#it only exists on tv. just like all of the monstrous wars we used it as an excuse to start!

[micamicster]

it only took 12 interviews i guess for somebody to bring up 9/11 to me

[blackknightgargiemoviephile]

How To Train Your Dragon Saga

In the beginning, I was never really interested in watching the movie and never even bothered to watch the trailer, since we thought it was one of those cliche failure movies (and Dreamworks hasn't really had a very good track record of good animated movies at the time), but after being bombarded with tons of Toothcup fanfics and fanarts and after very high recommendations by my friend Jello13 from dA, I finally got down to watching the movie. Boy, was I glad I took my friend's recommendation to watch this movie, and the subsequent sequels after that, because after 3, 4 friggin' times, I still fucking LOVE this movie!!!

Here's my findings of the saga:

Apparently this movie was based on a children's novel written by Cressida Cowell which focuses on the 2nd book in a 10-volume book franchise. There are certain deviations between the real Hiccup and Toothless and the storyline as a whole, but after reading the summary of the original story, I think I like the movie version better. In fact even the writer said so in her blog that she likes the deviation as the movie captured the core essence of her story and it was amazing to see her story to be interpreted this way.

The storyline and the pacing is very good, and the sarcastic humour and slight optimism of Hiccup despite people thinking he's anything BUT a Viking is very intriguing. I love his catchphrases like "I'm way too muscular for their tastes. They wouldn't know what to do with all...this" and "Thank you for summing that up" and his famous line "You just gestured to ALL of me!" is just some of the LOL-worthy lines the talented Jay Baruchel who voices Hiccup does.

I was totally shocked to find out that Gerard Butler plays the role of Stoick, Hiccup's old man! I have never expect him, who is known for his brawniness and action-packed persona, made famous in the movie 300, would actually play a voice-over for a cartoon character. After finding out, spotting his voice and hearing the familiarity was much, much easier.

And of course, the creme de la creme of the entire movie: TOOTHLESS!! He is just so, so, so, soooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo uber cuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuute~~~~!!!!! When I read about him in fanfics and caught glimpses of him through fanarts, I was thinking, "Hey, this dragon is quite cute." Now amplify that feeling by a gajillion times more. That's how I feel about Toothless. He started off a little vicious with his snake-like slit for eyes, trying to act strong and tough like the dragon he was, but the moment he let his guard down a little, he got these pair of big doe eyes that is just so MOE and SQUEE-worthy. And of course I finally learn how he got his namesake: with retractable teeth that he can materialize at will

My most favourite scene of the entire movie would be this scene where Toothless finally was at peace with Hiccup and allowed him to touch him. The way Toothless tried to copy his drawing, and then growled whenever Hiccup stepped on his drawing, then Hiccup moved to avoid the lines in tune with the music until finally they were so close they were allowed to touch was just so AWW-worthy. And the music score was perfect too, especially the title of that score: Forbidden Friendship. Isn't that just sweet?

The part where Hiccup and Toothless slowly develop that bond while trying to get Toothless back on his flight feet again was also very interesting as they slowly worked together and forget each other's differences to reach a common goal, while at the same time trying to learn about each other, and Hiccup using that knowledge to good use (the eel and the scratching of the neck part was really epic), making him the life of the team, much to his crush, Astrid's chagrin.

I also love the part where Hiccup tries to convince everyone during the final exam of killing a dragon that dragons are not what they think they are, and tried to pacify the Monstrous Nightmare only to be interrupted by Stoick and having Toothless coming to the rescue (damsel in distress much, Hiccup? XD) and revealed their relationship. It felt really sad and my heart just broke when Hiccup shouted Toothless for him not to kill Stoick and Toothless looked at him with his doe eyes, then Hiccup tries in vain to stop everyone from hurting Toothless, and that argument which led to his disowning, and earning back his role as a son by proving his worth and Toothless' reputation, though a cost of his leg. I was wondering where would be the scene where he looses his leg, since I read that he had a prosthetic in fanfics, but turns out it happened in the near end of the movie, and literally mirrored Toothless' missing left tail fin.

Ending is a bit cliche where he gets the girl, he is lauded as a war hero and gained the respect of everyone including his father, the dragons made peace with humans and all that, but still it was a very heartwarming cliche scene. One that leaves a smile on your face and a sigh of contentment in your heart.

Speaking of Astrid, not really sure it's because of that yaoi in me, but I never really saw Astrid as a suitable pairing for Hiccup. I know, I'm not usually one for bestiality, but seriously, can't you just FEEL the love between Hiccup and Toothless to the point where you can consider them as lovers? Toothcup (Toothless/Hiccup) pairings are in the rage right now since the movie has been uber popularize, and you cannot deny that sort of relationship exist, right?

This one, personally I feel, is almost as par as the first one. Not better, not worse, but more or less par. Hiccup and Astrid are still together, but the Toothcup shipper in me just don't feel like they match somehow. Moreso, suddenly out of the blue, Snotlout and Fishlegs were heads over heels with Ruffnut, which I ABSOLUTELY have NO CHEMISTRY feel whatsoever! Even after I've watched their TV series that led to the second movie, I STILL don't get the vibe or the chemistry between those three people. It's like "Wait, what?" moment.

Although that moment when Ruffnut was just totally thirsty for Eret was absolutely hilarious though. I couldn't help laughing and cringing at the same time.

When the moment Hiccup's mom Valka showed up, I was not expecting her to be so... skinny. Stoick said that he made helmets out of Hiccup's mom's breast plate, and it seemed pretty big, but looking at her, she didn't look like someone who was close to being a big bosom woman, but what is continuity anyways? LOL Though Hiccup definitely has inherited her knack for dragons. Guess it's in the blood after all.

I teared up a little when Stoick died, and I felt so bad that their bromance was threatened by this, but thankfully Hiccup still loves Toothless and is willing to forgive him and try to bring him back to his side. Goes to show how deep their bond is, and Toothless ended up becoming the Alpha Dragon was one of the most epic moments in the whole movie.

It also kinda interesting that Hiccup has somehow became pretty hot in this movie. Was pretty surprised at how he transformed from the awkward tiny little runt of a boy to a strapping man LOL

Plot feels similar to the 2nd one, but the ending was so so SO bittersweet. A fitting ending, but sweet yet painful for me to watch.

My heart broke at the scene wen Hiccup was complaining about Toothless being in love n said "Am I not enough?" and I was like internally screaming "YES! U ARE ENOUGH!! U TWO ARE ENOUGH!! FUCK THAT LIGHT FURY!!"

Throughout the courtship scene btwn Toothless and the Light Fury i was like internally screaming "NO, SHE'S A TRAP! SHE'S A FUCKING TRAP! HICCUP, WHY ARE YOU OKAY WITH THIS?! I'M NOT HAPPY WITH THIS! I AM NOT OKAY WITH THIS!!"

I cried like a fucking baby, especially at the end of the movie. It was like I knew it was happening, that they were gonna break up, but I was in denial, then when Toothless hugged Hiccup goodbye, I lost it, waterworks all over. In fact, waterworks all the way to the end at their final reunion ugly-cried like a fucking baby.

It did ended perfectly; perfectly bittersweet and perfectly heartbreaking and I was like "This is it. It's official. It's over. My Toothcup ship has fucking sank!!"

Fuck you, DreamWorks, you have killed my bromance!! Gahh!! I hate and love this movie at the same time!

Overall rating:

HTTYD: 9/10

HTTYD2: 7.5/10

HTTYD: 9/10

[anncanta]

‘Dracula’ and ‘Doctor Who’. Blood is testimony

Stephen Moffat is often accused of using similar plots, repeating the same plot lines, and returning to a number of his favorite ideas.

Moffat really develops a certain set of specific, quite recognizable topics, and in his different scripts, he one way or another tells similar stories.

But with his recurring motives and ideas, as, indeed, with another stuff, not everything is so simple.

First, the outstanding authors are most often accompanied by craving for certain narratives and archetypal forms, as well as cross-cutting themes. Some of this authors create ‘frames’ for these ideas in the form of multivolume novels or novel cycles, others devote wreaths of sonnets and collections of stories to their favorite topic, and others choose whole genres for reflection on issues that are important to them. I think that none of those reading this article will have any difficulties with examples.

Secondly, there are not so many really interesting stories.

And thirdly, repetitions can be different. Like any feature, it can exist on its own, or it can – if the author has a large-scale talent – become another way to tell a story like no one else do.

In Stephen Moffat's case, we are dealing with a very unique situation where the author's stories are literally read through one another.

I will make a separate reservation: I am not talking about postmodern ‘intertextuality’ – a vile definition for references and quotations that have existed in literature since the emergence of storytelling and are news only for postmodernists themselves – but about a peculiar use of certain plots and motives.

If you want, you can find a huge number of such things in Moffat's scripts. The viewers who have been closely following his work since the period when he became the showrunner of Doctor Who will immediately name a dozen of them. But I would like to dwell on one example – the newest one for today.

When the TV series Dracula by Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss was released on BBC and Netflix in 2020, some viewers noted the similarity of its style, and in some places, the plot outline, with Doctor Who, and directly called the main character of the film, Agatha Van Helsing, the female version of the Doctor.

The first is obvious, and the second is quite understandable in light of the two years earlier release (absolutely disastrous, in my opinion) of the eleventh and twelfth seasons of Doctor Who.

But the beauty of both Moffat's game and the whole story is that there`s not Agatha who is the Doctor here.

Yes, by all appearances, it is this brave, interested in science, well acquainted with evil, fighting against it and even – partly – traveling through time, the heroine who seems most suitable for the role of the Doctor in the new setting. There was a calculation for this: Moffat, during his time as the showrunner of the series, who, it seems, tried all the plot possibilities except this one, and who left on the eve of the epochal transformation of the character, it would seem, had to offer the audience his version of the female Doctor. Well, he did: on the surface. As if he said: ‘Here is a heroine with such qualities. This is how you imagine her, isn`t it? Well, get it.’

And inside this shell, as inside the unfortunate Jonathan Harker (Moffat, as a true Briton, uses materialized metaphors and often literally shows what he means), there is another story.

In order to understand it, you need to take a close look at Dracula and – at Doctor Who written by Moffat.

With Dracula everything is simple. As soon as you start looking for the main character of this film who: a) lives for several centuries; b) collects human stories; c) travels in time; d) always has one or more people next to him – you instantly find him. And if you've watched an entire episode and a half and still don't understand anything, in the middle of the second one you will hear a direct quote.

'The sophistication of a gentleman, Agatha, is always a veneer.'

'Even a gentleman like Mr. Balaur?'

'Mr. Who?'

But that's just one detail.

A deeper level opens if you try to read Dracula through Doctor Who itself.

In the Christmas special Twice upon a time, which ends the last season, written by Stephen Moffat, the plot is centered on the Doctor's encounter with strange creatures, as if made of glass, which are living vaults of memory. The episode itself is full of layered ideas and references. But for us now only one dimension is important.

At the very end of the special, the Doctor addresses the glass creatures with an ardent speech – one of those that he loves so much.

‘You're just memories, held in glass. Do you know how many of you I could fill? I would shatter you. My testimony would shatter all of you. A life this long, do you understand what it is? It's a battlefield. And it's empty. Because everyone else has fallen.’

Does this remind you of anything?

It seems to me that this is a literal description of what is happening with Dracula.

What he says throughout the film, and what Agatha did not understand even at the end, because in order to understand this, you had to live his life.

And in order to understand this whole context, you need to understand that the Doctor was never a good guy. He always said this to everyone but no one believed him.

No one believed the stories of the horror before which entire civilizations tremble, about a creature that destroyed its entire species in order to stop the most destructive war in history, about the person who does not need weapons so that the captains of warships flocked from the most distant corners of the Universe, after listening to him for a couple of minutes, ran away without looking back.

The Doctor was never a good guy, but just as important, he always knew it. For the Doctor of Russell T. Davis, this position looks like a fact with which neither the character himself nor the people around him and aliens are very inclined to interact. I guess it’s a matter of Davis’ very outlook on the story and perhaps his own worldview.

But the Doctor of Moffat is a hero who lives with this knowledge and with the impossibility of passing this knowledge on to others.

Because the Doctor is always the one they are waiting for, the one they go to for advice, the one with whom they travel around the Universe, the one who opens the door to the magical world, the one they hope for.

He is never the one who sits on the roof of the TARDIS, surrounded by the loneliness of the starry sky. Not someone who lives longer than any human being, not someone who knows what it means to make monstrous decisions in circumstances that most of us cannot imagine.

And the one in whom there is so much testimony that it is able to break the vessel that they will try to fill with.

In Dracula, all these details, motives, and meanings are repeated sequentially.

The most obvious is ‘blood is testimony’. This is not self-quotation, as it might seem, but a literal proposal of the author to look in a certain direction.

The blood in Dracula is not only memory. It's also a way to watch. And to see a bright and diverse world, which otherwise would have become boring long ago.

In the fifth season of Doctor Who, there is a moment when Eleventh says to Amy Pond, ‘You don't understand. I have the whole Universe in my backyard. I'm used to it. I don’t notice it. But when you appear, I look with your eyes. And it becomes a miracle again.’*

In this sense, the ‘brides’ and everyone that Dracula ate are in some way his companions. If you remember what a great sense of guilt towards most of his companions the Doctor felt and how some of them ended up, the comparison turns out to be not so poor.

Dracula, like the Doctor, has companions with whom he has a very special relationship that he cannot explain to himself. He travels through time and space, discovering one day that all human experience is stored and cataloged somewhere in his head, and there is nothing new.

And – as is often the case in Moffat's stories – here one character completes and harmoniously implements a theme started by another.

If the Doctor, being who he is, and fully aware of this, tormented by endless insatiable loneliness and memories of life as an empty battlefield, invariably continues the path that seems to him more and more meaningless, then Dracula decided to end the life like that.

And all this, the whole story, is organized as a transition, as a movement forward and backward in time, which unites and brings to life what is dissolved, inherent, basically exists, and ‘spilled’ in blood. The blood here is also the same as the space in the Doctor Who, it is the Universe, which belongs to everyone and flows inside everyone, and inside which everyone exists, and which determines everyone. In order for blood to become an individuality, it takes time, a specific moment at which each specific individuality comes to the surface. So, for example, the return of Agatha takes place. There must be something she wants to come back for. Like the TARDIS, blood is always within us and speaks through us. In the case of Dracula and Agatha, this is their bond, their love for each other. Even if this love is unaware, – sometimes the TARDIS acts on her own and travels wherever she wants, forcing the Doctor and his companions to act in the circumstances she suggests.

And all this, this whole context, the whole story, with all its dimensions and additional meanings, became possible only due to the fact that Stephen Moffat, the author of both series, is not afraid to describe ambiguous heroes, to reflect out loud on their adventures, and – sometimes – to repeat.

* The words of Eleventh quoted from memory.

[gffa]

spectral-musette replied to your post: Scattered Star Wars Thoughts: - One of the things...

     Hm, I did really enjoy Alliances, but at this point I feel like Treason might just be sticking with me more (I apparently really love Ar'alani???). I can definitely see your points about Alliances: my big complaint was that it didn’t have enough Anakin/Padme romance. I took it for Anakin being task-oriented, but now that you mention it, he probably SHOULD’ve been thinking about Obi-Wan more (I guess I was doing that enough for everyone?).       (continue re: Alliances) - But I didn’t take the Padme POV stuff about Duja to mean that she was particularly closer to her than any of the other handmaidens, just that their friendship was prominent in her mind due to the circumstances.

shadowsong26x  replied to your post: Scattered Star Wars Thoughts: - One of the things...

      i was talking about this a while back–i overall liked alliances, but it did kind of fall flat for me, too; in part for the characterization issues you mention (though i have more issues with vader than anakin/padme, but i can def. see where you’re coming from); but also bc someone pointed out to me that thrawn is kind of a sherlock holmes expy? and in alliances there’s no real watson analogue, so that dynamic is missing. and holmes sans watson can be insufferable. (cont)       whereas in treason, while it’s not quite the same as in other books, he has *way* more compatible people to bounce off of, so…idk, that’s part of it for me at least?

Oh, no, I apologize for this in advance.  XD  I just really have a lot of feelings about these books!  I loved that first Thrawn book so much, even knowing that Zahn had a tendency to write his OC as the most special ever, I was feeling pretty charitable towards the character because he was obviously going to lose on Rebels and I loved Eli in the book, and it was a nicely balanced book re: everything that frustrated me about Alliances. The thing that got me about Alliances is that I don’t think it achieved a very good balance about how to use characters like Anakin and Padme.  When Zahn writes more minor characters (like his OCs or like Arihnda Pryce) it works out because we’re not coming in with those characters having a huge established story already in place.  But Anakin and Padme have these connections that should have been coming up--this was set not that long before ROTS, right?  Why isn’t he thinking more about Ahsoka?  Why does he literally only even think about Obi-Wan like twice in the entire story?  I can buy that Padme’s thoughts were focused on Duja because she just died, but the way none of the other handmaidens ever seemed to be part of that tapestry just didn’t fit with how Padme handmaidens have always been a group.  Even Sabe’s relationship with Padme is littered with the other handmaidens being in and around them! And the final insult came when the book tried to kind of imply that it was Thrawn who got Padme to start thinking about how the Republic was maybe actually kind of terrible, which was mean to be a lead-up into her line in ROTS, “What if the democracy we thought we were serving no longer exists and the Republic has become the very evil we've been fighting to destroy?”  Thrawn’s supposed to be absolute shit at politics, that was well established in Thrawn (which takes place many years after this one!) but suddenly he’s canny enough during the Clone Wars to:  "Maybe what really troubled here was his suggestion that the Republic and Separatists all played by those same rules." In theory, it’s a neat connection to the events of the movie, something I wanted more of!  Connection to the rest of the established GFFA and the events in it!  But it gave me this really sour taste of how Padme’s story, her entire arc, as a politician who has an arc across the entirety of the TV show that’s at least somewhat hers, is actually inspired by Thrawn instead.  Thrawn, who’s supposed to be shit at politics. Add that together with how Zahn built up that Padme was a character who was about diplomacy, about talking to resolve issues, and in the end her big climactic scene was still shooting a droid with her blaster. Add all that together with how lackluster Anakin felt to me and I just was disappointed with Alliances.  I think @shadowsong26x really put it into clarity for me with those comments (THANK YOU FOR HITTING THAT NAIL ON THE HEAD), that Thrawn works for me when he’s the Sherlock in a Holmes & Watson dynamic, but then that follows that you just cannot put ANAKIN SKYWALKER into the Watson role because that downplays the competency of his character. Like, yes, look, I make fun of Anakin and point out all the ways in which he is a dumbass (largely because this helps me forgive him for all the monstrous shit he’s done, but also because it endears him to me and makes him so relatable to me) but when you write a serious novel and have Thrawn explaining electronic stuff to Anakin Skywalker?  No, get out of here with that.  Not unless Anakin is either geeking out on exactly the same level (NO, MAKE HIM GEEKIER BECAUSE HE IS!!!) or is like, “Yes, we all spent a semester in comm tech class, I get how it works just from looking at it.” or Zahn went even harder on the authority kink.  Because I do not believe, for one single second, that Thrawn knows more about machines than ANAKIN SKYWALKER. Thrawn works for me with Eli, because there’s a genuine sense of exasperation there, a genuine and justified sense of “what did you just fucking do?” when Thrawn gets him assigned to the Blood Crow, there’s an organic sense of growing affection between them, and Eli works as someone who is good with his own thing, but isn’t THE CENTRAL FIGURE OF THE SKYWALKER SAGA AND ONE OF THE MOST POWERFUL JEDI EVER.  I can see Eli being the Watson in that dynamic! I liked the hints of something really delightful going on there--that Anakin and Thrawn clashed with each other, that Anakin’s flying by the seat of his pants kind of style clashes with Thrawn’s need to control an entire situation to get the outcome he desires, that there were moments of hilarity when they snarked at each other (”Do you make a habit of getting captured?”  “NO!!!” was hilarious) or when Anakin’s authority kink was on display, but there wasn’t enough of that to balance out the other problems I had with the novel. (As a side note this is why I’m hoping that Zahn isn’t the one to write “what happened after Rebels with Ezra and Thrawn?” story, because I’m not sure I trust him to not try to put Ezra in the Watson role, when I don’t think that would suit his character.) Whereas, in Treason, Thrawn is being put in situations where the people he’s pinging off him can take more of a second fiddle role, where I can take enjoyment out of Thrawn outplaying them (which, yes, Anakin is not a great political player, but he has enough sheer raw power and enough tactical brilliance and mechanical brilliance that I need that to be respected).  That’s where Zahn’s Thrawn works best for me and why, when I went back to reread the first book, it still really worked for me even after I was crabby about Alliances.

[the-desolated-quill]

Okay, Enough With The Live Action/CGI Hybrids - Quill’s Scribbles

So the trailer for the upcoming Sonic The Hedgehog movie came out...

Do I really need to say it? Everyone and their mums have already said it. Hell, you’re probably saying it right now.

Sigh. Okay. Fuck it. I’ll say it.

Who the fuck thought this was a good idea?!?!

The trailer itself is shockingly bad. It looks bland and generic with almost nothing in common with the games. The jokes are forced and painfully unfunny (why are the people in the airport more concerned that the ‘child’ in the bag isn’t James Marsden’s rather than that there’s a fucking child in the bag in the first place?!), Jim Carrey is being his usual obnoxious self and is plain and simply a terrible choice for Doctor Eggman (isn’t the whole point of Doctor Eggman that he’s supposed to, you know, look like an egg?), and the soundtrack is utterly cringeworthy (Gangsta’s Paradise? Really?!?!). But that all pales in comparison to by far and away the biggest problem with the trailer. And I think you can all guess what that is. 

Yes I’m of course referring to the noticeable absence of Team Chaotix. An artistic decision so despicable, it’s practically a hate crime. For shame! Everyone knows that Charmy Bee is the best character in the franchise and yet they don’t have the guts to put him in the movie! Fucking philistines!

...

Oh yeah, and Sonic the Hedgehog looks like a monstrous abomination concocted from the fever dreams of Doctor Frankenstein and Walt Disney.

It’s hard to know where to start when talking about just how grotesque and disgusting this CGI Sonic is. He looks like what your computer would produce if it caught pneumonia. What I especially don’t understand is why they veered away so heavily from the original, iconic design. I mean...

I don’t know about you, but I’d honestly have no problem if the movie just kept this look from the games. Hell, I think even giving him realistic fur would be pushing it. This is perfectly fine. I could totally see this design working in a movie. Instead we get the secret love child of Gollum and Papa Smurf.

He just looks so weird with human proportions. The leg muscles, the two eyes, the human looking teeth. Apparently the filmmakers wanted this Sonic to look as realistic as possible. Because when I pay to see a movie about an anthropomorphic blue hedgehog that can run at supersonic speeds, that’s my first thought. ‘Is it realistic?’

... Jesus Christ.

But of course the main problem with this live action Sonic movie is that it exists in the first place. When it was first announced, I assumed in my naivety that it would be an animated movie. Because that would make sense, right? There have been movie and TV adaptations before and they were all animated. Imagine a big budget computer animated Sonic movie. That would be really cool. But it was not to be. In Hollywood’s infinite wisdom, they decided to go the live action route because... Actually why did they choose to go the live action route? Well that’s what I hope to address in this very Scribble.

Live action adaptations and remakes are nothing new of course. Disney had tried it a few times in the past with movies like 101 Dalmations, there have been other live action versions of animated or illustrated characters such as the Grinch and the Cat In The Hat, Garfield, the Smurfs and Alvin and the Chipmunks, and there was of course the infamous Super Mario Bros movie, which answered the question of what it would be like if the Mushroom Kingdom took place in the same universe as Judge Dredd. But this is the first time live action/CGI hybrids have been huge money spinners. Disney struck gold back in 2010 when Tim Burton’s version of Alice In Wonderland made a billion dollars at the box office and now the company is mining through their back catalogue of Disney classics and giving all their movies the live action treatment. Initially I was okay with this because in the case of Alice In Wonderland and Maleficent they were at least trying to reinterpret the original films and put a new spin on them, but now they just seem to be copying the movies verbatim. Making live action remakes just for the sake of making live action remakes.

Now other studios are trying their hand at, the most notable being Pokemon: Detective Pikachu. Here’s a picture of the original Pikachu:

Cute, right?

Now here’s a picture of the live action Pikachu:

Can you see the problem here?

(also why the hell is Ryan Reynolds the voice of Pikachu? I honestly can’t think of anyone more inappropriate for the role. It’s like casting Samuel L. Jackson as a Powerpuff Girl)

The fact of the matter is some things just don’t work in live action. Sonic the Hedgehog and Pokemon work in their respective universes because they’re animated creatures in an animated world, and their anatomy and design fit that world. In the real world, it just doesn’t work. Pikachu looks strange and kind of creepy in the real world. The same is true of the other Pokemon. Jigglypuff looks utterly adorable in the games and animated show with its spherical body and cartoon eyes and you just want to take one to bed with you and cuddle them like a teddy bear, but in the real world it looks fucking scary!

I wouldn’t want to cuddle that thing! It looks like it would go for my throat given the opportunity!

The same is true of Sonic. Paramount’s attempts to make him look more ‘realistic’ just makes him look incredibly alien and out of place.

Another example I like to bring up is the film Christopher Robin. Now we all know Winnie the Pooh. Silly ol’ bear. Charming, cuddly and endearing, right? Just look at him.

How can you not fall in love with him?

Now here’s the live action version:

When I first saw the trailer, I was utterly creeped out. He looks like something out of a horror movie. Add to that that they got the original voice actor from the Disney cartoons to reprise the role, and Winnie the Pooh pretty much became the source of all my nightmares for the next couple of weeks. That lovable voice should not be coming out of that... thing.

It’s a pattern that repeats itself over and over again. Look:

Charming and lovable.

Weird and unsettling.

Creative and fun.

Photoshop disaster.

Sweet and likeable.

Fetch my crucifix and holy water.

Emotional and expressive.

So ‘realistic’ to the point where he looks like he has the emotional range of a teaspoon.

Now I recognise this largely comes down to subjective opinion. If you like these CGI redesigns, that’s great. More power to you. But I know for a fact I’m not the only one getting increasingly weirded out by these computer generated demons from Hell.

So why does Hollywood keep making these films. Well obviously in the case of Disney it’s because they’ve ran out of original ideas and want to make a quick buck by exploiting their audience’s nostalgia. (the same can be said of the Star Wars sequel trilogy). But what about other studios? Yes they’re financially motivated too, but there’s got to be more to it than that.

I think it’s largely down to the stigma of animated movies. Animation has become synonymous with children. When you hear the term ‘animated movie’, you automatically associate it with ‘kid’s film’. And ‘kid’s film’ is often used in a negative context. Like it’s somehow lesser than quote/unquote ‘proper’ movies. Live action suggests a certain pedigree. A sense of prestige. But that’s obviously bollocks. The quality of a film isn’t dictated by whether it’s live action or animated. It’s determined by the writing, directing and acting. There have been live action films made for kids and animated films made for adults. And I’m not talking about Sausage Party. I’m talking about Finding Nemo.

Now I know what you’re thinking. Finding Nemo? Isn’t that a kid’s film? No. It’s a family film. And that right there is the problem. You heard me say Finding Nemo, an animated film about talking fish, and you automatically associated it with a kids film. But the thing is Finding Nemo deals with some very dark and adult themes and its moral message of not being overprotective and allowing children to take risks is intended for the parents, not the kids. Obviously kids can still watch and enjoy Finding Nemo, but it’s the parents who are clearly the target here. The same is true of Toy Story 3. Children can still watch and enjoy it, but the film is clearly intended for people who watched the original Toy Story when they were a kid and are now grown up. When you stop and think about it, it’s really sad that family movies are associated with kids movies. Not that there’s anything wrong with kids movies obviously. But why do people assume that family movies are meant for kids? Why can’t they be adult stories that are also accessible to children? Books have done it. The Artemis Fowl series is kid friendly, but its tone, themes and style suggest the author has an older and more sophisticated target audience in mind. A Series Of Unfortunate Events is popular with kids, but it’s adults that get the full experience because of the way Lemony Snicket uses postmodern and meta-textual elements in the books, which would sail clean over the head of a kid reading it. The idea that a live action remake is somehow more ‘grown-up’ than an animated movie is just absurd. The original Lion King was very grown up, thank you very much. There are lots of bright colours and fun songs for the kids, but it also doesn’t sugarcoat the darker themes such as death, betrayal, corruption and abuse of power. Mufaser’s death isn’t going to be made any more impactful in live action. The animated version was more than heartbreaking.

Shifting the conversation back to Sonic, this is also intrinsically linked with another problem with Hollywood at the moment. Movie adaptations of video games. And again, it’s a similar problem. People, especially critics, view video games as being lesser than movies. Roger Ebert famously said that video games will never be considered art. But that’s nonsense. There have been loads of video games that could be and have been considered art. BioShock, for instance, which scrutinises and criticises both objectivism and capitalism. There’s the Mass Effect trilogy, which is often described as this generation’s Star Wars. The Last Of Us is widely considered to be a masterpiece by gamers and literacy scholars alike. Hell, the fact that Hollywood wants to make movie adaptations of video games at all suggests that games do in fact have some inherent artistic value after all. And it’s not as if I’m wholly against making movies based on video games. There are some games that could translate really well to films, Sonic being one of them. (I personally loved the Ratchet & Clank movie, for example. It’s just a shame nobody else fucking watched it due to the almost non-existent marketing). However there’s an inherent problem with translating video games to movies as opposed to, say, translating books to movies. In book to movies adaptations, studios are adding something. Visuals, sound, performance, etc. In video game to movie adaptations, they have to take things away. The most obvious is interactivity. Unlike movies where nothing is required of the audience other than to just dumbly stare at the screen, video games require the audience to actively control the story. Move the character, kill baddies, solve problems and stay alive. You are an active participant in the narrative. As a result, the emotional connection you feel with both the plot and the characters is often stronger than that in a movie because you have direct influence over what happens. 

Also video games have the luxury of being able to tell their stories over the course of eight to thirty to even a hundred hours of gameplay. There’s no way you could condense something like The Last Of Us down to a two and a half hour movie. There would just be too much lost. Important character moments and plot points that would have to be chucked in the bin. Yes things get lost in book to movie adaptations, but nowhere near at the scale of a game to movie adaptation. A possible workaround would be to make game to TV adaptations instead, but then we’re back to the interactivity problem again. And don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that movies are better than books or that video games are better than movies. I’m just saying they’re each individually suited to tell their own kinds of stories in their own unique ways, therefore translating from one medium to the other is often difficult. The Last Of Us would never make a good movie, and that’s okay. The game is still amazing and the story is still amazing. Its artistic merit isn’t lessened because it can’t be translated to films, in the same way the merits of a bike aren’t lessened because it can’t fly. It’s just not designed to do that.

I guess the point I’m making is there’s no one way to tell a good story. There are an infinite number of ways it can be done. So lets stop Hollywood’s obsession with pigeonholing everything into one format and actually explore the possibilities, shall we?

[kingfubuki92]

RWBY Volume 6: The Concept of Trust, Futility, Anger, and Justifications

It honestly astounds me how many opinions have been formed after the last few episodes of RWBY, both because it means the show generated enough critical thinking to cause the formation of such opinions, and the variety of opinions I’ve come across.

RWBYQ is in the right and Ozpin is the devil

Ozpin is a sympathetic man who did nothing wrong and RWBYQ are insensitive jerks

Salem isn’t a bad guy and was dealt a shit hand by the gods

Salem is a manipulative monster and the gods can’t be held to human standards

Qrow is justified in punching Ozpin

Qrow is an absolute monster for hitting Oscar, a child.

Thing is, it seems a lot of people are unable to grasp the bigger picture. That picture being: they all have a point.

Lets start with arguably the simplest topic.

Morality of the Gods and culpability of Salem

This is arguably the easiest topic in that both sides are ultimately at fault, but both sides have reasons for their actions. Salem did manipulate people but all to gain Ozma back at first. Thing is though, Salem has the emotional maturity of a child. To quote the Fridge section on Tv Tropes:

Salem's Start of Darkness is more than just Love Makes You Evil. As the archtypical Girl in the Tower, she had probably been raised with very minimal social experience, while being waited on hand and foot. A nice guy finally breaks her out...and then dies. Of course she wouldn't have the emotional maturity to handle it, nor would she probably have anyone else to help her through this difficult time.

Salem doesn't even seem to consider Together in Death with Ozma until after such a choice is denied to her. She wanted things to be the way she chose and would settle for nothing else, much like how a child will throw a tantrum if not given what they wanted.

After failing to kill herself in the God of Darkness' domain, Salem seemed perfectly content with hiding herself in a small woodland cottage, scaring anyone away from confronting her. She effectively returned herself to her former conditions of being alone, but this time of her own volition and in a place of her own design, much like how an angry child would run to their room and desire to be alone. Its only when Ozma returns does she leave the cottage, for she had been given what she wanted. And when Ozma tried to leave with her daughters, she responded by lashing out in a rage and wanting to see Ozma burn, much like a child would get angry when someone takes their toy and start to hold a grudge.

She couldn’t handle Ozma’s death because she’d never had to experience something like that before. After trying and failing to die only to be made into a being of infinite life with a thirst for destruction, she kept to herself, and only became a false god when she finally had Ozma back. Now this behavior doesn’t excuse her actions, it makes them understandable. Salem was unable to grow up properly, and its very likely she would not have grown this way had she grown up properly.

As for the Gods, they did kill everyone and treat us more like an experiment, but its similar to how we would treat an Ant Farm. We don’t care for the feelings of the ants. To quote Father from FMA Brotherhood:

“When you notice an insect on the ground, do you stop to consider it a fool? The life of an insect is so beneath you that it would be a waste of your time to even consider judging it. That would be an accurate summation of my feelings towards you humans.”

This doesn’t excuse their actions however. Just because they are above us doesn’t make their actions alright, for they slaughtered all of humanity in an act of rage, even when not all were guilty. The brother gods may be our creators, but they are not our judge, jury, and executioner. They are not like YHWH. They are more akin to the Greek Pantheon. To us, their actions and behavior is monstrous. To themselves, its no different than putting down a dog.

Next, the most harmful topic

The Pain of Qrow and the harm to Oscar

I will not defend Child Abusers, but I don’t consider Qrow one. To start off, Qrow I feel sorry for in all this.

Qrow is someone already heavily mentally unbalanced to begin with, his alcoholism being a coping method for his shitty life. To have the one person he felt truly knew him, made him feel he was worth something, reveal that everything they've fought for, the lives he's had to see fade, ultimately meant nothing, he would understandably be pissed.

That doesn't mean he is completely justified though. His disregarding Oscar and only focusing on Ozpin is a clear sign of him unraveling, as is his much larger reliance on his flask after. Qrow is in danger of breaking permanently. One of the only pillars in his life (Ozpin, Yang, and Ruby) has shattered before him in his eyes. And a table can't stand upright on only two legs, each one cracking already. The past month itself has been hell for Qrow too, his sister and Leonardo betraying him, nearly dying thanks to Tyrian and being forced to relive something from his past in a dream, generally feeling aimless without Ozpin to lead them against Salem, and learning most of his friends in Mistral were murdered.

Just remember the opening, of the Grimm Claws dragging Qrow down after he goes for his flask. Qrow may very well be raising a death flag, and not out of being killed by the Grimm, but being too broken to bother fighting back.

That isn’t to say I don’t feel just as sorry for Oscar. Oscar didn’t ask for the pain, as it was Ozpin/Ozma who deserved their ire. However, as cruel as it may sound, Oscar isn’t a child anymore.

At this point, the moment Oscar began to fight alongside the others, he unofficially began to follow their path of being a huntsman. Something he acknowledged when fighting Hazel.

“Did she know the risk of being a Huntress? She made a choice! A choice to put others before herself! So do I.”

Oscar may be 14, but he isn't really a child anymore. He's an unofficial huntsman like RWBY now. And while yes, they can still be abused like Weiss is by Jacques, they aren't children anymore. They're growing up faster than most kids their age, so to treat Oscar as if he's a defenseless child, when we've seen him fight Grimm like the Manticore on his own, is disrespectful.

He didn't ask for any of this. The fact he's still with the group rather than wanting to go home, shows he is committed. He isn't Ozpin, Oscar is doing this because he feels he has too.

Next, the biggest of all the topics:

Ozpin v. RWBYQ

This right here is the biggest point of contention in the FNDM at the moment. However, in my opinion, both are right, and both are wrong.

Yes Ozma had a very tragic past, yes he is locked in a situation he does not like in the slightest, yes he has been forced by the gods to either make Remnant a Utopia or let it face genocide again, yes he is sympathetic.

BUT, a sympathetic backstory doesn't excuse the fact he has been doing all this with no long term plan, and that as far as we know, his war with Salem amounts to a massive game of keep away. He took a Grimm magnet onto a civilian transport, without telling the others, knowing they’d object for the sake of traveling faster, and that in turn put all the passengers in danger, got Dee killed, and required more than half of the Argus Limited to crash, when he could have easily told them this, and they could have found another way. He told them no more lies and half truths, and did it anyway. He may have trust issues, but he can’t expect people to trust him if he is not willing to give trust. He has had numerous people die under his watch as they believed they could either make a difference or stop Salem, when really, he thinks there is no way.

​But that doesn't mean there truly isn't. We, as an audience, know that Jinn could easily have used the Exact Words trope, meaning only Ozma specifically couldn't, not that she couldn't be destroyed period. Even without this knowledge though, Ozma must not give up. By admitting he has no plan and retreating into Oscar's mind, he has given up. He needs to be proactive again though. When he was the father, he pulled himself together and fought the Grimm himself, built the cane Ozpin and Oscar would use, and left plans for his next self. But when said next self learned Salem can't be destroyed, he fell into a rut. That's what Ozma is in right now, a rut. But a kick in the pants like this is what he needs to get out of it. Jinn can't answer the future, so if a way to destroy Salem doesn't exist now, he can still find one. He just can't give up.

​Yes, RWBY and Qrow have a right to be mad at Ozpin for leading them into a war that in their eyes is unwinnable, yes they are tired of Ozpin's lies in general, yes Qrow has just learnt the one person who made him feel like he had worth was ultimately leading him aimlessly leading him to spiral out of stability, yes they are somewhat justified. They are also heavily stressed out, Yang suffering from PTSD, Blake being tormented by visions of Adam, Weiss having to face returning to an abusive home she just escaped from, and Qrow has had to deal with all the shit I listed above.

BUT, they must realize that Ozma, and by extension Ozpin, was never this infallible leader. He's human like the rest of them, and can make mistakes. His past may not excuse his secret keeping, but it does paint him in a more understandable light, that of a man so broken by his experiences, he can't do anything else but keep Salem away. They may be under the belief this war is unwinnable, but they can't turn back now, after all they been through, the people they've lost like Pyrrha and Penny, they've come too far to give up. They need to realize, for all his mistakes, Ozpin is still on their side, and they don't have to follow him, but work with him.

And there is still hope of that. It's only natural after learning all this information, that humanity has faced genocide, that the gods are assholes, that Salem can't be stopped, that Ozpin has been leading them to think she could be stopped, that they would accentuate the negative. Especially while dealing with their own hangups, and having just learned all this in rapid succession. Given time to calm down however, they can more easily go through the information and think more rationally. Ruby, Weiss, and Blake themselves never tore into Ozpin, only Yang did. The three of them only looked at him in frustration. They need to simply calm down and realize, even if they don't like what Ozpin has done, they still need to work with him, and not give up hope on stopping Salem. Even if she can't be killed, they can still find a way to stop her.

While I’m happy that the episodes are getting people to talk and form opinions, I’m not necessarily happy that people are picking sides. And that these are intent on whitewashing one side while demonizing the other.

This situation is not black and white, nor is it light and dark. Its gray and grey. The characters, even Salem, are human, and not to sound misanthropic, but humans are beings of chaos, contradiction, and most importantly, emotion. We are ruled by it, and it can both help us, and destroy us. Even the Gods are just as human as their creations. That’s why they are more like the Greek Gods than YHWH, as they are human in all but status.

I only hope this post can shed some light on the subject and have people realize that this conflict has no demons and angels, just humans. We don’t have to like the actions they do, but to demonize them or glorify them is just wrong.

[alicescripts]

Part 3, Chapter 6: “This Isn’t It”

Alice: I don’t know what to say. I think this is it.

Keisha: Is this it? This might be it.

Alice: The story that we had been working on with Tamara Levitts at the LA Times, the one that laid out everything about Bay and Creek and Thistle – that story’s out now. Exhaustively researched. Connections and history even I hadn’t known about, and I worked for Bay and Creek for years.

Keisha: (- mosquitoes) took what was inside of us and injected it into the whole country. There’s no way down from here. Is this it? [sighs] This might be it.

Alice: I don’t know what to say. I think this is it.

Alice Isn’t Dead by Joseph Fink. Performed by Jasika Nicole and Erica Livingston. Produced by Disparition. Part 3, chapter 6: “This Isn’t It”.

Alice: Keisha screamed and pounded the ceiling of the cab. She sounded the truck horn, which was less like a holler of happiness and more like an enormous calf (lowing) for its mother. A mournful sound that prophesized what would happen to us next. But in that moment, we were carried by the raw feeling of it.

She didn’t know what to do with her hands, which was a little scary because she was the one driving. The truck (wagged) with her celebratory movements. “Careful!” I said. But I felt myself jumping in own skin, too. Who had time for careful when this much happiness was there for us to grab.

Keisha: We’re done. That’s what I was thinking. What the air in my mouth tasted like. What every sound that came from my mouth said. Even when I was too excited to form them into words. We are done! We get to go home. And before us, a life. Not that our problems would be fixed overnight. Even in my giddy moments, I didn’t believe in magic, not the sorcerer kind. But I did believe in magic as it exists. Sleight of hand, a triumph of human ingenuity and determination. Someone staring into a mirror, eyes bleary, in their third hour of practicing the same simple (palming) of a coin. I believed in the magic of hard work and sacrifice, and hadn’t we worked hard? And hadn’t we sacrificed?

Alice: I thought to turn on the radio and hear the result of what we had done. Someone sang to us in Spanish over a fluttering guitar, a song about a forest that was actually about a marriage. I spun the dial. Finally a news station. The markets were up, or maybe they were down, I couldn’t see how it could possibly matter.   “Why aren’t they talking about this?” Keisha asked, and I didn’t have an answer for her. I kept searching. Ah, another news station. The latest on a contentious mayoral race in Philadelphia.

What was happening? The world had been broken open, but life was going on as though it hadn’t.

Keisha: I pulled off the road and into the parking lot of a diner. I needed to see that this was having an effect on people. It had to. It had to.

We went inside and a smiling woman told us to sit anywhere. The TVs were on. Two movie stars were getting married, and there was live coverage of the ceremony. On another channel, the president was flying to Phoenix to talk jobs numbers.

Nothing about Bay and Creek, or about Thistle. Nothing about the government’s complicity and murder after murder. “Hey,” I said to a man at the counter. He looked up at me with the expression of anyone when they were annoyed by a stranger. “Yeah?” he said. “What do you think of this stuff that came out?” I asked. “The government funding a secret program? Serial killers living on military bases?” His eyebrows fluttered, concerned. He put up his hands placatingly. “I-I don’t go much into politics,” he said. I didn’t know what to say to that.

Alice: I had less hope than Keisha going in, because my career in this area had guarded me against hope, but even I couldn’t believe what was happening here. “Hey!” I shouted. “Do none of you read the news? Didn’t you see your government is conspiring against you?” We were asked quite energetically to leave the diner. I might have grabbed a guy’s shirt and shaking him, I don’t recall. For the next hour, I resembled a character from a cheap science fiction movie, running up to folks on the street and asking them to acknowledge the horror in the news, and none of them would. They set their eyes straight. They kept moving. “What is wrong with all of you?” screamed. “What is wrong with all of you?”

But it appeared from the outside that they were fine. The question that the world had was, hey what’s wrong with you?

Keisha: I sat in the truck. I reached within myself and found only despair. I had thought it was a matter of knowledge. That if all of them only knew. But that wasn’t it at all. What I realized in that moment, in that truck, is that all of them already had known.

OK, maybe not the specifics, not the names, but the shape of it. Oh, they had known the shape of it for a long time. It is possible to know something and then choose to not know it. And all of us, all of us together had known and then chosen not to know. So giving them the information had only confirmed their chosen ignorance.

That set us wondering. What was left? That had been our plan. There hadn’t been a backup. I didn’t see a way forward. So we just moved forward. Moved for months. Months of driving back and forth across the country, without a clear idea of what even we were doing anymore, why we were even still out here.

What was left for us? For anyone who hoped for the good out of this country?

A month after, out in the desert near Slab City, where something monstrous sleeps under the sand and the cargo trains howl through the long empty, and the golf courses dot out over the wasteland. And the Los Angeles department of water and power, that greedy giant, builds its power plants and its miles and miles of lines, carrying the lights to Hollywood, the air conditioning to Malibu.

We go for a hike in the Native American land near Palm Springs. A man sits by the trail a few miles up into the hills.

“It’s so beautiful out here,” he says as we pass. “It really is,” says Alice. “They can’t take that away from us, can they? Ha ha ha,” he said.

I think about whose land we’re on and how that story went. But I nod because – what else could I do?

Alice: Two months later. Easter, North Carolina. Not quite the seaside but not the urbane research triangle either. Here there are farms and boarded up main streets, but signs still of life. A giant bird painted on the side of an old brick building. The animal’s proportions and posture awkward, but its scale magnificent. A faux retro motel with pastel paints in its windows, a monument to color against the farm dirt planes.

We stop and eat our lunch on the side of the road watching a farmer use a tremendous machine to plow acres and acres of field on his own. He has headphones on. I wonder which true crime podcast he’s listening to.

We started to talk about after. Not after our victory, but after our surrender. What if we gave up? What if we just found some quiet place to live out our lives, away from a war we could never win? It could be the two of us again, and we could live knowing but choosing not to know about the brutality left behind. There could be peace in giving up.

Keisha: Three months later, we pass through Louisville, where I don’t drink bourbon and don’t see Horse (one), but do eat some good Ethiopian food at a place downtown with white plastic tables. It comes served in a  styrofoam takeout box, the injera folded over and under the stews. Here in the far far north of the south – really only the south in name, since it sits on the border with Indiana, which we can agree is one of the least southern states. Louisville is closer to Detroit than it is to Atlanta.

The cook comes out for a smoke break, nods politely at us as we eat the food he just made. “It’s delicious,” I say to him. He smiles. “Family recipes. Three generations.” He nods at his northern city and its southern clothes. “A couple decades ago, none of them would eat it. And now they want to make sure it’s authentic enough.” He shrugs.

Alice: Four months later in Chicago. Chicago looks like a seaside town, which is a real trick for the Midwest.

But that lake. I had grown up thinking “lake” and envisioning the puddles I swam in at camp, but this is an expanse. Even from the top of the Magnificent Mile skyscrapers, you still can’t see the other side. It holds frost within it, so even in that sweaty summer air, approaching it is like touching ice. You can feel the cold lift off of it from 20 feet away.

A woman comes directly from the jogging path on the shore and flings herself into the freezing water. “Ah!” she shouts at us. “Oh shit,” I say back. “It feels amazing,” she says. “Really?” I say. “Or terrible,” she says. But the kind of terrible that’s amazing.” She slaps the water and screams again.

Keisha: We drive. And as we drive, I realize. We’re not alone. All of these people, all of these people in all of these places, they are waiting to be good. They are waiting for the world to be good. What they need is a way forward.

It’s not that they’re choosing not to know. It’s that they don’t know what to do with what they know. I had thought it was a matter of knowledge, but it’s a matter of organization. It’s a matter of Praxis.

I thought about a woman slapping her palms upon Lake Michigan, and a man cooking food from Ethiopia in a rust belt city of Bourbon. I thought about the people that come to the desert in California because they have nothing, and the people who come to the desert because they have everything. And the people who come to the desert, because out past the highways, you can cause all sorts of trouble. I thought about people who grow food in North Carolina, digging their hands into the dirt, and you sit down to eat with the smell of soil lingering on their palms.

We are a country defined more by distance than by culture. But that distance is defined by the people in it. We give context to our miles. We are the fine parts that make up the heavy machine that heaves global events forward.

I thought about hands. I thought about thousands and millions of hands, reaching for the spatula on our eight at the grill top of a diner, and reaching into a toilet at hour twelve at the gas station, and reaching up to put the can of beans on the shelf at the supermarket, and reaching down to help their child cross the street.

I thought about millions of hands and what they could do if they all reached the same direction and grasped. And that’s when I knew. It was as clear to me as a memory, as unshakeable as my own breath. We were going to organize, starting with us and moving from there.

This was a country made up of a distance of people, and they could not be changed through headlines. They had to be organized, one by one by one. 

And maybe some part of me had spent the last year waiting for Praxis to save us. But not anymore. We would have to become Praxis ourselves.

That was it. That was it then.

Today’s quote: The Rubicon we know was a very insignificant stream to look at. Its significance lay entirely in certain invisible conditions.” From Middlemarch by George Eliot. Thanks for listening.

[stompsite]

Dreaming Of Another World

It was all Narnia’s fault.

I grew up in a deeply religious family, one that eschewed ‘worldly’ media for the religious variety. I remember Dad dragging us out of a showing of the Lion King one rainy September day--I think we’d gone to one of those theatres where the tickets were cheap and they only showed movies that had been out for a long time because my family was thrifty like that--because he was furious. Some time later, he explained to me that Disney was trying to brainwash us with “New Age Philosophy,” and he was angry at the spirit that tried to do it to us. Not a great birthday memory for me.

But Narnia? It had magic and monsters and demons and werewolves, and for whatever reason, we were allowed to watch it whenever we went to Grandma’s house. My parents drove us up to Independence, Missouri every few months for something called Enzyme Potentiated Desensitization, where we would stay with grandma and watch Narnia. EPD was an experimental allergen treatment that was banned in 2001.

I remember drinking water with bismuth in it and eating an awful meal that had the consistency of literal shit. This was supposed to help us get over our allergies, but I think the treatment was far worse. We weren’t allowed to eat many things, and most of what we could eat was disgusting, so most of the time, we laid around, sick, feverish, and vomiting, and we ate reheated french fries from Wendy’s (McDonald’s wasn’t allowed due to the oil they used), and we watched all of Grandma’s old movies.

My favorite one was The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe, a movie about kids who escaped the horrors of World War II by traveling to another dimension where it was always winter and a cruel, monstrous witch ruled with an iron hand. Eventually, thanks to the help of the Christ-like Aslan, they overthrew her.

It was a dark movie, a far cry from the generally happy, low-intensity religious movies Mom let us watch. Aslan died, y’know. It was, to 8 year old me, the most incredible thing in the world. Later, I read the rest of the books, and I loved them too. My favorite was The Silver Chair, the darkest and least hopeful book of all. No one book had more of an impact on my artistic sensibilities than The Silver Chair. Real stakes! Real pain! Hope! Triumph! All the good stuff.

When I was 10, I found Digimon.

I was hanging out at Hyram’s place watching The Magic School Bus, a show that we weren’t allowed to watch at my house because of the magic. Hyram’s family, being Mormon, had a more enlightened--so it seemed--outlook on the world, being okay with sci-fi and fantasy stories that my parents forbade us from seeing. So there we were, watching The Magic School Bus, and the commercials came on, and Fox Kids aired a commercial for Digimon (Adventure 01, Episode 28, in case you were wondering--the one with the ferocious Devidramon).

Digimon was even darker than Narnia. It’s villains were literally Satan and a Vampire. There’s an episode where one of the kids is told her mother doesn’t love her and as a result, she’ll never be able to help her friends. There was drama, self-doubt, pain, misery, and, in the end, the kids overcame the darkness that opposed them and triumphed.

Over the years, I found increasingly creative ways to catch my Digimon fix, going to the church next door with a cable I’d found to connect to the TV so I could just barely catch Fox 24 when it was broadcasting. When Digimon stopped airing, I desperately searched for a way to download the show online, which led me to IRC, which took me to roleplay forums, which led me to Kotaku comments, and finally Twitter, which is where I know most of you from.

I realize this may all sound very self-indulgent, and I’m sorry for that, but I feel it’s important to establish the personal context here. I love these stories about going to other worlds and experiencing things that our worlds could never give us. The stories acted as a kind of meta-transportation, a way of letting me escape the frustrations of my own life.

When I finally made the transition from cartoons and books to video games, everything seemed to snap into place. Games were the closest thing I’d ever found to actually visiting Narnia or the Digital World. My friend Robert introduced me to Halo in his trailer home. My parents gave me Microsoft Flight Simulator, and it was like being able to fly planes in real life, so much so that when I eventually attended flight training, my instructors told me I flew like someone with thousands of hours under his belt.

Games let me go places.

Games let me see new things.

So, one day, in early 2007, I found a copy of PC Gamer with Bioshock on the cover in the Wal-Mart magazine aisle. I remember furtively browsing the issue, making sure Mom didn’t suddenly round the corner and catch me reading it. The game looked incredible, but I was focused more on roleplaying forums at the time, and I forgot about it until that fall, a few weeks after it came out. CompUSA was going out of business and was selling off their games. I couldn’t game at home--our computers were old Boeing surplus and ran the Half-Life 2 Ravenholm demo like a slideshow--but with a portable hard drive I’d purchased and hid in the ceiling tiles of my bedroom, I could play them at the university I was attending.

So I did.

First person games appealed to me because they let me experience the game worlds as though they were real experiences. It was the closest thing to going to another world; third person games didn’t elicit the same response, so I didn’t play them as much. I was a big fan of the Age of Empires: Rise of Rome demo that came with my copy of Microsoft Flight Simluator, though. But it was the first person games, the ones I found on Maximum PC demo discs, that really mattered to me. I’d played hundreds of hours of Unreal Tournament 2004, Call of Duty, and even Far Cry.

When I played Bioshock, everything changed. I had to get my own computer. Had to. I moved out in late December to go learn to fly at K-State Salina. Got really sick that spring--my illness was just starting to reveal itself--and I flunked most of my classes. I was so sick most days I couldn’t leave the house. Got diagnosed with severe social anxiety disorder later. Only left the house at night unless I had classes, when I could make it to them at all. I’d earned enough money the previous fall to build myself my own computer.

I played games.

Bioshock had led me to System Shock 2. I pirated a copy of STALKER: Shadow of Chernobyl because I’d seen the disc at CompUSA (alongside Blacksite: Area 51) but only had the cash to buy Bioshock and The Orange Box without my parents noticing. I played FEAR and its expansions. All the Half-Life games. Crysis. Call of Duty 4. It was a great time to experience a lot of amazing first-person games.

System Shock and STALKER were the biggest influences.

When I moved back that summer, I scrounged and saved and used the last of my savings to buy STALKER: Clear Sky and Crysis Warhead. I played them while living in the unheated camping trailer my parents used to own (it was cheaper than paying for dorms whenever we attended church camps). It was cold. I could see my own breath most days. I got a job at Office Max and used it to buy a copy of Far Cry 2. A few weeks later, I picked up Fallout 3.

If you’re familiar with these games, you’ll notice a lot of them have things in common. They do interesting things with the game world. Many are heavily systems driven compared to their contemporaries. STALKER’s world especially feels completely alive. System Shock 2 does a bangin’ job of making you feel like you’re really exploring an abandoned spaceship. Far Cry 2’s systems-driven gameplay is fascinating and influences designers to this day. Fallout 3 has one of the best ecosystems in a video game, with enemies who you can wound and terrify and allied characters who will come to your aid.

Even Blacksite: Area 51 was a fascinating game. It had this cool morale system that had your soldiers responding to your commands and combat prowess in ways that, at the time, felt believable and awe-inspiring. In Crysis, if you dropped an unconscious man in a river, he would die because he drowned. Incredible. It felt real.

The games that shaped my experience took me to other worlds, shaping my perception of what games could be in a very specific direction. As someone who’d grown up reading the old Microsoft Flight Simulator tagline “As real as it gets,” I felt right at home.

I tried other games, like Nintendo’s platformers or controller-centric spectacle fighters like Devil May Cry 3, but I didn’t like them. They were too obviously games. You got points. Everything was abstract. I was playing. I wasn’t going anywhere.

As my health declined, the importance of traveling to other places increased. The mark of a good game for me became one where I could forget about the world I lived in and exist in another world. I’m reminded of Lord Foul’s Bane, a book in which a writer with leprosy is transported to another world where he is healed of his leprosy. Games provided me that escape, especially the immersive ones.

Ah.

Right.

That word.

Immersion is nothing to be afraid of. Some people say that any game can be immersive, because one of the meanings of the word is roughly analogous to “engrossed,” but the English language is weird and tricky and sometimes two words share the same meaning in the dictionary but mean very different things.

To be engrossed in something is to have your attention completely arrested by it. To be immersed in something, well… when you’re immersed in water, you are literally, physically inside of it. You are a part of the water, as much as you can be.

I was seeking out immersive qualities in games without really understanding it. I would learn that some of my favorite games in the genre were literally called “immersive sims.” Some people will argue that they are not engrossed by those games, so they cannot possibly be immersive, but I’d argue that when you’re immersed in something, it surrounds you, you’re inside it. Whether or not it grabs your attention is up to you.

When a game is immersive, it might not grab your attention, but it’s doing its best to create a living, breathing world. When you drop an unconscious man in water, he drowns because that is what would happen in real life. When you perform well in combat, your allies rally around you. When you shoot an enemy in the leg, he limps.

An immersive game is one that does its best to represent a cohesive reality.

If you don’t believe me, go listen to Paul Neurath, a founder of Looking Glass, a studio that made games like System Shock and Thief, talk about why they made the games they did. Look at the cool attempts at simulation elements in games made by LGS alumni, like Seamus Blackley’s Jurassic Park: Trespasser, or Warren Spector and Harvey Smith’s Deus Ex. Emil Pagliarulo got a job at Bethesda and has a senior role (I forget what it is, exactly, sorry) on simulation-heavy games like Fallout 3 and Skyrim.

Heck, the Sega 2K Football games were praised as having some of the most sophisticated and realistic AI in sports games before the NFL decided it wasn’t cool with yearly games being priced at a sub-premium price point. Marc LeBlanc worked on the AI for those.

The way I heard it, Looking Glass made flight simulators with realistic physics (I believe that was thanks to Blackley’s background as a physicist). At some point, the folks at Looking Glass thought it would be cool to take Dungeons and Dragons style tabletop and make a game out of it, but instead of building something like the isometric Ultima, they’d apply the flight simulator logic to it. The whole thing would be first person, and you could treat it like you were really there. Their publishing partner decided this new game should be an Ultima game, so Ultima Underworld was born.

After that, Looking Glass made a mix of flight simulators, golf games, and weird first-person games that took you to other worlds. System Shock put you on a space station. Thief let you do exactly what it said on the cover. Terra Nova was… well, read this piece on Rock, Paper, Shotgun. All of these games were fascinating and transformative, even if they had weirdly inaccessible control schemes.

Eventually, the studio died. Sony and Microsoft passed on buying them, Eidos made some poor financial decisions and couldn’t pay them. Talent moved off to other studios. Eventually, they shut down.

A few developers tried to carry the torch. Ken Levine’s Irrational games released Bioshock, which was like the bro shooter version of System Shock. Ion Storm Austin produced Thief 3 and two Deus Ex games. Bethesda’s work has become increasingly Looking Glass-influenced over the years. Clint Hocking’s Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory and Far Cry 2 clearly learned from Looking Glass’ games as well.

Over in France, a guy named Raphael Colantonio founded a studio called Arkane. They made a game heavily inspired by Ultima Underworld called Arx Fatalis. Then they made another one, called Dark Messiah of Might and Magic, using a Ubisoft license.

As game tech got better, simulation elements became more pronounced. The German Yerli brothers unsuccessfully pitched a neat dinosaur game, but eventually managed to convince Ubisoft to publish Far Cry and EA to publish Crysis. Their games are mostly known for their graphics tech, but I’ve always been fond of their intriguing stabs at realism; on its highest difficulty, Crysis’ enemies speak Korean, making it difficult for most players to understand their callouts. Crysis lets players use the game’s physics to enhance its combat, collapsing buildings on enemies or leveling foliage to give them access to easier sight lines. I wrote about one of my favorite levels here.

Bioshock brought the attention back, though. Even though it wasn’t very simulation heavy, it gave players that sense of presence that so many had been craving. Some developers stumbled; Far Cry 2 is beloved by game designers but wasn’t the critical or commercial success Ubisoft hoped. STALKER was one of the buggiest commercial games I’ve ever played, capable of crashing if you so much as blinked, so it didn’t sell as well as THQ would have liked, and GSC Game World sought a new publisher for Clear Sky, then shifted to yet another publisher for Call of Pripyat.

Fallout 3 had more simulation elements than most of its contemporaries and, I’d argue, did a better job presenting a living, breathing world than any other game of its generation, but people were too busy being mad that it wasn’t a classic isometric RPG to notice.

So, this is where my head was at when I entered into the world of immersive sims. I was fascinated by simulation elements, in love with the idea of exploring other worlds, and, most importantly of all: I needed an escape from my health. Immersive games, some of them sims, some of them not, provided the escape I craved.

In 2011, I downloaded the leaked demo of Deus Ex: Human Revolution. I’d been mowing the lawn and was going to take a shower before sinking my teeth into it, but it was so engrossing that, before I knew it, five hours had passed and I’d played the entire thing. As soon as I scraped the cash together, I bought myself a copy. It was the first game I’d been able to afford in years.

I loved it.

The next year, Arkane roared back to life with Dishonored, which was one of my favorite games, not just because it’s really fucking good, not just because the world is fascinating and creative, not just because Harvey Smith, the man responsible for Deus Ex and Blacksite (he deserved better treatment from his publisher on that one; if they’d had more time, I think it would have been rightly hailed as a masterpiece; as it stands, it’s a fascinating thing that I love to pieces), partnered up with Arkane to make it, but because it helped me get my first writing gig.

If you wanna read my thoughts on Dishonored, check it out here.

And yet…

Something felt off.

Not about Dishonored, but about the conversation surrounding immersive design. I’d read posts by people who talked about the importance of design, who placed a weird focus on systems-driven design, who seemed to think that immersive games were stealth games and nothing but.

Before Dishonored and Human Revolution, I recall reading one of the foremost voices in immersive design discourse proclaiming the genre was dead because Looking Glass and Ion Storm had shut down. He argued, while Fallout 3 was selling millions of copies, that immersive sims were dead because they weren’t commercially viable. Many agreed with him.

After the apparent sales failings of Prey (Arkane), Dishonored 2, and Mankind Divided, I’ve heard those conversations picking up again.

I think they’re wrong, and I’d like to try to explain why.

I think a lot of the people who talk about immersive sims, focusing on immersive design and talking about what these games should be, tend to get hung up on Very Specific Details without looking at the bigger picture. Go watch the Underworld Ascendant Kickstarter pitch video, and you’ll hear Neurath talk about how important it is to solve problems logically. Go listen to a lot of the immersive sim fans talk about games, and you’ll hear them talking about… well, other things.

One thing I feel like I see a lot is an emphasis on stealth mechanics. That’s great! I love stealth games. But I’d argue that stealth is not an important part of immersive games. Some people have told me that they don’t think Bethesda games are immersive sims because the stealth in those games is nowhere near as in depth as Thief. Maybe, maybe, but here’s the thing:

I think you could make an immersive game where you’re 12 years old and you’re visiting your grandparents at their farm on an island somewhere, and the entire game is just about being a kid exploring a little seaside town and making new friends. I think you could catch fireflies and go to the library and go fishing and do all sorts of things on an island that feels just as alive as STALKER, without actually doing any stealth.

But if you go play Dishonored or Deus Ex: Human Revolution, or the Thief games, or whatever, you’re going to have the immersive sim community types talking about how important stealth is. Thief is good, but get over it. It’s just one manifestation of a broader genre. Stealth is GREAT. Dishonored so good I will buy any Dishonored game sight unseen. I would kill to get a job working for Arkane, even if it was like… as a janitor or something. I love those people and I love their games.

I think the emphasis on stealth is part of the reason a lot of these games have failed. I love stealth games for the same reason I love horror games; they’re high-intensity, high-stakes games that, when you play them well, make you feel like a real master. I’d also argue that stealth is exhausting. Maybe I’m more attuned to this than most due to the whole chronic fatigue thing, but like…

In a stealth game, success can feel like failure. You’re constantly feeling the pucker factor. If you are seen, you fail, even if the game doesn’t actually have an instant failure state. When I get seen in Dishonored, I have to fight. Fighting is really fun, but getting caught means I wasn’t able to do what I wanted to; I messed up. I’m a failure. A lot of stealth stuff ends up feeling like constantly being on edge and failing because you had to kill like 5 dudes who saw you. I played Hitman last night and every time I killed or choked out someone who saw me, I just wanted to start the whole thing over.

I’d argue that most people feel this way when playing stealth games. They don’t like the stress. A little stealth is nice, especially in a game like Far Cry 5 where you can approach a base with a sniper rifle and take out like 6 dudes without them noticing you, but getting into a firefight afterwards feels fun and purposeful too, so you get a nice mix of occasional stealth and action. I think that’s probably why Far Cry 5 is the best-selling video game of 2018 so far (Red Dead releases tomorrow).

I love that we’re making stealth games with immersive elements, but I think we’re making a mistake when we assume that immersive games must be stealthy ones. There are so many games that claim to learn from immersive games--Mark of the Ninja, Deus Ex: Human Revolution, Wildfire, Quadrilateral Cowboy--and they do, but they’re also so very focused on stealth (the ones I’ve played are all among my favorite games, by the way! Please don’t think of this as a knock against them!). I can’t think of any game that claims to be influenced by immersive sims that doesn’t have stealth.

Stealth is a verb (short version: game design speak for ‘thing you can do’). It is not the genre.

Then there’s the whole “design” thing. Mario games are exceptionally designed. Each level is a unique, bespoke challenge, stacking mechanics on top of mechanics and helping you develop your mastery over the experience. This design comes at the expense of… well, I’ll get to that later. For now, I’ll just say that Mario Feels Like A Game.

That’s not a bad thing, but, like, you’ve got this for, so you know what I’m about. You can see why that might not appeal to me personally.

Buuuuuuut… a lot of the newer, like… I don’t know, it’s weird to call them “design-focused,” because all games are designed, a lot of these newer immersive sim type games seem focused on that kind of immaculate design. Walk into the bank in Deus Ex: Mankind Divided and you’ll see The Person You Can Talk Your Way Past If You Have That Skill, you’ll see The Lasers You Can Sneak Past If You Can Turn Invisible, you’ll see The Vending Machine You Can Lift If You Have The Strength Ability, and you’ll see The Air Vent You Can Crawl Through To Get To The Computer You Can Hack If You’re A Hacker.

Mankind Divided will give you The Most Experience Points for playing this without being detected and without killing anyone.

Suddenly, you are incentivized to treat the game like a game because it is objectively better for you to approach all objectives in a specific way. Heck, in Human Revolution and Mankind Divided, after you’ve nonlethally subdued everyone in a room, you can hack all the computers (even if you have a password) and crawl through all the vents (though there’s no reason to) for Maximum Points. It… it makes no sense. You’re not trying to be a part of the world. The game rewards you for engaging with it on a level that must recognize the game as an illusion.

It’s not the only game. I loved Prey, but I got the sense that I was being graded as I played, which meant I started playing more to the game’s expectations of me rather than how I felt I ought to act. Look, I grew up in a family environment where people were sneaking up on me to see if I was acting righteously. I grew up in a church where I was paraded in front of two hundred kids and told that I had The Devil in me because my pottery had shattered in their shoddily-built kiln and destroyed most of the rest of the pottery. I am so fucking tired of being judged, so exhausted of having to act a specific way to avoid being treated like garbage, I don’t want games to do it to me too. I just want to act in a way that feels appropriate.

In Eidos Montreal’s immersive sim games (and most immersive games, for that matter), I felt like I was running into The Metroid School of Design, in which a player is unable to progress through a level without the right tool, with one key difference: there are multiple tools you can use to progress. Four routes into the same room, every room, all the time.

This creates a sense of artifice. When I see a bunch of chandeliers and mysterious, architecturally suspect vents that show me an obvious route through a map, I see the designer’s hand. I see that the designer has planned all these routes for me. They have planned for any eventuality. They want me to sneak my way through this room, regardless of the skills I have at my disposal.

I can play their game in just one way. I can ghost-stealth it perfectly and get The Good Ending, or I can Violence Through It and get less progress points and The Bad Ending. If I am a hacker, there will always be a door to hack. If I am a fighter, there will always be a man to fight.

Oh, sure, the best games will give you a dozen tools that can be combined in really interesting ways, but someone has figured out what all those tools are and designed each level to perfectly accommodate every. Single. tool.

Every level is a puzzle, and puzzles are designed by a human with the intent to solve them. You don’t need to be creative--heck, sometimes, being creative is actively discouraged--because all you need to do is figure out what the designer wanted you to do and do it. Ah, I have tools X, Y, and Z? I know exactly where I’m supposed to deploy them. See, there’s the path you can blink through and the door you can bypass with a specific tool or the fish you can possess to swim through.

And… I cannot stress this enough:

It’s not bad.

It’s good.

It’s very good. I fucking love these games. They mean the world to me. They do.

But can you see how that might not be what I was looking for, and how I feel that’s… quite a long way removed from what Looking Glass was trying to do? Instead of solving solutions in a natural way, these games have created very nice puzzle worlds. As someone who loves puzzles, this is wonderful, but as someone who loved what Looking Glass and STALKER were doing… I can’t help but feel my own needs and interests aren’t being met.

I mentioned I was playing Hitman. I love it. I love it to pieces. I just did a Suit Only, Silent Assassin run and it was thrilling. But, like… I knew the route the guy would take. I knew The Device that I could interact with to take him off his path. I didn’t feel like I was improvising; instead, I was looking at one of several dozen ways the designers had very carefully placed in my path.

I can see you, designer. I know you’re there.

I couldn’t see the designer in STALKER. Everything felt natural to me. I woke up in a bunk. I met Sidorovich. He asked me to run a job for him. On my way to the job, there were dead animals and a wounded Stalker. He asked me for a med kit. I gave him the med kit. He became my friend. I joined a few Stalkers and we took out a bandit camp.

This will happen in every playthrough. It has been designed. I get that. But it wasn’t like a designer came in shouting PLAY YOUR WAY, ALSO THIS IS A STEALTH GAME, right? I could take out that encampment however I wanted. The more I play, the more tools I find. Sometimes, they randomly pop out of an anomaly. Other times, I find them on the corpses of people who died in a brutal gunfight. In Clear Sky, the gun you wield in the opening cinematic can be found right where you left it. It’s broken, but you can find a man to repair it, and later, you can get ammo for it by eliminating high-level enemies.

If someone says “hey, please help me take out this facility,” that’s all the direction you have. How you take it out is up to you. Stealth it? Sure. Lead mutants to it? Absolutely. Come in under cover of night or rain? You bet. STALKER’s verbs might be limited, but the game itself is so much more flexible. Sneak in through a crack in the wall or charge the front gate.

You play your way, but “your way” doesn’t mean four skill trees, it means “here’s a real, tangible space, with no hint of the designer’s hand. This feels real, like it actually exists in the outskirts of Chernobyl. There are bad men inside. Go get them, using whatever tools you have available to you.”

STALKER feels natural.

In fact, if there was one word I’d use to describe my ideal immersive game, “natural.” Would be that word. When I play Far Cry 2, I am playing a Designed Game. This is the Friendly NPC Zone. There are no friendly NPCs outside it. You can safely kill everyone because they’re bad. Everyone hits hard, so it’s best to snipe them. Make sure to go to the safe house, which looks exactly like all the other safe houses (and has the exact same supplies plus one unique bonus gun) to engage The Buddy System™, recharging your Buddy Meter® so your Buddy® will come to your aid when you go down One Time. If you go down a second time, he will die. This is how it always happens. It will never deviate.

In STALKER, I was caught finding bandits when a man named Edik Dinosaur passed by. He and I had met on occasion on the road. Edik Dinosaur fought valiantly alongside me, because he hated bandits and he liked me. I accidentally shot him during the encounter. He died because of me. That was way more impactful than Far Cry 2’s Super Obvious Buddy System, you know?

It was like I was there. I had to grapple with a sense of guilt at shooting blindly into the brush after a fleeing bandit.

I remember a story of someone playing an old Zelda game, I think it was Ocarina of Time, when their mom walked in and asked them what they were doing. They explained that, to cross a bridge, they had to get some item to unlock it. “Why don’t you just chop down a tree to cross the river?” came the reply. The storyteller said they rolled their eyes at this and thought their mom was crazy, but later, they were like “actually, yeah, why can’t I do that?”

Breath of the Wild let players do just that. It was hailed as a brilliant new Zelda game and seems more beloved than… basically every Zelda game in decades? This is a game where you can shoot a fire arrow, watch the grass catch fire, and use the updrafts to fling yourself into the sky, which lets you drop down on top of your foes for a powerful melee attack.

I have my complaints with the game, which you can read here, but I’m fascinated by the way its overworld avoids just outright telling you how to play and letting you figure out how to solve the problems it presents to you. Instead of being A Puzzle Game, Breath of the Wild’s overworld feels like a stylized yet real space. Its people are alive. Its spaces are not clearly designed to be exploited by specific mechanics. The Designer’s Hand is invisible.

This brings me to Bethesda.

Yes, sure, if you’re an RPG fan, Bethesda probably isn’t going to make you a happy camper. The writing can be stupid at times. They let you do anything, even though the narrative acts as though you’re on an urgent mission. The modular system design makes the world feel super artificial, and you can exploit the game’s systems in dumb, unrealistic ways, like putting a bucket on a person’s head (the AI has no sense of personal space and doesn’t mind) so he can’t see you steal things, or you can craft a million daggers so you can be The Best At Blacksmithing or whatever.

But… the thing is, when I hop into a Bethesda world, it feels relatively real. While you have a lot of skills that make you better at playing specific ways, like Unarmed or Melee or Rifles or Handguns or whatever, you’re never walking into a fight and seeing Five Specific Tool-Driven Routes and deciding which tool is The Best One For The Job.

I feel like too many immersive sims are specifically stealth-driven games with immaculate designer-driven puzzles that give you a dozen different tools to use How You Want (but, hint hint, there are a few very clear routes).

Bethesda games give you a billion tools and let you loose in the world, much like STALKER does. You can shoot someone so much they become afraid of you and run away, but some people are less afraid than others and will fight you to the death. Take out a guy with a good gun, and his buddy will run over, pick it up, and use it against you unless you can get to him first. Approach this fort aggressively, sneak in, talk your way in, do whatever. It’s going to depend as much on who’s in the fort as it is on you. Heck, I think in Skyrim, if you’re wearing Imperial gear, you can walk into an Imperial fort without anyone realizing you’re not an Imperial.

Bethesda games let you play how you want in the moment.

They let you formulate a plan based on what you feel like doing, and sometimes, you’re going to find places you can’t take on because nobody bothered to design a way for a specific character build to attack. Come back later or get creative. It feels more natural than most immersive sims because it’s trying to be a real place, rather than an artfully designed one. Yeah, Bethesda games have rough edges. They do!

And yet… they are immensely successful, and I think it’s because they’re actually trying to send their players to other worlds. They’re not demanding you play stealthily, they’re not giving you the same routes so that every player can play One Specific Play Style. They’re bringing a world to life and letting you live in it. In Skyrim, I can go save the world and become the boss of the Magic College, or I can be a simple elk hunter, peddling my wares.

I guess where I’m at is… we saw one studio trying incredible things in games, and they went under through little fault of their own. Their successors didn’t find the smashing success that the enthusiasts think they deserve, but I think that’s because… well… a lot of the enthusiasts are just looking at one or two games on the spectrum and refusing to make anything else. I think so many of the genre’s fans have a very limited, very specific view of what the genre can be, which is why none of them have managed to recapture the glory of Looking Glass; they’re not making the kind of games Looking Glass was, no matter how much they claim that they are.

There’s too much artifice in the inheritors.

Bethesda’s out there making billions of dollars because their games live up to the Looking Glass ideal more than anything else out there. These other games, this other design philosophy, it’s great. I love it. It’s wonderful and beautiful and fascinating, but when I see people arguing that “nobody wants immersive games,” because those games didn’t break sales records, I want to scream “how would you know? You’ve made something else!”

STALKER sold like 6 million copies. Skyrim’s up at like… what, 20 million now? Breath of the Wild has sold a bajillion copies. Red Dead Redemption 2 is poised to be the second best-selling game of 2018 after Black Ops IIII. Grand Theft Auto V made a billion billion dollars and it’s got some of the most sophisticated immersion elements in video games. Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain is one of the “could this realistically work?” games out there and it made a ton of cash. When you make a game that’s really about existing in a living, breathing world, you can make a shitload of cash.

When you make a stealth game with a lot of Specific Tools and Obvious Routes, you’re making a great video game, but you aren’t making an immersive one. That’s okay, but please don’t argue that we should stop making immersive games because your model didn’t work. The immersive model is thriving. You just made something else.

I just want to escape to other worlds.

[thousandeyesand-one]

Hey anon,

Thank you for your question! There is a common misconception people have about targ restoration that it is going to establish another era of Dragon Lords resuming rule in the Red Keep. Thats not atleast what I think is going to happen I'd like to think there's more people who understand this. 

Stark Restoration was just as important as Targaryen Restoration is for the future of this story. House Targaryen has a very bad reputation when it comes to rule or just in general. Almost like each & every single one of their mistakes were remembered by the history & maybe even exaggerated in some cases.

"The Targaryens have always danced too close to madness. King Jaehaerys once told me that madness and greatness are two sides of the same coin. Every time a Targaryen is born, the gods toss a coin in the air and the world holds its breath to see how it will land".

                      - Ser Barristan Selmy (ASOS)

There are so many accounts of the Targaryen's cruelty most of them true but one should wonder if before Targaryen's came to Westeros, before Aegon's conquest was Westeros really all that hunky dory at all? It is said in TWOIAF that even before aegon conquered the Realm the seven kingdoms fought amongst each other. Black harren terrorized the riverlands always in a fight with Argilac the arrogant whose name alone gives you the idea of what he was North forgot their were 6 other kingdoms, after the age of heroes. In short the war, destruction & internal conflicts are not House Targaryen's legacy alone in Westeros. 

"Because of the Long Night, these early wildlings were then pressured to begin a wave of conquests to the south. That they became monstrous in the tales told thereafter, according to Fomas, reflects the desire of the Night’s Watch and the Starks to give themselves a more heroic identity as saviors of mankind, and not merely the beneficiaries of a struggle over dominion."

          -Archmaester Foma's Lies of Ancients (TWOIAF)

Brandon the Breaker is said to have joined forces with joramun to overthrow the Night's King who according to Old Nan was a Stark. That is why Brandon the Breaker broke the horn of winter & is said to have wiped any record of the Night's King or any knowledge of such instance from Night's Watch history or Stark's records. I am not comparing but Targaryen's have never tried to wipe anything mostly because they didn't care about anything or anyone.

"Like their dragons the Targaryens answered to neither gods nor men."

"Treachery was a coin the Tragaryens knew well"

"What did a Targaryen ever knew about honor?"

Almost every POV we get speaks of Targaryen's in a derogatory manner. Neither has the history written by Septons or songs sung by singers have been dealt with by Targaryens in their favor unlike the Starks who behave way too good to have kept power for 8,000 years. Specially when it is widely believed that Valyrians are First Men just like the Starks.

So both Starks & Targaryens are descendants of same civilization but separated by land & time & later on religion. First men in westeros became the Kings of Winter & First men in essos became Valyrians. Both these families don't have clean records when it comes to their history. Starks defeated the children, killed the marsh kings & barrow kings of the old taking their women into marriage & making their reign formidable & long-lasting without any contests left in the north & Valyrians decimated their enemies & the leftover they enslaved. The oppressed children created White Walkers an army that literally fights & perpetuates death & those enslaved in the caves of 14 flames in valyria created the faceless men who also worship death. Point is both these families have their hands in the dirt but one (stark) were cunning enough to clean the board but Targaryens were too proud & idiotic to care about hiding their mistakes.

"Their must always be a Stark in winterfell" people say has something to do with the Kings of winter & Lords of Winterfell being buried down in the crypts that they'll wake before the endgame being the literal representation of "Winter is coming" as in the dead Kings of winter are coming. That is the true might of Winterfell. Before the Long Night comes again a Stark must be there in Winterfell to fight the army of the dead that brings the storm with them. That is why the stark restoration  happened. I understand we as viewers are very emotional when it comes to Starks because the story started with them & they have been the victims of the books+tv show that we've been following but the stark restoration had a much more deeper meaning behind it than just merely giving them a safe place in this cruel world.    "Everyone is where they are & what they are for a reason.. "  Starks are needed before the endgame that will be the final twist in the show regarding the Night King.

Likewise, Targaryen's are needed to Break the Wheel they created at King's Landing because quite simply nobody else can or will. When Aegon conquered the 7k he offered mercy to the Lords who bent the knee & granted them the land with the title of Lord Paramount but the ones who rebelled & fought him he decimated House Hoare wiped out, House Durrandon wiped save for a daughter who married Orys Baratheon, House Gardener also wiped out. Rest of them bent the knee. Aegon showed mercy to House Stark, House Lannister & just about everyone who begged for it. While House Tully he instilled as Lord Paramount of Riverlands, House Baratheon he gifted his Bastard brother his own house name & a castle, House Arryn also shown mercy to & house Tyrell were stewards of House Gardener who bent the knee to Aegon & he named them the Lord of Highgarden. Even though Martells very much like the Starks had no interest in the power outside of their kingdom they just wanted independence but they never bent the knee whatsoever. Point being all the other houses after the conquest were no less than common folk to the might of House Targaryen, they were sort off elevated to a level of lordship by House Targaryen kinda like how house clegane was elevated to Lordship with their own house sigil by Tywin Lannister, like Ser Davos Seaworth was knighted for his deeds even after being a smuggler by stannis. Back then the fear of Dragons & the might & wrath of Targaryens kept any & everyone under control. so when time came they rebelled against them not only that but are now vying for the very power the Targaryen's created playing the game of thrones.     

"Varys: give us common folk one taste of power we are like the lion who tasted blood.. nothing is ever sweeter"

"LF: Do you know what the realm is? It's the thousand blades of Aegon's enemies, a story we agreed to tell each other over & over till we forget that it's a lie."

"Varys: Power resides where men believe it resides. It's a trick. A shadow on the wall."

Ever since Robert Baratheon died all the people who say they have the claim or want the claim joffery, cersei, Renly, Stannis, Robb, Little Finger, Tyrells etc everyone of these people are trying to chase that shadow on the wall it's like they're trying to catch smoke with bare hands it's too treacherous & volatile causing the destruction it did in the War of the Five Kings. Only the most erroneous of the lesser people will be able to tame it like Cersei who fought to win to save her children & now after losing all of the 3 she's fighting for her own skin, her family. She doesn't care about the greater good or anything she did what nobody had the the soul to do, she stopped at nothing! She tames the shadow on the wall because she stepped into darkness & shadows don't exist in darkness.

"... to reach the light you must pass beneath the shadow"       -Quaithe

Maybe this is the shadow that dany has to pass beneath to find the light, to pass beneath the shadow of power to find the light of wisdom & courage to break the wheel. (Although am not completely denying the possibility of dany going to asshai & passing through the shadow lands as a lot of people theorize). The Targaryen Restoration is just as important as Stark Restoration is.

[positivelyamazonian]

10 Favorite Game/Anime/Movie Characters

Tagged by: @a-super-evil-cat-who-murders (thanks!!! It was fun!)

The Rules: Name your top 10 favorite characters from 10 different fandoms, then tag 10 different people.

Well I’ve already done a tag for FEMALE CHARACTERS so I’ll leave this in case you wanna check it. For not repeating myself, I’ll do this time just male characters.

I’ll tag: @luluvonv @luthienamell @adayka @hydraballista @anyathebloodshell @anentireamazon @jar-cup @kim-v-croft  @autumn-star93 @lady-trent

Of course don’t feel obliged to do this. And yes my characters come in not a particular order!

1. Haplo the Patryn - The Death Gate Cycle (book series)

Posting an amazing fanart by Melusaaste because there’s not an official art that shows him so close-up, and honestly, this is the most accurate depiction of him I’ve ever seen. 

Haplo is the anti-hero and main character of The Death Gate Cycle series written by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman. Personal childhood hero (despite being an antihero himself), husbando and whatnot, until today he’s one of my fav characters ever, because through him I learnt the most perfect character development, from a cruel, merciless and amoral villain, to... well, not a hero if you think so, but to redeemed human being. 

“A 'why' is a dangerous thing... It challenges old, comfortable ways, forces people to think about that they do instead of just mindlessly doing it.” - Haplo in Dragon Wing, the first volume of the series.

2. Johan Liebheart - Monster

You don’t know what’s a villain until you meet this bastard. I am not an otaku or very enthusiastic of anime series, but Monster by Naoki Urasawa are probably the best manga/anime series ever written. And his villain, Johan Liberheart, one of the most twisted fucks ever written by an author.

Tortured, mentally ill, twisted, cruel, amoral, there’s no way to explain Johan. He experiences no character development and he has not a single redeeming quality, yet you just can’t let him go. An unforgettable character, not recommended for the weak and vulnerable.

There's nothing special about being born. Not a thing. Most of the universe is just death, nothing more. In this universe of ours, the birth of a new life on some corner of our planet is nothing but a tiny, insignificant flash. Death is a normal thing. So why live?

3. Geralt of Rivia - The Witcher (book/videogame series)

I’m so sorry I met this amazing character through The Witcher videogame series, because he existed already in the book series of the same name written by  Andrzej Sapkowski, and I really feel like posting this video because it perfectly sums up the spirit of the character.

Geralt is a witcher, a mutant specialist in killing demons and monsters for coin. He’s shaped like an anti-hero and despised by his society because of his nature and his mercenary job, but despite having everything for being just a rogue scoundrel, he manages to become a very rich character. Full of redeeming qualities despite his grey morals, Geralt struggles in a cruel Middle-Ages world to keep something human for himself, when everyone surrounding him tries to turn him in the heartless freak he was trained to be.

“People," Geralt turned his head, "like to invent monsters and monstrosities. Then they seem less monstrous themselves. When they get blind-drunk, cheat, steal, beat their wives, starve an old woman, when they kill a trapped fox with an axe or riddle the last existing unicorn with arrows, they like to think that the Bane entering cottages at daybreak is more monstrous than they are. They feel better then. They find it easier to live.” ― Andrzej Sapkowski, The Last Wish

4. Raistlin Majere - The Dragonlace (book series)

Again, I’ve to go back to a character created by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman (man, this people CAN write characters I tell you), this time for the Dragonlance series. These books are less original and brilliant than The Death Gate Cycle, but more popular and beloved because they are easier to read. And Raistlin Majere is probably the best character written for these series, being saved among them because of being, probably, the less cliché and the more complex of them all.

And again, anti-hero at times, redeemed hero at other times, tortured, twisted, cynic and cruel, but also able to show kindness and a human heart at times. Raistlin was born weak and sick and sacrificed everything (including his own health) for one sake: magic. And power. His only life desire is what will lead him to his own destruction.

"Of course this means a lot to me, Caramon. It means everything! I have worked and studied almost my entire life for this chance. What would you have me do - cast it aside because it is dangerous? Life is dangerous, Caramon. Just stepping out that door is dangerous! You cannot hide me from danger. Death floats in the air, creeps through the window, comes in with the hand-shake of a stranger. If we stop living because we fear death we have already died."

5. Tyrion Lannister (A Song of Ice and Ice/Game of Thrones series)

This little amazing piece of awesomeness needs no presentation. I am again sorry I met through the Game Of Thrones TV series and not A Song Of Ice And Fire books, but it was totally worth it because it’s one of the most well-written characters I’ve had the pleasure to meet, and I must say Peter Dinklage was born to play him.

What can I say? Tyrion is one of those characters who are worth living. A dwarf, deformed, ugly, with no physical or war skills, relying only in his extreme intelligence and wisdom and his political talent to survive, he’s one of the most strong inspirations one can find. Definitely go check him.

6. Kurtis Trent (Tomb Raider: The Angel of Darkness videogame)

I included Lara Croft in my female characters list, it would be absolutely unfair to forget Kurtis as he’s the other character that got my heart in TR series. Not gonna rant long about him here, because you already know my opinion. He was amazing. He deserved better. Ex-legionnaire, demon hunter and Lux Veritatis warrior, I’ve devoted all my fanfics to develop him as there was no chance for Core Design to do it so.

Fitting more in the role of a hero, I think he was also the perfect partner for Lara. His background is very well written and he had a lot of potential. The fact I will never see it doesn’t change anything. He deserves his place here.

"And I thought this would be one of my easy days." - Kurtis, The Sanitarium.

7. L Lawliet - Death Note (manga/anime series)

Again, I reinforce the statement that I’m not a fan of manga/anime series, but definitely Death Note is, together with Monster, one of those you should watch. And yes for everyone who loves Death Note, I’m a L fan. You always choose between L or Kira sides, and despite I’ve to recognize that Kira is a very complex, well written character, it’s L who gets my heart.

Supertalented, amoral, brilliant, extremely unpredictable and surprising, L is the first one of the agents that will try to catch Kira, the murderer who uses a Death Note to implant his particular justice world. L deserves your attention more than Kira, I presume. Or at least, it’s what I think.

“There are... many types of monsters in this world: Monsters who will not show themselves and who cause trouble; monsters who abduct children; monsters who devour dreams; monsters who suck blood, and... monsters who always tell lies. Lying monsters are a real nuisance. They are much more cunning than other monsters. They pose as humans even though they have no understanding of the human heart. They eat even though they've never experienced hunger. They study even though they have no interest in academics. They seek friendship even though they do not know how to love. If I were to encounter such a monster, I would likely be eaten by it. Because in truth, I am that monster.”

8. V - V for Vendetta (graphic novel/movie)

I know, easy to love him, right? Again I’m sad that I met this character through the movie and not the original graphic novel, though you can’t say a thing against Hugo Weaving’s magnificent delivery. I wish I could get my hands on the graphic novel, so I can know him better.

Anarchist, terrorist, idealist, V is the incarnation of the protest against dictatorship and opression in a dystopian England that has supressed all the rights and human freedom. If you don’tknow him, I strongly recommend at least the movie, for the inspiration this character delivers goes beyond that the mask that has trascended the movie itself to become a symbol of citizen fight.

9. Roger - American Dad (TV series)

Well technically he’s not a he, he’s rather an it, but whatever. Also he’s it’s a different trend in this post since I love him particularly because he’s funny and incarnates all the non-political correct you can expect from someone.

He also gives me, kinda, TR vibes. Roger is an alien who landed in Earth during Cold War and was rescued and sheltered at his home by Stan, a CIA agent who’s the main character of the series. Honestly I think Roger is the best of American Dad - a TV show which basically and mercilessly mocks every American value - because despite being an alien is absolutely, indecently human. I prefer him and this show much more than the overrated Family Guy.

10.  Dwight Schrute - The Office (TV series)

Last but not the least, the efficient, clever and adorable bastard hillbilly from The Office. I loved him from the very first moment he appeared. Yeah I know many people hate him or prefer the goofy boss of the handsome Jim but Dwight is really my spirit animal and speaks to me in so many levels. No more comment needed. He’s the best of the show to me.

Well this took forever, right? Sorry for the length of this post but now I’m free I wanted to give it some thought. I see again that I’ve a soft spot for grey morals, redeeming qualities, bad boys and complex characters. This is how it goes! ;)

[aion-rsa]

How Tom Hardy’s Venom Finally Made the Character a Superhero

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For decades, Marvel has been confused about what to do with Venom. While one of their more marketable characters, the company has never been sure what his deal is. Is he a villain, blinded by his own failures and driven mad? Is he a self-described hero, trying to use his status to justify his endless bloodlust? Is he the hulking agent of a corrupt Avengers, existing as a monstrous alien costume controlling a pathetic criminal too desperate for relevance? Is he a handicapped war hero trying to live up to Spider-Man’s example by using the violent symbiote as a weapon against evil? A mafioso? A space knight? A knock off of John Carpenter’s The Thing?

Even with the movies, the two incarnations of Venom are as different as the two Deadpools or the two Banes. While both Topher Grace and Tom Hardy‘s Eddie Brocks are media screw-ups who bond with alien goo that unleash the id, they also represent very different versions of how Venom has existed in the comics. The version from Spider-Man 3 died and that was that, but the one from 2018’s Venom has not only gone on to turn himself into a franchise, but he’s been able to finally settle Marvel’s mind. The movies, including this weekend’s Venom: Let There Be Carnage, have redefined the character.

To understand, you have to go back to the beginning when Venom first started showing up in the late-1980s. Venom was two beings bonded over a shared hatred of Spider-Man. Spider-Man had been spending time wearing a black costume he figured was made of alien technology, only to discover it was a living being that wanted to become one with him. After he removed it, it joined with Eddie Brock, a reporter whose faulty article about a serial killer’s identity was proven wrong by Spider-Man catching the real killer. Rather than realize that he made a mistake, Eddie doubled down and blamed Spider-Man for the way his life crumbled. Together, the symbiote and Eddie became Venom and they wanted to make Spider-Man pay.

But there came a bit of a twist. While Venom was very much dedicated to gruesomely murdering Peter Parker, he was deluded enough to think that this was for the greater good. To him, Spider-Man really was a menace who ruined Eddie Brock’s life. Venom wasn’t spending his off-time robbing banks or trying to take over the world. He wasn’t teaming up with other villains. In his mind, he wasn’t a villain. He was just a good guy pulling off some good old fashioned vigilante justice.

Between Venom’s popularity, his alienation from the rest of the villains, and the fact that he was never going to actually kill Spider-Man, the writing was on the wall. Venom was going to have to actually start fighting crime, even if it was in the Punisher style. A couple What If…? comics from the era played with the idea. There was even a backup story that showed Venom saving a teenager from criminals while preparing for his first fight against Spider-Man.

In 1993, Venom went full-on antihero with the miniseries Venom: Lethal Protector. That started a five-year stretch of Venom comics where the hero went around murdering muggers and getting roped into the occasional superhero team-up, whether it was with Spider-Man, Wolverine, Ghost Rider, or Morbius. As is normal with changes in the comic book status quo, it eventually rubber-banded back to Venom being a full-on villain who wanted nothing more than to kill Spider-Man. It’s always so simple to just go back to the past and treat recent stories as a failed experiment.

Marvel wasn’t sure what to do with Venom for years, but they wanted Venom to be synonymous with villainy. Yet at the same time, they understood the novelty of a heroic Venom, so they tried to have their cake and eat it too. Mac Gargan (formerly the Scorpion) became the new Venom and was treated as genuinely monstrous. In the meantime, Patrick Mulligan was introduced as the new symbiote superhero Toxin. Once he fell into obscurity, Eddie Brock started fighting crime again as Anti-Venom. Then later on, Eddie became host to the Toxin symbiote.

Flash Thompson became Venom for a time, and it was Marvel once again trying to have it both ways. Although the symbiote was evil and overly violent, Flash was able to control it via drugs and willpower. Dealing with the symbiote was treated as a metaphor for recovering from alcoholism. Then when the symbiote took a liking to Flash and became good, it was forced to bond against its will to criminal Lee Price. This culminated in Eddie Brock becoming the symbiote’s host again for the first time in years, and he was again at least trying to do the right thing.

After all this time of playing Hot Potato with alien fashion, we hit the point where Venom was fighting crime again. It was roughly 20 years since his Lethal Protector days, but those days had become a base of nostalgia. Instead of reverting Venom back to how he was in his original handful of stories, writers were starting to remember the antihero stories as the “good old days.”

Now when Spider-Man 3 came out in 2007, it was a little after Eddie Brock got rid of the symbiote in the comics and during the early days of Mac Gargan���s turn. There was nothing modern to latch onto and there was little problem with just going with an early depiction of comics Venom, albeit with some differences. Mainly that Topher Grace’s Eddie was supposed to play like an evil mirror of Peter Parker to the point that he was a photographer instead of a reporter and wasn’t supposed to come off as especially bulky. Bloated as the movie was, this version of Venom didn’t have anything going for him other than being all about revenge, so we have no idea what his next step would have been had he won.

Conversely, the Tom Hardy version of Venom had to be fully formed without Spider-Man’s existence, complete with not only a new origin story but also a new motivation for Brock and the symbiote to stay bonded. That meant going to the Lethal Protector well once more. Both Venom and Venom: Let There Be Carnage are filled with references to that era of Venom. Carlton Drake, the Life Foundation, Riot, Shriek, Eddie having homeless friends, the symbiote hungering for the chemical that’s found in brains and chocolate, and so on. The details of Cletus Kasady’s childhood were taken directly from Venom: Carnage Unleashed.

Even the goofball sense of humor was something Venom had going for him back then, though it was more Eddie than the symbiote (it really didn’t get a “voice” until years later). This was a guy who murdered a room full of goons while singing David Bowie’s “Let’s Dance,” then admitting he forgot most of the lyrics. He once went undercover in a church by cross-dressing as a nun. The dude went on TV and crashed a news broadcast with the Incredible Hulk while doing a Hans and Franz impression!

But more than anything, it went with the idea of Venom being a problematic attempt at being a hero. Eddie is a mess of a man who ruined his own life and needs to be led on the right path. The Venom symbiote is a petulant child that wants to feast on human flesh and unleash havoc, but can be won over to do the right thing and be civilized. While Venom does good overall, it’s also an excuse to do what he wants. Murder and eating people is okay as long as they have it coming. The sequel makes it apparent that such an attitude leads to repercussions and it’s not a sustainable lifestyle for someone who wants to hold onto a normal life.

When Venom made all that money at the box office (over $850 million internationally), it sent a message: Marvel realized that the world wanted Venom as the good guy. He wasn’t there to chase Spider-Man, but to have his own adventure. Be the protagonist. Be the hero. Be over the top about it all.

While Venom’s comic adventures have certainly been weird in the last few years, they have been consistent in making it clear that Eddie Brock and the Venom symbiote are on the side of good. Eddie had a great, cathartic moment where he admitted to the Avengers that he doesn’t know whether to call himself good or bad because once upon a time, he thought killing Spider-Man was the right thing to do. How can he trust his own judgment if he had that going on?

Then he went on to pull this shit.

He’s still not nice enough to let Spider-Man eat his fries, but they’re at least on good enough terms to get lunch together. That’s progress!

The success of Venom: Let There Be Carnage only solidifies Venom in the eyes of the public. Tom Hardy’s CGI space monster is someone we want to cheer for. Let him be redeemed. Let him protect.

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[theastrophilearchitect]

Recent reads #1.

In February, I formatted my wrap-up actually as a wrap-up, but I didn't really enjoy making myself write about every movie and every show and every audiobook, so I've decided to cut the movies and tv shows unless I specifically want to review one, and just do recent reads every ten books I want to talk about, ignoring rereads I have literally nothing to talk about, and not filling two of my weekly post slots per month first with a tbr, then with a wrap-up. I have other things to talk about.

So, here's ten books I read recently.

1. Skyward by Brandon Sanderson

Hoo. So I finally read this, and, ultimately, I did enjoy it, but it was about two hundred pages too long. I'm sure if the first three/four hundred were condensed, the characters wouldn't feel so developed, but I think it would be worth it to increase the pace. If the pace of this book were on a graph, it would be flat until the last fifty pages, at which point it would increase exponentially.

Anyway, to this book is set in a (technically dystopian) sci-fi future, in which humanity is living on a planet called Detritus, where the crew of a ship called the Defiant crashed during a battle with the alien race of the Krell. This was several generations ago, and for several decades, the original crew split into groups, because when in groups of over a hundred, the Krell could sense, attack and kill them. Fast forward several decades, after a huge battle, humanity now lives together again, partially on the surface. Skyward follows Spensa Nightshade, daughter of a coward from the Battle of Alta, when humanity came back to the surface. Spensa wants to be a pilot, to battle the Krell, defend humanity, and eventually escape past the debris field surrounding Detritus. Then she finds a ship. A ship, broken and run-down, but more advanced than anything humanity has, and fixable. And it talks.

I'm going to keep this one brief because I have a lot to say about this book, and am planning to make a full review, but for now: I was so bored throughout the first three hundred pages. I didn't particularly care about the characters--of whom I felt there were too many--and found Spensa irritating, which bothered me particularly because this book is written in first person. Then, events, action, character arcs, and I left this book absolutely desperate for the next. I think my main issue with this was just the amount of set-up required for the clearly epic saga Sanderson is planning

On the plus side, its sequel Starsight came out in November, so, if all goes to plan, that should be around the third or fourth book on this list.

Rating: um. Last hundred or so pages I feel deserve full five stars, but I think the first few hundred drag this down to about 3.73 stars, specifically.

2. Ghosts of the Shadow Market by Cassandra Clare, Sarah Rees Brennan, Maureen Johnson, Kelly Link, and Robin Wasserman

Honestly, I wasn’t going to read this Shadowhunters novella bind-up. I haven’t read any of the other bind-ups. I only actually decided to read it because I was running out of audiobooks I wanted to listen to, and this was the only Shadowhunters bind-up on Audible. But I’m so glad I did.

So this novella bind-up is set in the world of the Shadowhunters and basically follows Jem Carstairs from the end of the Infernal Devices, up to its epilogue and then beyond. It was released after the Mortal Instruments, the Infernal Devices and the Dark Artifices, but before the Last Hours, the Eldest Curses and the Wicked Powers (obviously, because the Wicked Powers doesn’t even have a title for book one yet). The earlier novellas set up the Last Hours, the later ones the Wicked Powers, and probably the Eldest Curses, too, but I don’t really remember.

I didn’t enjoy the Mortal Instruments, and after reading City of Bones, I listened to the rest as audiobooks so I could read the other series, which I did love (even if I felt the Dark Artifices was unnecessarily long). Chain of Gold, the first book in the Last Hours has been out for just over a year now, and has definitely been the most hyped Shadowhunters book in the recent years, so I can’t wait to get to it, and am so glad I read this and got to know a little about the characters, though I don’t think you need to have read this to read Chain of Gold.

Rating: 4.3 stars. (Yes, apparently I’m doing decimals other than .5 now).

3. The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes by Suzanne Collins

I finished this audiobook on March 19th, which says something about how my reading’s going this month. Actually, this is the fourth book I read in March 2021, because I also listened to the Mockingjay audiobook this month in my preparation to read this, but I didn’t think it was necessary to include it in this list because I’ve read it so many times before. Four books in twenty days isn’t bad--it’s more than most people read, but still. Especially when three of the four are audiobooks.

So, this book follows Coriolanus Snow, Panem’s president in the original series, as he acts as a mentor in the 10th Hunger Games. These Games are very different to the 74th we see in The Hunger Games, and every character in this book (minus the one character under the age of ten) was alive during the war. Since there have obviously only been nine Games before now, the tributes obviously couldn’t have victors from their districts as mentors the way Katniss and Peeta do, and this is the first year they have any form of mentoring. There’s no training, watching isn’t mandatory, this is the first Games in which they have sponsorships etc. Coriolanus is assigned the female tribute from district 12, and finds himself questioning his morality.

I really wasn’t sure what the point of this book was. It showed more inequality within the Capitol than what the trilogy exposed us to, but it didn’t seem to contain the same message as the Hunger Games, partly because Coriolanus essentially had a negative character arc, so as to become the tyrant, and partly because we knew how it would end. (Spoiler: Coriolanus falls in love with his tribute, but we knew it couldn’t work out because he couldn’t and wouldn’t marry someone from the districts, but he had a wife and daughter in the trilogy.) I don’t understand why Collins is trying to get us to sympathise with this villain--I love sympathetic villains, and anti-heroes, morally grey characters etc., but Snow just isn’t that in the trilogy, so it has little impact.

Granted, I did find the insight to his mind interesting, and the book was very entertaining--and had an excellent narrator--but I just didn’t see the point. I think this had the potential to garner five stars from me, but it just adds so little to the original story, I can’t do it.

(Leena Norms on YouTube made an excellent spoiler review on this book that goes much more in-depth about symbolism, themes etc. You can find it here)

Rating: 4 stars.

4. Eliza and Her Monsters by Francesca Zappia

I read this in three days. I’m not a huge contemporary person, but hell yes. This book? Mwah.

We follow Eliza Mirk, your typical teenage outsider. She hates high school, and is just waiting for graduation. Online, however, she’s LadyConstellation, the anonymous creator of the hugely popular web comic Monstrous Sea. Then she meets Wallace Warland, a Monstrous Sea fan who Eliza soon discovers is actually RainMaker, the most popular Monstrous Sea fanfiction writer. We have romance, we have geeky stuff, we have relatable hatred of school.

I listened to the audiobook (a running theme of audiobooks here, because I was currently very slowly reading House of Earth and Blood by Sarah J Maas, which is 800 pages. If your book’s going to be more than 600 pages, make it two books. Please.), which was a little disappointing because I later found out the book has Monstrous Sea comic strips in it, which are in the audiobook, you just don’t get the visuals. Regardless, the narrators were excellent, and I loved this as my intro to the contemporary genre.

Rating: 4 stars.

5. Sea Witch by Sarah Henning

This was the last book on my audiobook list before I gained a ton more, and though it wasn’t mind-blowing, it was enjoyable, and I do want to read the sequel. Or rather, listen to it.

This book takes place before the game of the Little Mermaid, and follows a young woman who will become the Sea Witch. One day, a girl drowns as her friends fail to save her. Three years later, a girl with nearly the same name arrives in her friends’ lives, though no-one but Evie recognises her, and Evie must help her get the prince to give her true love’s kiss to save her.

The plot wasn’t especially exciting and the characters weren’t especially interesting; the plot was rather predictable, but the writing was excellent and it was enjoyable nonetheless.

I’m curious as to where the sequel will go, because this book’s epilogue is set 50 years after the climax, but I assume it’ll be the retelling of the actual Little Mermaid story.

Rating: 3 stars.

6. House of Earth and Blood by Sarah J Maas

I didn’t want to love this book as much as bookstagram does. In fact, over time, my love for Maas’s Throne of Glass and A Court of Thorns and Roses has faded, especially earlier this year when I listened to the Throne of Glass audiobooks (my second read through), and was struggling by the end, because it took itself way too seriously, and it felt like it was just continuing for the sake of it (I stand that the entire eight-book series could have been four or five books at most, and that’s including the prequel). In contrast, this just didn’t drag. I was intiially overwhelmed by the 800 pages, but, God, it was worth it.

The Crescent City series is set in a modern-day fantasy, with modern technology, but where humans, angels, shifters, fae, and a thousand other kinds of supernatural creatures, live side by side. Bryce Quinlan is half-fae, a party girl, living like tomorrow doesn’t exist, until her best friend, and her best friend’s wolf pack, are murdered. Two years later, a similar string of murders starts up again, though the supposed killer remains imprisoned, and Bryce is recruited by the city government to investigate, with the help of Hunt Athalar, an enslaved fallen angel, who Bryce is incredibly thirsty for.

I made notes while reading this. I had many thoughts, throughout 800 pages.

Maas just really wants to write kind-of-fae protagonists: every one of her books (bar Catwoman: Soulstealer) has a protagonist who isn’t always entirely human, and who isn’t always entirely fae.

It felt like this was only classed as adult instead of young adult so she could use the word ‘fuck’ three times per page--her previous books being young adult didn’t stop her writing graphic smut scenes.

In the first three hundred pages, the main cast walked into the road and halted traffic so many times (being like twice)--Jesus, can we just let the poor drivers be?

This book never really explains the Gods in this world. There’s so much lore, and worldbuilding, but the Gods are never really explained.

Lehabah’s character reminded me so much of Iko from The Lunar Chronicles by Marissa Meyer, and I am so here for it.

‘...Bryce mused, toying with her toes. They were painted a deep ruby. Ridiculous, he told himself. Not the alternative. The one that had him imagining tasting each and every one of those toes before slowly working his way up those sleek, bare legs of hers.’ Right, so the Umbra Mortis has a foot fetish.

Looking back through my notes, I made this one--’I get that it’s more fun to write attractive characters, but not every no-name needs to be drop dead gorgeous’--which is hilarious to look back on because the character I was specifically referencing turned out to be a very big name, but still.

I did enjoy every second of this book, but I still think it could have been condensed. God only knows how many words were in the first draft of this book.

A lot of the words for things in this--Midgard for Earth/the mortal world; Vanir for the supernatural creatures--are from Norse mythology, and I’m so here for it.

By the time the actual truth of the mystery came out, I’d already been given so many assumptions and alternatives as to what happened, that, having finished the book, I can barely remember the actual truth. We were given at least four versions of the story.

Finally, Bryce and Hunt spend literally this entire book lusting after each other, and we hear about their fantasies about each other at least twenty times, but they literally never have actual, penetrative sex. There are explicit scenes, sure, but the most action for himself Hunt gets is alone in the shower.

Anyway, I loved this. It was 1000% better than previous books by Maas, and I want book two immediately. (Maybe not immediately; I’d like to read other books, but still.) I finished it on March 31st, and it was my 30th read of the year, actually completing my Goodreads goal for the year--it was intentionally low because I only read 23 books last year, but in the shortest quarter of this year, I already met my goal. I’m leaving the Goodreads official goal at 30, because I don’t want to push myself too far, but I have a silent goal of 100--if I keep up this pace, I can read about 122 books, but we’re going to keep quiet, because I sincerely doubt I’ll manage that.

Rating: 5 stars.

7. Starsight by Brandon Sanderson

God, this surpassed Skyward. I think part of that is because I already knew a lot of the characters, and Spensa is significantly less annoying in this one. It follows an incredibly different storyline to the first, but still has the same vibes, and was, frankly, a fantastic sequel.

I will say this series reads very young, and it’s very difficult for me to imagine the characters as adults.

Also, called the romance, and they kiss in this one, and it’s actually very anticlimactic. The two characters are in completely different places for most of this book, so there’s not much development, but my God. 

This book, this world... ahhhhh. If you don’t like science fiction, you won’t like this series, but otherwise, just read it. You won’t regret it.

Rating: 4 stars.

8. Call Down the Hawk by Maggie Stiefvater

First off, I love the US cover for this, but the UK one is so much better, and you can fight me on that.

This is the first book in the Dreamer Trilogy, a sequel series to The Raven Cycle, centred on the wonderful Ronan Lynch. The existence of this book was actually why I decided to reread The Raven Cycle--I listened to the audiobooks in, I think, 2018, and didn’t pay a huge amount of attention, which was, in retrospect, a horrible idea, given how complicated the storyline is, but I wanted to read this series, so a reread was required. And, as we know, I’m so glad I did, because I absolutely fell in love.

I do wish this book had more of the other Raven Cycle characters--you’ve obviously got Ronan and his brothers, and Opal, but there was so little Blue, Gansey and Adam. Adam was actually in quite a few scenes, but he’s my least favourite of the main four; Gansey had some texts and Blue had a single phone call, except that chapter was from Declan’s perspective, so we only got Ronan’s end.

Regardless, Stiefvater, as usual, introduced some amazing new characters, more worldbuilding, and I love the way she gives the antagonists’ perspective, too. There’s about a month, as of today, before the sequel comes out, and, fair to say, I can’t wait.

Rating: 4.2 stars.

9. A Court of Silver Flames by Sarah J Maas

I hate this cover change. Utterly inferior to the original covers.

In all honesty, my love for SJM has faded over the last few months--though I do now think House of Earth and Blood may have revived it--but I did still enjoy this. So now let’s go through the notes I made as I went!

First off, though, this is the fourth book in the A Court of Thorns and Roses series, focusing on Nesta and Cassian, but I’m not saying anything else so as to avoid spoiling the first three.

The opening reads like fanfiction. The introductions, the inciting incident--I’ve never been a huge fanfic reader, but this reads like fanfic setup. 

SJM’s apparently going on a Norse mythology surge, what with Vanir in Crescent City and Valkyries here, but I’m really, really here for it

Elain Archeron feels irrelevant. She has imapct on Feyre and Nesta, sure, but she has no agency of her own. People ship her with Azriel, solely because she’s the unmated Archeron sister; he’s the unmated bat boy, but I’m not sure how I feel about that.

I sincerely hope we get more context as to Amren’s origins. There was a little in this, but not enough to satisfy me.

SJM has an obsession with masculinity. Little to a fault, honestly--every one of her male characters in described in some way, shape or form as the epitome of masculinity and ‘male arrogance’, and it irritates me to no end. Honestly, her books all feel like vessels for a sub/dom kink. Just saying.

‘As if she’d been freed from a cage she hasn’t realised she’d been in.’ I didn’t make note of it, but she this was the second time Sarah tried to test whether or not we’d notice this blatant manipulation of the ‘breath they didn’t realise they were holding’ cliche.

Stop capitalising the word ‘Made.’ It’s really not that difficult, and it’s ugly.

And as for the 70% of this book that is purely smut: hate that Nesta’s scent was disguised because Cassian’s ‘essence’ was all over her. What does that mean and why does even her scent submit to him??

Literally all of her female characters fall into the minority of women capable of orgasm from purely penetrative sex: it’s unrealistic, and I’m not entirely convinced SJM understands how the female body works. Also, in both this and Crescent City, she kept saying ‘her breasts pebbled’, and I still have no idea what that means.

I did, however, really enjoy seeing the Winter Solstice celebrations again.

I enjoy the smutty scenes as much as the next reader, but the latter fifth of this book, when they finally stopped shagging and got on with the plot, were so much better than the earlier ones.

Regardless, I did really enjoy this book, and come out with a hugely positive opinion, mostly because I enjoyed the last hundred pages so much.

Rating: 4.1 stars.

10. The Sky Blues by Robbie Couch

I cannot get Robbie Couch’s name right. I keep thinking it’s Crouch, and I don’t know why. Anyway.

This was the Booksplosion book of the month for April, and is very much not my typical thing. I am, however, trying to branch out my reading from purely fantasy and sci-fi, so here we are.

This book follows Sky Baker, an openly gay high school senior in Michigan, who is planning a promposal for his crush. Who may or may not be straight. Then, his promposal plans are exposed to the school in a homophobic, racist email-blast. That’s basically it, which doesn’t seem to me like a lot, but then most books I read aren’t 300-page standalones.

The narrative is a little cliche. We get an appearance-by-mirror on page four, which didn’t exactly give me much faith. There were, of course, also the times Couch pretended he wasn’t using the let-out-a-breath-they-didn’t-realise-they-were-holding cliche: ‘took a burden off my shoulders I hadn’t even realised was weighing me down.;’ ‘a million pounds I hadn’t even realised had been weighing me down for days.’ A nice metaphor, but cliche nonetheless.

It contains so many pop culture references, which are really entertaining in 2021, but will probably really date this in a few years.

Also, minor spoiler: we didn’t even get to see the actual prom. There was the whole build-up to it, the month before, the weeks before, the day before, and we never even got satisfaction.

Regardless, this was an easy, wholesome read, and I think it’ll be a good part of my entry to the world of contemporary.

Rating: 4.1 stars.

And those are my recent reads.

[lildaveselectronics]

HERE AT WIRED, we like Sonos speakers. Throughout the last five years, we’ve reviewed everything from its small Play:1 speaker to its soundbars and recommended every one of them. But it’s not cheap to turn your home into a Sonos-powered shrine to sound. Like Apple products, Sonos speakers are built to work with other Sonos speakers, and don’t come cheap, starting at $200 for the least expensive, smallest model. But which ones should you buy? Read on for our recommendations.

What’s WIRED about Sonos speakers

After flooding my home with every Sonos model you can buy (and filling all remaining space with the boxes of said speakers), I’ve learned that not every Sonos speaker is the same, but they have an elegant synergy and sound that no other speaker system seems to have. There’s an additive effect, as well—the more speakers you connect to your home Wi-Fi, the richer your home audio becomes. If you have a few speakers in a room, it’s almost hard to tell where the sound is coming from. The crystal clear music can completely engulf you. Here are the top reasons to buy into Sonos:

Easy streaming: There isn’t another speaker system that lets you string together multiple speakers as easily, or connect them up to stream in different rooms of your home while keeping the audio perfectly in sync. The Sonos ecosystem can also handle home theater applications, and can support a full surround sound setup. It’s also incredibly easy to set up these speakers. The Sonos app guides you through the process of starting a new system, or adding speakers to an existing system. AirPlay 2 and Siri control are also on the way in 2018.

They sound amazing: Sonos speakers are all high quality and deliver a fairly consistent, appealing sound signature. It’s easy to argue that Sonos hardware is too expensive, but it's difficult to fault the products' sound quality.

Spotify on Alexa: Spotify can now be accessed using Alexa voice control on the Sonos One, the speaker with Amazon's voice assistant built in. If you have one of these speakers, you can set Spotify as your default music service in the Alexa app. Then, when you ask Alexa to play something, it plays from Spotify.

What’s TIRED about Sonos speakers

As amazing as all Sonos speakers sound, and as seamlessly as they connect together, they still have some limitations, both in application and technology. We don’t think these are dealbreakers (yet), but you might.

Aging Connectivity: The tweeters and woofers inside Sonos speakers still sound amazing, but the way they connect to your network (or TV) is dated. Sonos speakers only have 2.4GHz Wi-Fi 802.11 a/b/g, which means that they cannot connect on the sometimes faster/cleaner 5GHz frequency commonly used today. I have yet to notice loss in fidelity or have dropouts on a Sonos, even in a Manhattan apartment, but the lack of support for today's Wi-Fi standards, including n/AC, may eventually haunt these speakers. Both of Sonos’s soundbars also rely on optical cables and they lack modern ports like HDMI needed for Dolby Atmos.

No Batteries or Bluetooth: None of the speakers have battery power or Bluetooth, so you cannot use them outside of your home. You can unplug and move them from room to room, but it's not exactly encouraged—the app has you tune their sound to each space and give them names like "Kitchen."

You Must Use the Sonos App (mostly): Sonos has done an admirable job updating its speakers with new features through its app, but the app is also the only way to listen to many sources of music. Sonos is slowly freeing services from its app, allowing you to directly broadcast to any speaker within the normal Spotify, Tidal, and Pandora apps, for instance. But for others, you’re still stuck using the Sonos app, which functions fine, but isn’t ideal. Sonos promises several more apps in 2018, including Audible and iHeart Radio.

THE BEST SONOS SPEAKER

Sonos One

(November 23-27 Sale: $175 ($25 off) on Sonos and Amazon)

The Sonos One is just about the smallest Sonos speaker, but it still packs enough oomph to fill most rooms, and its new hands-free Alexa integration is a lot of fun. Sonos took the time to make Alexa sound great, and because of the voice commands, the Sonos One has become my go-to speaker. It holds the premiere spot in my kitchen, where I like to listen to tunes the most each day. Alexa works like normal, and can play music, tell you the weather, find a recipe, and answer simple questions. Amazon keeps adding Skills to Alexa, making it more useful all the time. Support for Google Assistant is promised for 2018. The Sonos One is also the first third-party Alexa device that lets you use voice control to stream Spotify.

It’s the same price as the similar Play:1 speaker ($50 off for the rest of 2017), and a lot better thanks to its added skills and touch controls. If you already own an Amazon Echo, it can be used to control a Sonos system, but if you’re buying an expensive speaker, why not get the better one?

I'll recommend other Sonos speakers in this guide, but you also can’t go wrong just buying 2-4 Sonos Ones to fill your house up. They’re much more affordable and their small size means you can hide them in any room.

THE BEST-SOUNDING SONOS SPEAKER (A +1 FOR YOUR PAD)

Sonos Play:5 ($500 on Sonos and Amazon)

If you really like to party, I recommend adding a Sonos Play:5to your setup. It has enough of a kick to dial a party up to 11, or really annoy your neighbors. I placed mine in the largest room of my apartment and it’s honestly more power than I need. Sonos boasts that this model has six Class-D digital amplifiers: three tweeters, three mid-woofers, and a phased speaker array. In practical terms, it will fill a very large room, or basement with ease. Out of the four standard Sonos speakers I tested, this one delivered the largest range of sound, with enough thump to satisfy fans of any genre.

Avoid the Play:3: The medium-sized Play:3 is an older model that hasn’t gotten an update in years. It still sounds decent, but it doesn’t have the depth of the cheaper Sonos One, despite carrying a bit more bass. It sounds noticeably worse, in some ways. Even at its $250 holiday 2017 sale price, you’re better off buying a second Sonos One or the monstrous Play:5, both of which have newer touch control, look nicer, and carry better sound.

THE BEST SONOS SPEAKER FOR YOUR TV

Sonos Playbar

(November 23-27 Sale: $600 ($100 off) on Sonos and Amazon)

A soundbar can make all the difference in a home theater, and costs a lot less than a full surround sound setup. Sonos has two options for your television. After listening to both of them extensively, I prefer the Sonos Playbar. With more mid-woofers, it delivers deep bass. Overall, it has more balance and depth than the Sonos Playbase (also on sale for $100 off), which does sound a little sharp when you hear high treble sounds, like cymbals. The Playbar is one of the best soundbars you can buy at any price.

Truth be told, both sound fantastic, and there are very practical reasons you might want to choose one over the other. The Playbase sits perfectly under a standing TV with a base that measures about 28 inches wide, 15 inches deep, and around 2.5 inches tall, giving it a very thin profile. But if your TV is mounted on the wall, it won't work. The Playbar is built to hang on a wall, but at just over 3-inches tall and 5-inches thick, it can also sit in front of most TVs without hassle.

The Sonos Sub is Worth It ($700 on Sonos and Amazon): If you can spend another $700 (yeah, it’s a lot), buy the Sonos Sub and set it next to, or under, your couch. You could also add speakers for surround, but buy the Sub first. The Playbar with Sub combo is a better combination.

THE BEST SONOS SURROUND SOUND SETUP

Sonos Playbar, Sub, and 2 Sonos Ones

(November 23-27 Sale: $1,650 ($150 off) on Sonos and Amazon)

To enable surround sound with one of its soundbars, Sonos requires two extra speakers, one for the left and one for the right. I’ve used two Play:5 speakers, but it’s overkill. Two Sonos One speakers are a better match. You simply place them to the left and right of your couch. They don’t add as much benefit as you get from the Playbar soundbar and Sub combo, but if you watch a lot of movies and want to hear things like TIE Fighters flying over your head in Star Wars: The Force Awakens, you’ll like the extra juice a couple of Ones provide. You can buy the speaker combo piecemeal or in a bundle, but Sonos doesn’t discount bundles.

As mentioned previously, Sonos speakers can be configured to output 5.1 surround sound, but the company's products are not currently equipped to deliver Dolby Atmos. Still, this is one of the easiest surround sound systems to set up. You just open up the Sonos app, say you want to add a surround speaker, and start hitting the Next button while it sets everything up for you. It takes less than 10 minutes, as does setting up almost any Sonos product.

If you don’t have a table on each side of your couch to set these speakers on, Sonos sells Sanus Speaker Stands for $100 and Wall Mounts for $60. I have not tested these, but I don’t see any red flags.

Don't Buy Play:1 for Surround Unless... If you can find significantly cheaper Play:1 speakers used or on sale, those will work perfectly fine. They don’t have Alexa (no microphones), but you don’t really need a voice assistant in a surround system. Sonos sells a surround sound package with two Play:1s, a Playbar, and Sub (Sonos/Amazon). But again, don't buy them unless they are significantly cheaper than the Sonos Ones, or you already own an Amazon Echo. Eventually, you may want voice assistant functionality, so it's best to buy the newer product.

When you buy something using the retail links in our buying guides, we may earn a small affiliate commission. Read more about how this works.

[knightofbalance-13]

Yes, yes it was

http://dudeblade.tumblr.com/post/162849826936/im-not-sure-if-this-was-stupid-or-not

How boy, nostalgia. A powerful thing isn’t it. Let’s fight nostalgia with a few facts.

I recently started rewatching shows that I enjoyed as a kid…

Okay...for what reason? Nostalgia? Boredom? Rediscovery? Your reason for watching these could very well affect yoru opinion on them, especially with your bias against RWBY. (As we shall soon see.)

And I realized that the show, Beast Wars, one of the very FIRST 3D Animated shows ever aired, is better than RWBY. The plot is less confusing, and in the span of ONE episode, they managed to make the monstrous Rampage sympathetic; RW/BY is struggling to make Cinder out to be sympathetic in TWELVE episodes.

Well, there are three problems here:

1. The purpose of Cinder was to be hated, not redeemable. For god’s sake, you love the Joker and yet he is irredeemable: Does that mean this Rampage is a better villain than the Joker?

2. Your examples don’t say why Beast Wars is better. You don’t say why Ramapage is more redeemable than Cinder nor how the plot is less confusing. And that’s ALL you say. Nothing about animation, the rest of the characters, the audio, the visuals, the graphics nor action or jokes. Just because it’s better than RWBY in two aspects doesn’t make better overall. Speaking of....

3. Facts contradict you. IMDb lists Beast Wars at an amazing 8.2 (which I think it deserves a round of applause for being rated so highly...but RWBY is rated as 8.3. And unlike Beast Wars which is a part of an existing franchise, complete and had more professional backing: RWBY didn’t and still doesn’t. Again, while this is amazing of Beast Wars, RWBY is still factually rated higher so your opinion doesn’t hold much weight.

The show Adventures of Jimmy Neutron Boy Genius is also 3D animated. And the overall characters are more relatable, and everyone gets a chance to have the spotlight.

Again, you don’t say why they are more relateable. I don’t find Sheen all that relateable, nor Carl really, Jimmy only somewhat ect. The one I find relateable is the professor who could never finish his works, something I have a fear of. And I can remember that Carl didn’t get very much development, Sheen didn’t really develop beyond comedy relief and Jimmy stayed pretty arrogant. Whereas the same cannot be said for most of RWBY’s cast.  And again, that’s only one aspect. There is more to animation besides characters.

And again, the facts don’t agree with you. In fact, Jimmy Neutron is rated only 6.7 whereas RWBY again has an 8.3. And this while being completed and backed by a popular network whereas, again, RWBY is NOT. SO even with all those advantages, RWBY still beats it out.

The show Storm Hawks made me remember all the good times I had with the show. I would get up early to watch it when I was younger. The characters were interesting, the overall plot was spectacular, and the action is interesting.

How how and how? Also, music, animation, graphics, color design, character development?

And again, Storm hawks has a rating of 7.3 and RWBy has a whole star above it. And it aired on Cartoon Network and is complete. So your statement fails.

The kicker? - All of these were western shows that aired BEFORE 2010, a full FIVE YEARS BEFORE RW/BY!

And the only one I really fond impressive is Beast Wars. Storm hawks and Jimmy Neutron are both utterly crushed by RWBY in teh ratings, who doesn’t have network backing, isn’t a part of an existing franchise and isn’t complete so it can still go up.

In fact, considering your tags, let’s take three more shows into account: Legend Of Korra, Loud House and Steven Universe.

Korra has a IMDb of 8.6, which seems impressive compared to RWBY...except Korra had network backing, experienced writers, is complete and has full episodes. And speaking of experience, it’s actually a downgrade from The Last Airbender’s staggering 9.2 and guess what, This was rejected from Japan (although I will admit this is partially due to the Japanese stand ins remindingt them of a dark time in their history). So Korra had more advantages than RWBY and still barely surpasses it.

Loud House has an IMDb of 7.8, still lesser than RWBY’s. And again, it has more experience behind it (the writer wrote both the powerpuff girls and Dexter’s Labratory) and network backing.

The only one I am impressed by here is Steven Universe, who has an IMDb Rating of 8.4. However, it’s original so it has less to fall back on and came in during a time that was still pretty iffy for Cartoon Network. Howqever, it has had more money behind it, more exposure, more experience (Adventure Time and MLP: Friendship is magic) which means that RWBY is keeping up with one of the most famous pieces of western animation while basically ahving more disadvantages.

And let’s take a look at RWBy’s stated inspirations from anime? NGE has both an IMDb rating of 8.6 and Hideaki Anno had a reputation with Hayao Miyazaki and one of their most famous works: Nausicaa of the Valley Of The Wind. Ghost in The Shell (/Stand Alone Complex) has an IMDb rating of 8/8.6 and Gurren Lagann, the one RWBY takes the most influence from and was Monty’s favorite anime, has an IMDb rating of 8.4. RWBY is starting to rival her predessors.

And RWBY is pretty groundbreaking as well: First American anime to be exported to Japan, made it into Japanese theaters, has an all star dubbing cast, has a crap ton of merchandise there, got a manga adaptation and, oh yeah, is airing on Japanese TV as we speak! Can’t take that away.

So, was it stupid to do this? I feel as if I just ruined the show for me when I know that there are better ones that have already aired before.

Yes, immensely. Your nostalgia doesn’t change facts nor does it devalue CRWBY’s work. All this did was bring me off my Hiatus again (I gotta work on that), severely questions your critical thinking abilities and your status as a RWBY fan and shows how impressive RWBY really is. So you kind of failed here.

And can I also mention that the Smash bros. Brawl machinima, Smash King is also better as well? - I feel like I should mention that.

barely known, has about the 1/5000th of RWBY’s likes and views and is mostly just using Smash Bros brawl for acting. You probably shouldn’t have.

[alexsmitposts]

North American, European Public: Finally Wake Up, Damn It! Year after year, month after month, I see two sides of the world; two extremes which are getting more and more disconnected: I see great cities like Homs in Syria, reduced to horrifying ruins. I see Kabul and Jalalabad in Afghanistan, fragmented by enormous concrete walls intended to protect NATO occupation armies and their local puppets. I see monstrous environmental devastation in places such as Indonesian Borneo, Peruvian gold mining towns, or the by now almost uninhabitable atoll island-nations of Oceania: Tuvalu, Kiribati or Marshall Islands. I see slums, a lack of sanitation and clean drinking water, where the boots of Western empires have been smashing local cultures, enslaving people and looting natural resources. I work on all the continents. I never stop, even when exhaustion tries to smash me against the wall, even when there are hardly any reserves left. I cannot stop; I have no right to stop, because I can finally see the pattern; the way this world operates, the way the West has been managing to usurp it, indoctrinate, and enslave most of the countries of the world. I combine my knowledge, and publish it as a ‘warning to the world’. I write books about this ‘pattern’. My most complete, so far, being the 1,000 pages long “Exposing Lies of The Empire”. Then, I see the West itself. I come to ‘speak’, to Canada and the United States, as well as Europe. Once in a while I am invited to address Australian audiences, too. The West is so outrageously rich, compared to the ruined and plundered continents, that it often appears that it does not belong to the Planet Earth. A lazy Sunday afternoon stroll in Villa Borghese in Rome, and a horror walk through Mathare slum in Nairobi could easily exist in two distinct realities, or in two different galaxies. Even now, after I slightly misspelled “Villa Borghese”, my Mac immediately offered a correction. It is because Villa Borghese does exist. On the other hand, “Mathare”, which I spelled correctly, was underlined red. Mathare ‘is an error’. Because it does not exist. It does not exist, despite the fact that around one million men, women and children lives there. It is not recognized by my MacBook Pro, nor by the great majority of my relatively well-educated readers in the West. In fact, almost entire world appears to be one big error, non-entity, if observed from New York, Berlin or Paris. I come and speak in front of the Western public. Yes, I do it from time to time, although with decreasing frequency. Frankly, to face European or North American crowds feels depressing, even humiliating. It goes like this: you are invited to ‘tell the truth’; to present what you are witnessing all over the world. You stand there, facing men and women who have just arrived in their comfortable cars, after having good dinners in their well-heated or air-conditioned homes. You may be a famous writer and a filmmaker, but somehow, they make you feel like a beggar. Because you came to speak on behalf of “beggars”. Everything is well-polished, and choreographed. It is expected that you do not show any ‘gore’. That you do not call your public ‘names’. That you do not swear, do not get drunk on the stage, do not start insulting everyone in sight. What you usually face is quite a hard, or at least ‘hardened’, crowd. Recently, in Southern California, when I was asked, by a fellow philosopher and a friend of mine, to address a small gathering of his colleagues, some people were banging on their mobile phones, as I was describing the situation at the Syrian frontline, near Idlib. I felt that my account was nothing more than a ‘background, an elevator music’ to most of them. At least when I am addressing millions through my television interviews, I do not have to see the public. When you ‘speak’ in the West, you are actually addressing men and women who are responsible, at least partially, for the mass murders and genocides that are being committed by their countries. Men and women whose standards of living are outrageously high, because The Others are being robbed, humiliated, and often raped. But their eyes are not humble; they are drilling them into you, waiting for some mistake that you might make, so they can conclude: “He is fake news”. For them, you are not a bridge between those who ‘exist’ and those who don’t. For them, you are an entertainer, a showman, or more often than not: a nuisance. To learn about war, about the terror that the West is spreading, is, for many in my audience yet another type of luxury, high-level entertainment, not unlike an opera performance or a symphony concert. If necessary, they can even pay, although mostly they’d rather not. After a titillating experience, it is back to the routine, back to a sheltered, elegant life. While you, the next day, are often catching a plane back to the reality of the others; to the frontline, to dust and misery. They, your public (but face it, also most of your readers) came to show how ‘open-minded’ they are. They came ‘to learn’ from you, ‘to get educated’, while keeping their lifestyles intact. Most of them think that they know it all, even without your first-hand experience, they are benevolently doing you a favor by inviting you, and by dragging themselves all the way to some university or a theatre or wherever the hell you are standing in front of them. They did not come to offer any support to your struggle. They are not part of any struggle. They are good, peace-loving, hardworking people; that’s all. You know, like those Germans, in the late 1930’s; self-righteous, hard-working folks. Most of them love their pets, and recycle their garbage. And clean after themselves at Starbucks. A few days ago, we stopped the coup in Venezuela. I say we, because, although deep in devastated Borneo Island, I had been giving interviews to RT, Press TV, addressing millions. Even here, I never stopped writing, tweeting, always ready to drop everything just fly to Caracas, if I were to be needed there. To defend Venezuela, to defend the Revolution there, is essential. As it is essential to defend Syria, Cuba, Russia, China, North Korea, Iran, Bolivia, South Africa and other revolutionary and brave nations that are refusing to surrender to the Western diktat. While the ideological battle for Caracas was raging, I was thinking: is there anything that could still move the Western public into action? Have they – Europeans and North Americans – become totally indifferent to their own crimes? Have they developed some sort of emotional immunity? Is their condition ideological, or simply clinical? Here we were, in the middle of a totally open coup; an attempt by the West to overthrow one of the most democratic countries on our planet. And they did almost nothing to stop the terrorism performed by their regimes in Washington or Madrid! At least in Indonesia in 1965 or in Chile in 1973, the Western regime tried to hide behind thin fig leaves. At least, while destroying socialist Afghanistan and the Communist Soviet Union by creating the Mujahedin, the West used Pakistan as a proxy, trying to conceal, at least partially, its true role. At least, while killing more than 1 million people in Iraq, there was this charade and bunch of lies about the ‘weapons of mass destruction’. At least, at least… Now, it is all transparent. In Syria, Venezuela; and against North Korea, Cuba, Iran, China, Russia. As if propaganda was not even needed, anymore, it as if the Western public has become totally obedient, posing no threat to the plans of the Western regime. Or more precisely, the once elaborate Western propaganda has become extremely simple: it now repeats lies, and the great majority of Western citizens do not even bother to question what their governments are doing to the world. The only thing that matters are ‘domestic issues’; meaning – the wages and benefits for the Westerners. There are no riots like during the Vietnam War. Now riots are only for the better welfare of European workers. No one in the West is fighting in order to stop the plunder abroad, or the terrorist attacks unleashed by NATO against non-Western countries, or against those countless NATO military bases, against the invasions and orchestrated coups. How much more can the Western public really stomach? Or can it stomach absolutely everything? Would it accept the direct invasion of Venezuela or Cuba or both? It has already accepted the direct intervention and destruction of Yugoslavia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and Syria, to name just a few terrorist actions committed by the West in recent history. So, how much more? Would an attack against Iran be acceptable? Let’s say, 2-3 million deaths? North Korea, perhaps? A few more millions, a new mountain of corpses? I am asking; it is not a rhetorical question. I really want to know. I believe that the world has to know. Has the Western public reached the level of the ISIS (or call them IS or Deash)? Is it so self-righteous, so fanatic, so convinced of its own exceptionalism, that it cannot think, clearly, analyze and judge, anymore? Would provoking Russia or China or both into WWIII be acceptable to people living in Bavaria or South Carolina, or Ontario? And if yes, are they all really out of their minds? And if they are, should the world try to stop the, and how? I want to know the boundaries of the Western madness. That there is madness is indisputable, but how massive is it? I understand, I have now accepted the monstrous fact that the French, Yanks, Canadians, Brits or Germans do not give a shit about how many millions of innocent people they kill in the Middle East, or Southeast Asia, Africa or in ‘places like that’. I accept that they know close to nothing about their colonial history, and want to know nothing, as long as they have football, plenty of meat and 6 weeks vacations on exotic beaches. I know that even many of those who can see monstrous crimes committed by the West, want to blame everything on Rothschilds and ‘Zionist conspiracy’, but never on themselves, never on their culture which expresses itself through the centuries of plunder. But what about the survival of our planet, and the survival of humankind? I imagine the eyes of those people who come to my ‘combat presentations’. I tell them the truth. I say it all. I am never holding back; never compromise. I show them images of the wars they have unleashed. Yes, they; because the citizens are responsible for their own governments, and because there is, clearly, something called collective guilt and collective responsibility! Those eyes, faces… I will tell you what I read in them: they will never act. They will never try to overthrow their regime. As long as they live their privileged lives. As long as they think that the system in which they are the elites, at least has some chance of surviving in its present form. They play it both ways, some of them do: verbally, they are outraged by NATO, by Western imperialism and savage capitalism. Practically, they do nothing tangible to fight the system. What is the conclusion then? If they do not act, then others have to. And I am convinced: they will. For more than 500 years the entire world has been in flames, plundered and murdered by a small group of extremely aggressive Western nations. This has been going on virtually uninterruptedly. Nobody finds it amusing, anymore. Where I work, in places that I care about, nobody wants this kind of world. Look at those countries that are now trying to destroy Venezuela. Look closely! They consist of the United States, Canada, majority of Europe, and mostly those South American states where the descendants of European colonialists are forming majority! Do we want another 500 years of this? North Americans and Europeans have to wake up, soon. Even in Nazi Germany, there were soldiers who were so disgusted with Hitler, that they wanted to send him to the dogs. Today, in the West, there is not one powerful political party which believes that 500 years of Western colonialist plunder is more than enough; that torturing the world should stop, and stop immediately. If Western imperialism, which is the greatest and perhaps the only major threat our planet is now facing, is not decisively and soon dismantled by its own citizens, it will have to be fought and deterred by external forces. That is: by its former and present victims. https://journal-neo.org/2019/06/06/north-american-european-public-finally-wake-up-damn-it/

[robotnik-mun]

Answer ALL OF THEM.

....oh you dirty *BITCH*....!

A cartoon you remember that nobody else does.

At times I feel like the only person on Earth who remembers Exosquad.

It’s a real shame, because Exosquad was one of the best toons of the 90s and proof positive that just because something was made to tie-in to toys, doesn’t mean that it has to be little more than a mindless extended commercial. 

A cartoon you like but nobody else seems to.

That would be Beast Machines. A sequel series to the uber-good Beast Wars, this series caught a lot of derision for its shift in tone, design and character. Given the context though, I didn’t really see it as being ALL that divergent, with our heroes returning to a world where Megatron rules all and forced to learn how to use new, techno-organic bodies in order to combat him. Given the stress of the situation, I thought it wasn’t really THAT much of a stretch that the character’s personalities would change so much given the trauma of what had happened. Ah well. 

A cartoon you don’t like but everybody else seems to. 

That would be the Looney Tunes Show. At times I feel like the only person on Earth who just wasn’t impressed with it. I mean its not horrible or anything, but I feel like I’m the only person around who wasn’t all that wowed by it when it came out. 

A cartoon you wish would be forgotten.

Sausage Party. For being a simplistic, puerile, overhyped puddle of mediocrity, it deserves to be swept into the dustbin of history. 

The worst cartoon you’ve ever seen, and why?

You know, I had to give this some thought, but that would have to be Mr. Pickles.  Mr. Pickles is basically an amalgamation of everything you could ever hate about ‘adult’ cartoons in the US- it’s ugly, unpleasant and pointless. The humor is one note and entirely reliant upon grossing people out in the most nauseating ways possible, and there is literally no one to root for- the dog is the Devil, every human being alive is monstrous, ugly and stupid, the only person who is clued in on this is a feeble old man who lives to be bested and tormented by the devil dog, and given how awful everyone and everything around him is you’re just left to wonder why he bothers. Everything about this series is just irredeemably, endlessly unpleasant. 

The worst moment you’ve ever seen happen in a cartoon.

That would be the ‘Bunny Pajamas’ incident in Hey Arnold. See, there was this episode where quite by accident, Arnold discovered that Iggy, the coolest kid in school, liked to wear Bunny Pajama when sick. After having the information pried out of him by Sid and Stinky, Iggy forces Arnold to walk out in Bunny Pajamas in public as a means of forgiveness, utterly humiliating him in the process. What’s worse is that Sid and Stinky only *guessed* the truth. There was just... nothing after that. No resolution or anything. It was just a weirdly mean-spirited of an otherwise excellent series. 

The worst thing you’ve ever seen happen to a cartoon that ruined it.

The love triangle nonsense in Legend of Korra. I just... couldn’t let myself be invested anymore after it, I just couldn’t. I learned to detest everybody involved, and so I left the series before it could fester any further. 

A cancelled/forgotten cartoon you would bring back to television.

I have to pick just one? Geeze... well, I’m gonna break with tradition, and say War Planets. WE DESERVE AN ACTUAL RESOLUTION DAMMIT!

An animated character you remember but nobody else seems to.

Nilus the Sandman. I seriously feel like the only person who remembers that this guy was ever a thing. 

An animated character you hate the most, and why?

Hmm... that would have to be Cheese. It was bad enough that this utterly useless and unspeakably obnoxious little cretin got more and more screentime on the show, but as time went on he practically became the mascot for Cartoon Network. He represents everything you could possibly hate about a character, and more importantly, the tendancy for executives to latch on to the lowest hanging fruit in the name of grabbing attention and views.  

A non-animated property you would like to see as a cartoon

Oh, that’s easy- Starfox. I’ve always, always wished that there had been a Starfox cartoon out there and given the time the first game was released, I’m kind of amazed we never got one. 

A trope or trend in animation that you dislike.

I’m not all that fond of the reatreat from action toons that has been going on for a while now, or the fact that cartoons are increasingly focused on comedy at the expense of everything else. It’s not so much that I don’t like comedy or anything like that, but I just prefer there to be a bit of variety and feel a genuine regret that things like Batman: The Animated Series or SwatKats are increasingly becoming a phenomenah of the past. Well, who knows, maybe Netflix will give toons like that a place to thrive- Young Justice will be coming back, after all. Here’s hoping that starts a trend, or rather, RE-starts a trend. 

A currently airing cartoon that you know is going to be forgotten about in the future.

Pickle and Peanut. And thank God for that. 

The best episode of a cartoon you really like.

Code of Hero, Beast Wars. One of the best Transformers anything ever, this is always gonna be a favorite. 

The worst episode of a cartoon you really like.

Ro-Becca, from Sonic the Hedgehog. I love you SatAM, always will, but good GOD we could have done without that one. 

A cartoon you feel deserves more recognition than it gets.

Disney’s Gummi Bears. Besides the fact that this series is what really got the ball rolling with Disney’s major TV rennaissance, the series itself is really quite incredible from both a visual and storytelling standpoint, especially with regards for the time that it was released. Despite having a fairly typical ‘Gang of Critters’ setup for the time, right down to each character being named for a trait (Gruffi, Tummi, Cubbi etc), every one of the Gummi Bears has a lot more going on than the surface would indicate, and there is a maturity to the worldbuilding and storytelling that belies what its name and appearance would suggest. Besides that, Princess Calla has to be one of the most badass princesses ever to grace television. This series is a gem, and its a shame it isn’t remembered and recognized more than it is. 

A cartoon you feel deserves less recognition than what it gets.

Sausage Party. I’m mentioning it twice, but it really does not deserve the hype it got or the kind of reviews it got. In the history of adult oriented animation in the US, Sausage Party brings nothing new to the table beyond re-affirming that tired stereotype that ‘mature’ animation must be the most puerile and juvenile minded tripe out there. Everything from its supposed themes to the nature of its humor is just sub-par, and I will never, ever view it as anything more than a cheap gimmick film that banked on novelty rather than anything worthwhile. 

The worst idea you can think of for an animated series.

Lara-Su Chronicles- The Series! 

At what point did you realize a cartoon, any cartoon was starting to get bad?

Well, like many, I started to realize things were going downhill in the ‘03 Ninja Turtles cartoon once we reached the Flash Forward season. Now to be clear, I didn’t think it was a bad premise, and a lot of the ideas and designs in the season had a lot of promise. Unfortunately, that promise wasn’t really met- the season lacked a certain spark that those before it had. The magic was gone, replaced by something that just didn’t do the series justice. I lost track after that season, and from the looks of it I was right for doing so. 

An experience with a cartoon you thought you were going to like but turned you away from it.

Wolverine and the X-men. See, I like X-men. I like Wolverine. So surely, I should like this right? Well, initially I did... but as time went on, Wolverine became less and less tolerable, particularly since it felt like Cyclops was getting shit on as a character to make Wolverine look better even though their dynamics were now completely opposite from what it had traditionally been. Which could have been interesting mind you, but nothing of worth was really done with it. I abandoned the series and never looked back. 

Something you would like to see more than anything in a cartoon.

Hmmm... this is a fandom specific one, but honestly? I’d love to see a Transformers cartoon that does the old ‘Cybertronians Become Human’ bit, but to *actually* do it and explore the concept in a mature way, to explore how immortal war machines respond to suddenly becoming frail, short lived humans and all too aware of the fact, as well as learning how to endure a human existence. Maybe someday it will happen, but for now, I can but wish. 

What do you feel makes a cartoon forgettable?

I think more than anything, writing and plotting can be the key to if a cartoon is remembered or forgotten. Being overly reliant on stock plots and playing it too safe more than anything can make a cartoon bland or cliched. I mean don’t get me wrong, there’s a lot more to it than that, but this is I think more than anything is what leads to a lot of cartoons winding up forgotten.