#how sweet...... i really should not be admiring the concept of a group suicide

[triglycercule]

i know jk fashion au doesn't have any angst and all and i do not plan on ever making it have angst but whenever i listen to kamihikouki by pepoyo i can ONLY think about the jk!mtt. its gotten to the point that im planning on making a drawing of them based on the song after i finish this horror one because they just remind of it,,,, so,,,,, much,,,,,,,

like they wouldnt DIE and be regretful and all that enough to do a group jumping off roof stuff but like. its the sentiment ok its the SENTIMENT. they wouldn't BUT in an alternate universe,,,,, there would be an alternate triglycercule who would see them doing that (probably because i did make jk fashion au to have angst in said parallel universe)

[mozillogames]

You’ll be Nier to Automata-ically Buying Nier Automata

Nier Automata always managed to surprise me the more and more I played the game. A game that’s built on its side quests and the characters that they involve, it works with interesting concepts of life and consciousness that’ll leave you feeling confused about your own existence, and then you’ll pull off some sweet looking combat combo and all will be good again in the world.

If you have no major experience with the Nier franchise prior to this game, or even the Drakengard series of which Nier is a spin-off from, I’m not sure how as there’s a distinct lack of dragons in Nier, you might be worried that you might be missing some concepts from previous games, but fret not, as far as I can tell, outside a few references here and there, Nier Automata can be played blind and still be an incredibly enjoyable experience.

If you were like me, you may have first witnessed the game when Yoko Taro, the game’s director, stepped out onto the stage of the Square-Enix E3 nightmare of 2016 wearing some bizarre mask that seemed completely alien and just added to the already baffling press conference. Regardless of this, the Platinum Games collaboration had me, and many others, intrigued and as it turns out the game is very impressive and fun.

The story takes place several thousand years in the future in which a mysterious alien race almost wiped out all of mankind with its army of machines. The few remnants of the human race escaped to the moon and then created humanoid androids to fight on the front lines to take back Earth and clear out the machines. Glory to mankind, and all that.

Following 2B, a female android designed for battle in which the B literally stands for ��Battle”, you’ll find yourself interacting with fellow androids of the resistance as well as machines themselves as you explore the land and try to rid the world of the vile machines. Except, not all machines are vile or, at least, evil. There are numerous machines out in the world who are more than friendly and want nothing more than to live a happy life, or as close to one as they can get. It’s these interactions that provide a large bulk of what makes the game so wonderful.

The side quests provided by various machines and androids can range from helping a lost child back to their parent, that’s a machine child and a machine parent, teaching a machine about various aspects of life and the human condition or even a machine that learns the tenements of martial arts, with a big axe. On the flipside, your fellow androids have quests that reflect the length of this war with the machines, as they’re all exhausted and tired, often looking for resources to repair themselves or their friends or even just hoping to learn what happened to their lost comrades.

If you wanted a game that’s main theme was that of heavy existentialism then this is the place to look. While 2B talks about the cycle of life and death, in reality it’s something that affects very few in this world of robots as there’s always another body that their consciousness can be put in to, or another version to take their place and a lot of people start questioning their identity when that starts happening. It’s this crossing of the darkness that is life itself with the lunacy of an amusement park and the unhinged nature to be found with beings that have no true concept of death that makes the game such a delight.

The game itself plays as any sort of action orientated adventure game, with plenty of stylish moves and combos to use when destroying waves and waves of machines. Nier Automata takes a spectacle fighter and mixes it up with constant changes in perspective, turning the game into a side scrolling brawler or even a top down shooter. Incorporating bullet hell mechanics into a third person combat game may sound like pure, unrivaled madness and yet it somehow works and leads to a lot of the bosses working in an oddly unique manner. This all adds up to unique take on an already stable system and it pays off surprisingly well, while the combat is nothing to blow your horn over, it’s by no means a terrible process.

The combos and combat of the game are beautiful pieces of choreography for each weapon and character that had me often just stood in the middle of nowhere admiring 2Bs sweet moves, AND NOTHING ELSE, don’t look at my search history.

Nier Automata manages to break the shackles of its predecessor, which was generally not very good, and struts hard and fast with a stylistic piece of existential panic and confusion. The story progresses into ever darker tones and you’ll see characters you grow to love over the game change in front of you and leave you feeling a little hollow. The story, or at least the pacing, takes a massive dip in the middle of it all as you’ll find yourself repeating certain parts, but there’s at least enough new aspects introduced that the game in its whole doesn’t completely grind to a dull stop.

It’ll keep you surprised as to how far the game is willing to go to tell a story and keep you second guessing yourself, one moment that truly blew me away was when I realized there was a dialogue conversation going on during a loading screen so as to “avoid detection”, or something. Every character and group of characters struggle with humanity as they develop more and more personality whether its simple machines, to the androids of your party and even going so far as the simple companion robots and watching this all take place is where the game really shines.

Some of the few faults I have with the game stem from the difficulty, or the lack of it. If you find yourself taking part in a fair number of side quests, which you should, you’ll find that the cataclysmic events that take place in the story die all too rapidly. When a large boss is shortly disintegrated by your small pod’s gunfire, when you’re really meant to be punching this robot in its dumb giant face, the boss fights no longer seem impactful, but then maybe you’re not meant to spend hours of time just doing almost everything.

Overall, Nier Automata is a wonderful game. It has one of the best sound designs that I’ve seen in some time with three different versions of each track that all cut into one another at just the right moment to really add to those heavy hitting quests. The side quests seem to be where a large portion of the game’s enjoyment comes from, just witnessing the strange characters in this world. That’s not to say that the main story isn’t interesting, but watching a machine commit suicide because it realized about the futility of life is something that’ll haunt me for some time. It’s a great game.

[carousels-on-fire]

I’ve been thinking back on my Emilie Autumn phase. It wasn’t just a band I liked or a thing I listened to. It was an all-consuming obsession, something that ate a rather large chunk of my life. I’ve mostly moved on, but lately I’ve been listening to her again. Thinking back on my “time the asylum” so to speak. Especially in light of my own mental hardships as of late. I understand her and myself far better than I used to.  More below the cut:

I was a die hard Emilie Autumn fan. That’s putting it lightly. From the time I was 17 or 18 until I was 23, I worshipped the ground she walked on, hung on her every word, devoted myself to her for years. And I didn’t even realize it was happening. I embraced it wholeheartedly. I was a Plague Rat, Muffin. Inmate. I avidly followed her social media, sometimes sitting and waiting for updates. I followed all her ‘Bloody Crumpets’ and their own fanclubs. I was obsessed with everything she was obsessed with. Anyone who knew me in 2009 could tell you how I lived and breathed for her every word. I learned everything I could about the victorian era, about mental illnesses. It was a cult like, religious, fanatical obsession. It was actually starting to scare my friends and I just didn’t care. Every bit of my art was about her, all I listened to was her. Her spoken word poetry, her music, her silly outtakes. I copied her style, I cut heart shaped holes in all my shirt, sewed many many pairs of bloomers. Dressed like her for the first year or two of college. I quoted her words, sang her songs, memorized passages from her book. But eventually I found out she wasn’t a very nice person. And not a very truthful one either. I first had my suspicions that she was lying when I told my aunt about the part in her book where she befriended a girl with an eating disorder who later went into electroshock therapy. Apparently they haven’t done electroshock therapy on anyone since the 80s. It’s been outlawed. My aunt would know because she had electroshock therapy back in the 60s or 70s. She has bi-polar disorder. Emilie wasn’t hospitalized until about 2006. But I buried that, convinced that there must have been some mistake. She must be wrong. Then later, through obsessive watching of her forum and twitter I saw Emilie being mean to people. Yelling at fans who jokingly asked her for tickets. Yelling at fans who questioned her in any way. Then I noticed the suspiciously long list of musicians and collaborators who’d been burned by her. It was a quietly heart-breaking experience. I tried to explain away her behavior and apologize for her because I needed her, and I couldn’t let that fantasy and this world that she’d invented out of my grasp. It was the cocoon that protected me from the world. My corset really was my armor. I pretended for a long time. I pretended I didn’t see things, that she didn’t really mean certain things she said. I think I found her at a very difficult point in my life. I was uprooted from my original hometown, a few years beforehand. Uprooted from the first real, kind, non-abusive group of friends I had to move thousands of miles away to a completely different area with its own confusing, conservative, deeply religious culture. And then, as things happen, I found new people, people like me, something that hadn’t been usual in my hometown of 2200. I made another large group of friends, some of home I’m still friends with now. Then, a year later I was uprooted again, moved a half hour away, put back in a smaller high school, with people who didn’t like me. You aren’t easily different in a small town. I told myself I took pride in it, but it’s still emotionally exhausting. Even if I made friends there too. It was the start of the fractured stability that’s plagued me since. Like most people I took solace in my music. But I treated the bands I listened to like idols, the worlds of their music like my world. I tried to be like them because they were everything I wanted to be. Creative, flamboyant, fiercely individualistic, and loud enough to tell the whole world off. But then, when I was about to graduate high school I discovered a violinist called Emilie Autumn who was unlike everyone else. She was singing about some fucked up shit, but in pink and white instead of black. Red and white and covered in glitter and blood. A female rockstar who defied any attempt at categorization. She had a persona, a cult of personality, and I was just the type of obsessive, lonely, damaged person to be the ideal rube for her snake oil sales. Her books and remixes and overpriced limited edition t-shirts that I can’t get $15 for now on ebay. I wanted all of it because I wanted to be her. I desperately wanted to be part of her Asylum of angry girls, broken down by the people in their lives but willing to fight back against them. She made her rage and pain and getting revenge for it not only heroic but glamorous. She was sarcastic and witty, and to my teenage sensibilities very very original. Her singing voice wasn’t always the best, but her screeches and sarcastic spoken word always seemed so true to me. The emotion so very very understandable. I clung to her words and her characters even more tightly when I graduated high school. After the assumed at the time ‘suicide attempt’ of my mother, (later discovered to be her carelessly taking pills with alcohol) I stayed with my aunt for two weeks and then left for college. I went from a very strict, very structured, ‘ask before you do anything’ home life, to being unceremoniously left at the curb at my new dorm to start a life where I could do anything and I had no idea what to do. I was also newly figuring out my sexuality in a time of life when most of my peers had been dating and breaking up for years. These were the prime years of my obsession. I coped with the stress and the abuse and the constant anxiety of my new surroundings by burying myself as deeply in The Asylum as I possibly could. Ironic now.  I think back to how my friends were concerned with me ‘losing myself’ and I understand now. I held too tightly to the character of Emilie Autumn to see it then. But it’s strange now, years later, to see it in hindsight. To realize that I basically lost my true personality and adopted someone else’s for years to deal with the real world. Hers was the armor I wrapped around myself. The uncharted, fantastic missteps of my early life, to me going to college to study costume design to where I am now, were all set along these warped tracks. I look at her now and it all seems so obvious. The bait and trap.  I think back to when I met her. I haven’t told anyone this yet, because at the time I still wanted to preserve the illusion. But she actually snapped at her tour manager and me, when I gave her the striped blood dripping tea pot I painted. (I actually almost died painting it with enamel, but that’s a story for another time!) She suggested she keep it on stage, and then, when I said she could do whatever she wanted with it, she decided it was entirely too fragile. She also seemed to be slightly impatient for me to finish telling her how much I admired her. I kept that part back for a long time. That was in 2012. I think it was over at that point.  I’ve always considered myself to be a very self aware person. I’m thinking constantly just so I can catch myself when I slip up. But I can’t, not really. I’m just as prone to horrible mistakes and being led on, and buying into other people’s lies as anyone else. I never realized that I was coping with a difficult life. I never considered it difficult until my therapists put all my little anecdotes together in a coherent timeline for me and I realized what I’d been doing to survive. I’m slowly, very slowly beginning to figure out who I am as a person. Now, at the old age of 26. And as much as I can completely get caught up in the lives and details of a person when I’m stressed or lost (*cough*Davey Havok*cough*) I know I’m doing it now. I know that when I fall down the rabbit hole of a fandom or concept or person, it’s me coping. I’m trying very hard to be genuine about the things I like. About not pretending to like things because my friends do and I want to relate to them. I am my own person now, I worked hard and fought my own demons to become that person, I’m still becoming that person. I’m still years off from being a ‘completed work’ but it’s closer now. Its truer.  But sometimes, only sometimes, I’ll make her recipes for funeral biscuits, and put on her classical violin music. Sometimes I’ll get out the china tea pot, or draw little skulls on said biscuits in frosting. It wasn’t all pretense, the little bits and pieces of her that I liked were genuine. I’ll read her book, because ironically, I understand her songs about suicide much better now then I did as a young fan. My dysthymia, as it’s been diagnosed didn’t take shape until the middle of college. After my first and only big break up. And its been spiraling since.  I do think that much of her work was real. Once you’ve been suicidal, you know what the ‘real thing’ looks like. I understand the pain and frustration of the people around you not seeing that you’re in pain and not caring enough to try and help you. Even though logically, you know they can’t. And I do genuinely love the victorian era. But I’m making it my mission, should I ever become any amount of famous for my work that I’ll be kind. That I’ll tell people what’s persona and what’s real, if there is to be a persona at all. I’ve outgrown her. She was the cocoon that helped protect me, but it was poison too. My thanks is a mixed thing. I think though, I’m going to start selling off my collection. I hope some new fan will love these things like I used to, but I pray, they have a sense of themselves. That they don’t get sucked in entirely. That they can step back and realize that she is a deeply flawed human being with a pretty face and very sweet lies. But some of what she says is true. I can’t separate myself from who she was to me. A part of me will always be nostalgic for the magic of living in a fairy tale, even if that fairy tale has striped wallpaper and rats running along the walls. “You can take the girl out of the asylum, but you can’t take the asylum out of the girl.” You never really leave.