#i will stop here

[mistbow]

Okay I can’t say this enough but Sorey as the protagonist really embodies the themes and messages of Zestiria so well that it feels like you can’t truly like Zestiria if you don’t like him. He’s the narrative itself, he might as well be called “Tales of Zestiria” the character.

As an anniversary title, Zestiria puts emphasis on inheriting from your legacy and how to evolve and build on top of that legacy respectfully. From this you can see why the developers would draw inspirations from actual history, and since it’s the Japanese history they’re intimately familiar of, they went with it.

Japanese history has always been highly influenced with spirituality, that’s a fact that Zestiria also tries to bring up. We’ve come so far in these modern times, but that’s also thanks to the many eons of traditions that we’ve exactly come a long way. Think about it, the time we get to live is so short compared to how long the world has lived and will live (yet the world is also still young, it still continues to evolve), recorded in history or not. We’re all connected from the past to the future. If we forget about it and don’t show the gratitude, who will?

I’ve talked about “born Shinto, die Buddhist” but that’s how uniquely pluralistic the Japanese society is. It’s not even moving from one to the other, because both are still practiced, even though people in the modern times often think they don’t have time for things like these anymore.

On one hand, Shinto is really all about how sacred this world is, and that includes your life, so please cherish yourself as well. It is exactly because Sorey, as a mere human who really is not all that special in the larger scheme of things (yet he’s still part of this world, the only one he has), has pure appreciation for the world around him, excitement and curiosity for the mysteries yet to unfold, and the eagerness to pass this feeling onto others that he’s in tune with himself and conscious of the way of the 神. Living in harmony. On the other hand, death is an inevitability of human condition, and Sorey, as the 導師 (a word that also specifically means Buddhist monk for funerals in Japan, as mentioned before), has come to regard death as a way of salvation. Death is often seen as something so sad, so unfortunate, but he has learned that perhaps it can be a release for some. Life is beautiful, life is sacred, but life is also suffering. That is just being human.

This ties in nicely with what he wants to do and what he needs to do. There is passion in both. The things he wants to do, it’s because he knows life has so much more to offer out there, and he has plenty of time and energy for all that! The things he needs to do, it’s because he took upon that responsibility himself, and with that he has to accept viewpoints and approaches he might have had a hard time agreeing with before, but thanks to those his horizons widened and again, death is an inevitability, it must happen. However, both of these don’t exist in vacuum, they’re both interlinked. Both of these are what make a human, human. The more you respect life, the more you respect death. The more you respect death, the more you respect life. A balance is needed here, and in the end, he doesn’t tip the scale too far in one direction, yet he doesn’t lose a sense of himself.

Then you have both Shinto and Buddhism teach you on how to conduct your own self, in relationship to your life, mostly. But you’re not alone, there are others, and they’re different, that should be celebrated! Precisely because there are others that you can shine more in your own way. Each of us has a role to fulfill, and that’s fine, let’s just all work together towards a better future for our successors. In both Shinto and Buddhism, the human is originally pure, yet life makes them be afflicted with either kegare or kleshas. There’s no way around this, that’s just another fact of life as a human, and Sorey accepts this, accepts that malevolence will always be there as long as humans exist, but they don’t and won’t get to define humans, ever. Humans are so much more than the malevolence; humans and malevolence might be inseparable, but they’re barely one and the same. Despite everything, everyone deserves their own chances to come to their own answers.

I don’t know I’m just thinking out loud how much I love Sorey as a character (and subsequently Zestiria as a whole). I’ve been saying this since 2015 but in my eyes he’s one of the most well-executed characters Tales has and I will die on this hill. Not saying it is without its hiccups, but Zestiria is really a thematic masterpiece to me. Everything fits together nicely like puzzle pieces; it starts with this one idea, expands, and then converges again to that one idea.

Just look at him. I love him so much I could combust. The legend that has become “hope” to me.

[gyuworm]

)): omg thank you so much for 500(+2). when i started writing on here i fr never thought i would get like . any interactions and i seriously appreciate all of the love i have gotten on my writing here — every comment, reblog, message, like etc means the world to me. i don’t think or feel like i deserve any of the attention i get here )): im genuinely so grateful and happy >:

thank u thank u thank u <33 !!

[kvothes]

so true

[mochasucculent]

Dumb thing that would not leave my brain

[riacte]

not romantic not platonic but a secret third thing [what would happen between earth and the moon if the earth stopped spinning as illustrated by xkcd randall munroe]

[kochei0]

I turn to Ares.

Thanks to Tyler Miles Lockett who allowed me to draw inspiration from his ARES piece for page 2! Look at his etsy page it's SICK

⚔️ If you want to read some queer retelling of arturian legends have a look at my webtoon

[citricacidprince]

Hey hey hey listen to me [snaps my fingers in front of your face] you’re not going to be mean to kids joining Tumblr because TikTok got banned right? You’re not going to make fun of them because they’re ‘cringe’, especially on the supposed ‘cringe is dead’ app, right? You’re not going to go out of your way to just be hostile to children because you don’t like them, right?

“Oh but they deserve it, they’re annoying” cunts were saying that shit about you when you were ‘uwuing’ and ‘smol beaning’ on here in 2015. Kids will always be annoying and your generation, nor will you, ever be an exception to that rule. This app isn’t like an exclusive club, be fucking nice for once.

Edit: Since some people have brought it up in here tags

“Most of the TikTok kids aren’t going here, they’re going to Red Note” That’s fine, in fact, I’m very happy to see the Chinese community there welcoming them with open arms! However, it’s not like we aren’t going to have any kids join this site. I’ve already seen some join before the ban was imminent and most of them are children fandom artists. I stand by what I said, be nice to them.

If they don’t understand the culture here, teach them in a way that isn’t outright rude! Tell them about the lack of an algorithm and the fact they have to follow people for content! Tell them reblogs are more important than likes! Tell them they can leave notes for the OP or for the person they reblogged it from in the tags; that you can treat it like a little diary if you want!

And most of all, tell them that it’s okay, they don’t have to censor themselves here. After years of being on that app they’ve grown used to it, but you have to get it through their head that censoring words like ‘Kill’ ‘Murder’ ‘Rape’ ‘Pedophile’ isn’t helping ANYONE, they’re just making it harder for folks who have those tags blocked to be able to filter them out. Help them kill the cop in their brain and make sure they don’t fall into purity culture. Help them be cringe and free.

[a-a-lost-munchkin]

I Can’t Help But Wonder

Odysseus, who just violently and mercilessly murdered 108 or so men, who claims in the next song that he’s no longer a kind or gentle man, actively listens to Telemachus and kindly and gently responds to everything his son’s expressed.

Telemachus asks, “Am I like you? Am I strong like you? Will you embrace me? Will you love and accept me as yours?” He says, “I’ve felt so alone.”

And Odysseus claims him in a heartbeat, answering, “My son. My boy. My sweetest joy I’ve ever known. I embraced you twenty years ago. I’d do the impossible for you. I’d die for you.” He says, “Seeing the men here today, I can only wonder what you’ve been through for twenty years. My son, you’re already strong. You’re my own. You’re not alone. I’m home.”

And then they fucking embrace.

[bilbotargaryen]

Not to be THAT guy but my solution would have been just to snap the characters who's actors wanted to move on anyway and then begin a new arc with the remaining ones.

Sure you miss out on all the Fan Service of Endgame but it would have been a much cleaner cut.

I would also highly suggest a year or so break to form said new arc. Plan it out a little so that you have a goal to aim towards and not end up all over the place.

but what do I know lol

The thing is that the most interesting and novel invention of the MCU is a universe where billions of people turned into dust and then were physically reconstituted on the spot five years later, in a world that had just barely adapted to their absence.

That is wild. That is intense! That is a series of pathos-ridden emotionally complex doorstoppers waiting to happen. Half the entire world! All dead! And somehow we coped with that! And now we have to cope with them all being back?

A whole street of empty houses--surely not everyone there became ash. Some of them moved to better places, now opened by the mass mortality. Some of them died afterward. Who will live there now? Even if inheritances are reversed by resurrection, surely leases aren't renewed. What the fuck happens to everyone who remarried?

What happens to the children snapped back to a world where their parents didn't survive, or the reverse?

But they had to then hastily smooth over this utterly batshit sci-fi premise and get the world mostly back to normal working order as rapidly as possible, without too much emphasis on how literally every person in existence has been placed in a mason jar by a narcissist and shaken twice in five years.

So they could get on with more superhero whack-blam business, which is customarily done against a background of Normality.

This is, tragically, the most Comics thing these movies have ever done.

It is beyond satire that they did this immediately before and during a worldwide pandemic that everyone was pressured to smooth over and 'return to normal' about within 2 years if not sooner.

[canisbeanz]

Silly doodle bc it was the first thing I thought of when I saw Pomni.

[neurovarious]

[doctormori]

the devil made me do it

[captainjonnitkessler]

You know I used to think "tumblr's absolute refusal to actually engage with the Trolley Problem in favor of insisting that there must be a third, morally pure option that doesn't require them to make a hard decision and anyone who asks them to make a binary choice is just a short-sighted idiot is really fucking annoying, but I guess it's not actually doing any harm".

Anyway that was before we asked tumblr at large to decide between "guy aiding a genocide but making progress elsewhere" and "guy who would actively and enthusiastically participate in a genocide and would also make everything else much, much worse for everyone elsewhere" and the response was that there must be a third, morally pure option that doesn't require them to make a hard decision and that anyone who asks them to make a binary choice is a short-sighted idiot.

[shinybulbasaur]

[greenbergsays]

I'm going to say something that will make sense to the Fandom Olds and will probably be slightly controversial to the younger crowds, but I'm going to say it anyways

TPTB becoming increasingly aware of fandom and fanfiction over the past two-ish decades and thus, the spawning of the expectation of your ship going canon has ruined fandom a little bit

I mean, fandom does a great job of ruining itself a lot of the time, but this idea that a ship isn't "real" or "valid" if it isn't canon

or the idea that one ship is superior to the other because one is canon and the other isn't?

it's absolutely bananas

I grew up in an era of fandom where characters didn't even have to be from the same media source to ship them. I mean, do you know how many BtVS/HP crossover fics I read back in the early 2000s???

That shit was never gonna be canon, but we had fun with it, anyways

Like. Yeah, a lot of fanon speculation is bullshit, but it always has been and always will be. You have hundreds and/or thousands of people riffing off each other, the observations and the meta will always be deeper than what TPTB intended, and that's okay! That's what makes it fun!

I just think more people would be a lot happier in their fandom experiences if they realized that fandom is supposed to be an escape instead of a crusade

[proxycrit]

Day 49– Riju’s Guestroom

(Ambassador Rauru never meant to get attached to the twin chieftains. The one that becomes the Demon King accuses him of forgetting his own history— the other, concerned with her people’s safety, bitterly capitulates to Hyrule’s demands.

Perhaps a kinder peace could have been achieved, if only Rauru chased after Ganondorf like Naborus on that fateful day. It didn’t matter, in the end. Time has ground every decision into indistinguishable dust, until all that’s left is echoes and ghosts.)

(This self indulgent totk rewrite au is called Familiar Familiar! It all starts when Zelda doesn’t get sent back in time, and now has a whole new batch of tragic tragic lore.)

((Wanna support me? Check out my patreon, with my throw away sketches and references! Remember to use web or android folks, apple charges 30 percent tax.))