#every individual choice in the setting and to the lore of the world affects how these known dynamics will play out

[prismatoxic]

congrats on writing the fic that made a man text his (sort of estranged) dad. fr your portrayal of every single dynamic is so flawless and considerate. nobel prize.

THAT ACTUALLY DOES FEEL LIKE AN ACCOMPLISHMENT... i hope it goes well anon!!!

there's a lot to be said about people who did the wrong things but feel genuine remorse and want to get better, i think. i've been there (though not in a parent sense), and it's also what happened with my mom after i moved out, so i guess i kind of know how it is from both angles. on top of, you know, just writing what i know of who chilchuck is as a person (and assuming a lot of things about meijack and the others, lmao...)

[thedinanshiral]

How have the dragons aged.

I have to address the identity crisis many are having around Dragon Age. Namely, what is Dragon Age? What makes Dragon Age be Dragon Age?

Dragon Age is everchanging, it always tries new things, introduces new protagonists, new companions, new conflicts and cultures to navigate through. Maybe it'd be easier to define what Dragon Age isn't. Dragon Age isn't unchanging, it isn't stagnant, it isn't a single uniform thing, and tryingto reduce it to such will always result in failure.

The simpler, more obvious answer when searching what defines a Dragon Age game is worldbuilding, storytelling, characters. Dragon Age isn't about a specific, limited game genre, a set-in-stone gameplay style, or a single character that must always return for it all to make sense, and it isn't a determined art style either.

Dragon Age is Thedas, with all it contains. It's the lore, and i assure you it has not been retconed and the games haven't been rebooted, because everything's been a conscious choice that makes sense in-world. And because at this point Thedas is its own, none of it has to adjust to what we expect of it.

From a technical standpoint it's simply not feasible to include every decision from past games, there's just too many, and frankly many don't change anything on the grand scale of things. I saw this happen with the Keep, many of the choices available for DAO and DA2 i couldn't even remember. Maybe they mattered then and there, and served their purpose with exposition, but clearly whatever my Warden decided to do with the werewolves in the Brecilian forest was never going to define the fate of the world. So devs have to decide which choices matter in the big picture, the biggest picture they can think of, and work from there.

Many were very upset certain decisions from previous games weren't affecting Veilguard like they imagined, and it wasn't just choices but lore as well. But lore in DA can be tricky for some; it's not presented by an omniscient narrator, quite the contrary, the lore in DA has always been presented by UNRELIABLE narrators, questionable and extremely biased sources like Orlesian scholars and Chantry sisters, or sources who are just as clueless about it all as the players, as random farmers, adventurers, common folk just leaving notes and letters behind, even gossiping. The lore in Thedas is presented in a similar way as our own history is: records are missing and maybe later rediscovered, some authors have an agenda, victors write history and the defeated and conquered are silenced and their version of events lost to oblivion, things go terribly misunderstood for ages and upon new findings hopefully they get corrected. There has even been quests exemplifying this, so the game itself is telling us repeatedly to question everything. We don't know Thedas as well as we like to think we do, and we've only participated in a couple of decades of its ninth age.

Disclaimer tho, this post is not an invitation to argue with me, to tell me how wrong i am and how much you disagree with me. I know these are controversial points a lot of people are very upset/annoyed/disappointed with, it's why i'm addressing them, i have read enough of that side and i'm simply providing an alternative and nope, i will not budge on any of this (: If you disagree just go on with your life, best of fortunes to you and have a nice day!

[SPOILERS AHEAD]

Who the Warden was and what choices they made as an individual don't matter much going forward, only that they stopped the Fifth Blight; that and that alone is their real contribution to thedosian history, when you really think about it, if you can put nostalgia on break for a bit. I love Hawke, i do, but they were just a lil' guy doing the best they could with the cards life dealt to them. Interesting things happened to them, not the other way around. And we can all agree the defining moment in DA2 was the fireworks, and that wasn't even Hawke, it was Anders. The Inquisitor is a bit more relevant, if only because of an extra unfortunate case of wrong time, wrong place. Again, fate just messes with people in Thedas in unforeseeable ways. What do you mean you found a blighted Magister Sidereal sacrificing Divine Justinia during the Conclave, and accidentally touched an acient elvhen artifact that marked you as the new key to the Fade itself and granted you power to close holes in the Veil from where demons come out??? Oh, y'know, just another Tuesday in Thedas. But that's where it gets more interesting, Inquisition is where certain players showed up, and with them came revelations. The Golden City is not so golden, the Maker is not sitting in a throne, at least one ancient Tevinter Magister is walking around blighted, the Evanuris weren't particuarly nice, some ancient elves still live, Flemeth is Mythal, and Solas is not just an apostate hobo mage who knows stuff because he "saw it in the Fade", but because he is the Dread Wolf, the one responsible for the Veil and how it reshaped the world.

That was a lot to take in, and it changed everything.

The Inquisition choice most people are upset about that didn't carry into Veilguard is who drank from the Well of Sorrows, because of the implications of whoever did being bound to the will of Mythal. The reason why that is inconsequential now is simple: Mythal is dead. There's no longer any will to be bound to! And you could counter saying Mythal has been dead for a long time, yes, but the fragment that survived through Flemeth was possibly her strongest, and she's gone too. Morrigan in Veilguard explains what she has of Mythal now is just her memories and knowledge; there's no will left, only a fragment here or there with no real power to exhert over anyone. We can see the consequences of drinking from the Well already in Inquisition, when we meet Flemeth through the Eluvian, and she either controls Morrigan or controls the Inquisitor to stop Morrigan. But once Flemeth is gone, that power is gone too. Therefore, as much as you might hate me for saying it, who drank from the Well of Sorrows doesn't matter anymore.

Another thing people are mad about is they don't get to see racism, slavery and oppression, which is...odd, that you'd want to see that so much not having it ruins the whole game for you. Personally i'm no fan of torture porn, and i can infer a lot from blood magic ritual sites littered with charred corpses and blood splatter decorating the walls. That's what we got and i don't need much more. Yes, we got see to Tevinter. Ok, not the whole of Tevinter, just Minrathous. Ok, not Minrathous per-se, but Dock Town. We can visit the poor area of Minrathous. Who's gonna have slaves when they're poor themselves? Oh yeah, Halos the guy that fries fish by the docks is gonna have an elven slave to mistreat in front of Rook just to remain truthful to the lore we got so far, sure. That sounds ridiculous to you? Good, it should. Seeing Dock Town is not retconing the awful bits of lore about Tevinter, it's adding to it. Minrathous is not the jewel of an empire, it's a big city and like all big cities it has its ugly side, it has slums too, it has areas where the poor live poor lives barely making it day by day, under the thumb of an elite that doesn't even know they exist nor would they care at all if they did. We may not get to see slaves being abused or people being racist towards elves but we can hear how common people keep disappearing, and later find out some Tevinter mage needed bodies for their rituals. We find so many bodies, such gruesome scenes...

Another complaint i've seen around is how who was chosen as Divine in Inquisition doesn't matter because apparently there's no Chantry in Veilguard and that goes against the lore, etc. In short, that's like complaining there's no Protestantism in the Vatican. The North is not under the Orlesian Chantry influence, Tevinter has its own version of the Chantry, their own Divine, their own expressions within the faith. Who was chosen as Divine south of the Waking Sea probably, most likely, doesn't even faze them. If there's a chantry to have any influence in the areas we visit in Veilguard, that would be the Tevinter one, but even so the North is a very particular region. We learned in previous games that magic is to be feared and therefore controlled, that dealing with spirits is unwise at best, and that the risk of possession leads inequivocably to abominations and must therefore be avoided at all costs, spirits are to be avoided, they can turn into demons, everything is demons! Bodies are cremated to prevent possession and anyone claiming to be talking with spirits is identified as an abomination. Yet in Rivain, which is not under the Chantry and has a history of cultural and religious diversity, seers can commune with spirits in a harmless way, and work together just fine. Meanwhile in Nevarra, there's a whole institution dedicated to the preservation of the dead, the communication with the decesased, spirits and demons, a whole branch of magical studies and applications revolving around diving into what Andrastianism warns against, and it's done in a very solemn manner and benevolent attitude. Tevinter's main difference with the South comes from a different interpretation of the Chant of Light, where if magic is to serve man, then those in power who are to serve the people should be mages, so they're ruled by a mage supremacy and their entire society is defined by it. It makes, in game, within the lore, perfect sense that we don't get overly religious andrastians crying for the Maker to deliver them from demons and possession and the evil of magic in a region where all that is everyday's bread and butter and people are generally cool with it or at the very least used to it. Harding talks a a bit about the Maker, Neve admits she can't keep up with the andrastian festivities, and i guess the only case for the Andrastianism we know would be Antiva, but let's face it, a kingdom ruled from behind the curtains by an order of assassins for hire isn't gonna be very adept to following religious tenets. (As a small note of colour, there is a Chantry building in Antiva, unaccessible as far as i know, and right across it through the canals there's a nug statue, one could say a golden nug statue but on its four legs, not like the one we had in DAI. I like to think that's Schmooples, and a hint that by default the Divine is Leliana but that's just me ok she's my Divine).

I also want to talk about "those across the sea". For people who got or learned of the secret hidden post-credits scene, it may have felt like that reveal automatically invalidated everything we ever did in every game so far so nothing really matters anymore, but that's not the case. The choice of words they use was deliberate by the devs, Epler said that much on Bluesky. These mysterious figures "balanced, guided, whispered". They did not "control" or "forced". They did basically no different than what Flemeth/Mythal had been doing, giving history a nudge when needed. They manipulated different actors throughout history, but didn't exactly force their hand. The Magisters decided to follow the whispers of their gods and try to break into the Fade because of their own greed for power. Loghain betrayed Cailan and the Wardens because of his own feelings, Bartrand fell to the power of the red lyrum and refused to listen to his own family. These beings, whatever they are, have influenced the stage setting it all up for their arrival, but ultimately it was people's choice, by their free will, what had the final say. Loghain could have respected his own King whom he had a duty to serve, Bartrand could have listened to Varric, everyone under their influence could have broken out of it if they wanted to do differently.. but they didn't.

Lastly, I've seen comments about how Veilguard is a "soft reboot" because of how it handles the events in the South, virtually erasing it so nothing from previous games mattered and now there's a "clean slate" to take the series to new places instead of ever returning to Ferelden. First off, nothing says we had to return to Ferelden at all. Guys we had THREE games in Ferelden already, let it rest. Secondly, the events from previous games do matter, they have all led to the events in Veilguard: Varric wouldn't have been at the right time and place to join the Inquisition if Hawke hadn't become the Champion of Kirkwall making himself a POI for Cassandra, nobody would have been at the Conclave if Anders hadn't set the fuse, and Anders wouldn't have had Justice and later Vengeance if Awakening hadn't happened. So Varric and Harding wouldn't have been chasing after Solas at all, nobody would even know he existed, without a long chain of previous events from all games and pieces of media in this series. It has all led to this moment, and for that it has all mattered. Ferelden and the South being destroyed is consistent with them experiencing two blights at once, with enhanced new darkspawn, with two blighted Evanuris on the loose. It's the end of the world! And this time there's no magic hand to save the day, the people in the south are just that, people. Trust the Inquisitor and their allies to do their absolute best to face the threat, that's all we can do. Life and history moves on. And just as the North, where most Blights took place, with the first one lasting a hundred years, survived and eventually thrived so can the South, they can eventually recover, heal, and real world limitations aside, it'd even be possible to be part of that effort. I can easily imagine a new protagonist taking the action back to the South, contributing to the efforts to recover after the double Blight, helping Ferelden and Orlais stand again. Not to mention, with how deep and rich Thedas is in its worldbuilding, if BW wanted to "reboot" they could just pick any place, any point in history, any faction, create new ones, and just go wild with it. What happens in the South in Veilguard is not necessary at all for a reboot, so it's there at the very least to show how desperate the situation is, how high the stakes are. I think the updates we get from the Inquisitor are there to really make us feel it, and as Rook try our best to solve things on our end because the sooner we kill the archdemons, the sooner we end Elgar'nan and Ghilan'nain, the better the chances of the South to survive this calamity.

I could keep writing but this is long enough. I'm not done playing The Veilguard (on my 2nd and 3rd run!), and i keep taking oh so many notes, but i wanted to lay down my thoughts on these few points first. If you read this far thank you and i'm so sorry, it's annoying how i can pull a counter for everything, i know.

[butterflydm]

wot on prime rewatch: 1x08 the eye of the world (part 1)

spoilers through the end of season one of the wheel of time. I will do a reblog of this soon after I post it, with additional book-related spoilers.

1. Aaah, this opening. All in the Old Tongue! LTT is SUPER-HOT. The way we can see that the clothes they’re wearing here are kinda modern-ish with a twist. There’s so much visual information in this opening, in addition to the actual lore that we learn in the discussion between Lews and Latra. Just... opening up with “3000 years ago” and straight into a made-up language!

2. I like the design of Lews Therin’s house here. It does evoke a sense of grandeur, with those tall archways and columns, and there’s a lot of light coming in from every angle, and a nice tree inside the house. And the little (for now nameless) baby and us moving from the nursery and showing off that 3000 years ago was FUTURISTIC with flying cars, etc. And that the show itself is set in a post-apocalyptic world. Really nice reveal.

3. After the credits, we’re in the Blight with Moiraine and Rand.This is just a short scene to show that they are dealing with a place of rot and danger. Rand is, I think, feeling in over his head right now.

4. Back in Fal Dara, Perrin talks Egwene out of trying to chase after Rand into the Blight. They both talk about how they love Rand, check in with each other emotionally that this recent fight hasn’t impacted their friendship, and then have some consoling hugs. Very sweet scene.

5. During a rest stop, we learn that Rand and Lan talked off-screen at some point, and Lan told him that he’s from Malkier. Rand tries to do some emotional bonding with Moiraine over leaving the people they care about behind, but Moiraine is Not Ready for that kind of emotional commitment when she’s walking to what she believes to be her death. Or, honestly, ever in general.

6. Lan and Nynaeve share a moment, and she says that she’ll help him go after Moiraine and Rand, but he needs to bring Rand back when he does. Moiraine, of course, is his priority there, but... will she always be? Lan then tells Nynaeve that he admires her deeply, but also kinda shuts the gate on the idea of them being a couple. Makes sense to me -- from Lan’s PoV, Moiraine was able to use his affection for Nynaeve as a way to go off on her own, without respecting the choice that he made years ago to share in her dangers with her. So I get why he’s shutting a door that was only just opened with Nynaeve. His commitment to Moiraine and, you know, also saving the world means a lot to him.

7. Moiraine gets stabbed in a dream, and Rand confronts, ah, the Dark One, all flaming eyes. I wonder who he thought was the Dragon, since he says here that he DIDN’T think it was Rand. I’m gonna go with... Perrin. I think Moiraine was hoping it was Egwene, and that the Dark One thought it was Perrin (for book spoiler reasons that I will mention in the reblog). Both Rand and Perrin had individual dreams that we were shown, but Rand’s dream was a lot more chaotic than Perrin’s (literally everyone else was wandering around in his dream) and Perrin’s dream felt much more focused. That might reflect the Dark One being more focused on Perrin than on Rand.

8. Rand immediately shoots an arrow straight into his eye. Love that for him. The Dark One then pulls off his charred face by pushing in the arrow and just looks like a regular person. Anyway, arrow to the eye doesn’t work (at least not in whatever kind of dream this is). This actor is really really good (yes, I say that about pretty much all the acting on this show. But it’s all been really good!) and, right away, he shows a pretty deep familiarity with the past Dragon -- saying that Rand looks ‘nothing like him’, reaching out to touch his face, etc. Rand is, of course, pretty freaked out by all this. And the Dark One just talks very casually to “Lews Therin”. “Finally having a conversation once again.”

9. The Dark One negs Rand by telling him how pathetic it is for him to come here with just one Aes Sedai. I mean, gosh, put in some effort, Lews Therin, lol. He questions if Rand has ever even touched the Power (...not intentionally) and Rand pulls out a sword and points it at him. I mean, that’s kinda an answer all on its own. Anyway, Rand stabbing himself here is very logical from what he’s seen -- he assumes that he won’t ‘really’ get hurt (and doesn’t) because, well, he shot an arrow into someone’s head and they didn’t really get hurt. and I love that the Dark One is just kinda exasperated that Rand stabbed himself.

10. Much like Moiraine didn’t want to talk about how it felt to leave Lan behind with Rand, Rand doesn’t want to talk about his dream with Moiraine. Still processing everything that happened, I’m guessing. There was a lot! Rand wants to know what Moiraine’s plans are (this is always what Rand wants when it comes to Moiraine -- he just wants to be let on the plan!). Moiraine introduces him to the idea of a sa’angreal, to help amplify the Power. Moiraine says the plan is for Rand to put the Dark One back where he belongs.

11. “You thought it would be Egwene, didn’t you? You taught her to channel. You introduced her to your Amyrlin Seat. You thought it was her. So did I.” This is an interesting comment from Rand, because I kinda think that BOTH Moiraine and Rand ‘thought’ it would be Egwene for the same reason -- wishful thinking and denial. For Egwene, being the Dragon Reborn isn’t being sentenced to madness and death. For Mat, Perrin, or Rand, it is. Egwene is someone who can channel in the way that is culturally acceptable (in most places). Egwene being the Dragon Reborn would mean that the Aes Sedai wouldn’t need to question any of their current cultural practices re: gentling men.

12. Moiraine dances a great jig here to avoid telling Rand that she can’t actually see the Power when it’s used by men (as the show revealed in 1x4) and doesn’t know how to talk him through using it the way that she could talk Egwene through it. ~Oh, you’ll figure it out~ she vaguely tells him. No quiet intimate talks about rivers and trying to find the light in her jewel for Rand. imo, She is trying to maintain an illusion of certainty, both because she probably believes that Rand needs her to be certain so that he doesn’t lose his nerve and also because the illusion of certainty is pretty much how she lives her life. We get another of her great pauses where the Oath traps her from lying here, I think, when Rand presses her and asks her how she can be sure that he’ll figure out channeling when he needs it. And she goes into a story about an Aes Sedai beating her until she reached for the Power herself instinctively in order to make her stop. And this story is not actually answering Rand’s question! He doesn’t have a block, he has a lack of training. (but I do think her moment here of being genuinely vulnerable with Rand did reach him, and what she said helped him later, but it’s definitely a far cry from actually trying to teach him to reach the Power, like she did with Egwene).

13. Egwene, Nynaeve, Perrin, & Loial go to the bar where Min works to find some answers. Egwene starts the conversation with a demand (like how Rand started his conversation at the end of the last episode, though he backs down, apologizes, and starts over again when Min pushes back on him) - “We need some answers.” Min tells them, “People’s secrets are their business, no one else’s.” I respect show!Min so much. She doesn’t back down from this position! She doesn’t bend and tell them Rand’s secrets. And then the situation changes, as she gets a viewing of Nynaeve and then people all around them in the bar getting horribly injured. This is not very much warning for Min & Fal Dara. The horn in Fal Dara blows, and we see people head out out of the bar immediately. 

14. Through a break in the trees, Rand and Moiraine see the Shadowspawn army heading for Tarwin’s Gap. Rand worries about his friends in the city, but Moiraine tells him that the only way to really help is to continue on their path and confront the source of the problem. Inside Fal Dara, Lord Agelmar learns of sabotage, which means Darkfriends looking to help the Trollocs & Fades invade. I like the scene between Lord Agelmar and Lady Amalisa -- it sets the stakes of the coming conflict -- he does not expect to survive the battle, believes that the Last Battle is upon them all, and only hopes to help win enough time for the world to pull together and fight. And it’s a nice family moment between the two of them.

15. Moiraine and Rand arrive at a building that goes downward into the earth, mostly just a huge hole with many staircases. Rand feels a familiarity with the location and here, once they’ve reached this point, he asks Moiraine if she’s walking to her death here and when he realizes that she DOES believe she’ll die, he tells her that she should stay here (but of course she does not, for multiple reasons).

16. Moiraine says straight-out here that the White Tower’s libraries were purged by Darkfriends (of knowledge of this place, but I’m guessing of many other things as well), which helps establish the stakes of why she and Siuan have kept their search for the Dragon Reborn such a secret. They are aware that they have traitors inside the White Tower.

17. As Rand tries to explain how/why this place feels familiar, he has a vision of the person that we know from the cold open is Lews Therin, talking passionately to someone, then spreading out his hands. Very interesting at this point is that, when Rand is deep in trying to remember what happened here, he is speaking in the first-person from Lews Therin’s memories. “I fought someone here.” But he says that the puzzle pieces don’t all fit together correctly. We get a glimpse of the Dark One, standing opposite across the symbol from where Lews Therin had stood. If Moiraine still had any doubts about Rand, this speech of his likely would have wiped them away entirely.

18. Rand find the symbol at the center of the room -- a circle, divided into two halves by a sinuous line. One half black and the other half white. He touches the Eye and there’s a lot to unpack in the various climaxes of the episode, so I’m going to take a break here.

[ajollybirdcollector]

HOTD: Succession is messy and Alicent has a point

I’ve seen many takes all over the internet that Alicent is power-hungry and wants to usurp the throne from Rhaenyra in favour of her own kids. That the Greens have no rights, that Rhaenyra is the heir, that it doesn’t matter that her kids are bastards because they have their claim to the throne through their mother, etc... And I wholeheartedly disagree. 

I do not think Alicent necessarily wants the throne, actually, we are given quite clear indications in the earlier episodes that Alicent did not want Aegon to be named heir ahead of Rhaenyra but she quickly becomes to understand that things are not going to unfold smoothly and it’s mainly due to the patriarchal system of Westeros but also how Rhaenyra behaves as an individual. Early in the show, Alicent is made aware by her father of how ugly the situation could turn out, she also understands that Viserys is not willing to clean up the mess (much of it of his own making), that Rhaenyra is going to act however the fuck she wants and that Alicent can trust neither with her own safety and the safety of her children. Alicent knows shit is going to go down regardless and that she and her kids will die if her side loses.

* DISCLAIMERS: I just want to make it clear that I am pro-absolute primogeniture, I do not agree with the male preference within the patriarchy and overall misogyny of Westeros. This post is not about justifying Rhaenyra being passed over or anything like that. It is more about highlighting that Alicent does have a point and that viewers are short-sighted and unfair when they bash her and judge her action with their 2022 worldviews, completely ignoring the different social structure of this fantasy world and the implication it has for how the characters within it behave. Personally, I am neither really on Team Green nor Black when it comes to who has a right to the throne because... It should be Rhaenys Targaryen, she should have be Queen instead of Viserys... so Team Queen Who Definitely Should Have Been? Or even better, Samwell Tarly’s idea of I don’t kow... democracy? Like a government chosen by the people and not some random dude who happens to be the son of some other random dude but hey... We are a couple of centuries too early for that in this world. Furthermore, this post is mostly sticking to a political cost-and-benefit analysis of the situation and won’t got to much into details about how those characters’ personal feelings and traumas obviously affect their decisions.

Alicent has every reason to be fearful of what will happen once Viserys dies. It was already the case before Rhaenyra had children and it only got worse once she gave birth to obvious bastards. You may think what you want about Otto but he puts out a very fair assessment in the show when he says that most lords won’t easily accept a woman as the Queen, especially when there is a healthy dragon-riding male heir (Aegon) available. There are rules of succession in Westeros but nothing is set in stone and many scenarios can unfold. The judicial system is really more like a set of loose customs rather than organized laws that are rigorously enforced like in our world. The laws of inheritance are not clear cut.  George R.R. Martin says himself that they are “vague, uncodified, subject to varying interpretations, and often contradictory”. So yes... succession gets messy when several people have a claim. 

The ideal situation in this world is to have a strong, healthy and adult legitimate first-born male as heir but when you can’t have that, what is chosen instead? If you know about the lore of ASOIAF, you will see that there are many instances of succession crisis when a choice must be made between different pretenders that all have a claim but none has the absolute best claim (ideal situation above). So what do we choose? The female heir (daughter) or a more distant male relative (half-brother, uncle, cousin, etc), the infant heir who can’t rule or go to war on their own or an adult relative who can, a sickly/insane heir or a healthy relative, the heir with dubious parentage or the relative who is undoubtedly legitimate, etc... There are quite a few messy successions in ASOIAF’s history like the succession of Beron Stark, of Walder Frey, of Aenys I Targaryen, of Aegon IV Targaryen, of Donella Hornwood, of Jeyne Arryn, of Jaehaerys I Targaryen, etc... And most succession disputes involve a lot of people dying. People pick sides and start scheming and fighting and it quickly turns into a bloodshed (the Dance of the Dragons is the most famous one).

In HOTD, there is no first-born male heir to Viserys. So what would the lords of Westeros choose? A first-born female heir (emphasis on the first-born) or a second-born male heir (emphasis on the male)? Viserys might think he settled the matter by naming Rhaenyra his heir, but it doesn’t really mean anything. The lords are technically subservient to the king but in reality, their collective opinion matters more than his individual one, especially once he is dead. I believe Jaehaerys knew that and it’s why he had the lords choose the future heir at the Great Council of 101 rather than declare an heir himself. 

And while I’m mentioning the Great Council, the characters in the show are right to say that it sets a precedent. Rhaenys and her children (which included a boy) were passed over in favour of the next male in line, Viserys. By the very precedent that put her father on the throne, Rhaenyra and her children should be passed over in favour of the next male in line who is Aegon. Without that precedent, Rhaenyra would not even be in a position to be heir to the throne or to fight over it with Aegon because Rhaenys would be Queen and Rhaenyra would be way down the line of succession behind Laena, Baela, Rhaena, Laenor and their “Strong” children (although in a world where Rhaenys became Queen instead of Viserys, Laena and Laenor probably would not have married Rhaenyra and Daemon). If you go against that precedent, then what would stop Rhaenys and the Velaryon to start their own war for the throne since Rhaenyra becoming Queen would nullify the precedent set and actually make Rhaenys the person with the best claim to the Iron Throne. Without that precedent, the Iron Throne ‘rightfully’ belongs to Rhaenys. Now, this could have been solved by the marriage of Rhaenyra and Laenor Velaryon. Rhaenys compromises. She forgoes her claim to the throne and in return her son becomes consort and her grandchild will be the monarch after Rhaenyra. She, Rhaenys, never becomes queen but at least her descendants do eventually get the Iron Throne and a war is avoided. Except... Rhaenyra and Laenor do not have children. Worst than that, Rhaenyra passes off bastards as Laenor’s children as well as Rhaenys and Corlys’ grandchildren (in the world of GOT, it doesn’t matter that Laenor is on board with it, especially since Corlys is still the head of House Velaryon and not Laenor). Because of that, both the Iron Throne (Rhaenys’ birthright) and Driftmark (Corlys’ birthright) will go to the bastard sons of their daughter-in-law (Jacaerys for the throne and Lucerys for Driftmark) who are blood-related to neither of them (in a feudal, patriarchal world like ASOIAF in which bloodlines, ancestry and houses are the most important social institutions, it doesn’t matter that Laenor liked those boys as if they were his, it doesn’t even matter if Rhaenys and Corlys like the boys, they are still bastards that aren’t related to them. Equal rights for adopted/non-bio kids do not really stand in such a social system like it does in our world in 2022). And this is why the betrothal of Jacaerys and Lucerys to their cousins Baela and Rhaena was essential to keep House Velaryon on Rhaenyra’s side. Through those marriages, the Iron Throne still goes to Rhaenys’ descendants through Baela and Driftmark still goes to Corlys’ descendants through Rhaena.

Coming back to what the lords would choose between the two claimants (Rhaenyra or Aegon)... Well, every house is going to take a side based on what they think is “right” but mostly according to which side they believe they stand to gain the most on and which side won’t upset the social hierarchy for everybody else (how many succession disputes would break out all over the kingdom if it becomes acceptable for women to have a claim as strong as their younger brother? Most lords will want to avoid that). And it doesn’t matter if Alicent and Aegon do not want to throne (which was made pretty clear that they indeed don’t really want it). It doesn’t matter if they are perfectly fine with letting Rhaenyra become Queen.

Daenerys said it quite accurately to Jon in the last season of GoT which is (roughly): “It doesn’t matter what you (Jon) want. What will happen went they (the lords) demand you press your claim and take what is mine (the throne)? [...] It will take on a life of its own (the truth about his ancestry) and you won’t be able to control it or what it does to people.” She knew that it didn’t matter that Jon had bent the knee to her and that he didn’t want the throne. The lords and ladies who had something to gain (or even just had a preference) from Jon being on the throne instead of Daenerys will plot to get him there and to get her out of the picture. Similarly, Alicent knows very well that many lords (because of misogyny and because of how recklessly Rhaenyra behaves) will force a war on her sons against Rhaenyra.

Furthermore, she knows that if she lets Rhaenyra take the throne before a war can be forced on all of them, her sons will still most likely die. For the Blacks, Alicent’s sons will always be a threat to Rhaenyra’s rule and they will have them killed even if the order to do so doesn’t come from Rhaenyra directly (it would probably be from Daemon or Corlys or any other advisors who will make sure “accidents” happen to ever prevent Aegon, Aemond and Daeron, or anyone else on their behalf, from pressing their claim to the throne.) 

Rhaenyra does propose marrying Helaena to Jacaerys to ‘reunite’ the Green and the Black but that is also not a feasible option and Alicent refusing it makes sense. As I mentioned above, Jacaerys and Lucerys must marry Baela or Rhaena if Rhaenyra hopes to keep the support of Rhaenys and House Velaryon. Furthermore, Alicent must have known that if anyone still tries to use her sons  to take the throne from Rhaenyra, such a marriage would have condemned her daughter and her grandchildren by her to most probably die (see Elia Martell and her children, they had to be killed even after Robert had won the throne because they will have always been a threat to him).

Really, the only way the Dance of Dragons could have been avoided would have been either to marry Rhaenyra with Aegon (best solution as they would have ruled together and the throne would have passed down to their legitimate son who should have then been married to a daughter of Laena Velaryon, effectively making both Rhaenyra, Team Green and House Velaryon happy) or have Rhaenyra and Laenor actually have a legitimate son that would have married Helaena (different combination, about same result).

Alicent was put in a difficult position in which her life and that of her children would have been on the line no matter what. She could either let everybody uses them as pawns, or take charge of her own side as much as she could and try to get the best deal out of it because everybody else in her life (her father Otto, her husband Viserys, her best friend Rhaenyra) made it clear by their words or actions (or inactions) that she and her well-being are not their priority and that she would always come after them and their interests. She is not a man, she is the daughter of a second son who might be Hand of the King (a title that can be given or taken away on a whim of said King) but is no lord and has no army (unlike say Margaery and Cersei who were the daughters of great lords and had the red cloaks/green cloaks in King’s Landing to protect them as well as brothers in the Kingsguard), she has no power of her own and unlike Rhaenyra she doesn’t have a dragon, she is the Queen but that is really just an honorary status because her husband is the King and it only lasts as long as Viserys is alive. She is in survival mode and it is understandable that she is going to be as ruthless as need be. For all that I support this woman’s rights and this woman’s wrongs (mostly).

* English is not my first language, please forgive my poor grammar and convoluted sentences. 

[a-garden-of-worlds]

Alright so a few people have expressed wanting to adopt and own a lamia bitty that I created a while back.

So, now that I have a design for his brother and their eggs (there are two, one created by me and one created by my new friend, Sys, who's bitty blog is @forgotten-bittys

Both the bitties and their eggs have strange effects on their environment, so without further ado, let's get into the lore, shall we?

So to start off, this particular set of bitty twins are a strange phenomena that has started being reported throughout the world where random people and random bitty shops recieve a small package of unknown origins. Sometimes it holds (one) of the two eggs mentioned above, which will eventually hatch into a set of twins. Other times it holds the already hatched pair of baby lamia. (85% male, 10%female 5% other (nonbinary)

The Lunar Type egg (the first one, drawn traditionally by me) affects the dreams of those who sleep with in the same room as the egg. Whatever dreams you might normally have start becoming increasingly bizzar until the egg hatches.

Sometimes these dreams are prophetic, and you find that what happened in your dream ends up coming true not long after. Other times you get the feeling you've traveled, or even witnessed something change in the (sometimes very distant) past and may later open up a history book to find that very event had actually happened. (Or you get the feeling it should be something else and has changed)

Still, other times you travel to other strange, unknown realities. And throughout each and every dream and nightmare you get the sense that your body or soul is traversing the surface of the egg.

For the Solar type, (drawn digitally, again by Sys.)

It gives of a glittering, cold, black mist and glows in the dark. Causing hallucinations during the night and bringing a feeling of comfort during the night.

Both sparkle and shimmer in the sunlight.

The bitties: each single egg hatches a pair of twins. More often than not these twins will be tightly coiled around each other, embracing and it could take some gentle coaxing to get them to separate. It will be easier to coax them to let go of each other if you got them as an egg and were the first one seen when they open their eyes, but if you got them after they hatched, they'll likely be a little more stubborn.

As for personality, it's entirely up to the individual adopting as each pair is different in their own ways.

If you decide you only want to adopt one and not the other, know that separating them will make them always feel as though something is missing. They might try to fill that void somehow.

The twins feed on negative and positive emotions as you might expect from a dream and nightmare bitty, leaving behind no waste. They can still eat regular food however, if they so wish but you might want to limit their intake lest they get indigestion. Some individuals may have allergies or be lactose intolerant. Also: their little crowns appear sometime after feeding on emotions for the first time.

As for the effects of the bitty twins, they appear to cause an increase in bad and good luck. You might win the lottery, but at the same time you could have your identity stolen. (Might wanna up the security on that just in case)

Sometimes you may also end up with a cryptid or something stalking you at night, wherever you go. This last one is much more likely to happen if you only have the crescent twin.

Mating/heat

They get their first heat at age 18. However for some reason, all attempts at breeding them has never worked to produce the lunar or solar eggs, and more often than not they prove to be infertile so the origins of the eggs remain a mystery. (You can still make ship kids with them though I won't stop you.)

Oh! And one more thing about their lore: since they're such a strange phenomena, the local government might try to come take them from you in one way or another if they catch wind of you having them, so uh, bitty disappearances might happen.(Should you want to spice things up in a fic or something)

That's... About all the information I've got on my lamias so far, besides an idea for corrupted versions of them but if I ever go through with it it'll be at a later date in a separate post.

So, how do you adopt? Just make something with them. Draw it, write it, or even just daydreaming about it. Choice is yours. Ya want a pair or even just one, go for it. I don't mind.

Can you make nsfw of them? I don't mind as long as

1. They're both appropriately aged and act/look like it.

2. Everything is appropriately tagged/in the appropriate place for that kind of content so as to avoid minors coming across it.

3. ABSOLUTELY NO MINOR/ADULT! That shits gross.

Credit: as you probably already know, og Nightmare and Dream were made by jokublog while I made the design and one of the eggs shown here.

Should you credit me? Well, it's not 100% necessary but I'd really like to see what you make if you decide to do anything with them so if you could do that just to tag me, that'd be great. (Again not 100% necessary as long as your not claiming the designs as your own.)

And well... That's it! That's the post! 😊 adopt away!

[flopsider]

What Makes a Paper Mario Game Great?

*This post was turned into a script for a Game Domain video which I’ll post here once it’s out!

The Paper Mario game series has undergone massive changes with its last few installments. Most fans can agree that the first 3 (or, if you’re strictly fond of the formula from Paper Mario 64 and The Thousand Year Door, the first 2) games achieved something brilliant. They cemented Mario’s role in the RPG world, providing players with unforgettable experiences that left many with powerful nostalgia and an urge to revisit the titles as they grew older. However, with the newer titles, the gaming community’s feelings on the franchise have been shaken. Once Nintendo began to develop Paper Mario as an Action-Adventure series, many fans were left feeling like the company stopped listening to its fans and were taking the series in an unwelcome new direction. For some fans, however, particularly younger players who are just now discovering the Paper Mario games through the newer titles, these new changes and formulas offer some very enjoyable experiences. Undoubtedly, nostalgia plays a huge role in how we view video games, but there is more at play here than just sentiment. The question I’d like to pose, then, is “What Makes a Paper Mario Game Great?”

Let’s take a look at the individual games and see which areas they thrive in, and what holds them back. Keep in mind that every opinion listed here is just that: an opinion. I’ve tried to be objective in my analyses here, but like all people, I have biases and nostalgia which affect my opinions of video games, so don’t take what I say as the undisputed truth. This is simply my attempt to answer the question posed as best as I can, so if you disagree, let me know peacefully and respectfully in the comments!

 Paper Mario 64

 I feel like this game is the perfect entry to the series. It has a charming art style that I feel still holds up, offers fantastic gameplay and controls and a solid battle system, and has memorable characters. The main things that hold it back are the more basic storyline and villain, and the less unique character types compared to the next 2 games. However, both of these things can be forgiven since it was the first entry to the series. The chapters are all joys to explore, the leveling system is satisfying and allows for customization, and the badges are a great way to personalize Mario based on your playstyle. Paper Mario 64 laid the groundwork for the games that would follow, and most of the aspects of its formula would evolve throughout the next two entries.

 Paper Mario: TTYD

 There’s not much I can say about this that hasn’t been said before, but in summary, this game took everything that made Paper Mario 64 great and evolved it into something phenomenal. It built upon the battle system, offering what is widely considered to be the best battling in any Paper Mario game. The audience feature made battles livelier and more exciting, offering further incentive to pursue optional enemy encounters. It gave players new attacks and new ways to orchestrate them, with less repetitive actions than in the first game. It offered a much deeper, darker story with compelling antagonists, partners and NPCs unique to this game which made the world feel alive, and side quests that allowed you to progress through the game and level up your character in a less linear way. The world was crafted beautifully, with areas that stand out in many players’ memories and are far less formulaic than the typical Mario worlds. There were tons of secrets and areas to explore, as well as the first iteration of the Pit of 100 Trials, a side quest arguably more challenging than the game’s final boss. It’s no wonder this is likely the most acclaimed Paper Mario title to date. 

 Super Paper Mario

 First and foremost, I have tons of nostalgia for SPM. It’s maybe my favorite video game of all time, or at least in the top 3. It’s the first Paper Mario game I ever played (I was 7 or 8 years old and have since replayed it many times), and when I played it I had never heard of Paper Mario. There’s a chance that if I instead played 64 and/or TTYD first, I’d be more partial to those games because of nostalgia. However, I truly believe that, nostalgia aside, SPM provides the best overall game experience. I also think that if SPM had come first, and the creators then shifted into a more straightforward RPG style over time, it would be less polarizing.

The move away from turn based combat and into the more classic Mario platforming/real time combat was bold, but not universally appreciated. I totally get why some people feel it was a bad change. If you were in love with the camera perspective, movement, and combat mechanics of the first two, this may be less fulfilling. However, if you are a huge fan of platformers, then it’s certainly a welcome new angle. And if you’re like me and you grew up enamored with classic 2-D Mario platforming action, but also fell in love with the style, RPG elements, and stories of the first two Paper Mario games, then you’ll likely find the perfect mix of the two in SPM. Plus, I feel like turn based combat was never the basis of the Paper Mario franchise, or at least was not the core concept that made the games great. Some people disagree with that, but I personally believe that all the before listed criteria make up the greatness that is the Paper Mario series, and I think Super Paper Mario lives up to them. Despite its many differences, Super Paper Mario felt like a true successor to TTYD. The graphics were quite similar aside from the camera angles, the dialogue and storytelling were stylistically similar but done even better this time around, and several elements were revisited such as the Pit of 100 Trials. I loved the turn-based combat in 64 and TTYD, but I also adored the platforming and real time combat of SPM. Overall, I just feel SPM has the most to offer and provides the most unique, thrilling, and memorable experience. The New 2-D / 3-D switch feature quite literally adds a whole new dimension to the game. I think this is super interesting and fun to use, and it allows for more interesting level and puzzle design. It offered a nice balance since much of the game is played 2-D style whereas the first two entries were set in a 3-D space. Without the 3-D option it’d still be a great game, but might end up feeling a little basic by comparison. The Pixls, in my opinion, are a fantastic reimagining of the partner system. Since the game ditched turn-based combat in favor of platforming combat, the Pixls affect your movement, attack, and defense abilities in real time and can be swapped quickly. This makes platforming, fighting, and movement in general more fun and varied. In my opinion, they’re a fresh take on partners, and even though I love the old partner system, I see this as a welcome new take on it. Flipside and Flopside serve as effective and memorable hub worlds where you can touch base after exploring other dimensions. They have tons of explorable areas, puzzles, characters, and secrets, all of which contribute to the world development. The NPC’s helped add depth and contribute to the lore, with the Flipside and Flopside bartenders being the best examples. The ability to play as 4 different characters, each with different special abilities and movement characteristics was a huge step forward and made the level design much more interesting. In several areas, you have to utilize all available characters to access certain areas, some secret and some required. The best example of this in my opinion is in Castle Bleck, where in order to effectively maneuver around the platforming challenges and access secret areas you have to take advantage of Mario’s ability to flip into 3-D, Peach’s parasol gliding, and Luigi’s super jump, while Bowser is your key to easily clearing rooms of tough enemies. Maybe the least controversial thing I could say about this game is that it has a phenomenal story, the best of any Paper Mario game to date in my opinion. It’s darker than any other Mario game I’ve played, and despite its cartoony appearance, the stakes were higher than ever. It had incredibly memorable characters, small bits of backstory at the end of each chapter which slowly reveal the connection between the antagonist and Mario’s partner Tippi, excellent dialogue and humor, and a darker plot than any Mario game I’ve played. This is balanced by the game’s colorful visuals and soundtrack which make it a joy to play. The game had an inspired world design with bold style choices. For example, in the space levels of Chapter 4, the game temporarily becomes a Defender type horizontal space shoot ‘em up. It was a perfect blend of the RPG style from the first two games and the side scrolling platforming of older Super Mario games. The music is a fantastic mix of retro and modern, a concept mirrored in the graphics and gameplay. All in all, Super Paper Mario is a perfect blend of old and new. 

Okay, clearly, I have a lot of love for this game. But I want to be as objective as possible here, so let’s look at some of its shortcomings. The XP system was more basic than the first two games. It being present was a huge plus, but when you level up, it upgrades a predetermined stat (HP or attack) as opposed to you having stat customization. Along these same lines, the lack of badges meant less customization and attack options. Level design wise, some areas felt somewhat empty in 3-D. I didn’t really feel like this as a kid, but as an adult I feel like they could’ve done more with the 3-D perspective in certain areas. In some places, they totally nailed it though. 

 That brings us to the more recent, more divisive action-adventure titles. To preface, I have the least experience with these games, and the majority of my familiarity with them is from reading articles and watching videos which analyze them and compare them to the older games. So I’ll try not to be too critical, as I’d like to play them all the way through before completely solidifying my opinion on them. That being said, you can learn a lot about a game by watching gameplay footage and reading analyses of them, so I’ll do what I can to go over their pros and cons.

 For all three of the newest titles, it’s worth noting that I didn’t include the world being made of Paper in the list of what makes these games great. I don’t hate the jokes, comments, or visual references to paper and crafts in these games. In fact, sometimes I think they’re quite clever and add to the feel of the game. However, in the first 3 “classic” Paper Mario games, it wasn’t a major point of plot or world development, but rather something casually referenced in some well-timed jokes. In fact, the first game wasn’t even meant to be a paper based world. It had many titles in development, and the one directly preceding Paper Mario was Mario Story. The name Paper Mario, more than anything, is a reference to the art style being reminiscent of a pop-up book, and is not the basis of the gameplay or world creation. At least until the more recent games, that is. Sticker Star, Color Splash, and Origami King all base many core gameplay mechanics, the visuals, much of the humor, and even some of the world development on everything being made of paper. This is a cute idea, and the graphics in the newer games are undeniably vibrant and beautiful, but it ends up holding the newer games back only because they focus more on paper gimmicks than they do the story, unique character design, and gameplay. To be fair, I haven’t played the newer games completely, and from what I’ve seen, Origami King looks like a phenomenal stand-alone game and a much stronger Paper Mario entry than SS or CS. I just think Arlo summed it up perfectly when he said, “We didn’t love Paper Mario because it was paper, we loved it because it was Mario’s story.” That being said, let’s look at each game and see what they have going for them.

 Paper Mario: Sticker Star

 This is easily the most universally criticized Paper Mario title. Every so often you’ll find someone who will defend it, but for the most part, the fans of the series see this as the point where the games took a turn for the worse. Instead of just adding to the overwhelming pile of hatred for the game, I’m going to try and discuss some specific things that hold it back while giving it credit where credit is deserved. Sticker Star is not irredeemable. It has some of the charm the series is known for, some solid dialogue and humor, and appealing visuals. Unfortunately, there’s not too much more I can give it credit for, at least in the context of the other games in the series. So much of what made the first 3 games great were lost here. One of the most obvious steps backward is the near-total lack of original characters. Instead of a world packed with new NPCs and enemies with distinct personalities, the game almost exclusively utilizes classic Super Mario characters. You’ll see plenty of toads, goombas, and koopas here, and not anything in the realm of demonic shadow queens, members of ancient tribes, or mysterious cape and monocle wearing antagonists threatening the existence of all worlds. The villain here is Bowser, which is not just disappointing because it’s formulaic, but it almost feels like it separates the franchise even further from its roots because of Super Paper Mario’s inclusion of Bowser as a protagonist. The battle system also fails to reward you for entering into enemy encounters, and feels much more basic than the previous games. Overall, my main criticism of this game is that it took several steps backwards and not enough steps forward to justify them.

 Paper Mario: Color Splash

 This game improved upon the action-adventure formula of Sticker Star in almost every way. In that way, it can be seen as a parallel to TTYD, which improved upon its predecessor’s formula. The difference is, TTYD’s predecessor established a formula that was already phenomenal, whereas the groundwork Sticker Star laid for Color Splash was far weaker. Most of the criticisms I have for Sticker Star could be echoed about this game, just less harshly. Speaking more positively, this game had gorgeous visuals (second only to The Origami King), excellent dialogue and humor, and some creative levels, such as the section where you operate the cannons aboard a sailing battleship. 

 Paper Mario: The Origami King

 Overall, The Origami King looks to be the strongest Paper Mario entry in years. It seems to have developed the action-adventure formula of its two immediate predecessors, while including a handful of RPG elements. The battle system is both new and familiar - it’s turn based, but the ring system adds a puzzle element that, to some players, makes battles much more enjoyable and to some distracts from the battling itself. Utilizing the rings, it seems like there are far more creative ways to reach your opponents, but far fewer creative ways to actually attack them. Once again, the world and characters are more formulaic, relying heavily on classic Super Mario locations and characters. However, this game offers more uniqueness than the previous two, starting with the non-Bowser antagonist. The fact that King Olly has a previous close relationship with Mario’s main partner Olivia is reminiscent of Count Bleck and Tippi from Super Paper Mario. This provides the foundation for a better story than Sticker Star or Color Splash. In addition, the visuals are undeniably beautiful. It has the best graphics of any Paper Mario game, and some areas are truly striking, particularly the desert oasis area. The huge con of this game is that is triples down on Nintendo’s shifting of the Paper Mario series away from its RPG roots and toward a more formulaic action-adventure approach. The major positive is that it seems to be a solid game in its own right, one which makes much better use of the new formula than Sticker Star or Color Splash did. It’s got loads of charm and some solid gameplay, but if you’re looking for an experience comparable to the first 2 or 3 Paper Mario games, you’ll likely be left wanting something different from it. 

 So let’s return to the original question. Based on what we discussed about each title, what makes a Paper Mario game great? I’ve done my best to narrow down what I consider to be the 10 most important criteria that, when met sufficiently, provide the best possible Paper Mario experience. These are:

A compelling story with unique characters

Partners to assist in combat and movement

Clever dialogue

Visually appealing art style

Exploration

Puzzles and Secrets

Cohesive world design with unique areas

An XP system which rewards combat

World development and lore

And finally, a willingness to go darker than other     Mario games

 There are plenty of other criteria I could add to the list, but these are the main ones which stood out to me as I analyzed each game for their strengths and weaknesses. 

 Answering the question of what makes a Paper Mario game great is not a simple task, nor is it an objective one. As I said before, my nostalgia for Super Paper Mario is a huge part of why I discuss it so positively. I truly believe it’s worthy of the praise, and I stand by the opinions I’ve stated for the other games as well, but my thoughts on each game in this series are my own, and many of you will and should have different thoughts on them. So share them in the comments, and keep it respectful! 

[spiralatlas]

GCAP (Game Connect Asia Pacific) 2017 Day 1

I’m in Melbourne for GCAP and PAX Australia, and GCAP started today.

Sadly things were cut short by me BREAKING MY WHEELCHAIR in a DOOMED QUEST FOR A SMOOTHIE. I got a replacement, but it was a hassle and I needed to go rest afterwards. But what I saw of GCAP was good!

Below: descriptions of talks by Steve Gaynor and Karla Zimonya (creators of Gone Home and Tacoma) and by David Gaider (narrative designer on Dragon Age), plus misc other conference things.

There were three introductions, all about How Great The Melbourne Games Scene Is and how Everyone Is Friends And Awesome.

Keynote: Steve Gaynor and Karla Zimonya from Fullbright Games: The names didn't mean much to me but then I realised THEY'RE THE PEOPLE WHO MADE GONE HOME AND TACOMA :D

The theme of GCAP this year is The Ripple Effect, and the theme of this talk was how people connect and affect each other.

Steve and Karla met as part of the team for Bioshock 2. Karla was a researcher, and Steve a level designer, and when they were in those roles they didn't interact. But they both finished their assigned tasks and asked around for other things that needed doing, which led them both to the massive task of writing all the little bits of extra dialogue around things like what enemies say when they attack, flavour text on objects, optional little stories told through random audio diaries etc. They made a great team (Steve as writer and Karla as editor) and got really into it. I think you can totally see how this grew into their later approach to games.

The company 2KMoran being willing to let them develop like this was part of them being a good company, with many ex-employees who have gone on to make interesting games.

Steve then got to design his own DLC, and went I MUST BRING IN KARLA. And after they did that, and Bioshock 2 was done, they created Fullbright and started working on Gone Home.

At some point Steve encountered some cool Bioshock fanart and became mutuals with the artist on twitter. Since she was a lesbian, he asked her if she'd be up for discussing things to help with the game. She brought along her wife for an extra point of view. The wife turned out to be a 3D artist, and both of them ended up hired to work on the game.

David Gaider: Creating a World and Making it Stick

So this was like 50% general advice and 50% morality tale about the Hubris Of The Writer Who Thinks His Worldbuilding Stands Alone.

Basically he created all the basic Thedas worldbuilding by himself, then told the rest of the team, and worked with his writers, and never checked in to make sure the game worked as a whole until it was Far Too Late.

He was trying to create a relatively grounded, dark, realistic story...and the art team was making orcs and bikini armour. He had lore about the mages being too oppressed to learn offensive spells or do anything flashy in public, while the gameplay team was implementing fireballs, and specialisations like Reaver which were not connected to the worldbuilding at all. And by the time these incompatibilities became apparent everyone was committed and refused to budge. So the final game is a hodge podge of inconsistent parts that all make sense individually but don't fit together.

Now my general notes:

He scrawled out the original Thedas map on paper the same way he would for a D&D game (his original draft looked very Middle Earth-ish in style), expecting someone who knew geography would go through and fix the rivers at some point. They did not.

One lesson he learned is that you can't just throw pages of worldbuilding at people and expect them to both read and be engaged with it. You have to have a "razor", a short description of the core of the game, and make sure everyone understands what it is. Anything that doesn't fit the razor gets cut. For example, DA2 had themes of The Price of Freedom, Family, and All Things Change. And you have to sell them on why your worldbuilding elements are interesting, and what makes them cool. Once the art team understood what darkspawn were they got invested and redesigned them to not just be orcs.

Remember to feel: Don't just come up with the history of your city: what is it like to visit, is it loud and friendly and sunny or oppressively silent?

Pick your battles: choose the parts of your worldbuilding you really value and emphasise those, be willing to let the others go, especially if it’s to follow changes that make the game more fun. The game being fun is the final aim, your worldbuilding is just a tool to get there.

He got confused by his cursor a lot :)

One good thing about the DAO worldbuilding is that he didn't know where it would be set at first, so worked out all the history for everywhere, and that added lots of depth.

Names are the devil, totally subjective so everyone argues about them and hates any new suggestion. Many names for DAO were bandied about, like "Chronicle". He has a rule to never put Shadow, Dark or Blood in a list of possible names or the publishers will go THAT ONE.

His two rules: 1) People aren't allowed to complain about a name unless they have a better suggestion. 2) Wait six months. Chances are people will be used to it and not mind any more.

When the Grey Wardens were first suggested they were supposed to be pretty minor, based off the rangers in Tolkein. So they got named the White Rangers, but that was too similar, so White Wardens, but that wasn't morally grey enough, so: Grey Wardens! Which was fine until they turned out to be important, people suggested "cooler" names like Blood Knight Brotherhood/Lords of War/Disciples of Pain (not sure if he was joking) but he waited six months and took a vote and lo, the old name stuck.

Track your changes.

Have an elevator pitch (not the same as the razor) If you can't come up with one your concept needs work.

Question your biases. He was originally inspired by Middle Earth and D&D, and his own ideas of Medieval Europe...all of which are way too white. Some of this could be fixed in later games, but the world he created closed off a lot of possibilities (he didn't say any examples but I guess he meant, like, Africa and Asia equivalents)

When he took inspiration from Jews and Romani for the elves he thought he was being very clever, and only later realised that this created all sorts of unfortunate implications, since now anything that happens to elves seems like a statement about those cultures.

He was happily surprised to be able to include bi characters in DAO.

The writers were all pretty happy with how they'd handled gender in DAI, then the Voice Over person was like "why are the vast majority of our lines for men?" and they realised they'd all made most of their background characters men for no reason.

At the start it's hard to walk the line between a long, boring, exposition heavy intro, and players getting confused by lack of explanation. (It felt like he wished players would just be smarter lol) He said "If DAO had started at Ostagar then the PC's backstory would have felt irrelevant" which made me think "So like DAI?".

Players have to know why to care about an event before it happens, or the emotional reaction will fall flat.

When you introduce the first member of a group, they should be fairly typical so the player gets a feel for the default. For example, Sten is a pretty typical Qunari. Only after that can you introduce outliers like The Iron Bull.

Every main character the player interacts with (for a RPG, the party members) should represent a different interesting facet of the worldbuilding.

They didn't think DAO would get sequels, and thus had those wildly differing epilogues. He isn't sure he'd change letting the player died, since it was a cool moment. But it was certainly inconvenient to deal with later.

They had a rough idea of how the history of Thedas would continue after DAO "but no plan survives contact with the enemy, in this case I guess that's EA" loll

Having player decisions affect so much has been a bit of a nightmare.

Card tricks in the dark: if you do something clever and the player doesn't notice, it doesn't matter.

If the enemies drink potions and it's not obvious they're doing it, it just looks like the AI is cheating. If a choice affects the plot but this fact isn't made clear, players will just think that's how the plot always goes. Need to heavily lampshade that this is the consequence of that choice. And keeping track of all the possibilities gets ridiculous with characters like Alistair, who can be any one of dead/king/a drunk etc.

The players who DO pay attention to these changes tend to want way more reactivity than is practical. So nobody is impressed. And most new players found the save game editors confusing and off putting. He thinks perhaps it would be better to have a smaller number of major choices.

He's not going to judge other writers but the HUGE changes at the end of the Mass Effect trilogy mean they can now no longer set anything in that galaxy again.

Question time!

Something about the process leading to Krem being written. He talked about the bad stuff previously, and them realising they'd screwed up. A trans fan on the forums said "Could we have a trans character who isn't a sex worker or the butt of a joke?". They got jumped on, but the team read it and went "Oh."

Gaider wrote Maevaris in the comics, talked to a trans woman friend about it. One of the other writers was working on Kress...*audience shouts KREM* and he seemed a bit boring so he got made trans, since it added some interest and fitted in well with the worldbuilding about the Qun etc.It would have been better with a trans voice actor but they couldn’t find one.

What program is best for explaining stuff to the art team etc early on: Biowre had a sort of Grey Box level for playing through choices, but something like twine is good, just to test pacing. (not sure this actually answers the question asked)

Are there any genres you would like to work on but haven't: Yes :D :D But he can't tell us about it yet :D :D

He got sick of high fantasy after ten years. Would look longingly at Mass Effect sometimes just for a change but then they would implode and he'd think"Actually I'm fine".

Off the top of his head: Victorian London, finding husbands for your girlfriends while fighting zombies and also it's a Western?

Misc other things: I didn't make it to any more talks because Wheelchair, but met some cool people, and played some of the student games on display. My favourite was a time travel murder mystery called Lacuna where you have to connect clues. Apparently I was way better at it than most people :D I also actually enjoyed one of the puzzle platformers (I forget the name but it's about a little grumpy blue hexagon), which is a pretty big achievement.

GCAP has a "food intolerances station" with special food options and knowledgeable staff which was pretty great. Morning tea was just various gluten free biscuits, but for lunch there was poached chicken and salmon and various plain chopped vegetables, as well as dressed salads and gluten free bread and dessert. I could eat about 1/3 of it which is pretty good odds, I ended up happier than my partner who doesn’t have as many intolerances but just didn't like any of the food options.

[terramythos]

Review: Riven: The Sequel to Myst by Cyan Worlds, Inc (1997)

Genre/Tags: Silent Protagonist, First-Person, Atmospheric, Science Fiction, Fantasy, Great Story, Lore Heavy, Classic, Puzzle, Parallel Worlds, Multiple Endings, Strong Worldbuilding, Gender Neutral Protagonist

Warnings: Almost identical to the first game-- lots of unpleasant stuff (murder, genocide, drug use, etc) is referenced, but relatively little is shown. This game ups the ante in violence through certain endings compared to the first title. 

Playthrough notes: Again, I played this one with my sister Katy (@mistressofmuses​) Unlike before, no remaster or modern port currently exists. You can purchase Riven on Steam, but it is functionally a copy paste of the original release, including the need for compatibility mode to run it properly. 

My Rating: 4/5 (Recommended)

**Minor Spoilers (for both Riven and Myst) and My Thoughts Follow** 

I did not create the Age of Riven; unlike my father, I have never presumed to have such power, and yet, the future of all those who live there has fallen into my hands. So far, I’ve managed to read the page before it turns; the island continues to appear stable, and I would like to believe that I have saved a dying world, but the theories of one individual cannot support the lives of real people indefinitely. I must get everyone off of Riven as soon as possible. -Atrus' Journal

My Summary: At the end of Myst, Atrus tells the player that a great threat looms that you must help overcome-- greater than the minor trials Myst presents. Riven makes good on that promise and leads directly off the famous first game. Atrus sends you to "The Fifth Age" -- a world known as Riven, where his wife Catherine is trapped; imprisoned by his father, Gehn. The Fifth Age lies on the brink of collapse, so Atrus stays behind to "patch" the world long enough for you to complete your mission. Atrus sends you to this harsh and confusing world with three goals-- rescue Catherine, trap Gehn in a prison book, and evacuate the people of Riven. 

How you're meant to accomplish these goals is anyone's guess, as Riven is jarring and strange compared to the island of Myst. People run when they see you, and strange, cryptic symbols litter the five islands. The mysteries of Riven only reveal themselves to you with enough thought and cunning. Only after plenty of both can you accomplish your goals. The rest, I'm afraid, is spoilers. 

The Good:

This game significantly expands on the lore of the first game. Characters like Catherine and Gehn-- barely mentioned plot devices in Myst-- are major players in this title. You also learn a lot of interesting things about Riven (which was referenced extensively in Myst), the now almost extinct D'Ni, and some sense of how the Ages and alternate worlds operate. 

Like Myst, Riven is extremely good at using setting details to tell a story. It is particularly notable in the repeated symbols you find throughout the islands, the reactions of what people you do encounter, the animals, and even an especially dismaying classroom. You come to a lot of conclusions on your own. 

You may recall from my Myst review that Myst does not hold your hand. Riven takes this to an extreme. Pretty much everything you need to solve is based on your own reasoning. There are some hints, but they are few and far between, and the most major sources don't appear until at least the half way point. This makes for a puzzle game that relies heavily on deductive reasoning. There are two instances where filling in the blank using unconventional ideas makes for a very satisfying solution to a puzzle. 

Like Myst, this game features multiple endings (9, to be exact) and a moral choice-esque component. It's impressive for the time, and the developer foresight in certain instances is also neat. I only encountered 3 of the endings, but there are a lot of variations based on small context details. 

The game messes with player expectations in some interesting ways. You expect Catherine to be a damsel in distress. She defies the trope impressively in ways I won't spoil. You expect the main character foils to be Atrus and his father Gehn. Nope-- it's Catherine and Gehn, and it plays it up a lot. Even the journal Atrus gives to "guide" you appears to be a victim of a glitch because too many pages turn at once. Nah-- if you figure out the mini puzzle and read it, you can deduce why it's doing that. 

Having played Myst, it’s fun to see how similar traits pop up between all the members of this messed up family. 

In terms of story, it explores some really cool themes. The big one is the nature of religion and idol worship. There's also a meta-narrative about writing a story through scientific means vs. from the heart, which was also interesting to think about. 

This game heavily reminded me of 999 in a variety of ways. Both stories keep the player in the dark, throwing them into a confusing scenario they have to puzzle through. Only about half way does some information come through-- and it explains a lot and affects your initial perceptions. You also notice a certain number everywhere in the game, and it affects many details of the plot. 

I'll just say it outright-- this game is gorgeous. Ignore the fact that this game is 20 years old. It aged extremely well. The background renders are stunning. The real-person video mo-cap is used more heavily and it really does look seamless with the game world. There are even instances where characters interact directly with objects in the game and it looks smooth and polished. I can see why this game took so long to develop and had such a massive budget at the time. Animations-- especially the roller coaster sequences, honestly look good. This game is 20 years old and it still looks good.

The Mediocre: 

This game is buggy. I didn't run into a game break, but there was an issue where a screen change brought me to a completely different location than it should have, and I did have to look up ways to bypass and progress. I know other glitches exist that I was able to miss in my playthrough. 

How did no one on the development team at any point realize that you can't load a saved game from the main menu? You have to create a new game every single time and load through the sub-menu. What the fuck. 

Not a fault of the game necessarily, but running this on Windows 10 is an adventure. There's no modern port so you have to try finding a stable compatibility mode. Even so, the game froze frequently. Instability is a bit ironic considering the theme of the story, but it gets frustrating. The saving grace is this type of game makes it difficult to really fall behind due to a crash; you remember the solution or write down the relevant information. 

Another neutral thing to note, but you will not really understand this game unless you played Myst. So, uh, do that. 

The Bad: 

Riven is regarded as the most difficult game in the series. That in and of itself is fine. What I don't consider fine is making things so hidden that it becomes frustrating. I admire this game for its no hand-holding policy, but there are quite honestly almost no hints and so much information that it is often difficult to parse what you're supposed to do. Between this and unfairly hidden passages and buttons, this game can be quite frustrating-- not challenging. It's a miracle to me that anyone beat this game without a guide. 

The final major puzzle is so intensive and has so many components to it that, again, I have no idea how people figured it out. I'm going to post the notes Katy and I took just so you can see the extent of it (spoilers, at the bottom). The final solution has something like 93 trillion possibilities. An earlier puzzle requires a great deal of intuition to understand at all. 

Final Thoughts: 

I have my complaints, but Riven is still a good damn game. The lore is very fascinating and well executed, and like its predecessor, Riven feels way ahead of its time. This game has its share of twists and still maintains enough mysteries and loose ends to keep you interested in more. The characters and general concept are intriguing. And despite the limitations of the time, it accomplishes some truly astonishing technological feats. 

You should play Myst if you haven’t. And then, if you’re hungry for more, you should play Riven, because it delivers. Just keep in mind the instability and some of the design issues, because you may need some hints to figure out what to do.

I plan to at least play the third game with Katy; not sure if I'll continue past that, as the series seems like it went in a different direction after that. 

[ramajmedia]

Star Trek: Picard Is Answering TNG’s Most Frustrating Unanswered Question

Star Trek: Picard is poised to answer one of the biggest open questions from Star Trek: The Next Generation - the fate of Hugh and his collective of independent Borg drones. The CBS All Access series marks the return of Sir Patrick Stewart to the role of Jean-Luc Picard, which he first took on in 1987 on the small screen for the first-ever Star Trek spinoff. The new series is set to pick up roughly two decades after the events of 2002's Star Trek: Nemesis, the final film to feature Picard and the rest of the TNG crew.

A handful of major Star Trek players will be around for Star Trek: Picard. Stewart confirmed Jonathan Frakes and Marina Sirtis will return as William Riker and Deanna Troi, respectively, late in the first season; Frakes will also direct a pair of episodes. The show's fantastic San Diego Comic-Con trailer also revealed that Brent Spiner will be reprising his role as the beloved (and deceased) android Data, and Star Trek: Voyager's Jeri Ryan is returning as former Borg drone Seven of Nine. Seven's participation is yet another indicator that Star Trek: Picard will once again be grappling with the Borg, the most vicious threat Picard ever faced in his days as the captain of the Enterprise.

Related: Every Next Generation (& Voyager) Character Returning In Star Trek: Picard

Along with those franchise heavyweights, however, was the announcement that Jonathan Del Arco will also be returning as Hugh, the liberated Borg drone who was the focal point of two of The Next Generation's best episodes. Hugh's return is loaded with philosophical and emotional resonance for Star Trek fans, as he was the one avenue through which TNG could ever find a way to empathize with the nightmarish Borg. But before we can understand what Hugh's return means for the future of Star Trek, we need to take a look back at how we got here.

The Borg are generally remembered as the biggest and baddest threat the Enterprise ever took on in Star Trek: The Next Generation, but the cybernetic space zombies actually only appeared in three episodes over the show's first four seasons. They were introduced in season two's "Q Who?," in which the omnipotent trickster Q threw the Enterprise thousands of light-years away into the Delta Quadrant to prove humanity wasn't ready for the dangers that awaited them in deep space. There they met the Borg, the impossibly powerful cyborg race bent on the assimilation of all life. After the Enterprise narrowly escaped destruction and Q had made his point, the Enterprise was returned to the Alpha Quadrant, but the damage was done - the Borg were now coming for Earth.

That confrontation would happen in the epic two-parter "The Best of Both Worlds," which bridged the third and fourth seasons. During a failed attempt to stop their march toward Earth, Picard was captured and assimilated into Locutus, a Borg drone that would be used to speak to humanity and utilize Picard's knowledge of Starfleet defenses. Earth and Picard would both be saved by some ingenious strategy by Commander Riker, but the cost was high; the Borg destroyed 40 Starfleet vessels and killed over 11,000 people at the Battle of Wolf 359 before they were finally stopped. Ostensible foes like the Ferengi and Romulans felt like speed bumps in the face of the Borg, and TNG would maintain the Borg's mystique by keeping them off the board for two years after "The Best of Both Worlds."

The next time the Borg would be featured was in season five's "I Borg," in which the Enterprise unwittingly uncovers a crashed Borg scout ship with one survivor, a young Borg drone classified as Third of Five. While Dr. Beverly Crusher and Lieutenant Commander Geordi LaForge attempt to heal, study, and understand the drone - eventually giving him the name Hugh - Picard plots to reinsert Hugh into the Borg Collective as a kind of computer virus that would potentially wipe out the entire race. Seeing Picard so overtly court what essentially boils down to genocide is disturbing, and it's supposed to be - Picard's assimilation was a deeply traumatic assault that left him with mental scars he'd spend the next decade of his life attempting to overcome. Once Picard realized Hugh was beginning to reassert his humanity, he abandoned his plans for destruction and offered Hugh the choice of staying with humanity or returning to the collective. Hugh chose to return the collective in hopes that his individuality would spread throughout the Borg and alter the race forever.

Related: Star Trek: Picard Trailer Breakdown - 18 Story Reveals & Easter Eggs

Hugh and the Borg would return in Star Trek: The Next Generation's two-part season six finale/season seven premiere "Descent," in which it's revealed many Borg drones were indeed affected by Hugh's individuality, but not necessarily in the same ways; many drones were unable to reconcile their programming with the return of their individual impulses, sometimes resulting in horrific malfunctions and even suicides. A group of affected Borg were taken in by Lore, Data's evil brother, so he could fashion them into his own personal army. Hugh and a group of liberated Borg aided Picard and his crew in defeating Lore, with the promise that he would help guide these vulnerable Borg drones toward their own independence and peace of mind.

However, this would be the last time Hugh was seen in Star Trek: The Next Generation, and when the Borg were next seen in the big screen TNG film Star Trek: First Contact, they were back to the lethal space zombies of old, with no mention of Hugh and his kind. And while Hugh was something of a test run for Seven of Nine, the nature of Voyager's story meant there really wasn't an opportunity to address the liberated Borg during that show's run. It has been one of Star Trek's most frustrating unanswered questions for over 25 years - and Star Trek: Picard is finally poised to give us some answers.

The Star Trek: Picard trailer dropped some pretty strong hints that the Borg played a role in the decimation of the Romulan Empire, and that there are many more unassimilated drones that exist in a Romulan-run prison. It's easy to imagine Hugh's collective have been attempting to quietly live their lives, but that galactic politics have made them a target of hatred and violence. Not only would this be a way to acknowledge the current real-world antagonization of refugees and immigrants - a welcome return to Star Trek's roots as a culturally progressive moral arbiter - it would also be thematically resonant for Jean-Luc Picard himself.

One of Starfleet's most decorated officers, and often held up both within the fiction and in real life as a paragon of virtue and intellectualism, Picard's one true personal failing was his inability to consistently empathize with the Borg. Despite the grace he showed Hugh, Picard was violently unhinged in Star Trek: First Contact, very nearly sacrificing his crew - and potentially the purity of the timeline - in his quest for vengeance against them. Picard spending his twilight years attempting to protect his most despised enemies feels like a fitting final chapter for one of the most towering figures in science fiction history.

It's more difficult to predict what exactly has become of Hugh so many years later. There have been hints that Hugh and his collective may not look as cybernetic as they once did, perhaps in an effort to not draw attention to themselves. If he's survived for 25 years with the face of the quadrant's most dreaded foe, it means Hugh is a survivor, and likely the leader Picard predicted he would become at the end of "Descent." No matter what life has been like for Hugh and his collective, when Star Trek: Picard releases, it will finally give an answer fans have been waiting for since 1993.

Next: Star Trek: Everything That Picard Is A Sequel To

source https://screenrant.com/star-trek-picard-tng-unanswered-question-hugh-borg/

[lamentis]

A.MNESIA WORLD-BUILDING: the gods, granting wishes & after effect ( discussing heterochromia ).

disclaimer. This is 100% accurate to MY portrayal, making the world-building lore & headcanons actual canon to my blog. There are other people in the A.mnesia RP community who have their own take on things. They don’t need to recognize my canon as their canon I’m not trying to dictate anything aksjdhakjhg, but if anyone WANTS to consider any pieces of this as relevant to their blog as well, you don’t like... have to ask.

THE GODS & GRANTING WISHES.

The world(/s) A.mnesia takes place in normalizes the belief in multiple Gods in a way that makes it seem as if polytheism isn’t exactly rare among the denizens of whatever world happens to be active at the time (whether it be during U.kyo’s world hopping or in the original, “Joker,” world before the events of the game or after everything is said and done.) Both I.kki & U.kyo have referred to “THE GODS” at some point in time, while also hinting at a remaining belief in one particular God as a center of worship (switching gears to headcanon territory): polytheism, henotheism, and monotheism are all common beliefs that can be found throughout society and there are several religions crafted based upon these -- some definitely familiar to the real world, others completely fictional and specific to the A.mnesia universe that I’m not even going to try to build into existence, but most being rather common, so hearing someone talk about Gods plurally OR a God singularly are both commonplace. Likewise, hearing beliefs that differ on other supernatural creatures vary as well (the belief in angels/spirits/demons/etc.)

Of course, it’s established in canon itself that there are multiple Gods active in the A.mnesia universe: there are several Gods, one of which who felt U.kyo’s anguish over losing his loved one, another that heard I.kki’s plea when he was a child, and, by extension, many more who occasionally latch onto the prayers and desires of the mortals beneath them whenever they reach them or, alternatively, whenever they simply “feel like it.” Why a God will grant certain wishes is up to their individual tastes -- the reason Neil granted U.kyo’s is because he felt his pain from losing the Heroine was so intense he couldn’t bear the strength of it and, therefore, he took pity on U.kyo and ended up sacrificing his godhood to grant his wish out of pure sympathy for the two of them, even dragging one of his servants (a spirit -- O.rion) down with him, knowing that the Heroine had made a similar wish.

The God who granted I.kki’s wish would’ve done so simply because it seemed easy enough, with no regard for consequences, but eager to seem as if they’re accomplished something. Sure, the wish itself ended up ruining the human’s life, but it had been intended that way. A child wished “for girls to like me” because he wanted to make friends; given the nature of the wish and how insignificant it was, the God in question was likely to have looked at the short-term rather than the long-term. Girls look into the child’s eyes and instantly want to become friends; wish granted, good deed for the day done. The Gods in A.mensia’s universe are clearly not all-knowing, so thinking of the long-term and what that would mean for the human affected wouldn’t have even crossed their mind. On the other hand, it clearly would’ve been a God who does not care about what happens after the wish is granted. Seeing mortals as lesser beings, there’s no reason to look back on these wishes to see how they panned out -- humans are closer to play-things than they are lives to worry about or watch over. They wouldn’t even know what happened with I.kki afterwards or how the wish panned out years later.

The Gods are as varied as their mortal counterparts: some of them are frivolous, some are sympathetic, some are products of anger who may try to hurt the wish-maker, others may grant the opposite of the wish made out of spite or as a “joke,” some may see humans as toys, others may seek to protect them, play tricks on them, meddle with their lives, etc. Because of this, they will be attracted to the wishes and prayers of humans who appeal to their personality or desires. I.kki’s wish was seemingly simple and quick -- something that could be done to feel as if something was accomplished in a moment of downtime and (supposedly) inconsequential enough they wouldn’t have to care about it later. U.kyo’s was intensive and required a great amount of empathy and patience. Etc. Wishes aren’t granted left and right, of course, but when they are, the wish granted will have attracted a God whose personality matches with said wish. They are beings of opportunity who pay little attention to the on-goings of mortals: occasionally, a human is noticed and, for better or worse, their wish may be granted.

With that in mind, as a whole, almost all Gods do see humans as lives they can tamper with, whether their intentions be good or bad, with little in the way of consequence. Most do not have much regard for what becomes of the human.

Of course, interfering with humanity at large is forbidden and, thus, if anything drastic is altered, a God will be stripped of their position and sent to live among the mortals along with any supernatural being that aided them; demonstrated by both O.rion and N.eil being cast to live on Earth as humans after altering time in several realities to help U.kyo save the life of someone who was meant to die (& later bending Joker World’s set rules/reality to allow them to continue existing at the same time, post good ending.)

Beyond wish-granting or dealing with their own agendas, they have little to do with humanity: thus, the beliefs society takes on go in every direction depending on the stories, etc, they’ve been told. The Gods are elusive enough that there is still doubt that they may even exist, meaning atheism is also common among the populace.

AFTER EFFECT: ( HETEROCHROMIA. )

I’ll start off by saying that the heterochromatic eyes in the A.mnesia universe are obviously a stylistic choice and (bouncing off of @tragedis / @devotedis‘ headcanons, with her permission) my portrayal of I.kki will not recognize that the others also have heterochromatic eyes (applying to S.hin, T.oma, K.ent, the notable girls, etc -- whose eyes are all one “default” color w/o the stylization.) This, of course, may change depending on who I’m interacting with (I won’t stomp on your own headcanons kajshdkjg), since this is by default ofc, but the only other people who actually have heterochromia in the cast by my portrayal’s standards are U.kyo, W.aka, O.rion / N.eil, and the Heroine.

The only people who have heterochromia (among the cast) are those who have MADE A WISH that was GRANTED by the Gods. Upon having said wish granted, their eyes, previously one solid, natural color -- become heterochromatic after a secondary color mixes in with their natural eye color (in I.kki’s case, the PINK in his eyes is unnatural: a result of his wish.) I.kki wished to be liked by girls as a child, U.kyo wished to save the Heroine’s life, the Heroine wished to see U.kyo again as she was dying, W.aka was cursed by the Gods after a wish he made in a past life backfired (as per @congruis‘ headcanon), and O.rion & N.eil both fell from spirit/godhood and thus retained those features.

That being the case, those who have heterochromia as a result of their wish being granted (if they can RECALL making said wish) are open to having suspicions of others who also have it. This isn’t to say people don’t naturally end up with it through genetic means or anything, it isn’t specific to divine intervention, but, at least for I.kki himself, he’ll always assume it has something to do with the Gods first, before thinking about it logically (”they were probably just born like that”) since his own heterochromia comes from having his wish granted.

There is a societal belief in place that people with heterochromia have been "blessed by God/the Gods” since most stories from people who claim to have wishes granted would have heterochromia. This is largely part of the reason so many people believe in I.kki’s eyes being enchanted -- they’re heterochromatic and those who knew him when he was young know they weren’t always that way. Thus, his explanation that he had his wish granted makes sense to people who believe in all of this. It’s also the reason those among the cast who have heterochromia (and can remember the reasoning behind it) are more likely to believe U.kyo’s story if he ever told them.

In short, heterochromia is the result of having a wish granted by a God and society as a whole (minus those who do not believe in any higher powers) whether they believe in one God or several, are far more likely to assume that someone who has it was blessed by a heavenly power rather than being born with it. For some people, like U.kyo, this is true, despite the pain his wish brought him: for others, such as I.kki, who sees his wish being granted as a curse, it furthers his desire to damn the Gods rather than worship them.

[theinquisitivej]

‘Mass Effect: Andromeda’ - A Game Review

I don’t often do game reviews. The medium is dear to my heart, and I posted the odd review for smaller games that fascinated me back in the early days of this blog. But film is what I’m drawn to, even leading me to decide to spend my life studying it, so my writing has reflected that. Despite this, games are still an important part of my life, so I’m going to write game reviews every now and then if I’ve finished a game and feel a need to talk about it.

          The Mass Effect trilogy is one of my favourite game series, and features my favourite sci-fi setting in any medium. The world building and character development is unparalleled, and experiencing them through the eyes of Commander Shepard resulted in fantastic interactive storytelling. Shepard would always be a distinguished Commander in the human military, but their gender, appearance, history, decisions, and actions were all in the player’s hands. Some viewed this as potential for limitless storytelling, where your decisions had a direct, impact on the world your character inhabited, leading to an experience where you, the player, could carve out your own narrative. This was true to an extent, but I prefer to think of it as elastic storytelling; you can stretch the story in multiple directions, but there will always be a limit. How you would resolve a situation was ultimately your choice, but there were only ever a finite number of pre-selected options in each scenario for the player to choose from. The game’s developers used their finite resources to craft an experience which we knew could only unfold in a certain number of ways, but still managed to feel limitless. Our playthroughs were memorable and beloved because players will forever feel like they shared a journey with THEIR Shepard.

          So a trilogy closes, half a decade passes, and we return to begin a new journey. This time, we play as Ryder, a human who has taken part in the Andromeda Initiative, a mammoth undertaking by the various races of the Milky Way to explore the far-off galaxy of Andromeda, and eventually establish a home there. 600 years have passed as the Arks, vast colony ships housing the different species, have finally completed their long journey. Inevitably, problems have arisen. A strange and devastating radiation called the Scourge makes much of Andromeda space dangerous for ships to even travel through, and has even turned potential colony planets uninhabitable. On top of that, a new hostile race called the Kett poses a threat to all life in Andromeda. Meanwhile tensions are high between the Initiative and the Angara, the native race of Andromeda, and racial relations are crucial to prevent making another intelligent species our enemy. Finally, Ryder’s father has perished, and his role as the human Pathfinder, a leader charged with ensuring the survival of their species, has been passed onto Ryder. It is up to them and the player to somehow make the Andromeda Initiative work.

          Let’s get the obvious criticisms out of the way first: the facial animation and glitches. Many have torn ‘Andromeda’ to shreds for its lacklustre facial animation, in which characters stare with wide-eyed blank expressions, and the various parts of their face move with an uncomfortable strain. The vocal performances are still up to the series’ standards, but hearing them come out of these uncanny androids is distracting, especially when paired with stiff body movements that don’t quite sync up with the character’s tone or mood. Yes, Mass Effect, and Bioware games generally, have always suffered from awkward character models and stiff animation, but this was either a case of it being especially bad, or the straw that broke the camel’s back; people simply cannot accept lacklustre presentation when they’re trying to engage themselves in a virtual world. The various game-breaking glitches and character movement bugs don’t help either, leading to a disappointing feeling of sloppiness. I understand why so many people damned this part of the game, especially closer to release when things were even worse.

          Having said all of that, I am tired of this being the only point of discussion when it comes to ‘Mass Effect: Andromeda’. When people discuss ‘Andromeda’, it’s only about its animation and glitches. I realise that such a striking and immediate fault would be a major talking point, but I have little interest in reducing my overall impressions of a game to what ultimately amounts to presentational issues. Mass Effect was never just about presentation. It was an experience that blended fine characterisation, worldbuilding, and some solid gameplay. The character models are not great. Now let’s move on to discuss how the rest of the game holds up.

          When you’re not having conversations with characters or advancing the story and making tough decisions from a list of options for each situation, Mass Effect games are third-person shooters with a range of tools to play with. In addition to a diverse range of futuristic guns, the player has access to skills and abilities that can be powered up as they progress through the game. Maybe you want to be a soldier specialising at using weapons and military equipment, or a tech-savvy engineer that hacks enemy equipment and uses gadgets to adapt to any situation, or perhaps you want to enhance your biotic abilities, the equivalent of psychic powers in the Mass Effect universe which happen because… um, convoluted lore and backstory, shut up, you can lift a man into the air and snipe him out of the sky.

          ‘Andromeda’ does a decent job encouraging you to explore the different abilities found in each class, as you can switch between a set of four customisable profiles, allowing you to mix and match classes if you don’t want to commit to playing the game in one particular style throughout the whole playthrough. I appreciate the effort, and think it works well to a degree. However, because of the profile system, you only have access to three abilities at a time, and when you switch profiles your abilities are all automatically set on a cooldown. What this means is that when you’re done using three abilities and want to seamlessly switch to another set to unleash more powers, you have to wait for a while before you can use those new powers. For people who enjoyed focusing more on the powers and abilities rather than the weapons, this can feel limiting. Maybe I was missing some trick to speed up the cooldowns which would allow me to snap between profiles and have my powers ready to go, but the game doesn’t exactly walk you through the intricacies of the combat, so you’re left on your own to figure stuff out.

          A neat feature which changes up the combat is the new ability to use a jump-pack and evade dash. Since enemies still orient themselves to cover, you can use the jump-pack to leap over cover and slam down, or, alternatively, temporarily hover and fire down on them from above. It’s another option for the player to use or not use at their discretion, and it fits in seamlessly with the rest of the mobility found in combat. Where it starts to present a problem is how it affects movement outside of combat. You see, when you’re exploring alien worlds, the jump-pack is there to allow Ryder to traverse the landscape and free up vertical movement when, say, climbing a mountain. But the geometry isn’t always smooth, so Ryder will leap up, but not quite find a landing large enough to stay put. As a result, exploring Andromeda often boils down to mashing the jump button as you continuously slam your head against a steep surface until you somehow reached the top. Things get even worse when you’re in the Remnant sites, ancient ruins with machinery from an unknown dead civilisation. These sites are meant to elicit wonder, like a hidden tomb in an ‘Indiana Jones’ film. Instead, they boil down to platforming segments as the machinery morphs into a series of platforms for you to traverse by jumping and climbing. What should be a glimpse into the game’s deeper lore becomes a disjointed sequence that feels very much like something that only exists because this is a video game. Ryder also moves in a floaty way when they’re not involved in combat, so you’re not so much controlling Ryder as you are struggling to convince them to go in the direction you need. Consequently, platforming becomes imprecise and unsatisfying.

          It took me a little while to warm to the worldbuilding, but I did end up really liking what they were going for. At first, all the people you meet are fellow volunteers that went on this Andromeda Initiative, which means there’s a bit less diversity between individuals. For a long time, one of the dialogue options for every single person you come across will always be “so why did you join the Initiative?”, like students awkwardly falling back on “so what subject are you studying” as an ice-breaker. For the early parts of the game, I was worried that we weren’t really getting a new world with countless different perspectives to explore, but rather a pretty environment with a bunch of people who all shared the exact same “oh gee whiz, I just want to explore the universe!” philosophy. However, as you go further along, you do start to see that people have their own reasons, and not all of them can be chalked up to a starry-eyed spirit for adventure. I also appreciated being someone in charge of making the Initiative work and meeting people who had different attitudes towards it after things start to go wrong. You have to decide whether to try and convince the disenfranchised that there’s still hope, or to move forward with honest transparency and trust that people will have the strength to cope with it on their own.

          Things become even more interesting when the Angara come into play. From that point on, ‘Andromeda’ is not just about ensuring the survival of the people placed under your care in a hostile environment, but also about navigating the many obstacles and pitfalls that come with establishing a co-operative relationship with a new civilisation. First contact is something the original Mass Effect trilogy never really covered. All of that had already happened, and served as the lore for a pre-established universe. Here, you get to see every part of this new relationship between species unfold, and much of the questions that you would ask and the themes you’d want to explore are gone into through the many side missions and small tasks that you can undertake throughout the game. This is my favourite aspect of the game, and ‘Andromeda’ delivered a lot of satisfying and memorable moments that focused on this premise.

          I also enjoyed going through this with the new cast of characters. The new crew will never hold a candle to your squadmates from the Normandy back in the original trilogy, but I did find myself becoming attached to the characters as I fought alongside them. I was frustrated by Liam constantly causing problems, but also loved his optimism and the fact he never stopped trying, even when things went wrong. Vetra, as the Turian squadmate, was always going to be cool, but I thought the issues she was dealing with as an older sister forced to take responsibility in an uncertain environment made her a solid character underneath an appealing visual design. Cora and Peebee didn’t get as much time in my squad as the others, but I warmed to them once I got to know what made them tick, even if their surface personalities didn’t do as much for me. Drack was my second favourite squadmate, and not just because it’s been too long since we’ve had a Krogan on the team. Stanley Townsend delivers Drack’s sage advice with a badass gruffness, as well as an assured certainty that sells the fact this character has lived and fought for over a thousand years. Drack is fun, but also wiser and more nurturing than his jagged exterior would have you believe. Much like the other players I’ve spoken with, Jaal has become my favourite character in the game. As the Angaran squadmate, he’s a fascinating representation for the species, and I thought it made the most sense to have him on every mission to ensure that I constantly had the Angaran perspective in mind when making my decisions. He is sincere, hilarious, and shows multiple sides to his identity which, instead of making him feel ill-defined, results in him being the most well-rounded personality on the team. Nyasha Hatendi gives Jaal a rich charm through his voice, and I think he, as well as the rest of the cast, should be very proud of their performances.

          The one area where the characters appear weak is the main villain. The Kett are interesting enough once you discover what they intend to do to the people of Andromeda and are left guessing at their motives, but the Archon, their leader, is a disposable Saturday morning cartoon of a villain. He pontificates and does nothing except tell Ryder that the Kett are superior and we will never succeed, and his dialogue just repeats this ad nauseum. This is most grating in the final boss fight, where his big ‘GRRR I’M AN EVIL BAD GUY’ voice is constantly chiming in with updates that yes, he is totally going to kill us all, and that he is the ultimate being, blah blah bloody blah. How did we go from fascinating antagonists like Saren and the Illusive Man to this? Those guys represented a real threat, but when they showed up to have a conversation with you, they had your full attention. Their philosophy had led them to twisted conclusions, but you could understand it, and to a certain level, even agree with them. I could never find myself giving the Archon anywhere near the same level of respect as these two, and I certainly never found the threat he posed to be as haunting as the elemental terror the Reapers instilled.

          The thing that bothered me the most while playing ‘Andromeda’ was that, the further I got into it, the more it felt like I wasn’t exploring a living, breathing world, but moving down a checklist. Missions and tasks pile up, and so many of them can be boiled down to ‘go to this exact point on the map, and then you’ll either have to scan a thing, or a fight will break out’. Yes, the characters you engage with along the way provide context which can make you care about the implications of what you’re doing. But there’s little room for deviation or a winding road along the way. You simply move to an exact point on the map, do a thing, then move onto the next thing. Even within missions, there are so many times where things are padded out when you try a door or a bridge and you’re told ‘this isn’t working; go five feet over there and scan that object or switch it on. Done it? Okay, now we can move on’. It seems like an unnecessary detraction, and if this tangent doesn’t engage the player, why bother? I don’t feel like an explorer playing this game, but someone doing a job. In a strange way, that does kind of work with the context of being placed in a position of responsibility and endeavouring to help in as many places as you can. But not everyone is going to think like that, and even with that concession I found the experience to drag at times.

          I’ve had a great deal of complaints about this game, but I do think there is some good content in there. I care about this world and its characters, and there were countless moments where I was confronted with problems on both the large and small scale which made me pause and deliberate. These are some of the most vital components to a Mass Effect game, and I believe ‘Andromeda’ does well in these areas. But there is a lot of things about it that detract from the overall experience. I would be a lot more on board with the theme of exploration that every character goes on about if the way we explored this universe wasn’t so stiff and ordered (it also doesn’t help that ‘Breath of the Wild’ from earlier this year handles open-world exploration so much more masterfully, but that’s for another review). I’ve said my problems, and so have many people in the gaming community, as well as the Mass Effect fanbase. Yet for all its faults, I am glad I played ‘Mass Effect: Andromeda’ for all those times I felt truly engaged with its world. The game’s poor reception may mean that we won’t see it for some time, but I think it deserves to be expanded upon and refined in a subsequent instalment.

For its technical features, I’d give ‘Mass Effect: Andromeda’ a 5/10, but to give you my honest take-away from this, I’m giving it a…

6/10.

Its flaws are numerous, but the experience is kept afloat by a compelling premise and many moments with solid characterisation and interesting moral dilemmas. A rough ride, but one I’m glad I saw through to the end.

[fragmentsofchaldea]

hi! i love your work very much but your stories deserve far more attention and likes then they have! does it ever bother you there are some stories that deserve far less with more favs and follows than yours? your such a creative and hard working writer yet you have little recognition! i think thats sad! :(

==

For the purpose of this answer, I’ll presume you mean followers, reviews, and favorites.

==

Even though it doesn’t hamper my production, I’d be lying if I said it didn’t bother me a bit. As a working artist for my career, recognition means leagues more to me than most, so that does influence how I feel about it.

I don’t like comparing my work to others because I believe that’s unfair to all parties involved. That aside, I do look scan from a neutral standpoint if only to understand exactly why things are the way they are. I’ve come to a few conclusions about my story involving recognition (favorites/follows/reviews) upon observing the fic trends.

1. It’s a Fate/Grand Order fic, not Fate/Stay Night. This is inherently the biggest drawback, since the original garners more attention since the category is named after it (yet there are a bunch of non-anime and other stuff listed for sub-groups). I’ve noticed Fate/Grand Order fics, with the exception of crossovers, receive very low recognition. As an example, my work seems to be the most recognized vanilla Fate/Grand Order fic out there by a decent margin.

2. The entire premise and world design. It certainly doesn’t help my cause that it’s considered a slight AU. I’ve made a few Nasuverse changes that have sweeping repercussions and I can understand that would upset the Type-Moon lore masters. Include Slice of Life, choice shipping, and a few other pieces and the work starts losing more potential recognition due to polarization.

3. Continually shifting focus. What I mean by this, is that I don’t tend to focus on one servant unless it’s their fragment, and there’s no telling when they’ll pop up. Most people aren’t like me, who treats all servants rather equally and on a level playing field. Some outright hate ______ while they love _____. Treat someone they love bad, and they’re gone. Shine a nice light on someone they hate, and they may either skip it or drop reading. Those are rather “extreme” examples, but how many people want to keep reading a work that’s not focusing on their favorites?

It’s both an advantage and disadvantage to my work that I give recognition to servants regardless of the community popularity. 

4. I update on a weekly, set schedule. Most don’t find it necessary to follow or favorite something that’s always on page one of the Fate/Stay Night category. It certainly makes sense. Reviews aren’t really affected by this, which is probably why that count is high compared to the other two.

Combine those three points, and that’s likely the reason anyone could see my recognition as “sub-par”. 

I will admit: It’s pretty disappointing to me. While I feel like I do get amazing feedback from quite a few individuals, I do often wish it would receive far more recognition than it has. Call it greed or something similar, but based on the number of Grand Order players, 300ish recognition seems non-existent.

Which is why I appreciate every single person who has decided to favorite and follow. You’ve made the simple effort to show your support and I appreciate that greatly. It’s why I keep working, if only to make sure those vocal individuals and the many that confirmed recognition can continue to enjoy what you’ve come to appreciate.

I guess I needed to get that little popularity rant out of the way, huh? I guess thanks for that, Anon. It’s good to air a grievance or two every now and then.

[sandsandsorrows]

a-rat-and-a-blob submitted:                        

Eh…. Why not? I guess. Sorry if this becomes too long.

To put it bluntly, I feel like the world of runeterra and the characters are simply more dynamic and identifiable.

In terms of character, you learn more details about them that at least makes them stand out from the typical character tropes that they obviously represent. (Every character is a trope in some way or form) Many people seem to forget that the old lore severely lacked detail and was super vague, making them seem like they’re just the stereotypical trope and nothing else. While sometimes this vagueness works well to the advantage of some champions (Viktor & Amumu are the best example of this), a lot of champions did suffer from this vagueness. In Twitch’s lore, outside of the fact that he was being used as a tool and he was prideful in being a plague rat in the old lore, you don’t really have an idea of what he’s like as a character outside of that or what he’s been through. Janna’s lore raises a lot of questions on how a half-naked air elemental could even exist in an urban setting such as Piltover or Zaun. Even ZAC’s old lore, as much as I loved it, doesn’t really establish an interesting character to look into after his story is done. All you know is that he likes to save people and give funny lines and… that’s it?

With the writers adding more details, connections, and development to their characters, it’s should be interesting on how these characters differ from the trope. Do all the details always match? No. Not by a long shot. (Azir being a rapist is not what I have in mind..) But I still really like some of these details and the connections between characters. The fact that Renekton would teach Azir. I like the fact that Rammus apparently has a cult around him yet he ignores all of it. I like ZAC’s hobby of fixing infrastructure. Additionally, I also like the fact that these characters have the ability to change. In the old lore, I felt like the institute was severely handicapping them in terms of development and change, which are both crucial factors that affect characters. You just can’t settle conflicts like ordinary people with that crutch. (Every story would be a sports rivalry if that’s the case)

I also like the fact that the world of runeterra is growing more grey and interesting, albeit inconsistent. In the old lore, all of the cities seemed to be based off of stereotypes. Good Scientist City Piltover. Bad Scientist city Zaun. Hero Demacia. Villain Noxus. Pirate Bilgewater. In the New Lore, while they still somewhat have these stereotypes, it’s becoming more interesting. It’s no longer one note rivalries between cities or a place where all of this stereotypes hang out. And as evidenced by the Bilgewater event, these environments can also be subject to change. 

To me, the new lore is more dynamic and ever changing. The characters and the world are becoming less of simple 1 dimensional tropes and growing more in their own stories. Do I agree with everything? No. The yordle update was stupid. Amumu’s lore was insultingly bad. And anyone who follows me knows what I feel about ZAC as of now. They don’t always hit bullseye. But does that take away from the new stories that I do like and my interest in the champions and the new world. No. Absolutely not.

Before we start to harp on how the old lore lacked detail and yadda yadda, let’s not forget that in those times they had a lot less people and resources to deal with only the lore.

It was like the current short lores: just the basic idea that could later be expanded upon. Yes, they were tropes, but if you read the short lores and only the short lores, they still are. The new lore has the advantage that now there are resources for flavour stories, a whole lore team to work on this sort of thing.

On the other hand when the old lore had the resources to match the new one in details, it was much higher quality. It’s a precious few champions who got Judgements and/or participated in the JoJ articles, I know, but it’s a glimpse into what could have been if the new lore decided to build upon what already was there instead of discarding the base of their world.

Because that’s what is missing: the coherent world underneath the various unconnected stories, the base of the narrative. As silly and simple as the old lore was, it was one organic whole, it made sense within the narrative.

The new writers looked at the old lore and said. “What is missing? This is a skeleton, we need to flesh it out with details.“

And what did they do? They threw the skeleton away and started piling details on each other without anything to hold them up. No wonder when you look past the fact that this or that details is cool, it makes no sense and just sort of... flops. One of my friends compared it to fanfiction without having a base world first and I wholeheartedly agree with that description.

Make no mistake, some of the ideas they have come up with are cool, but it doesn’t lessen that as a whole, the only dynamic thing the new lore does is some pathetic wobbling if you poke it. No amount of good ideas will make a story good if they are just all thrown into a pot and presented together with no regards to coherency and no solid, logical base to build upon. Not only do they not add up, at certain points they outright contradict each other. You don’t even need to look outside of the individual stories: they in general seem to have a tendency to tell you one thing and then show something entirely different.

Not to mention how often they get stuff wrong - so wrong it’s immersion breaking. It takes one look at the new map where Piltover is sitting in the middle of Noxian territory, happily independent for me to say that it’s nonsense, that’s impossible. The whole mess with Azir knocking up slaves and the fact that apparently nobody on the lore team opened a history book to check what a harem was.

I have an ever growing urge to jump off a bridge every time they talk of anything science related in the new update because that’s not how you science. And not how universities work and ffs is everyone stupid in this city? If they had an ounce of common sense they would have left Zaun a long time ago - don’t tell me Noxus or Demacia wouldn’t be happy to have them. Labourers (probably trained labourers even) for the cheap price of a not-deadly living space and food. As far as we know, Piltover doesn’t forbid them from leaving, so why are they still there when they are starving, poisoned on a daily basis and Piltover can decide any day that they will wipe the rest of them off the face of the planet? Not because of Zaunite pride, because if they had a choice, they would rather be Pilties instead.

“The Institute is too hard to write around”. Okay, then change. Gradually. So you can keep your foundations and build towards a different conclusion without shooting yourself in the foot and crippling your whole universe. As people who follow Cataclysm timelines show, it is very simple to gradually remove the IoW without retconing everything and it opens up multiple possibilities depending on how each nation and champion reacts to the change. 

I would argue with the world turning greyer and it being a good thing by default, but I already wrote a wall, I’ll leave that for another day.

tl;dl.: Because they are focusing too much on adding special flavouring to each individual champion, I think the world the new lore presents is standing on much too shaky legs to hold up its overall narrative. The details are all these bells and whistles they tack on their already unsteady base that might look nice or even cool on their own, but they do not fit together and present a chaotic, outright bizarre picture when you look at more than one at a time.

I don’t know if you’ve ever been to a house where every piece of furniture and every piece of decoration is from a different style and period, but the overall effect if disorienting and plain ugly. That’s how I feel about the new lore.

[hharchive4-blog]

FELIX PRICE + THE MIKAELSONS

 i’ve  been  meaning  to  write  some  meta  about  this  for  a  while.   the  originals  is  arguably  one  of  my  favorite  fandoms  to  cross  over  with  because  felix  is  new  orleans  based  by  default  so  it’s  super  easy  to  picture  him  in  that  world.   before  i  delve  into  his  relationship  with  each  individual  mikaelson,  here  is  a  little  background  on  how  i  envision  the  verse  as  a  whole:

 as  per  usual,  felix  comes  to  new  orleans  after  the  events  of  his  bio,  on  the  run  from  a  clan  of  hunters  after  murdering  their  leader’s  daughter.  this  time,  however,  felix  is  in  search  of  more  than  just  a  large  crowd  to  blend  into.   after  hearing  whisperings  of  another  hybrid  in  existence,  he  sets  out  to  find  the  famous  klaus  mikaelson,  only  to  discover  the  man  is  a  new  kind  of  monster  entirely  –––  part  original  vampire  &  part  werewolf,  with  the  power  &  connections  to  take  down  his  enemies  once  &  for  all.   he  finds  himself  immersed  in  the  world  of  vampire  politics  as  klaus’  right  hand  man,  doing  his  bidding  in  exchange  for  protection  &  a  sense  of  belonging.

 continued  under  the  cut  because  this  shit  is  a  lot.

 KLAUS  :   felix  idolizes  klaus.   truth  be  told,  there  is  a  part  of  felix  that  is  desperate  to  find  something  to  connect  with,  a  part  he’d  sooner  die  than  vocalize.   after  all,  he  came  to  new  orleans  because  the  possibility  of  someone  like  him  existing  out  there  plucked  at  his  heartstrings,  giving  him  hope  for  his  long,  lonely  life.   even  when  he  discovered  klaus  wasn’t  the  half-human,  half-vampire  being  he  initially  assumed  he  was,  this  didn’t  change  his  opinion.   in  fact,  finding  out  that  klaus  was  a  mikaelson  (  not  just  any  mikaelson,  the  original  hybrid  )  just  made  him  respect  the  man  more.   the  fact  that  someone  who  is,  for  all  intents  &  purposes,  an  outsider,  could  be  such  a  powerful  force  when  he  is  outnumbered  by  thousands  is  admirable  to  felix,  who  has  been  cast  aside  his  whole  life  by  both  of  his  species  &  envies  the  respect  the  vampires  give  klaus.   if  teased  or  called  out  about  his  devotion  to  the  hybrid,  felix  will  simply  roll  his  eyes  or  go  to  great  lengths  to  deny  it.   i  don’t  think  he  realizes  just  how  far  in  he  is  because  if  he  did  know,  he’d  surely  try  to  find  a  way  out.

 on  the  other  side  of  the  same  coin,  klaus  is  well  aware  of  felix’s  quest  for  validation  &  uses  it  to  his  advantage.  whether  its  sending  him  on  errands  or  making  him  look  after  hope,  he  sees  the  dhampir  as  a  devoted  follower  to  do  his  bidding.   klaus  trusts  felix  about  as  much  as  he  trusts  anyone  outside  of  his  family,  which  is  not  a  lot.   that  said,  he  has  promised  felix  protection  from  the  hunters  which  i  guess  means  he’s  not  entirely  disposable  &  the  two  have  had  several  conversations  about  their  mutual  interest  in  art.   i  think  klaus  is  amused  by  felix  but  not  devout  in  the  slightest  –––  though  this  could  change  if  he  learned  more  about  him,  since  they  have  quite  a  bit  in  common.

 in  this  particular  verse,  i'm  inclined  to  believe  that  felix’s  father  was  a  part  of  klaus’  sire  line,  making  felix  sired  (  at  least  in  part  )  to  klaus,  as  that  would  explain  his  undying  loyalty  to  the  original  hybrid.   lore  permitting,  davina  breaking  the  sire  line  in  season  three  wouldn’t  have  affected  felix  either,  seeing  as  he’s  only  sired  through  norman  &  was  born  a  dhampir,  not  created.

 ELIJAH  :   felix  does  not  like  elijah  &  i’m  pretty  sure  the  feeling  is  mutual.   as  we  all  know,  elijah’s  driving  force  in  life  is  klaus’  redemption  &  he  sees  felix  as  yet  another  obstacle  in  the  way  of  the  man  he  wishes  his  brother  to  be.   in  addition,  elijah  finds  felix  to  be  very  immature   –––   not  that  felix  really  helps  his  cause  with  how  he  acts  in  return.   felix  likes  to  pick  elijah  apart,  criticizing  everything  from  his  suits  to  his  pretentious  attitude  to  his  hypocrisies,  making  no  secret  of  his  distaste  for  the  original  even  when  klaus  is  around.   the  two  bicker  like  school  children  but  that  hasn’t  stopped  felix  from  doing  elijah’s  bidding  from  time  to  time.   i  think  that  felix  is  very  much  aware  that  if  any  of  the  mikaelsons  wanted  him  gone,  he  would  be  gone,  so  as  much  as  he  pushes  his  luck  with  some  of  the  siblings,  he  does  his  very  best  to  prove  that  he  is  indispensable.

 REBEKAH  :   felix  thinks  rebekah  is  hot   –––   i  mean,  obviously.   he  likes  it  when  she  comes  around  &  enjoys  dropping  flirtatious  comments  her  way  regardless  of  what  her  relationship  status  is  at  the  time.   that  said,  he’s  not  looking  to  date  rebekah.   he  knows  better  than  that,  having  heard  plenty  of  stories  of  what  happens  when  men  get  too  close  to  klaus’  beloved  sister.   rebekah,  on  the  other  hand,  finds  felix  amusing  but  pities  him  too  much  to  truly  see  him  as  an  equal.   over  the  course  of  her  long  life,  she’s  seen  many  klaus  fanboys  come  &  go  &  knows  its  only  a  matter  of  time  until  felix  becomes  collateral  damage  in  one  of  her  family’s  many  battles.   needless  to  say,  she’s  not  attached.

 KOL  :   felix  has  an  interesting  relationship  with  kol.   the  two  have  a  mutual  understanding  for  one  another,  kol  as  an  outsider  in  such  a  closely  knit  family  &  felix  as  an  outsider  to  both  humans  &  vampires  alike.   they  get  along  best  on  a  one-on-one  basis   –––   aka,  when  klaus  isn’t  around.   kol  probably  finds  it  disgusting,  how  felix  follows  his  brother  around  like  a  dog  in  search  of  scraps.   he  doesn’t  see  klaus  as  worthy  of  admiration  when,  in  his  eyes,  he’s  done  nothing  to  deserve  it.   felix  definitely  feeds  more  when  kol  is  around.   he  usually  tries  to  avoid  drinking  blood  as  much  as  possible,  but  with  kol’s  insatiable  appetite,  felix  can’t  help  but  give  into  temptation.   kol  brings  out  his  worst  behavior,  but  i  think  of  all  the  mikaelsons,  he’s  the  one  felix  has  the  most  in  common  with.

 FINN  :   felix  never  had  the  pleasure  of  meeting  finn  &  it’s  probably  for  the  best.   he’s  heard  enough  stories  about  the  deceased  original  to  know  that  they  wouldn’t  exactly  see  eye  to  eye.   felix  would  find  finn’s  stick-in-the-mud  attitude  to  be  annoying  &  finn  would  think  of  felix  as  an  equally  irritating  extension  of  klaus.   the  only  thing  i  could  see  them  connecting  on  is  their  distaste  for  immortality.   felix  does,  however,  feel  bad  for  finn’s  sires,  who  had  no  choice  in  the  matter  of  their  death.   according  to  felix,  death  is  the  one  thing  every  creature,  man  or  beast,  should  get  to  control.

[tavoriel]

Black hole & Star cluster please :>

Star cluster - Does your Shepard have any mental illnesses and if yes, do they visit a therapist or talk to someone about it?

I gave Kanae Shepard the went-through-HELL backstory combo, so she lost her family to a slaver raid, and went on to survive a thresher maw attack almost all of her squad was killed by.  She started out pretty traumatized, and she actually went through a lot of personal growth regarding that.  I wouldn’t say she had long, deep heart-to-hearts with Wrex specifically about her personal life, but getting to know him, and being his friend, taught her a lot and gave her a lot of encouragement and validation and hope.

What I’ve read about mental trauma basically describes it as an outlook shift where the assumption that lethal danger could easily happen is built deep into your worldview, and you’re wired to live your life accordingly.  And the symptoms are basically grounded in that, in how you don’t want to experience a terrible thing or die.  

Now let’s talk about krogan.  The lore describes them as very survival-oriented; even the placement of their eyes (wide-set, for scouting out danger, rather than close together, for focusing on prey) is supposed to reflect how deeply ingrained it is in their minds to prioritize survival.  We learn that prewar krogan only rarely had blood rage, and that that stuck out as a plus in the whole evolution scheme when the cities came crashing down because being able to get out of a tight spot and momentarily not feel pain turned out to be pretty useful.  So modern krogan society is made up of these individuals who, by archaic standards, and modern standards of other aliens, basically count as messed up in the head; the world is obviously not out to get you.  But guess the fuck what everybody!  Tuchanka literally is out to get everybody!  Because it’s Planet Fuck Everyone Who Lives Here!  And the krogan aren’t scuttling around in shame because they’re “wrong” about their outlook according to outsiders who don’t know them.  They’re thriving with everything they’ve got, and they’re damn proud of being alive.  By their standards, they’re doing just fine.

So Kanae met Wrex.  And it turns out he’s carrying a lot of grief.  It turns out he’s carrying the pain of abandonment from his family, the pain of having failed his clan and his species, the pain of oppression from the galaxy at large, and just a lot of pain; and he doesn’t seem to really have anybody to rely on, or anything.  But here’s the thing.  He’s a big fucking red guy with badass scars all over his face and scary looking reptile eyes.  And he’s at peace with not being at peace.  He doesn’t try to make his pain prettier for anybody; give the crew a 2 minute task of coexisting and being nice in an elevator, and he’ll say something caustic to see how people react, and remind people he’s seen some shit and is Grumpy about it.  If he’s talking about this stuff directly, he’ll explain exactly how upset he is about it, and bite back if anyone even thinks about giving him trouble for being affected.  And Kanae didn’t really know this was an option for how to try to recover from things; that you can just accept that something horrible happened to you and it will never be okay, and also move on and be yourself and live your life or whatever.  And the more she learned about krogan, the more she came to just seriously respect and appreciate them, so much.  Because they’re all kind of like that.  They don’t expect each other to pretend not to be affected by deeply unsettling things.  They face deeply unsettling things every week; they just roll with it and keep going.  Wrex inadvertently gave her permission to feel all the things she felt, instead of primarily worrying about how fun and enjoyable and understandable she was to others.

Black hole - What is your Shepard’s greatest fear?

Maybe the fear of not being worth anything, or worth much, intrinsically and/or to other people.  And I want to take this opportunity to say she’ll fight the hardest for others when she’s defending them from things she’s afraid of, or has faced, herself.  Probably because she’s capable of deeply empathizing with others.  So when Mordin started talking about gardening krogan, you basically have this smugass fucker pointing to the first glimmer of genuine hope she’d found in years and calling it irrelevant garbage he was proud of having defiled and invalidated, and would defile and invalidate again if he was given the chance to do it all over.  According to the logic he outlined, people who are too weird or fucked up in the head shouldn’t make their own choices or control their own destiny when there’s a risk it could negatively impact people who are less weird and less fucked up in the head, and that the less weird/fucked up are in no way obligated to make any particular considerations for the greater good of the more weird/fucked up.  It’s safe to say he didn’t know who he was talking to.

There’s a part in The Hobbit where Tolkein tells us that, while Bilbo Baggins faced lots of things that look really brave on paper, like fighting in a war, the actual bravest thing he ever did on a personal level, the hardest fight he had with himself, was convincing himself to walk through a cave passageway when he knew there was a dragon on the other end.  Kanae Shepard didn’t opportunistically lose track of Mordin in the chaos of the suicide mission, because she knew his death wouldn’t solve anything or prevent any further harm, and she felt that, according to her values, handing out death as a punishment wouldn’t be Doing the Right Thing.  And I’m very proud of her.

[jimblanceusa]

Apocalypse here: Why Colorado is such a popular setting for humanity’s downfall

In Wasteland 3, the latest entry in the influential role-playing game series, a group of militarized survivors fight through the frozen shells of Colorado Springs, Aspen and Denver during a nuclear winter that makes most blizzards look tame by comparison.

The choice of setting was easy for the video game’s art director.

“We’d done ‘brown and hot’ for two games in Arizona, and we needed a change, so we went with white and cold for this one,” said Aaron Meyers, who lived part-time in Denver during the game’s development. “Colorado seemed like the perfect place to give us that feel and those aesthetics, as well as a wealth of interesting lore and locations to mine for our story.”

Wasteland 3, which was released for the PlayStation 4, Xbox One and PC on Aug. 28, joins a long line of video games that have pictured Colorado as a blood-soaked landscape of zombies, foreign military invasions and robot dinosaurs, including acclaimed, multimillion-dollar earners like The Last of Us, Horizon: Zero Dawn, the Dead Rising series, Homefront, World War Z and Call of Duty: Ghosts.

Even those are just one category in a larger group of novels, TV series, films and comics that have mined Colorado for their apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic stories, from Stephen King’s “The Stand” — which imagined Boulder as the center of humanity’s resistance against a supernatural evil — to “Dr. Strangelove,” “Waterworld,” “Battlefield Earth” and “Interstellar.”

“You can really visualize Colorado when you mention it, even if you’ve never been here,” said Denver author Mario Acevedo, who has written wildly imaginative, urban-fantasy novels starring werewolves, vampires and zombies. “We’re shorthand for ‘mountains,’ but also the type of people who tend to live in the mountains. Scrappy people do what it takes to survive.”

But even as writers and artists paint Colorado with ashen skies, resource-driven riots and nuclear holocausts, the trappings of the post-apocalyptic genre have grown all too cozy in 2020.

Across the U.S., multi-state wildfires, a devastating hurricane, and civic unrest feel like cruel toppings on a summer already larded with misery in the form of a global viral pandemic that has killed nearly 200,000 Americans and left millions unemployed. As the line between depiction and prediction grows almost invisibly thin for post-apocalyptic storytellers, they’ve been forced to turn up the intensity to stand out from our increasingly grim reality.

“Over 40 years of popular culture, a lot of people have looked at what’s happening on a global scale and extrapolated these disasters that end up mirroring reality,” said Boulder novelist Carrie Vaughn, whose 2017 book “Bannerless” won sci-fi’s coveted Philip K. Dick award.

They just didn’t think it would arrive so soon — or all at the same time.

“The only thing that hasn’t happened yet is zombies,” Vaughn said with a laugh. “And I’m not going to make any bets against that.”

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For centuries, apocalypse stories centered around humanity’s punishment from angry gods. That changed after World War II as people woke up to the possibility of global nuclear annihilation. Since then, post-apocalyptic stories and dystopian sci-fi have spread out into every facet of popular culture.

But with the events of 2020, the genre seems to be eating itself from the inside out, particularly as the tropes and clichés of the genre continue to pile up. Is there anywhere else to go?

A perfectly terrible place

Yes, things are messed up everywhere. Few people are immune to the “historic convergence of health, economic, environmental and social emergencies,” as the Associated Press called our “turbulent reality” last week.

But even during good times, popular narratives did not usually depict Colorado as a fun, happy place. Westerns and horror were two of the first genres to capitalize on the state’s isolated, hardscrabble reputation in the 20th century through both novels and films. Harsh winters, brutal landscapes, cabin fever and cannibalism are built into the state’s history — and thus the way people continue to perceive Colorado.

“People who aren’t from here view it as a frontier because it still has this kind of Old West-aura to it,” Vaughn said. “Montana feels remote, but somehow, Colorado is very accessible. You’ve got mountains, prairies and lots of pioneer credibility.”

In fact, the rugged lawlessness and individualism of Westerns, as well as tales like “The Shining,” helped set the stage for today’s post-apocalyptic Colorado narratives, which found their lasting visualization in 1979’s ”Mad Max” and its 1981 sequel, “The Road Warrior.”

But movies such as 1984’s ”Red Dawn” — which imagines Calumet (a former mining town north of Walsenburg) as ground zero for a military invasion by the Soviet Union — also influenced a generation of storytellers.

“I was 11 or 12 when that came out and it was a big favorite of mine,” Vaughn said. “It’s just ridiculous, though. How realistic is an army coming in and trying to occupy the Rocky Mountains? And yet the movie was so iconic that it imprinted on a lot of people.”

Vaughn is a self-described military brat who first came to Colorado when her father was stationed in Colorado Springs. She believes our concentration of military bases plays a big role in the casting of the state. For decades, storytellers have returned to Colorado to visit the command center inside Cheyenne Mountain in Colorado Springs, which has been imagined as both a catalyst for a global nuclear disaster and the last refuge in an irradiated world (see “Dr. Strangelove,” the “Terminator” series, “Jeremiah,” “Interstellar,” etc.).

“I love it because of ‘WarGames’ and ‘Stargate SG-1,’ ” Vaughn said of Cheyenne Mountain’s recurring role in science fiction. “But I got to tour NORAD in high school through my Girl Scouts troop, and again in my current events class, and of course it looks nothing like the underground city you see in most movies. The big blast door, at least, is accurate.”

Some storytellers, such as Wasteland 3 art director Meyers, lean into their artistic license.

“We tend to parody cliché rather than avoiding it entirely, so a few of Colorado’s pop culture connections get a nod and a wink,” he said. “But we didn’t go out of our way to include or exclude any trope based on whether it was well known. If it worked for the story or added to the atmosphere, we put our own twist on it and used it.”

Like Meyers, Wasteland 3 senior concept artist Dan Glasl has lived in Colorado (in the latter’s case, growing up just west of Colorado Springs) and visited most of the iconic areas depicted in the game, from Garden of the Gods to downtown Denver’s Union Station, the Colorado State Capitol and even the former Stapleton Airport.

“We did try to pick locations and landmarks that would be iconic to Coloradans and interesting and visually appealing to outsiders,” Meyers said. “So you can visit places like the Garden of the Gods and the Denver (International) Airport, and see our takes on them, as well as lesser-known places like Peterson Air Force base, and then sillier places like Santa’s Workshop — which is in fact a front for a drug operation.”

Whose apocalypse?

While outsiders may see us a mono-culture, Coloradans know how radically different the conservative Eastern Plains or Western Slope are from ritzy ski-resort towns and liberal Front Range cities. Like Stephen King’s Maine, Colorado is diverse enough in geography and culture to welcome a variety of fictional interpretations.

But that doesn’t mean they’re accurate.

“If you say ‘Colorado’ to someone in the Midwest, they’ll have certain stereotypes about us,” Acevedo said. “And storytellers use that to their advantage. We’re remote enough that they can fill in the blanks and people will buy it.”

Most of these stories don’t reach beyond the history of European settlers as their implied starting points, whereas Colorado’s Native American, Spanish and Mexican history runs much deeper. Until the last century, birth rates in the mountain west were persistently low, Acevedo said, due to the persistently harsh conditions.

That led to constant, life-or-death clashes between indigenous tribes that were, for all intents and purposes, their own versions of the apocalypse. (And that’s not even considering the arrival of European settlers.)

“The Arapaho, Comanche and Utes all had low survival rates,” Acevedo said. “You can’t go to any one part of this land and say, ‘Well, this is the pure, original history of it,’ because everything is folded over everything else. When each previous civilization or society ended, it was truly their apocalypse. You have to look at the history of a people, not just the history of a region.”

For example, few Colorado stories — apocalyptic, western or otherwise — dig back to the Cliff Dwellers of Mesa Verde, whose civilization collapsed near the end of the 13th century due to drought. Despite their essentially Stone Age technology, the Ancestral Puebloans traded with travelers from all over the region and left spectacular marks on their environment.

“The people living in Colorado 1,000 years ago were a lot more aware of what was going on around them than we give them credit for,” Acevedo said. “But with oral history and no written language, it was harder to keep track of things. You could go back however far you want and find an interesting story about some of the early Cro-Magnons coming across the land bridge, and the onset of the Ice Age — that being an appropriately apocalyptic event for them.”

As in reality, not every fictional character is affected the same way by disasters. People with money and privilege tend to see the effects last, insulated as they are from the rusty clockwork of everyday life.

But when a story involves disasters that affect us all — climate change, water shortages, viral pandemics and zombie/alien invasions — there’s opportunity for pointed social commentary and personal reflection, authors say.

“There are 10 million stories about how computing is going to change our lives,” said Paonia-born Paolo Bacigalupi, a bestselling sci-fi author and Hugo award winner, in a 2015 interview. “I think we can have a few more about climate change, drought, water rights, the loss of biodiversity and how we adapt to a changing environment.”

Bacigalupi’s acclaimed sci-fi novel “The Water Knife” imagines a near future in which the Southwest is dramatically remade by clashes over water resources. Bacigalupi was inspired, in part, by watching the fortunes of the rural area he grew up in rise and fall over dwindling water resources.

“I’m constantly looking over my shoulder,” he said shortly before “The Water Knife” was published, “because it seems so glaringly obvious that someone else would be writing about this exact same thing.”

Too real?

Before the title screen for Wasteland 3 appears, players are shown a disclaimer: “Wasteland 3 is a work of fiction. Ideas, dialog (sic) and stories we created early in development have in some cases been mirrored by our current reality. Our goal is to present a game of fictional entertainment, and any correlation to real-world events is purely coincidental.”

The game’s art director, Meyers, declined to answer questions about the reasoning behind the disclaimer, but that’s understandable. Games like Wasteland 3 typically take several years, hundreds of people and millions of dollars to produce. Appearing too topical, or turning off potential players with real-world, political overtones, can limit a game’s all-important appeal and profits.

Legal concerns also trail post-apocalyptic games set in real locations. When the PlayStation 4 exclusive Horizon: Zero Dawn launched to critical acclaim and massive sales in 2017, its publicists pitched The Denver Post on an article exploring their high-tech location scouting, which resulted in stunningly detailed Colorado foliage, weather patterns and simulated geography.

However, game developers would only agree to an interview if trademarked names were not mentioned, given that the studio had apparently not cleared their usage. While The Denver Post declined to write about it at the time, other media outlets ran photos of the game’s bombed-out, overgrown takes on Red Rocks Amphitheatre and what would become Empower Field at Mile High, as well as various natural formations and instantly recognizable statues in downtown Colorado Springs.

That gives Wasteland 3 — which uses elements of parody — some leeway, in the same way that TV’s “South Park” has mocked local celebrities like Jake Jabs, Ron Zappolo and John Elway without getting sued.

“We did have to change a few things here and there, but the references should still be clear to those who know,” Meyers said of Wasteland 3 items like Boors Beer (take a wild guess). “We’re part of the Xbox Game Studios, so there are teams of folks involved in ensuring we have things like proper rights clearances for names.”

Of course, that’s part of the problem in 2020: Bit by bit, it’s beginning to resemble any number of fictional, worst-case scenarios for the collapse of modern society. Competing political factions often label each other as violent cults. People who don’t wear masks have been described as zombies. Police violence and gun-toting civilians are everywhere.

In that way, it’s getting harder for writers and artists of post-apocalyptic stories to stay one step ahead of the news. There’s a creeping feeling that we’ve seen it all before — even if only in our heads. But good writing can be its own virtue, regardless of subject matter, and the post-apocalyptic genre has always stood proudly on the wobbly, irradiated shoulders of others.

“We’re obviously inspired by others and we wouldn’t even be the first post-apocalyptic game set in Colorado, but we have pretty unique sensibilities,” Meyers said of Wasteland 3. “It’s a very serious and dark world, but we put a unique twist on just about everything, and we really enjoy dark humor. You’re going to have brutal ethical decisions to make about life and death, but there’s a lot of humor throughout as well.”

Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?

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from Latest Information https://www.denverpost.com/2020/09/02/apocalypse-here-why-colorado-is-such-a-popular-setting-for-humanitys-downfall/