#especially considering that most of my lu breakdowns

[adrift-in-thyme]

Frame by frame breakdown after each lu update

I’m very happy to be known for this

[therealslimshakespeare]

I feel like Maureen and Sanchez have a strong potential to be at least friends with each other. Probably not bffs, but they share common character traits if you think about it. They both value their work and place in a chain of command, both are hardworking and willing to pick of slack for others if needed. Sanchez has reasonable fears about Maureen reaction to the truth of assault that Gale and Sanchez suffered, but I honestly cannot see Maureen blaming either of them for what happened when they were captured. Especially since in the last part we already see her post her breakdown and with her walls slowly collapsing, on the brink of some very serious soul searching of her own. If anything, considering how much Maureen knows about the abuse that Gale (and Brady) went through, she could be a good ally for Sanchez who considers herself outsider to the tight knit 100th group. Let’s be real, they are not most likeable individuals in the group (and thats why I love them so much) but as Gale said in your latest chapter, that doesn’t really matter in a place like this. And on top of that, they are left behind with the others after Gale, Ida and Lu made their escape. That lends so much potential for some kind bond to form. Idk, I want them to be cool with each other and I feel like interaction between them would be at least very entertaining

I ATE THIS UP!

so many elements of your ask are exactly my writer’s intention when I drop tiny crumbs of connection and motivation between them. And as we get more plot filled in we’ll learn more, of course. But yeah, Maureen by the point of the chat about Spymaster has gone through some shit but worse yet, she’s had to hold the hands of folks going through shit. Ida, Jack, Gale, etc. and Sometimes that’s a worse position for some personality types, and yet she’s stepped up.

So I totally don’t see her ever thinking poorly of Sanchez for anything related to Gale or the assault, just as she was also able to recognize Gale’s bravery in even wanting to approach the woman again. There’s a sentence in the Sanchez fic about Gale almost admiring the moment she cuts his cheek, because it reminds him of something the girls would’ve done. i think Maureen has the same opinion, she woulda done it too

ALSO YES! When it’s Maureen and Bucky and Benny and Brady and a Sanchez left behind? Amongst our other babies of course…cannot wait to explore how that nexus has to bind together and iron out the creases without the moderating influences of Gale and Ida and Smith. Rough batch to lose, for sure

[ljf613]

Why Azula Doesn’t Need a “Redemption”

I recently read this fabulous meta by @deliciousmeta​​ about some of the issues with saying that Azula needs a “redemption,” and I completely agree and wanted to expound on it. 

The term redemption arc is so ubiquitous in fandom, especially when talking about Azula, and I hate it, but I can’t get away from it. If I want people to recognize that what I write is in any way about understanding or humanizing Azula, let alone about working on her healing or actively trying to do better, I have to tag it with “Azula Redemption,” or people won’t know what I’m talking about.

So let’s talk a little more about the concept of “redemption” within the Avatar world. 

The show does use the term redemption, particularly with Zuko and the Fire Nation, but it’s not talking about some arbitrary concept of “good person” vs “bad person.” No, words like “redemption” and “restoration” are specifically used regarding one thing: honor. 

Before we go any further, let’s define our terms: 

[ID: Dictionary definition of the word “Redemption”: Noun 1. the action of saving or being saved from sin, error, or evil. 2. the action of regaining or gaining possession of something in exchange for payment, or clearing a debt. End ID] 

Redemption has two separate meanings. The first is about being saved from sin/evil, and @deliciousmeta​​​ already went into many of the issues with this, but I’ll add one more point: it’s passive. There’s a person being saved, and another person doing the saving-- and the show itself rejects this. Iroh, no matter how hard he tries, can’t save Zuko. Zuko has to make his own decision to leave on his own terms. 

The second definition is the one that’s important right now-- regaining something lost. Zuko (and the Fire Nation) has (or at least, believes he has) lost his honor, and he wants it back. 

(Side note: That idea of reclamation/repossession is also something to consider when talking about Aang/the Air Nomads, the Water Tribes, and the Earth Kingdom regaining everything they’ve lost in the war. (I might discuss that in another post.) Redemption isn’t generally the word you hear in regards to victims, but it does apply.) 

[ID: Dictionary definition of the word “Honor”: Noun 1. high respect; great esteem. 2. adherence to what is right or to a conventional standard of conduct. Verb 1. regard with great respect. 2. fulfil (an obligation) or keep (an agreement). End ID]

From Zuko’s very introduction, we see that he does honor his word, even when his opponents don’t. He told Aang he would leave the Water Tribe village in peace, and he kept his word, even when Aang did not. 

Zuko’s obsession with redeeming his honor (again, that second definiton of redemption) is because he has conflated the two meanings of “honor”; he lost his esteem (read: privilege), and he thinks that somehow means he’s lost his integrity. In his obsession with regaining the first, he loses the second. This culminates in “The Crossroads of Destiny.” When he turns his back on Iroh in Ba Sing Se, he has broken the trust Iroh had in him-- he’s dishonored himself. 

(Which, in a sense, is a microcosm for how the Fire Nation lost their honor-- they broke the trust all four of the nations had for each other.) 

When he returns to the Fire Nation, he has what he thinks he wanted-- esteem and respect (read: his father’s “love”). But it’s a hollow shell of what it should be. He’s always been a person of integrity-- the person who’s being honored isn’t him. (Or, at least, it isn’t who he wants to be.) 

And so this time, he rejects that first definition of honor. In essence, he says that respect is useless if the person’s actions aren’t deserving of respect. 

In doing so, he takes back-- he redeems-- his real honor. 

That’s what Zuko’s redemption arc is about. It’s not about “becoming a good person” or “being saved from evil,” it’s about taking back what he already had. 

So I have no problem with calling Zuko’s story a redemption arc, because that’s what it is: a tale of a boy, and eventually, a nation, taking back what they’ve lost-- their honor-- through his own hands. 

Any narrative about Azula, however, can’t be about that. 

There are two reasons for this. 

First off, Azula herself doesn’t care about honor. Unlike Zuko, her honor has never been something she valued. In “The Chase,” she rejects the very notion of honor when, after claiming that “a princess surrenders with honor,” she breaks her word. For Zuko, his honor is an integral part of his value system and who he is, but Azula has never even entertained the question-- if it doesn’t help her acheive her goals, it’s worthless.

Second, as I’ve mentioned, true redemption is about regaining something that’s been lost. What does Azula have to regain? Azula’s drive has always been about getting things she doesn’t have. (See Mirror & Misdirection - The Distortions of the Mirror Scene from @cobra-diamond​​ for more on Azula’s goals and motivations.) 

And the most of the things she’s lost are things she can’t get back: 

Her relationships with Mai and Ty Lee were flawed from the beginning. Even if she does build new ones with them, they can’t be the same. Her relationship with Zuko might not have started wrong, but it’s become so warped and deformed, I don’t think either of them could get it back to the way it was-- nor should they. Most people have a different type of relationship with their siblings as adults than they did when they were children, and that’s okay. Her relationship with her mother is fractured and messy-- even if they did want to make up, it would, again, have to be a different kind of relationship. (And if you’ve been following me for any period of time, you also know my feelings on her relationship with Lu Ten, which, obviously, she can’t get back.) 

Anything else-- her relationship with Ozai, her title and status, and that expectation of being a perfect princess-- are things she probably shouldn’t get back, because they would do more harm than good. 

So no, an Azula story would not-- could not-- be about redemption. 

Ideally, a narrative focusing on Azula would focus on two things: healing and atonement. 

[ID: Dictionary definition of the word “Healing”: Noun the process of making or becoming sound or healthy again. Adjective tending to heal; therapeutic. End ID]

[ID: Dictionary definition of the word “Atonement”: Noun 1. reparation for a wrong or injury. 2. (in religious contexts) reparation or expiation for sin. End ID] 

(Read @deliciousmeta​​​‘s take on the difference between “redemption” and “atonement.” In short, redemption is about “being saved” from “inherent badness,” while atonement is about taking responsibility for your actions and doing the best you can to try and fix the wrongs you’ve done.) 

At the end of ATLA, Azula has what, in layman’s terms, is commonly referred to as a mental (or nervous) breakdown. I’ve seen arguments about how that “proves” she’s a “horrible person” (coming back to OP’s argument about our obsession with categorizing people as “good” or “bad”), and I’ve seen competing arguments calling this ableist and furthering the stigmatization of mental illness. 

I’ve talked about nervous breakdowns before, but here’s the gist: they are a body’s way of crying out for help. In real life, mental breakdowns are meant to be followed with the sick person (because mental illness is just as much an illness as cancer or sickle-cell anemia) actually getting the help they need. 

What Azula needs is help-- preferably from an adult who hasn’t been personally affected by her actions, and who she doesn’t have pre-existing negative feelings about. She needs to be willing to accept that help (because you cannot help someone who refuses to be helped). And she needs to come to the realization that she has made mistakes-- that her actions have hurt people. 

Only then will she be able to start making atonement for her actions. 

What would that look like? I’m not sure, but I’ve got some ideas...... 

(No, I’m not going to tell you what they are, I have to leave some surprises for my future fics!) 

[gosmelters]

Hello to [the] Your First Video Game: A Personal Reflection on My Scholarly Beginnings

I’m finding the writing process for this blog harder than other platforms because of one issue I hadn’t considered when making it: my audience. 

How much do those reading this know about me? How much will I insult my instructor if I copy-and-paste the syllabus goals with every post? I am simultaneously overconfident about my plans for this blog and hitting backspace every time I try to post on it.

I figure it might be easier to be explicitly clear about my research from the jump. Every week, I’ll be responding to this course’s assigned readings by connecting them to games of analytic interest -- specifically Night in the Woods and Doki Doki Literature Club -- to further hone my feminist and queer perspectives on game mechanics, games as cultural artifacts and close-reading conduits, and, ultimately, what games studies mean to me. 

The latter question has been especially pressing as this course begins, as its importance surpasses any other project I’ve undertaken in my academic career. When I was young, about fifteen or so, I knew I would one day have an opportunity like this one. I had no idea how, but I was destined to figure it out. My dreams of entering the games studies circuit were fostered by countless presenters at the late Games+Learning+Society conference in Madison, Wisconsin; modeled by the research of colleagues and close friends Kyrie  Eleison Caldwell and Sean Seyler; and thrown into overdrive by the classic work of Tom Bissell and his adventures in virtuality. And here, now, listening to the instrumental of “Your Reality” and pondering ever so lightly how mine reached this point, I begin to understand what Caldwell and co. told me just a few years ago as I failed to find an undergraduate program at which I felt at home: “you just kind of make it up as you go along.”

Sebastian Deterding's "The Pyrrhic Victory of Game Studies: Assessing the Past, Present, and Future of Interdisciplinary Game Research" concludes with the thought that games studies are “increasingly coalescing into a relatively closed community within it, composed of humanities and cultural studies scholars with homogenous epistemic cultures.” The split between “games studies scholars,” mostly comprised of film studies, comparative literature, and art and design scholars, and the vocationally focused game design programs have created “more of a narrow multidiscipline than the broad interdiscipline [games studies scholars] set out to become.” The quantification of interdisciplinary, multidisciplinary, and economically validated game studies fields reminded me of those early days of college searching: without a holistic understanding of what games studies was or even did, I picked a new keyword every week (”comparative literature!” “COMMUNICATIONS.” “narrotology, maybe.” “lu...dology?”) and sought out a (usually liberal arts) school that could foster that keyword the best. Yes, foster the keyword: the dream I had was so undefined, as if faded over months of sleep and never recorded in the bedside journal, that I was gambling my future on whatever “theory/method coupling” seemed right to me at the moment. I wonder if seeing these issues from the academic bird’s-eye view of Deterding would have given me any insight into Caldwell’s suggestion to MacGyver my future rather than reverse-engineer it, but I doubt it. I would have seen Deterding’s conclusion, his call to coalesce sociology, media philosophy, and the vocational education of game design to dissolve that “closed community,” and would have asked my inspirations the easiest way to guarantee a spot at that table. 

Therein lies a self-referential issue I have with the problem of interdisciplinary identification: on the most practical level, one that I experienced in my early days of higher education, there is no solution to the problem that is the proposed solution. In an ideal world, I would have liked a solid understanding of these game studies components because I saw them in action. I asked myself (and others) at Well-Played sessions how I could get paid by close-reading games (I’m so glad, if extremely surprised, no one responded with a snappy “you don’t”) -- because what is an interdisciplinary field if you cannot in some way categorize its facets and pedagogical inspirations? It’s hard to reconcile how much “easier” it would be to go into “games studies” when even that moniker made little to no sense to me. This article (or at least its evidence; it is clear that Deterding’s desire for cohesiveness [figure A] is contrary to my next claim) is a fascinating example of how the breakdown of scholarship at the highest of higher educations facilitates no understanding of how to break into its world at the freshman level. In other words, if I had read this in the keyword-obsessive summer before my senior year of high school, I know I would have ultimately picked one of the article’s own buzzwords (”OMG THERE’S LUDOLOGY AGAIN! WE’RE GOING WITH THAT!”) and defeated the article’s call for homogeneity -- as what constituted “games studies” was still too far beyond what I academically understood at the time to feel comfortable going into it.

(Figure A) The above, for example, are solutions to the problem that would have made my break into academia much smoother, and less reliant on right-place-right-time philosophies. From “The Pyrrhic Victory of Game Studies: Assessing the Past, Present, and Future of Interdisciplinary Game Research.” Sebastian Deterding. Games and Culture Vol 12, Issue 6, pp. 521 - 543. First published September 1, 2016.

This sounds like a simple non-argument without a proper point of comparison, and I’ll concede that my issue could have been solved with proper (and simple) designation of what games studies actually is. Yet I found a perfect point of retroactive validation in the first chapter of Jonas Heide Smith,‎ Susana Pajares Tosca's textbook Understanding Video Games: The Essential Introduction. Their four-point breakdown of video game study -- the game, the players, the culture, and "ontology" -- which correspond to four different types of analysis (figure B) made a still-extant insecure part of my sixteen-year-old self feel reassured by his desire to learn all of them. 

Figure B - “Four Major Types of Analysis.” From Egenfeldt Nielsen, S.., J. Heide Smith, and S. Pajares Tosca. Understanding Video Games: The Essential Introduction. Routledge, 2008.

It seems I’ve covered a lot of contradictory points in a few short paragraphs, but my reasoning is rather simple. I’m hyper-aware of the fact that there could be kids still struggling to understand how they might break into games studies, and need the most basic intellectual foundation upon which they may rest a future. To this end, I can say that studying what has interested me -- the visual arts, gender, feminist, and queer theory, and history of all kinds -- has provided me with a more-than-appropriate framework for studying video games. And I hope that on some level, our definition of “games studies” does not radically dissolve individual humanities identities. This “closed community” of humanities scholars that Deterding critiques may be borne of those four major types of analysis, but I didn’t know the latter even existed when I was trying to find the former. The knowledge I now possess of how to MacGyver this field is a privilege only in contrast to how ill-defined “games studies” as an “interdisciplinary field” was to me at the time. The closed communities must be open to visibility, especially at that aforementioned “freshman” level, but they should not lose their identities as interlocking methodologies that are available outside of a Platonic form of games scholarship. I wanted a path, so I made my own, but the structure to do so should have been clearer to me earlier. 

Sounds like a lot, huh? Of course it is! And that’s why I’m kicking off my blog with these deep-running contradictions and this confused psycho-scrubbing: to show that this blog is the end result of years of worry, anxiety, and, well, making it up as I go along. To have this kind of platform, to showcase my theoretical side in a space upon which my name is attached? That’s progress. 

And, hey: if you were just like me (I’m sorry, ‘cause I wouldn’t wish that on anyone), struggling with what games studies is or what it means, I hope that this little corner of analysis, self-reflection, and citation does you as much good as it does for me.

Now, about those video games...