#i can't even say the story is held together by duct tape because it really seems to be held together by The Vibes and The Feels

[woodchipp]

Alright, so it's about time for me to dissect the whole "Sunny slashes Aubrey with his knife" moment because it's just. Not as clever as the game (and the fandom) considers it to be.

The whole shtick of Faraway Town is that it's more "realistic™" than Sunny's wacky and quirky JRRG dream world, and the first fight you have with Aubrey on Three Days Left is supposed to firmly establish that the player's actions have lasting consequences in the real world, with Sunny's attack causing Aubrey to actually get injured, her and her hooligan friends to freak out and Kel to take away Sunny's knife. I'd be lying if I said that the idea of a game pulling off a surprisingly realistic outcome in such a way doesn't sound really cool on paper!

Of course, the operative word combination here is "on paper." As with every other thing about this game's story, it falls apart the instant you start thinking about it.

1) The game only makes a huge deal out of the immediate aftermath of the fight. Aubrey gets shocked, the Hooligans call attention to the fact that she's bleeding... and then Aubrey rides away on her scooter just fine right after that even though she's supposed to be bleeding. I doubt the game would've focused on this the way it did if the injury Sunny inflicted wasn't that major, which brings me to my next point

2) Aubrey's (supposedly major) injury doesn't have any impact on her or the game's plot in general. She's perfectly able to fight Sunny and Kel in the church some time after that, and her battle sprite isn't even edited to actually show the bandaged wound. Remember these huge, visible gashes some of Undertale's plot-relevant bosses showed after you killed them to demonstrate the consequences of your actions to you? Pepperidge Farm remembers

Additionally, neither Aubrey nor her cronies seem to show any fear or unease about meeting Sunny the next day at Gino's pizza joint if you interact with them there. They're more annoyed than anything. Aubrey herself is... uh, giving Sunny the silent treatment? lmao

Considering that the game also gives you the option to pepperspray the Hooligans, Aubrey included, during their boss fight on Two Days Left, you'd think that Sunny wounding and pepperspraying her would make her hate his guts even more and significantly hinder the group's efforts at reconcilliation. Imagine if said reconcilliation depended on you deliberately choosing to hold back and allowing Sunny to lose to her each time you fought her! Of course, nothing of the sort happens, and Aubrey's reunion with the group on One Day Left happens in any case. Because hey, it's not like your actions in Faraway Town have any lasting consequences, right? :) Speaking of that

3) Aubrey (ostensibly) attacking Sunny with a nail bat, which is noted by the game to be "more dangerous than a steak knife", is not treated with the same degree of realism as Sunny's retaliatory strike. Baseball bats can smash a person's skull if you know where to hit, so why isn't Aubrey's nail bat treated as the one-hit kill it should've been treated as?

4) Finally, Kel confiscates Sunny's knife after the fight and scolds him for carrying around a knife in the first place since "That's dangerous!". Not only does Kel come off as a condescending asshole due to taking away Sunny's only real means of self-defense and telling that knives are dangerous to Sunny as if the latter was an actual infant, he also somehow ignores the aforementioned nail bat, which is, again, more dangerous than Sunny's steak knife.

Man, I fucking love how there's barely any thought put into anything in this game.

[rex101111]

Elden Ring, Armored Core 6, and the terror of Agency.

(spoilers for AC6)

Armored Core 6 being the first game FromSoft released after Elden Ring is actually really freaking interesting, specifically because both games tackle the topic of "Agency" from two completely different perspectives.

In Elden Ring, Agency is (mostly) mechanical, the player can, from the word go, provided they don't die, choose any direction at all and do whatever they want for as long as they want. The game has the largest amount of ending of any Souls game if we take into account all the Lord ending variants, because the player can effect the world so deeply in so many ways. You can reach the end in any number of ways and the ending you get tends to be entirely up to you, and every ending is unique to itself.

In AC6, the agency is more felt in the story. That is to say, you don't have any agency at all. 621, Raven, your player character, doesn't have any sort of autonomy whatsoever. They don't get to choose which side they want to exclusively support on Rubicon, they can't choose to express any opinion about what's going on or what people say about them, they don't even have any bodily autonomy. You're a husk of a human being that can barely manage to breath in and out without external help, your mech is a glorified wheelchair iron lung combo with guns attached, and the most agency you have is with your AC. What weapons to bring, what build to make...but even that is fleeting.

Some people have complained that some bosses are damn near impossible without a certain and specific build. While I disagree, certain builds make those bosses significantly easier, but mechanical skill tends to make up for most shortcomings if you wanna stick to something specific...but there's some truth to it.

Sometimes the game will just hold your head down in the mud and say "do this or die". And unless you want to put in a lot of practice...that's what you'll do. You'll give up what little agency you have because it suddenly became the less important factor. Now you're focused on killing the bastard holding you back and moving on. The mission is what's important.

There are several times in your first playthrough where you get to "choose" which mission you wanna do, the other option vanishing until you do a new game+. One mission really deep into the playthrough, a few missions before the end, gives you the option of choosing which of the game long factions you wanna support. In any other game, this would be story shifting. It would be world altering. Deciding which faction gets the upper hand in a war...and it's an illusion.

In the briefing for eliminating the Redguns, Snail tells you plainly that if you won't do it, they'll just send Rusty in to take care of things. And if you do choose to fight the Vespers, that's exactly what happens. No matter what you did, the Redguns were doomed. The only agency you had was whether the bullet that killed them came out of your gun or someone elses.

Then, at the end of chapter 4, you get captured, and what little agency you had is utterly stripped away from you. You are in a hopeless situation, without access to the mech you put so much time and money into, or the guiding voice of your handler. You get given a hunk of junk barely held together with duct-tape and hope, and told you either use this thing to run...or die.

And then, a few missions later, the game does the cruelest thing it could have possibly done, it gives you a choice. An actual choice, a choice that will matter, a choice that you know will determine how this will all end.

Finally, finally a choice, finally some agency, all the agency in the world.

And when I got to this point? I fucking froze, I just stood there, controller in my clammy hands, and just could not for the life of me decide who to side with, who to betray, who's dreams to make true and who's to shatter. I did make my choice, eventually, because I couldn't just stop here...but I made peace with it. People died, and I expected them to, because the consequences of choice were clear to me right away.

And then...NG+. I do the opposite, I try the alternate missions. I do the other ending...and then the game plays it's most cruel trick. That big choice up there? It didn't matter either.

No matter what ending you picked first, the same people die (minus Ayre because she's special and good and we're all glad she's here), Carla, Chatty, Walter, Rusty. They all die in every ending, some by your hand, some by an enemy's, but still, still they die.

Every time you think you have agency, the game snatches it away. And the final ending just hammers it home as hard as it can. In this route, you become the slave of ALLMIND, you follow its every whim as loyally as you would have with Walter, except maybe you're doing because you saw both previous endings and you hope this time it'll be different. Maybe this time Carla and Chatty and Rusty and Walter won't die, maybe this time the ending won't leave a rotten taste in your mouth.

And then it happens again, they die anyway, again because of and in spite of your choices. And at the end...ALLMIND shows up, and demands you surrender the tiniest bit of agency you have left, your own self.

And, finally, you fight back. Finally, when there is no voice in your ear to tell you otherwise, not Walter or Ayre or Carla or ALLMIND, you make the one decision you still have the power to make.

You fight for your fucking life.

Finally, finally, some agency the game can't and won't take away. Even if all else fails, even if ideals burn and dreams die, you will always have the choice to claw your way out and FIGHT.

After a whole game three times over of not having a real choice in what happens, the taste of Agency is all the sweeter.

[thattimdrakeguy]

What did DC do this time?

There's just so much stuff mixed together that made DC the opposite of what it was just a few years ago, but in the worst way.

I can't handle this stupid sanitized fan-service obsessive DC style they have now. Just doing things, not because it actually makes sense but because they know it'll give them praise because it's easy to do.

Jason lost what made him unique, and now he's just boring. Tom Taylor is horrible at writing characters, and I don't care how many random sentimental moments he adds in, that doesn't make it a good fucking moment just 'cause it's sentimental or a bit funny, it still has to work within that character and moment. Cass--like--gosh I've only read a story and a half, but what they're doing with her just feels so insulting. That whole Batgirls thing has this style of writing and presentation that feels so forced together and held by duct tape, I can't even describe how. Batgirls feels infantilized for children. I just wanna read Cass doing Cass stuff being Cass. Not being another character forced into a box they don’t fit into.

Like I'm using these vague words "contrived, forced" crap like that, but that's just because I'm not going to go in detail when I know so many people like this junk.

The dudes behind the current Damian comic said he's the one that knows how cool Batman is, that he's the punk-rock Robin, and stuff that doesn't represent who he is at all. They said the series was manga inspired--and within the comic itself they have Damian reading manga--which, it's better than Cheese Viking. But--it's so painfully unsubtle that I had second-hand embarrassment.

They're trying to make all these different things something  because the fans want it, but being in an environment where fans want all these things that are so contradictory to what they’re supposed like to begin with, makes things so dull to me.

These characters don't feel like people anymore. They're not authentic now. They don't feel real. They feel like paper cut outs being used as dolls to tell these stories you wouldn't get with the real deal, but it's just play time now.

That whole Wayne Family Adventures just being fanon in a comic, and having everyone obsess over it made me not even look at anything for weeks. It took proper strength to make me not block everyone that even referenced it. I dislike it so much.

What made the characters interesting is just gone. There's nothing to them. They're bland nothing characters. All redesigned in personality to be a bit more generically pleasant.

I can't handle the sanitized vision of everything. It's so fucking dull. The least sanitized thing is the Damian series, but I’m not reading that after the few things I’ve seen. It just plain looked ridiculous. And that scene where Damian hugs Jason just to distract him felt hideously out of character, not so much for Damian--’cause he’s a sneaky shithead that would totally be a fuckhole like that. But Like, seriously? Is Jason going to fall for that? He’s not a moron.

And do I need another scene that gives every Robin one trait each? Is that supposed to make them seem more interesting, ‘cause all it actually does it make them look weak as personalities--which, hmmm, lately they are. So fitting actually.

Tim’s going to be boring as shit again. So, what, am I supposed to look forward to that? Just let the character be the character and stop fucking forcing him into random shit. Do we really need to be told AGAIN that Damian earned being Robin when he’s been Robin for 12 fucking years? Just let shit set for a bit.

I’m not going to care about Tim again until they just let Tim be Tim and stop messing around with him. That’s what made his coming out storyline work. Sure, you can say they were messing with the character, but unintentionally or not he was so gay coded it worked.

I don’t need another “All right let’s just shove Tim over here again, let’s try this for the third fucking time now.”

Obviously Tim isn’t going to be very interesting for quite a while if they don’t think they can actually do it without making more random changes. I don’t care he’s my favorite DC character, he’s been boring for years. Turning him into a pretentious judgmental ass (no, there’s being a teenage boy, and then being a proper ass, if you can’t tell the difference, I don’t want to bother talking to you, ‘cause you’re not what ever you think you are), a smart ass rebel, Batman Jr, the most mentally damaged Bat-Family member that doesn’t murder, someone that actually blew up a building, a future child-murderer, and--well, Bendis didn’t do much with him which was the problem with him.

If they can’t just give Tim his own life again, and write something engaging with that. I am not interested. If it’s not going to be Tim doing Tim stuff as himself, without having to push him in another random direction for the 10th time it feels like, I am over it before it even begins. It is so tedious watching everyone think Tim needs this or that. As if he wasn’t a genuinely popular character at one point in time. They keep acting like he was never successful, when the only stuff that stopped that was their constant changing of his character to the point he felt so unimportant.

I’m not going to pretend like all of Tim’s stories are the best ‘cause he’s my favorite, ‘cause I’d be lying to myself. Most of his shit straight up sucks. That’s the same for most characters in the DC catalogue. 

It’s all just so freaking dull. I just want the characters to be the characters, and in engaging situations.

This isn’t Fast and the freaking Furious, I have no interest in forcing deeper connections between characters and retconning shit, for stuff to “work”. Just for the sake of “family”. Who needs anything interesting when you got generic tropes you’ve seen a million times?

If you can’t write anything interesting about the characters, without randomly changing shit for no reason, or making them so sanitized, I have no interest in your work on the character. Characters with only two character traits to make everyone different is boring.

Do I like the pleasant young man that teases, or the pleasant young man that teases? Or do I like the character they haven’t gotten right in years ‘cause all they do is regress him, get him wrong, or infantilize him?

[benoitblanc]

Your tv show sounds so interesting! Are you thinking you’ll pitch it to any studios once you have a pilot written?

that's the plan right now, but a. it's in such early stages that there's no guarantee it'll make it to me even writing a pilot- the first three seasons have a bit of meat in my outline, but the last one is held together with duct tape and yet can't be axed because i need the time to wrap up the plot. i'm also currently making a really gutsy move with the story arc of the third season that may or may not make the narrative cut- and b. i am a university student who has NO idea how the television industry works, lol. this was a long way of saying tentative yes but we'll see. (even if i do end up getting to pitching, there's no guarantee it would get picked up OR do well...)

[moony-moon-blogs]

Me, Myself and I

The apple never really falls far from the tree, and children always have something that came from their parents. At the end of the day, we are made up of other people — their mannerisms, their behaviours, their beliefs. The way I smile comes from a pretty girl I saw on TV. The way I twirl my pen comes from an old friend who taught me how to do it. I am made up of millions of little moments, all stuck together to make up the person I am today. In Syria, the thing everyone has in common with their parents before them is generational trauma.

Growing up, I was never able to sleep properly at night (a civil war will do that to you) and I was accustomed to loud noises. Coming to Canada, my world finally went quiet. Not completely seeing as I was sharing a bed with my mother, grandmother and brother in my uncle’s basement, but more in the general sense. It was like diving into the water on a hot summer’s day. All the talking and screaming and laughter fades away and you're left completely in a void of calm. The water muffles everything else until you float like one of the barnacles on the reef, completely at peace. Leaving Syria was exactly like that for me. I can't say just how much I miss my home and the opportunity to be surrounded by my culture growing up, but leaving was better than being shot in the head. (Kidding! They kidnap the kids to torture their parents! Most likely I would've been held in a prison because of all my rebellious relatives. You think you have a cool aunt? My aunt commanded and monitored over 500 men in engineering projects in order to help the Syrian resistance standing at 4 foot 11 at most.)

I was told stories from my parents of their time in Syria seeing as I left when I was 8 and I wasn't expected to remember much (Spoiler alert: I did). My father, despite abandoning his family in a foreign country, liked to tell me stories. When I was smaller they were stories of markets and people, of amazing adventures that happened just around the corner, but as I grew up he told me personal stories. Things that happened to him, or around him. He wanted to share his experience growing up at home because I had that taken from me because a megalomaniac decided he needed power. He began telling me of the military takeover and how his father had him duck on the floor out of fear of getting hit with stray bullets.

My mother told me much the same and made it into a game when I was a child. Using duct tape on all the windows because if a bomb hit, we wouldn't want to be hit with stray glass. Telling me to never repeat the propaganda I heard around me, to always say exactly what a teacher told me to in school even if I didn't want to. Back then we had to repeat slogans for the government of Syria, and such patriotism was encouraged in our schools.

Childhood is always filled with games and laughter and fun. Playing hide and seek was fun too until I accidentally hid in the fake wall in my parents’ closet. They hid my father’s shotgun and safe there in case we were hurt and looters tried to break in.

Now I know what you're thinking. Why on earth do I care about all these random events that occurred ages ago? The thing about escaping from a war-torn country is that it never goes away. Your brain is always in survival mode and everything seems like a threat. A sense of hypervigilance and a sensitive fight or flight response is common amongst my family. The mental illness of being in such a state constantly was left ignored because of the stigma and bias in our communities. My father is a very sick man. He refuses to acknowledge his mental illness and has in turn made himself completely miserable. He lives alone in Abu Dhabi and works at nearly 70 years old because he doesn't know how to live. And despite not living in Syria as long as him or experiencing trauma as bad, I have that very same sense of anxious survival.

I’m getting help now and it’s important to acknowledge that I need to mind my own business. The way I see it — there are three businesses in the universe. When I am concerned with how my father treats me, or what actions he takes, I am in his business. When I am concerned over natural disasters or when I’ll die or if someone is out to get me — I am in God’s business. Every time in my life that I have felt upset or anxious or any kind of negative emotion, I have been in someone else’s business. If you are living your life and I am also living it with you, who’s over there in mine? Even if it comes from love or affection, what’s best for others is never my business. I can only know what's best for me. Accepting that reality was incredibly difficult because I have a sense of survivor’s guilt. That if someone else lived instead of me they would've been smarter or a better person and I am robbing them of such an opportunity. That I haven't experienced enough trauma or pain to compare to that of my parents. Who am I to say I have poor mental health because of the decades of normalization of war and trauma? In comparison, I have experienced nothing worth feeling bad over.

I am breaking the cycle, all of this ends with me. Should I have children (as if I don't already have enough body issues) they will never experience the constant hyper fixation and need to succeed in life. Feeling as though if they don't end up as doctors or engineers, they are not worthy of love or affection. My children will be allowed to enjoy life instead of simply fighting to survive every day. I am allowed to be selfish and put myself first because my apples are falling far away from my tree.