the Eldrazi. The latter is particularly good foreshadowing. If you think Nissa is done with all the ugliness that came before, this is pretty conclusive evidence that she’s still struggling.

Perhaps that was why on every plane she visited she knew failure. She had failed to protect Zendikar. Failed to overcome Emrakul. Even her successes felt hollow. Perhaps she deserved this fate.

The Gatewatch always win FTW.

I can do anything I want. Anything at all. Remember that."

The angel came closer . . .

Nissa woke with a scream, sweat already cooling on her brow. Emrakul.

This is a callback to The Promised End, also by Ken Troop. Here’s the relevant passage:

Nissa shifted and brought her gaze to meet Jace's directly through the window. She sees me. Jace shivered, frozen to the spot. He could not move, could not look away. Her eyes glowed darkly purple. She spoke directly to him. "I can do anything I want. Anything at all. Remember that. The only thing saving you is..." the purple glow faded, the nimbus around her dissipating, "...I don't want anything."

Nissa had been echoing Emrakul’s voice. Don’t forget, they have a LONG history together, all the way back to her origin story.

Nissa’s Revelation by Izzy

Based on how much Emrakul appears in these visions, I strongly suspect that Emrakul has left a permanent mark on Nissa’s mind at this point. No one has stopped to ask why Emrakul lured Nissa to her. To free her? Or for something more?

Does Emrakul feel a kinship with the elf that set her free?

A dark snake, winged and venomous, cast its shadow upon the desert. The snake was huge, bigger than an oak, bigger than a forest of oaks. Its shadow covered the whole world.

The shadow spoke, its voice rumbling across the empty desert. "They would take away my power. They would take away what makes me me. This I will not abide."

The shadow of the snake wrapped its coils around the world.

"For what I require, I would drain every world. I would devour every single one. But I start here."

The shadow squeezed. The world screamed. Nissa screamed.

This image is symbolic in two ways. In one, it’s obviously meant to be Nicol Bolas arriving just after the Mending.

But what’s REALLY interesting is that Bolas says “But I start here.”

Meaning... it’s his first plot post-Mending. Meaning the Mending was a mere three Amonkhetu generations ago? On a world where people don’t age past 20?

But with a Meso-American themed set on it’s way, @talinthas pointed out on twitter that it also appears to be referecing Quetzalcoatl.

Three of the stars winked out. Their generation of light and heat snuffed. Their lives vanished.

But Nissa could still see movement where those three stars had been. Stars no more, just three dark rents in the fabric of the sky. Three dark holes, possessed of an energy and fury all their own, pulsing to a rhythm malevolent.

The five remaining stars moved, their new alignment warped, all bending to the shadowy line woven through their constellation. Their new outline suggested a pair of horns.

This one is interesting. This must represent Bolas co-opting the gods of Amonkhet, but the symbolism used is really interesting. Stars against the night sky... like Nyx? Perhaps these gods aren’t so different from those on Theros. Which is really important given my next quote.

Also, note that this seems to represent that the other three gods aren’t truly gone. Perhaps we’ll see them again come next set? I’ve got some thoughts on what they might be tomorrow.

She saw a young man, his face erased, stumbling among a garden of statues. High above the man a growing cloud of dusk attacked the sun. From somewhere outside the garden there was a mighty roar.

Golly. Who do we know missing a face, with a growing cloud of dusk blocking out the sun in their artwork?

Ashiok, Nightmare Weaver by Karla Ortiz

So what is this garden of statues reference? Well, what is Theros better known for than statues? Seriously. Go look at all the artwork of the place, anywhere you’re standing there are a TON! The sun is getting attacked? Sounds like a reference to Heliod? And a mighty roar? Sounds like it might be Ajani.

Art by Tyler Jacobson

Of course, all that could be referencing the Broken Lands on Amonkhet, too. Plenty of statues out there. The next part is even more interesting.

Nissa saw a world, then tens of worlds, hundreds of worlds. Thousands. She saw this world, the world of Amonkhet, and wrapped around it was a dark sinewy line. That line stretched back through all the worlds, all the thousands of worlds, and she saw an unbroken line of darkness from Amonkhet all the way back to the beginning of the line.

If this is meant to represent Bolas, where is the beginning of the line?

A large golden disc, shaped and stylized like a sun, descending from the sky. The sun disc approached a large circular stone tablet covered with strange sigils, and the two discs merged, becoming a single golden disc. Cracks appeared in the golden disc, small at first, then widening, growing. The disc crumbled away into nothingness.

Tablet of the Guilds by Nic Klein

My first thought was Ravnica, because of this art. But that’s obviously not the case. I believe this is instead a reference to Amonkhet’s Second Sun. An artificial sun, and when it’s time, it’s going to destroy Amonkhet (the circular stone tablet in the vision).

Cartloads of the ore snaked their way in a large procession toward the city.

Lazotep, as I’ve suspected, is going to be way more important than it appears right now.

The scenes shifted faster now, barely even an image forming before being replaced. A fizzling torch. A broken clock with a clean face. A mummified head facing backward atop a mummified body. A split tree, its sap oozing into the ground. A shattered shield, its shiny metallic pieces torn and scattered.

She closed her eyes against the onslaught, but still the images came tumbling through her head, crumpling her in mid-air. A falling dragon. Giants, covered in metallic blue, stomping through streets. A massive flash of light, consuming a world.

I can’t even BEGIN processing many of these. What are these Metallic blue giants? Artifacts, maybe? Or could they foreshadow viking world and ice giants? Could the falling dragon represent the Crux of Fate with Ugin? Or something to do with Bolas?

"No!" The angel's voice turned cold and harsh. "It is the wrong question! Pawns, queens, they're all still pieces! All still pieces, waiting to be moved."

Interesting.

"Stop being a piece, Nissa. Be the hand that moves." There was a loud rumbling behind them. The angel looked over Nissa's shoulder, and something shifted in her eyes. Without word or farewell the angel soared into the sky, and was soon just a speck in the far distance.

I’m pretty sure Nissa now has her own Raven Man situation going on, either that or Kefnet knows far more than he lets on, and WANTED Nissa to do something. I think it’s the former, simply because of the next quote here.

He did not seem to know, or care, of Bolas's blighted touch upon his essence.

So Kefnet, like the other gods, simply doesn’t realize how they’ve been affected by Bolas.

The God of Knowledge was made of leylines. Leylines she could manipulate.

Gods are made by leylines, eh? That’s helpful for us figuring out what they are, and it’s a nice bit of lore to stash away.

And though amateur she was, there was still a pattern of her own making residing in Kefnet. Still a thread she could tug . . . to what effect, she did not yet know. But she suspected there would be a time to find out. She was tired of being a pawn, constantly reacting to nightmares and failures, never ahead.

And perhaps even a queen was too small a destiny.

She heard a voice, her own voice, clear as a crystal bell.

"Be the hand that moves."

Oh man, whatever just happened, adding blue has NOT made Nissa a nicer person. Perhaps a queen was too small a destiny? I mentioned before that it’s clear Nissa is struggling with her darker impulses. We may be seeing her failing. At the very least, she may be taking on a very oldwalker-style attitude.

#vorthos #mtgakh

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