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margridarnauds · 4 years ago

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are OSP's videos (or at least the Irish mythology ones) that bad? like, that's a genuine question - i watched and pretty superficially enjoyed a lot of them when i was younger, but i can definitely understand how there could be a lot of issues in there!

Honestly, I don’t know! Which is partially why I’d like to see how they handle this stuff, because despite being an eternal pessimist when it comes to this sort of thing, I’m WILLING to give it a shot. God knows that we need better publicly available information on this sort of thing.

What I’ve noticed, in general, not necessarily with OSP, is that there is a tendency to do some of the following (which, really.....we bear some of the blame as well, us in the field, because we don’t have many good resources that are readily available):

Over-pantheonization - You’ll notice that, when I talk about the Tuatha Dé, I almost NEVER say “Oh, yeah, Óengus was the god of love/Bres was the god of agriculture/Lugh was the god of light/etc.” I tend to only do it for figures where we have some idea of, either from the texts or from comparative studies with other Celtic cultures. (For example, Bríg being a patron goddess of smiths/poets/doctors, possibly with a darker element of grief and mourning in there - I never say she’s a fire goddess for the same reason I don’t say anything about the others.) In the field, we tend to be VERY careful with those sorts of labels even among the few of us who still argue for a pre-Christian influence on this sort of thing (I’m not proud to say that number is shrinking, I’m a bit of a throwback in that sense, namely because I had a very, very persuasive supervisor.) Looking at the wiki, I have noticed that, for example, Balor’s labelled “The God of Destruction” - I don’t know whether anyone says that IN the video, but....people generally wouldn’t say that in the field. And something I’ve noticed is that even a lot of the better retellings tend to fall into this trap, most likely because it’s present in a lot of the Victorian sources like Lady Gregory’s Gods and Fighting Men. (Which is brilliant, tbh, despite it showing its age.)

Need to create a more coherent narrative than we have/failure to recognize that Celticists are actually.....there: You have NO IDEA how often I’ll see a write-up of a myth and I’ll see someone say something like “Some say that Bríg was born via a fiery arrow being inserted up the Dagda’s ass, while others contend that she was born via a magic cow.” Now, I won’t fault people for not knowing the big names in the field - I’m pleasantly DELIGHTED when people do, but I don’t expect it, nor do I REALLY expect people to know the finer details about the various recensions, etc. BUT what I do kind of expect is for people to at least say where they got this stuff from. (And salvage years of my life that have been lost when people use Robert Graves without citing Robert Graves.) Some of it’s legitimate variations in the tradition! That happens! But some of it’s taking Peter Beresford Ellis’ Celtic Creation Myth and using it, and then it takes us years to remind people that there IS no surviving creation myth. (Might have been at one point, but not now. We don’t have it.) Which, yes, I do know that ONE video series used, though I don’t know whether OSP used it.

Incidentally, like. Celticists ARE willing to consult on this sort of thing. I have low enough self esteem/am desperate enough to get good information out that I’d literally consult for free. I know plenty of other grad students who’d do the same thing. I have a friend who acted as a consultant for the RPG Scion on their use of the myths, my supervisor translated an Irish spell for the TV show Grimm (yes, really).....this stuff CAN happen. People just choose not to.

Flattening of the characters into fantasy archetypes. I get this ESPECIALLY with Cath Maige Tuired-esque stuff, where people.......make the good guys Good™ and the bad guys Bad™. Lugh is the Flawless Hero (nevermind that he does routinely....send people to their cruel, painful deaths), Balor/Bres is Sauron the Evil Overlord (despite both of them having Layers to them. Like ogres. But like. Viking ogres.)

Also, personal bitch point: CATH MAIGE TUIRED AND LEBOR GABÁLA ÉRENN ARE TWO SEPARATE TEXTS. THE EVENTS OF CMT DO TAKE PLACE DURING THE COURSE OF LGE, BUT THE TWO CONTRADICT ONE ANOTHER ON MULTIPLE POINTS, NOT THE LEAST BECAUSE LGE ISN’T ONE TEXT; IT’S A COLLECTION OF POEMS AND PROSE PRESERVED ACROSS MULTIPLE RECENSIONS IN A TRENCHCOAT, WITH LITERALLY HUNDREDS OF SCRIBES HAVING CONTRIBUTED TO IT. TO MERGE THE TWO TOGETHER DOESN’T TAKE INTO ACCOUNT THE NUACES OF BOTH. CAN RETELLINGS PLEASE STOP MERGING THEM?

...okay, bitch rant over.

Since I know that one of their videos deals with LGE, that does particularly worry me because VERY FEW retellings do LGE justice. As I implied in my above bitch rant, it’s a highly, highly complex text, it’s difficult to work with, and the central problem is that a lot of people don’t REALIZE it’s difficult to work with. The current, unmatched edition/translation of it, that includes ALL the recensions, is, notoriously, five volumes long and it’s a minor hobby in the field to poke fun of how bad it is, but no one’s going to do their own. And a lot of retellings are, at the very least, neo-colonialist in how they treat, say, the Fir Bolg. I don’t trust. ANYONE with the Fir Bolg until they really, really prove themselves.

I WILL say that, going on the TV Tropes page (like the good, brave researcher I am), I’m pleased that at least it LOOKS (?) like they raise an eyebrow to the Cú Chulainn/Áife situation - That’s a personal bugbear of mine, not the least because even people in the field can minimize what actually happened there. (And, subsequently, why I’ll never stop talking about it. Because I exist to prop up the characters that routinely get screwed over in order to bolster the “heroes”, bonus if they’re women.)

In general, at this point, I don’t REALLY trust anything, BUT I’m willing to give it a chance because I never know. I could be very, very pleasantly surprised.

#irish mythology #rape tw #(implied but it's there)#vierschanzentournee

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vapcrwaves · 4 years ago

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━♡ guess the 24 YEAR OLD JULY baby just arrived to dallyeog! it makes sense, because AOKI IMOJEN is just as BLAZING as the month of JULY. wait, why do they remind me of HIRAI MOMO? beyond that, they seemed SELF-RELIANT & BUOYANT upon first glance. i heard someone say they’re sort of INSURGENT & RECKLESS though. i hope they get acquainted here in COMPLEX # 3 / APARTMENT # 2 / FLOOR # 2 ; they seem to have a lot going on with HER job as TATTOO ARTIST / BASSIST.

bonjour , y’all !! my name’s jade ( she/her , twenty-one , gmt+8 ) !! and i’m super excited to meet and write with everyone !! this is my spunky kid , imojen , and i hope you’ll come to enjoy her as much as i did writing everything about her :D if you wanna plot , do not fret because i’ll be dropping in everyone’s IMs hehe , but if you prefer to plot over at discord , don’t hesitate to tell me !! <3

* 𝖕𝖗𝖔𝖑𝖔𝖌𝖚𝖊 ╱ ʙᴀꜱɪᴄꜱ .

name : aoki imojen nicknames : yoki , jen . age : twenty - four . birthday : july 27 , 1996 . zodiac : leo sun , aquarius moon , sagittarius rising . place of birth : tokyo , japan . currently living : seoul , south korea . occupation : tattoo artist , bassist . pronouns : she / her . orientation : bisexual biromantic . ethnicity : japanese . spoken languages : japanese , korean , english . character insp. : kat stratford from 10 things i hate about you , bridget vreeland from sisterhood of traveling pants , effy stonem from skins uk , young carol rhodes from gossip girl tv series , rhonda smith , mia’s backstory from if i stay . label / tropes : hoyden , icarian , insurgent , reveller , the rebellious spirit . pinterest : here . aesthetics : scared of commitment , but has 7 tattoos. a habit of endlessly lighting a lighter. platform boots to boost your height. but then again, sneakers for comfort while running from the cops. forgetting to discard empty cigarette packets from your bomber jacket. spilling your fifth espresso onto your drawings and designs , maybe it’s time to sleep. a frightening look on your face which millennials like to call a resting bitch face. the heat ruining your collection of leather jackets. finding comfort in your friends who seem to understand your mood swings. having a pet cat who’s as feisty as you. spontaneous adventures live inside your head and your friends fall victim to those ideas. liking the rays of the sun more than the moon despite being a night owl. oversleeps anyway. trimming your bangs yourself because you couldn’t be bothered to go to the salon. overcooking your sunny side up eggs. sleeping to forget problems. drinking to forget problems. epitome of a ride or die.

* 𝖋𝖎𝖗𝖘𝖙 𝖈𝖍𝖆𝖕𝖙𝖊𝖗 ╱ ᴘᴀꜱᴛ .

aoki imojen was born to understand what it was to live a life with no structure. her father was part of a rising band in the 90s, toured all over small venues in japan that they slowly rose to a known local name, and imojen has seen all the chaos unfold from backstage in the arms of her mom. however, slowly transitioning into the year of 2000s, the economy was still struggling from the lost decade and the income from touring never sufficed for a growing family. imojen’s father was forced to leave the music scene with the help of her mother’s influence: “it’s time to be serious”; and work multiple jobs in order to fully provide for his first child and the another growing one inside his wife’s womb.

growing up, imojen’s no stranger to music and her father loved to introduce rock music and bands to imojen’s upbringing. she adored b’z and the gazette, and it leaves no doubt that imojen’s father had been her greatest influence in life. as she grew older, not only did they share identical music preferences and influences, but imojen’s learned to play various instruments— the bass being her favorite. imojen’s also stemmed from that infamous reckless behavior his father’s known for back in the day, and when the teenage years came, so did the impetuous reputation begin.

imojen and her mother aren’t exactly as close as she was with her father. in fact, their relationship was a toe out of the civil line. it got worse when imojen started to focus on the band she created with friends instead of school and late night practices turned to never returning home for a few days and having the audacity to blatantly lie when asked where she was when asked. it’s hard not to blame her mother when she assumed things for the worst. imojen’s gone quite defiant especially when she discovered that her and her father’s relationship had began to run askew. imojen blames her mother’s interference with her father’s music career as much as her father did, she loved him so much that she was completely blindsided to always take his side. and when the divorce papers came and went, imojen chose her father as she always would.

her father got a job as a musician locally and eventually overseas, however, money didn’t come by so fast and easy initially. instead of going to university, imojen invested in learning the arts in tattoo design and worked as a tattoo artist to help with the bills. the pair finally thought to settle in korea when imojen’s father got a permanent job. and at this time, imojen has decided to try pursue a career as a musician as well, hoping that the thrill in her early band days are still well stored in her system.

* 𝖘𝖊𝖈𝖔𝖓𝖉 𝖈𝖍𝖆𝖕𝖙𝖊𝖗 ╱ ᴘʀᴇꜱᴇɴᴛ .

imojen can never be satisfied of living in the same area for so long, or at least under the roof with the watchful eye of her father. work’s payed well and imojen decided to move out and get an apartment of her own. hence, she found dallyeog, parties almost every single day, drags everyone into spontaneous adventures, comes home terribly drunk and wakes up with a huge hangover—well, still pretty normal. aside from the norm, imojen working at the tattoo parlor and taking gigs at bars as a bassist, imojen’s investing in writing music as well. she hopes one day to finally finish at least one song she’s been procrastinating for far too long and convince her father to make them a rock duo instead, but a band of her own would fantastic too.

* 𝖙𝖍𝖎𝖗𝖉 𝖈𝖍𝖆𝖕𝖙𝖊𝖗 ╱ ᴄʜᴀʀᴀᴄᴛᴇʀ .

imojen looks quite mean at first glance, and it doesn’t help that she’s indifferent towards anyone who isn’t part of already her friend. she doesn’t hate, hate is such a strong word, she simply doesn’t have the attention span for people that don’t interest her or she doesn’t know fully well to enjoy a conversation with.

honestly has the gina linetti energy “how was i supposed to know there’d be consequences for my actions” as she literally does anything she wants before her brain can even weigh the pros and cons to it.

imojen enjoys taking risks despite the relaxed attitude and seemingly nonchalant view in life. it might be a surprise to learn that she’s quite ambitious, but underneath, she does aim for the highs (both meanings) in life, except there isn’t exactly a time frame for those and would much rather pursue them steadily.

everyone can depend on imojen to have a good time, or if someone needed a friend to vent to, she can surprisingly be all ears, but never follow her words of advice. she does mean well, it’s just that she doesn’t know what she’s saying half the time and is quite reckless,, like ask her to pick between two choices and she’ll advice you to take the riskier one bc “it’s fun don’t be a prude”.

she is more sympathetic than she let on. imojen’s not very vocal especially with her emotions and on what she exactly feels about other people’s situation. serious conversations? catch her yeet away from those. they render her uncomfortable, most especially if it is about her. however, seeing her friends gloomy doesn’t sit right with her that she does anything to make them crack a smile.

believes that people should be left to roam free and that authority is useless and ruins the fun— hence why she’d always be caught defying them. yes, she uses her brain, but acts more towards intuition and what she felt like doing that day. so yes, she might loves setting her life on the line.

* 𝖋𝖔𝖚𝖗𝖙𝖍 𝖈𝖍𝖆𝖕𝖙𝖊𝖗 ╱ ᴡᴀɴᴛᴇᴅ ᴄᴏɴɴᴇᴄᴛɪᴏɴꜱ .

plastic hearts ╱ someone whom imojen shares a passion for music with. the both of you are like peas in a pod as you both are in the same wavelengths as each other. they may not have the same types of music, but open enough to share a plethora of music playlists.

angels like you ╱ the typical bad-good influence trope wherein imojen’s reckless behavior and liberated thoughts on legalities have gotten your muse in various dangerous but fun adventures. on a flip, your muse may be the reason why imojen’s woken up at 8 in the morning, bright, well, and not hungover.

prisoner ╱ an angsty and toxic relationship that imojen could not get enough of. everyone sees this partnership (romantic or platonic) of destructive nature, both of you may or may not know, but regardless it can never be broke off no matter how hard both try.

gimme what i want ╱ the typical fwb relationship, we can add spice to it, but on the base that’s the idea.

night crawling ╱ imojen’s ride or die, the person she would instantly run to for an adventure, midnight strolls, alcohol escapades, and vandalism. but as things you both do burst into haywire, you’re both aren’t afraid to be open to each other too and spill secrets or bodies hidden in the closet.

midnight sky ╱ perhaps a new acquaintance?? friend?? that doesn’t exactly have a first good impression of imojen?? maybe vomited on your muse the first time they met, or jen was really mean for no reason under the influence of alcohol?? she’s chaotic so perhaps it wasn’t a good first meeting.

bad karma ╱ imojen hasn’t been exactly an angel all her life, and perhaps karma has run around to bite her in her ass. your muse might’ve been somebody who hurt imojen; either a terrible break up or severing trust, let’s explore :D

golden g string ╱ a band :D maybe nothing too serious, just a group of pals playing and making music together :D or maybe the group's been playing gigs for awhile now and wants to head into the big leagues :D

honestly im so down with anything so !!!!!!

#[ PINNED POST ]#dallyeog:intro #this has gotten too long SORRYsdfsdf #but thanks for reading <3

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montagnarde1793 · 5 years ago

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Ribbons of Scarlet: A predictably terrible novel on the French Revolution (part 3)

Parts 1, 2, 4 and 5.

Style Issues

Stylistically, there’s a great deal of “tell don’t show” in this book, especially as regards the actual politics. The only things that are really concrete are the characters’ romantic entanglements and scenes of violence. This is a flaw that runs so deep that correcting it would mean writing a completely different book.

One thing that they could have done that would have made it somewhat more bearable, however, regards the use of language. In a book written in English but that takes place in France and where all the characters are French, please, I’m begging you, do not randomly (and often ungrammatically) insert whichever French words and phrases you half-remember from high school French class into descriptions and dialogue. It doesn’t give the characters a flavor of being French, it gives you a flavor of ignorance.

The key word here is “randomly”: note that I’m not talking about things like terms of address, exclamations, etc., for which there is an established convention, or terms for which there might not be an exact equivalent in English. No, I’m talking about this kind of thing: “[…] running a hand through his short-cropped noir hair” (p. 352). Please, resist the urge!

Also, this isn’t strictly a style issue, as the grammar is the least of the problems with it, but I don’t really know where else to put it... Each of the six parts opens with an epigraph. Here’s the one for Émilie de Sainte-Amaranthe’s (p. 437) :

“It was a sensual delight for l’homme rouge to see fall in the basket these charming heads and their ruby blood streaming under the hideous cleaver.”

—Archives Nationale [sic]

I can’t believe I have to say this to a fellow historian, but just saying a quote is from the archives is bizarrely and baffling amateurish. It’s like saying a quote is from the library, or from a book or from the internet. Without further information, it’s about as useful a citation as saying it came to you in a dream. Why? Because it tells us nothing about the author or the date or any kind of context and therefore gives us no real way of evaluating it — though the lurid, sensationalist language doesn’t inspire confidence. Since the author of this section more than any other seems to take as a principle of novel-writing that whatever is the most over-the-top makes for the best fiction, I would say sure, why not, but as the authors also apparently want their depiction of “history” to be taken seriously… I mean, what is there to even say?

Writing What You Want to Know

There’s a problem throughout this book with characters talking about 18th France like it’s a place they’ve only read about in books rather than the only place they’ve ever lived and therefore the only reality *they* know firsthand. Now, obviously, the authors, like the rest of us, *have* only read about a 200+ year-old setting in books (or come to know it through various types of primary sources), but good historical fiction should be able to make you forget that, or at least come close.

I can’t entirely decide whether we’re looking at a failure of research here or of imagination — or just clumsy handling of exposition. I suspect it’s some mixture of all three.

Allow me to explain. The clumsy exposition is a result of the aforementioned lack of trust in the reader as well, I suspect, of the few pages allotted to each author, which don’t allow for a more natural immersion of the reader into a world that is entirely alien to them but is made up of both new and familiar elements to the characters.

The research vs imagination issue is more complex. I’m a firm believer in the updated adage “write what you want to know,” but if you’re going to do that, the intermediate step between wanting and writing is inevitably research. And well, there’s research and there’s research. For a novel especially, you don’t just want to be researching what happened, the concrete material facts such as who was present for what event or what a given figure’s relationship was to the people around them, but also people’s mentalities/sensibilities. To plausibly write from their point of view, you also have to investigate the reasons they might have believed what they believed and to take that investigation seriously, whether or not you agree.

This was achieved better with some characters than others and again, I’m not entirely sure whether it’s for lack of research or lack of ability to empathize with certain points of view. Ironically, the chapter on Mme Élisabeth is probably the best handled. The author of that section says she wanted to be “fair” (back matter, p. 12) to her subject and I think she succeeds better than her co-authors, while showing that Mme Élisabeth, convinced of the absolute validity of the divine right of her brother, advocates at every turn for violently repressing the Revolution. She’s allowed to articulate her (frankly pretty abhorrent) beliefs in a plausible manner.

Perhaps the author of this section is just a better writer than her co-authors, but I think there’s more to it than that. I obviously can’t read minds, but from the text of the novel itself as well as from the authors’ notes, I get the impression that we’re dealing with a dual problem of epistemology (i.e. how do you know what you know?) and politics. In either case, it’s not a coincidence if Mme Élisabeth is the best drawn character… and Reine Audu and Pauline Léon are the worst.

First, on the epistemology side: whether consciously or not, it seems to me as if the authors largely started out with the assumption that they already basically understood their protagonists. Sophie de Grouchy is so ahead of her time she might as well be a modern woman, got it, no problem… Reine Audu is an avatar of the “mob,” (the author of her section’s words, not mine, back matter, p. 8), pitiable because of her poverty but with no real politics beyond that of hunger and resentment… Pauline Léon is a “well-intentioned extremist” to use TV Tropes parlance — you would think that label would apply better to Charlotte Corday, but the latter ends up being so saintly she basically converts Pauline Léon (in what is quite possibly the most maddening moment in the whole damn book)… and so on. If I’m right, the authors’ assumptions about these archetypes made them not really feel the need to dig too deeply into the question of what made these women tick, either through research or empathy.

We don’t know much about Reine Audu or Pauline Léon, but there has been a fair amount of research into the beliefs of the popular movement and revolutionary crowds from Georges Lefebvre onward (most of it tending to dispel the lazy stereotypes on display here). The authors either didn’t bother with it or made poor use of it (as is evidently the case with poor Dominique Godineau, who does figure in the bibliography).

The book does Pauline Léon a disservice on both sides, mischaracterizing her beliefs for good and for ill. They make feminism as a contemporary audience would understand it her primary cause and her support for the rest of the popular movement’s program (in which we learn that women and people of color are to be included, but not actually what it consists of...) accessory and easily disposable so Charlotte Corday can be proved right and “radical” men can prove to be the real enemy.

(Which… I could roll with it if the idea was just that men of all political flavors can be misogynists, but as usual, the message is all men are potential rapists (except Condorcet, Buzot, La Fayette and Louis XVI, of course) but the further left they are the rape-ier they get. That’s not how that works.)

Anyway, the point is, these are characters the authors seem to have gone in assuming they understood, either because they found them relatable or because they thought they knew what archetype they corresponded to. The author of the section on Mme Élisabeth, on the other hand, writes that this was a character that it took some effort to understand because the character’s worldview was so different from the author’s and that of her presumed readers. This was also the case to some degree with the author of Manon Roland’s section, who writes about having to grapple with her protagonist’s not being a feminist (a position that this author bizarrely seems to think was rare at the time). Regardless, in both cases, the effort to understand, along with the existence of more sources produced by the character they were attempting to inhabit, produced better results.

But again, I think there’s also a political element. Remember how I mentioned that this book’s main flaw is its feeling of artificiality? (I mean, to the point that the rest of this critique is really just about understanding why it feels so artificial.) One of the moments that felt the most authentic to me was Mme Élisabeth’s extravagant shoe-buying habit, her feeling bad about it and her confessor reassuring her that it’s fine because she hasn’t taken a vow of poverty, after all. And I don’t mean ‘authentic’ necessarily in the sense of ‘historically accurate’ — I don’t know enough about Mme Élisabeth off the top of my head to comment on her shoe collection. But I did think: there, consumerism and guilt about consumerism are in fact much more relatable to the middle class authors and their presumed middle class audience than hunger and privation — or activism relating to socio-economic issues, for that matter. Which is how we end up, here as in a lot of other media, with a relatable royal and revolutionary caricatures.

This is also a good demonstration of how research and imagination or empathy play off each other. Marge Piercy didn’t have more information about Pauline Léon than the authors of this book. In fact, she had less: she writes in the preface of her book that she learned that Léon’s mother was in fact still alive at the time of the Revolution when it was too late to change what she had written. Credit where credit is due, once again, this new book corrects that error.

But in every other respect, Piercy’s version is far superior, because Pauline Léon’s views as well as her experience are taken seriously. This is no doubt due in large part because Piercy herself has been an activist for various left-wing causes. Her activism surely allowed her to relate to her characters, but far from writing a simple projection from her own experience, it allowed her, just as importantly, to entertain the notion that there was something there to be taken seriously. And therefore, that it was worth researching what precisely these figures were fighting for and not simply the question of why people get caught up in “extremism.” That’s why Pauline Léon and Claire Lacombe’s chapters are the best in City of Darkness, City of Light, while Pauline Léon and Reine Audu’s are the worst in this book.

Next time: inaccuracies big and small!

#en anglais #French Revolution #Révolution française

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archer973 · 5 years ago

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You know which character I wasn’t expecting to like as much as I do?

Xander McClure

In season one I was pretty ambivalent towards him. I felt for him when he lost his dad, I called him an idiot when he was on his revenge kick, but I never really disliked him, because I understood where he was coming from. I liked his friendship with Ben and the fact that he defended Ben against Calvin (who I most certainly do not like)

...but now in season two, I dunno, he’s just really grown on me. I think it’s because they’re starting to branch out his relationships with the other characters, especially Maddie. I love the notion of them as childhood best friends that maybe grew apart a little bit but now are being pulled back together by all the craziness going on in Bristol Cove. I love that, it’s a trope that is near and dear to my heart, having characters with history reconnecting and remembering the happy times they spent together.

Personally, I headcanon Maddie as being a year younger than Ben and Xander, which would kind of explain why Ben and Maddie didn’t really know each other well during school, but Maddie and Xander knew each other because Dale and Sean (and by extension Patti) were friends. We already know that Dale would have Maddie stay with the McClure family when he had to go track down Susan when she disappeared, and Susan herself called Xander Maddie’s best friend.

I mean, picture it. A young Maddie and Xander sprawled out on a beat up couch watching bad old movies, probably horror movies because Maddie seems like the type of kid that would have liked old horror movies. And honestly, Xander doesn’t like horror movies, they wig him out, but 1) he’s not gonna admit that Maddie is braver than he is (even though she totally is and they both know it) and 2) they keep Maddie’s mind off of her mom, and the possibility that tonight is the night that Dale finds her too late, so Xander puts in the tapes without Maddie even having to ask and winds his hands into the blanket so he can pretend he doesn’t jump every damn time a zombie pops out of a bush. And as the hour grows later and Dale still hasn’t come back and Maddie starts to worry more and more, Xander starts keeping a running commentary of abuse against the movies, just so that Maddie will argue with him and not turn inwards and focus on all of the things that actually scare her.

And when Dale finally makes it back to the McClure house, the sun just starting to rise and Susan safe at home (for now), he and Sean find the two of them sound asleep, legs tangled together and most of Xander’s blanket thrown over Maddie, the TV humming softly with static. And Dale thanks every deity he knows for Xander McClure as he picks up his young daughter and carries her out to the car.

And I don’t think this stops when they’re teenagers, either. When Maddie just can’t take it anymore, when she comes home and finds Susan listless on the couch, eyes glazed over and speech slurred from the drugs, I think she goes to the place that has always been her harbor in the storm. And Patti welcomes her, and Sean too if he’s there, and Xander doesn’t say a damn word, not even if he had plans, not even if he had wanted to go down to the docks and fuck around with Calvin and Chris. Instead he just flops down on his bed and throws the remote to Maddie and offers her his extra pillow when she comes to sit. And they’d stay like that for hours, shoulder to shoulder, watching people get eaten by zombies and haunted by poltergeists. Xander still jumps and Maddie teasingly offers to hold his hand. Eventually the teasing falls out of her offer and Xander’s hearts flips when she laces their fingers together. And when Dale comes to collect Maddie after his shift, he and Patti find them sound asleep, hands still wrapped together, and Dale once again thanks the Creator that Maddie has a friend like Xander that she feels safe enough to lean on.

We know canonically that Maddie and Xander have slept together. I personally headcanon that they were each other’s firsts. Oh, Xander had totally told Calvin and Chris that he got lucky with that cheerleader from Camden Heights, but he had really only gotten to second base. And maybe one night Maddie comes bursting into his room, tears in her eyes, because she just can’t take it anymore, can’t take coming home from school and finding her mother lolling on the couch with a needle beside her. And she throws herself into Xander’s arms and he holds her while she rages into his chest, tears soaking his shirt, and his heart is breaking because Maddie Bishop is the strongest person he knows and he hates seeing her in pain like this. So he does the only thing that he can think of.

He kisses her.

He kisses her and she kisses him back and suddenly her hands are under his shirt and she’s kicking the door closed and pushing him back towards the bed and they fall onto it together and Xander’s heart is racing like one of those hummingbirds that Maddie made him watch a documentary about one night, but it’s the good kind of scary, and when Maddie quietly whispers that she’s never done this before he’s so insanely grateful that that girl from Camden Heights was saving herself for marriage, because the way Maddie’s eyes soften when he admits he hasn’t either is worth every case of blue balls ever.

They never put a label on it, but they’re together for a while, even though you wouldn’t be able to tell because nothing really changes. But then they graduate and Xander starts working on the boat more and Maddie is caught up with online classes and they slowly drift apart. A couple of years down the road Maddie gets with Ben and Xander is happy for her, because Ben makes her smile and laugh and even if his heart aches a little bit sometimes, it’s a good kind of ache. Because all he has ever wanted is for Maddie Bishop to be happy, and if that means dealing with mermaids and committing ecoterrorism, then he’s willing to do it. For her.

#siren #maddie bishop #xander mcclure #maddie and xander #wow this got long #siren headcanon #ruby metas #i accidentally made myself ship xander/maddie and i'm strangely okay with that #disclaimer i am only partway through season 2 #so if xander turns into a psycho i haven't seen it yet #long post for ts

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radwolf76 · 4 years ago

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FLASHBack: Week 89 [First-Class FLASHBack] - Japanese Cartoon

Time for another First-Class FLASHBack, where we talk about the more prolific and influential Flash animators of the early web. This month, we're going to be looking at another offering from Homestar Runner. As mentioned previously, the Brothers Chaps drew on a wealth of 80s and 90s pop culture (and even a dash of the 70s, absorbed from pop-culture osmosis from their older siblings, as well as the influence of older decades from the fact that syndicated broadcast television reruns mined content all the way back to the Golden Age of Hollywood). One example where this 80s/90s pop culture overload really shines is in Strong Bad Email #57, Japanese Cartoon, posted on 6 January 2003. James F. asks Strong Bad what he would look like as a Japanese Cartoon, and what it'd be about. Strong Bad goes on to describe himself in a chibi big-eyes/small-mouth style (except when the mouth is open, when it goes ridiculously huge), reminiscent of a helmetless Mega Man. With blue hair. You gotta have blue hair. (WARNING: TV Tropes link.) The show itself consists of him in space flying around in cool poses, an allusion to how many animes of the 60s-80s would rely heavily on a library of stock sequences for fight and transformation scenes, to pad out a show's run time (and sometimes that stock footage would get abused even further by US editors who needed to make up for runtime lost to localization censorship). The English is clearly dubbed, with mouth movements not even close to matching. Strong Bad's anime counterpart, Stinkoman, has a voice that sounds like voice actor Cam Clarke, who while best known for being the voice of Leonardo on the original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, also voiced on several prominent 80s anime dubs, including the roles of Max Sterling and Lancer on Robotech, Dirk Daring on G-Force, and Kaneda in the original dub of Akira -- at one point Stinkoman even breaks out with a line, "You're just a kid!" that echoes Kaneda's dismissal of Tetsuo's interest in riding his bike at the beginning of the movie. (The name "Stinkoman" was a reference to a line from another Strong Bad Email, Island, which may have been a take on the old 90s Sierra-Online/Dynamix Screensaver, Johnny Castaway.)

Now, it's important to note that television was not the only vector for introducing anime stylings and sensibilities to Western audiences. The shift of video game console market dominance to Japan after the video game market crash of 1983 meant that many titles would originally be developed for the Japanese market first and then have to be localized for the US. One such title is Rad Racer for the Nintendo Entertainment System, originally Highway Star for the Famicom. The Brothers Chaps lifted one of the songs from the Rad Racer soundtrack for their hypothetical Stinko Man K 20X6 anime. The anime's name is only revealed in an easter egg accessible by clicking the words "japanese cartoon" during the end credits -- using X to obscure a year was a gimmick that the Mega Man titles were particularly known for (but also occurred in Metroid as well as the Mother/Earthbound series). Inception-like, there are easter eggs within easter eggs here; clicking "japanese cartoon" a second time would bring up a clip of Homestar Runner watching Stinko Man K 20X6. For the final layer of the easter egg, under Homestar's TV are a collection of VHS tapes, one of which is labled "NES Endings". Clicking that tape brings up a pop up window that shows the ending to Rad Racer. Subsequent clicks on the pop up cycle through the endings to a bunch of video games: Castlevania 2, Mega Man 2 (furthering the connection between Stinkoman and Mega Man), Super Mario Brothers 2 (The US version, which began life as the wholly unrelated title Yume Kōjō: Doki Doki Panic), Hoops, Ghosts n' Goblins, Blaster Master (with a sketched on label and arrow calling out "Blue Hair"), The Legend of Zelda (whose credits provided the inspiration for some of the made-up names in the Stinkoman credits), Metroid (Samus is a girl?!?), Jackal, and Rygar. The world of 20X6 and Planet K would become recurring elements of the Homestar Runner site, and eventually the Brothers Chaps would even make a full Mega Man clone starring Stinkoman. Another subtle video game connection is the fact that the little mushroom clouds around Stinkoman's head when he laughs were inspired by Animal Crossing. Surprisingly, the indie video game I Wanna Be The Guy was NOT an intentional reference to this Flash, despite featuring a "Kid" who's motivation is "I Wanna Be The Guy"; the creator does acknowledge in his FAQ that he and his friend Eric who helped him name the game had probably seen this animation, but claims any influence it had was a subconscious one. (Fun Fact: I cosplayed as The Kid from I Want to Be The Guy at DragonCon one year, and almost got into hot water with con security over my gun prop.) That's all I really have for this week. Next week, we'll go from badly dubbed anime, that staple of after-school weekday cartoons, to something a little more Saturday Morning.

#radwolf76FLASHBack #FirstClassFLASHBack #Adobe Flash #Flash Animation #early 2000s #early web #Homestar Runner #Mike Chapman #Matt Chapman #The Brothers Chaps #Strong Bad #Strong Bad Emails #SBEmails #japanese cartoon #island #Stinkoman #Stinko Man K 20X6 #Rad Racer #You gotta have blue hair

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frankly-art · 6 years ago

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Frankly-Art’s Top 10 Video Games of 2018

Also available to read on my deviantArt!

With every New Year comes another year’s worth of video games to look forward to, and 2019 promise to be a good one in that regard: the release of Kingdom Hearts III is only days away, Piranha Plant and Joker are certain to be innovative and entertaining additions to the Smash Ultimate roster, Animal Crossing is coming to the Switch… and those mark only a small fraction of the many things 2019 has in store for us in terms of gaming. Amid all of this hype, I got to thinking about the varied gameplay experiences I had over the past year; so, I figured this would be as good an opportunity as any for me to reflect on them with a bit of a critical eye and definitively rank each of the video games I managed to get to during 2018!

Keep in mind while reading that, even though this is a list featuring games I played in 2018, many of these games were ones released in years past that I never got around to until last year—so, if you were expecting a list of the top 10 games that were released in 2018, I’m afraid you’ll have to look elsewhere (but not until after you read my oh-so-important list first! I crave validation!); expect a healthy mix of new and old titles in the list below. Additionally, this list will rank downloadable content (DLC) separately from standalone titles, as I don’t find it fair to compare a DLC add-on to a fully-fledged game. I’ll be weighing the score of each DLC depending on how well it improves and expands upon the narrative and gameplay of its original game.

Without further ado (and with no better means of transitioning from this introduction to the list itself than to use a somewhat tired expression in the realm of video games), let’s-a go! (Please forgive me.)

-SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT-

Favorite Characters: Revali, Urbosa, Kass Favorite Tracks: Monk Maz Koshia (all phases)

It might come as somewhat of a shock that a game with “Breath of the Wild” in its title would rank lowest on my list, but hear me out: no matter how much fun it was to be able to return to Hyrule in this DLC expansion, in my opinion, Champions’ Ballad just felt like more of the same of what we got in the main game.

Despite the nigh perfection that was Breath of the Wild, I have to agree with critics who said that the lack of aesthetic variation between segments of dungeon crawling and puzzle solving was a monotonous bore when compared to the varied themes and aesthetics of the dungeons in Zelda games past, and Champions’ Ballad did nothing to vary the atmosphere in its new shrines and dungeon from those of the main game. This disappointment was compounded with the fact that Champions’ Ballad added no new weapons to your arsenal (aside from a risky-to-use fork that functioned virtually like every other sword in the game) to allow for new types of puzzle solving or exploration. The unicorn motorcycle was certainly a cool reward for completing the DLC (the fact that I got to write the words “unicorn” and “motorcycle” next to each other is reward enough), but I had very little use for it since I’d already combed through the entirety of Hyrule during my first playthrough of the game. I simply believe it would have been nice for Champions’ Ballad to have given players something a little fresher to explore, even if it were just an aesthetic change of scenery.

I had also hoped that Champions’ Ballad might have expanded on the lore sprinkled throughout Hyrule and, even though we learned more about the four champions, I was a little let down that they didn’t really expand on anything else (Why can’t I climb to the top of Mount Agaat? Why does the entirety of the Akkala region fill me with a confusing sense of serene dread?? What the hell happened at the Typhlo Ruins???) I appreciate that, by not explaining everything, Nintendo give players the chance to interpret these things for themselves, but, when compared to the lore provided in previous Zelda games, I feel as though Champions’ Ballad fell short in fleshing out the history of this ruined Hyrule.

Favorite Characters: Prompto, Ignis Favorite Tracks: A Retainer’s Resolve, Apocalypsis Magnatus

Given how much of a beautiful mess Final Fantasy XV was upon its initial release, it’s certainly a consolation to the main game to see how well Square Enix supplemented its (rather disjointed) story and expanded upon its (frankly, lacking) gameplay through its various DLC expansion chapters featuring Noctis’ loyal Chocobros. And while I may not love Ignis quite as much as other chocobros like Prompto or Noctis, Episode Ignis was definitely an engaging and welcome addition to the enigma that is the Final Fantasy XV.

Particular highlights of Episode Ignis include its soundtrack, which features a heroic leitmotif for Ignis that really underscores the dire circumstances he and his teammates find themselves in during this segment of the story, and its addition of gameplay modes (Motorboat Simulator 2018 being one of them) are a welcome change of pace to the somewhat rudimentary battle and exploration systems found in the main game. However, a point of contention I have with Episode Ignis is with its narrative: while I appreciate that this DLC chapter finally explains how Ignis becomes blind, its multiple endings completely undermine the storyline of the main game itself. Does Ignis’ sacrifice save Noctis from having to make a sacrifice of his own in order to save the world? Does Ignis regain his sight after Noctis defeats Ardyn? Do Noctis and Luna finally realize that they’d be better off with other people (as it’s obvious that Noctis is already too preoccupied with his three boyfriends to make room for anyone else)? I need answers, Square!

Favorite Characters: Elizabeth, Atlas/Frank Fontaine Favorite Tracks: Patsy Cline – She’s Got You, Johnny Mathis – Wonderful! Wonderful!

I claimed to be a fan of the BioShock series for so long, even though I’d only ever played the first game in the series until the summer of 2017 when I finally bought a PS4 and, with it, the BioShock Collection. Now, I can call myself a fan of the series without reservation, having explored and discovered all that Rapture and Columbia have to offer. To me, BioShock Infinite: Burial at Sea Episodes 1 & 2 are a love letter to the entire series itself, featuring elements from the three main-series games and tying together each of their narratives (save for maybe BioShock 2, which is absolutely criminal, considering 2 is my favorite game in the series) in a way that, while forced in some aspects, felt like Ken Levine actually cared about clearing up some of the more confusing questions that remained at the end of BioShock: Infinite.

Burial at Sea really came into itself during Episode 2, where gameplay was switched up to feature more fleshed-out stealth mechanics that made sneaking around Rapture and Columbia both exhilarating and terrifying. It was also refreshing to be able to finally take control of Elizabeth, one of the most iconic characters of the series after the Big Daddies of BioShocks 1 and 2, and learn more of her own personal motivations and desires as she maneuvers through hostile environments. As I already mentioned briefly, I know some took issue with the way Burial at Sea wove the first two BioShock games together with the third, but, considering the mess that was made when BioShock Infinite introduced multiverse science into its mythos (and the narrative mess that Infinite was in general—I took great issue with the way they framed the oppressed populations of Columbia as “just as bad” as the ruling populations simply because they used violence to, you know, try and liberate themselves from their oppression), I feel that Burial at Sea did the best job it could considering that the setting of Infinite differed so greatly from that of the first two games.

Also, fun fact: I studied this game as a part of my Master’s Project and played it through a total of three times: once in English and twice in French! Isn’t academia weird?

Favorite Characters: Rando, Buddy, Vega Van Dam Favorite Tracks: 666 Kill Chop Deluxe, He’s My Dad, Brokentooth March

Anyone who reads TV Tropes is likely familiar with the trope “Gameplay and Story Segregation” and its less-frequent counterpart, “Gameplay and Story Integration”. In the case of LISA: The Joyful, this DLC game (which could practically be its own standalone title if it weren’t for the fact Steam labels it as “DLC” and won’t let you play it without first purchasing LISA: The Painful) absolutely excels in the latter and completely subverts the gameplay mechanics and narrative structure of the base game, and this can all be attributed to the way both games focus on your use of the cure-all drug that makes you feel nothing: Joy.

Indeed, where LISA: The Painful makes you question your use of the drug Joy, LISA: The Joyful (Joyful) is nigh impossible to complete without taking it in nearly every battle after you’re left to your own devices when the muscle of your party abandons you. As anyone who’s played the LISA trilogy will know, Joy is a dangerous substance, mutating its addicts and twisting the minds of anyone who uses it, and that Joy is an integral piece of the trilogy’s social and philosophical commentary on the freedom and restriction of choice, the commitment and devotion one carries for a person or cause, and the inherent, inevitable grey area of any and all actions one may take. Despite these themes, LISA: The Joyful is far from a demoralizing experience: if anything, the way the game simulates the feeling of being backed into a corner and the refusal to give up despite the odds only affirms whatever moral code by which you may already live, or is at least an opportunity to feel relief that you yourself aren’t forced to make such drastic decisions for your own survivability and freedom.

That’s it for the DLC games I played in 2018; now, the real fun begins! Brace yourself for my list of the top standalone titles I played last year!

Favorite Characters: Katie

This game was recommended to me by a friend, and, as much as I wanted to enjoy it, this game wound up being my lowlight of 2018, with its simplistic, seemingly rudimentary gameplay and conspicuous lack of any compelling narrative. Put bluntly, this game was like a forgettable rendition of Animal Crossing, only without any cute animal neighbors to run errands for. The game’s environment threatened absolutely no danger to your player character, yet still didn’t offer any engaging or challenging puzzles to solve to make up for this lack of danger (most “puzzles” involved figuring out how to get to a particular point on the map… and that was it). Despite this being an open-world game that offered endless opportunities for customization, I found myself hurrying to complete the game’s main (5-hour) campaign so I could feel justified to move on to other gaming experiences. The most unfortunate part of this to me is that I know there’s still more to the game’s world for me to explore, but I’m in no way compelled to do so.

In all fairness, though, I think that I’m a little older than the target demographic this game was aiming for. This game was never meant to be challenging or stressful, it was made to be a relaxing escape for anyone looking to pass the time exploring and discovering a beautifully modeled and brightly colored world. This game also wins serious points for inclusivity, especially considering the age group this game was most likely made for; my fondest memory of this game is of a quest where a woman requests that you find her the ingredients to make a potion that stimulates beard growth because she wants to grow a beard of her own, and not once during this campaign is she ridiculed or belittled for wanting one. Since Yonder seems to be a game for kids, I believe quests such as this are an excellent step to socializing them into a world that’s less judgmental and more receptive to other people. So, despite my earlier critiques of this game, Yonder would be a great game to consider if you’re looking for a low-key and off-beat (and all-human) alternative to Animal Crossing.

Favorite Veteran Fighters: Peach, Zelda, Zero Suit Samus Favorite Newcomers: Daisy, Ridley, Richter Favorite Stages: Fountain of Dreams, Fourside, Hyrule Temple Favorite Tracks: All-Star Rest Area (Melee), Destroyed Skyworld, Athletic (Yoshi’s Island)

We all knew another installment in the Smash series was coming ever since the Switch was first announced back in March of 2017. In fact, you might even say that the quality of each console’s iteration of Smash reflects the quality of the console itself, with Melee demonstrating the power and potential of the GameCube, Brawl being a gimmicky romp on an equally gimmicky console, and Wii U/3DS (what a title, right?) completely failing to capture player interest for longer than a few rounds of Smash (the Wii U era feels like a fever dream to me at this point). It’s a letdown, then, that with the Switch being such a commercial and technical success, Smash Ultimate seems somewhat of a disappointment when weighed against the hype that surrounded it up until its release back in early December.

It’s true that Smash Ultimate really delivers in regard to the character roster (everyone is here!) and stage selection (almost everything is here!), but the cuts that were made to series staples like trophies, event matches, and the like, detract from Smash Ultimate becoming the be-all end-all title in the series that it could have been. Trophy mode was where I learned much about video game history and was introduced to obscure series I would have never discovered otherwise, and their replacement with spirits feels a bit cheap, especially since spirits don’t come with any kind of information to contextualize them. Event Matches were hybridized with Melee’s Adventure mode and Brawl’s Subspace Emissary, creating the “World of Light”; while the World of Light has grown on me the more that I play it, it’s somewhat discouraging to me that, by combining so many modes of Smash games past into one, there will be nothing left for me to do with the game once I reach its end.

Still, Smash Ultimate offers plenty to look forward to. I’m more-than-hyped about the additions of Piranha Plant and Joker from Persona 5 to the character roster, and I can’t wait to see who might be announced next (unless it’s another Fire Emblem character… please God [Sakurai] don’t let it be another Fire Emblem character).

Favorite Tracks: The Bridge, Touching the Stars, Up to the Nest

I could never have prepared myself for the beautiful-yet-heart-wrenching experience this game would put me through, but I’m oh-so-glad that it did. On the surface, RiME is a relaxing exploration and puzzle game that takes place in a beautifully rendered in-game world, with a brilliantly orchestrated soundtrack and a plethora of diverse landscapes to get lost in. And yet, every moment of your adventure is permeated by an inescapable sense of isolation and dread, making you ask questions like “Where is everyone?”, “Just who is that man in the red cloak?,” and, “Is he stalking me, or are I stalking him?”.

Indeed, RiME’s narrative unfolds wordlessly as you explore and leaves you to discover and interpret on your own exactly what tragedies transpired before the events of the game, tragedies of which are far more poignant and moving if you were to discover them yourself. I know I’ve put a spoiler warning in effect, but I highly recommend you play this game on your own (or at least watch a decent Let’s Play of it) if you’re curious to know what unfolds during the game’s narrative. RiME is a relatively short game, too, lasting only between 5-10 hours, so it would be an easy one to fit into your queue if you’re looking for a fun gameplay experience with a story that will haunt you for weeks and months on end after completing it.

Favorite Characters: Terry Hintz, Buzzo, Wally Favorite Tracks: Men’s Hair Club, The End is Nigh, Summer Love

Having already talked about this game’s DLC expansion of LISA: The Joyful, you’re already aware that I hold the LISA trilogy in high regard—it also means I can make this entry somewhat brief, since a lot of what I said about Joyful can also be applied to its parent title, LISA: The Painful. You see, it’s in LISA: The Painful where the conflict in Joyful begins, and where we learn more of how the world came to be so depraved after the White Flash, an extinction event that inexplicably killed all women on the planet (at least, as far as the characters in the game know). The game considers what the repercussions of such an event would be on our society (aside from dooming humanity to die off within a generation) and really explores the darkest depths of toxic masculinity to call into question the detrimental effects it has on our self-esteem, our relationships, and our will to survive. Gameplay-wise, it’s a fairly traditional JRPG, though as I mentioned with Joyful, LISA: The Painful integrates its story with its gameplay by permanently increasing (but mainly decreasing) your stats depending on whatever injuries you escape or sustain throughout your journey. All in all, LISA: The Painful is a truly harrowing experience from beginning to end, but a must-play for anyone with an interest in the more macabre aspects of human nature.

Favorite Characters: Aloy, Erend, Vanasha Favorite Tracks: Louder

You know a game’s going to be good when its title screen holds you in awe before even pressing start. Imagine a sunlit vignette over purple mountains and a glistening river, a haunting and triumphant melody underscoring it all, as the title slowly fades into view in white in the center of the screen: Horizon Zero Dawn. O.K., I’m in. This game just did so many things right as an open-world game during an era where the genre was oversaturated by mediocre games that rehashed the same tired tropes and mechanics in its gameplay and world building. Horizon Zero Dawn truly set itself apart from the crowd for a variety of reasons: its beautifully detailed setting (being a microcosmic interpretation of Western North America), its intricate combat system with a graciously forgiving learning curve, and its compelling and socially-conscious narrative all worked together to distinguish this game within the open-world genre.

What really sets this game apart most of all, though, is the game’s protagonist, Aloy: a rare female protagonist who is a breath of fresh air in a sea of male heroes, whose capabilities and intellect don’t come at the cost of her physical appearance and femininity. Aloy set an example for other game developers that female protagonists are more than viable (and are in fact, overdue) in the video games of today, and her status as a female character never felt gratuitous or shoehorned (e.g. Battlefield V’s inclusion of a female protagonist as an enlisted soldier in the British Army and serving in the line of duty during World War II). It’s difficult (read: impossible) to play Horizon Zero Dawn and not fall in love with Aloy for her wit, her strength, and her general stick-to-itiveness in the face of adversity (not to mention, she’s just really cute and knows how to work a belly shirt). With Aloy as the protagonist, you’ll never tire of adventuring through Horizon Zero Dawn’s 70-hours+ worth of gameplay as you explore the in-game world to learn just what happened to “The Old Ones” and their society all those millennia ago.

Favorite Party Members: Ryuji Sakamoto, Ann Takamaki, Makoto Niijima Favorite Confidants: Hifumi Togo, Sadayo Kawakami, Sae Niijima, Toranosuke Yoshida, Chihaya Mifune Favorite Targets/Boss Battles: Ichiryusai Madarame, Kunikazu Okumura, Leviathan, Yaldabaoth Favorite Tracks: Blooming Villain, Rivers in the Desert, A Woman, Aria of the Soul

I’ll bet no one saw this one coming! Just kidding—anyone who’s exchanged more than a few words with me since the fall of 2018 knows how much this game absolutely consumed my life over the span of, I don’t know, I think it was four months? Indeed, I wound up sinking a total of 123 hours into this game, and there’s still a loud part of me that wants to return to it to begin a New Game+ (you’ll even notice that it was too difficult for me to contain my favorite characters into one category, instead having to split them up in order to represent all of my favorites because of how much I love them all). I’m already a fan of JRPGs, so it didn’t take much for Persona 5 to win me over with its turn-based combat, but the addition of certain gameplay mechanics—like earning an extra turn for exploiting enemy weaknesses or improving your relationship with your friends outside of battle to unlock gameplay bonuses—prevent battles and exploration in Persona 5 from ever becoming stale. Indeed, Persona 5 was truly a masterpiece from start to finish and an experience that I never wanted to end.

Frankly, any drawbacks I could mention about this game feel almost nitpicky, like the way the status ailment “Envy” is represented during the final boss fight by the color indigo instead of green, or how Kawakami can only manage to make me one cup of very useful, SP-restoring coffee over the course of an entire evening. Still, Persona 5 isn’t without its faults: for one, Persona 5 loses significant points for its questionable representation of LGBT groups (the camp gay men who openly harass Ryuji on multiple occasions being the most glaring example), and this isn’t helped by the queerbaiting that’s prevalent in a lot of character dialogue and relationships. Additionally, the fact that you can’t romance any of your male confidants comes across as erasive at best and homophobic at worst, especially considering that 1) all but one of your female confidants are eligible girlfriends, 2) you can two-time all of them at once if you so desire (which isn’t just disrespectful, it’s also flippantly misogynistic), and, most importantly, 3) one of this game’s main themes includes rebelling against oppressive societal norms (a theme that will resonate deeply with any LGBT+ player). Female representation in Persona 5 is also somewhat of a mixed bag: while the game features a large cast of diverse female characters, its constant and blatant objectification of Ann is not only creepy, it’s incredibly obtuse considering the sexual harassment and abuse she suffers by one of her teachers during the game’s first story arc. Fortunately, each of these drawbacks is easy enough to ignore when discussing the game as a whole, but I hope Atlus improves upon them in future installments: considering how incredible an experience Persona 5 was, imagine how much more incredible Persona 6 could be if these issues were fixed!

So that’s it for my top 10 games of 2018. What are your thoughts? Do you agree or disagree with any of my commentary? What were some favorite games you played during 2018? I’d love to hear your responses and start a discussion, so please, leave your comments in the notes!

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podcake · 7 years ago

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Podcasts & Genre: Comedy

Going into a long, Wikipedia certified analysis about the history and understanding of the comedy genre seems a touch unnecessary since we probably already know what angle I’ll be getting at upon reading the title of this editorial. But for the sake of consistency, let’s all pretend that we don’t know what comedy is so I can fill up the air time with something of actual depth for once.

When we look into the deep, deep archives of comedy, we find ourselves tracing back to the ancient period of the Greeks and when they originated the term we know today via the word kōmōidía all thanks to the Athenian democracy, the Spartans more fashionable cousins. Comedy has been around much, much longer then my previous genre topic and is nothing short of a staple in the world of entertainment. It is the lighthearted alternative to tragedy, the grinning mask to the perturbed look of frozen horror.

Aristotle hearkens it back to the komos, “a curious and improbable spectacle in which a company of festive males apparently sang, danced, and cavorted rollickingly around the image of a large phallus.” His words, not mine.

Shakespeare gives us a definition we’re slightly more familiar with as comedies in his plays were written to be more lighthearted affairs with happy endings and the only real crucial conflict arising from misunderstandings and the cultural clash of Apollonian and Dionysian values.

Unlike noir, comedy is less straight forward as a concept and dives into a variety of different mediums and styles that can still maintain the comedy belt to itself. With comedy we have satire, parody, and screwball humor that can come in a variety of flavors and are just as recurring in podcasts as they are television and plays. Also unlike noir, comedy is not restricted to ideas of aesthetic decisions or incredibly specific archetypes as comedy can be anything it wants to be, as long as its all around intention is to make you laugh.

Where podcasts tie into all this pretty self explanatory. We’ve all listened to a comedy podcast or at least a podcast that had a joke once and yet I found myself once again scrapping by with only a handful of examples to list here that proudly flaunted “comedy” in their iTunes category. As to why will be something to discuss later.

What I enjoy about comedy podcasts and the general use of humor in audio is the whole concept of using sound to get a joke across without needing to rely on physical visuals. Comedy has a slightly less difficult journey to accomplish as while noir is limited by the necessity of appealing to a very specific list of tropes, a comedic podcast’s job mostly boils down to being amusing, and they don’t need to fit themselves into any sort of template to accomplish that. This is why comedy has an always will be flexible to work around.

There’s probably a good reason why comedians can gain a second life on vinyl records and how I can always crack up listening to the “Salt and Pepper Diner” skit without ever actually seeing the live performance. One of the earliest examples of comedic film didn’t even have sound and would use text and rapid, enthusiastic acting to work a chuckle out of viewers.

Humor may be subjective though we can all agree that a good comedy show has a pretty bare bones goal from the get-go.

The thing about comedy that keeps it so fresh and refined after all these years is the various flavors is has to offer. Comedy can be dark and gloomy, comedy can be an anthology of loosely connected skits, comedy can be completely and utterly insane and surreal and yet they all have the same idea in mind once pen comes to paper and voice comes to microphone.

And despite how much bustling variety there is for comedy, it’s rare for me to run into podcasts that fall under the comedy umbrella that aren’t just improvisation or shows that simply have some comedy elements sprinkled into its set up.

There’s a good reason why My Brother, My Brother, and Me have managed to stay high in the charts all this time and ILLUSIONOID is a well produced science fiction show bursting with originality and new content that tickles both you and your imagination. Even Big Data, a show that is mostly scripted but does lean on the improv button quite a few times, relies on the unpredictability and natural senses of humor of its actors to make for some quirky conversation pieces.

Out of my recent years, the only real scripted comedy shows I’ve come across are Hadron Gospel Hour, Wooden Overcoats, Victoriocity, The Meat Blockade, and Hector Vs. The Future which may seem like a collection robust enough for a playlist of my favorite episodes, though is so far and few compared to all the horror and science fiction audio drama that’s out there that rarely ever relies on comedy to keep you tuning in. Well, Return Home has more jokes than the average horror show but that’s a Genre Parlor for another day.

My favorite podcast comedy that still has yet to be topped is Hadron Gospel Hour that leans more heavily on the parody category. With its loving portrayals and jabs at pop culture and occasional breaks for live action skit banter, it’s humor truly peaks with its need for funny scenarios and the exchanges between the two leading males. It has a certain Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy thing going on where most of the humor is done through quick-witted exchanges with a soft spot for heartfelt and touching moments and deriving a lot of its problems and jokes from elaborate settings.

Something I feel the need to bring up again is the shortage of scripted comedy shows which I only recently noticed upon my research but also grew to understand later on. Though comedy may not have the same limitations as a noir show with its specific aesthetic qualities and character charts to fill, it’s supposedly simple goal of humor leaves a lot of breathing room but just as much to be desired from its writing.

From my understanding, comedy is much harder to write and base a whole show around without having to risk not having any humor. Horror shows can cook up terrifying imagery and science fiction can jump from space ships to starry plant hemispheres without losing speed, but comedy has to pull off a certain balancing act while still keeping the laughs in mind.

Wooden Overcoats and Victoriocity are especially good at weaving comedic elements into their stories to the point jokes are a natural part of their structure while Hadron Gospel Hour seamlessly transitions between affectionate parody and some fun science fiction elements that can be equal parts dramatic and spectacular.

A newer addition is The Amelia Project that one could label as a black comedy and is easily becoming one of the more eclectic entries to the genre. Even if the sense of humor is touch bleak and sadistic, it still warms a certain part of your funny bone that might enjoy that sort of macabre yet casual understanding of death and the human condition.

The most refreshing one to have come out recently that plays up comedy almost as much as Hadron Gospel Hour is Victoriocity that combines some good old fashion screwball humor within a self contained mystery parody. Though a newer addition to my collection of shows, be it Palette featured or not, Victoriocity is a pretty fun comedy that oddly enough overlaps with my noir fascination that I mentioned in my previous article.

But above all, an excellent comedy show is truly at its peak when it can maintain just enough staying power beyond it’s comedic elements. A show, especially one that has any plans of having any significant plot development, cannot sustain itself simply by being funny. Though this may sound contradictory, it’s how an audio drama can embed humor into its day to day scenarios that make the jokes land in the first place.

A quick wit and enthusiasm for the next punchline has a certain charm to it that can carry one episode to the next, especially if it fills itself with what TV Tropes calls “brick jokes”, though it’s by no means a place to set up camp, so to speak.

My understanding of the term has left me on the conclusion that Kakos Industries, that dark comedy about the evil mega corporation...and some other stuff, is especially reliant on this style of joke telling if it isn’t just rattling off some dense imagery and sarcasm only ever interrupted by eerie silence or the familiar electronic thumping of its BGM.

Kakos does mostly grease up its stationary engine with this style of humor-introducing some sort of problem or character and having them return over and over again until their big funny moment is wrapped up and they’re left in the recycling bin until further notice. Now this doesn’t sound too tedious on paper but it does lack a certain punch to its line-ha, ha-when it’s the only illusion of structure the show has to offer.

It’s this sort of lackluster narrative style that cause it to never truly hold my attention during it’s now three year run time. Without a stable plot or stakes to challenge our protagonist, the show boils down to a bunch of loosely connected set ups and jokes that don’t really mean or do anything and exist as mere facets of a wide and wild world we still know little to nothing about with characters that are fun and yet unengaging since they seem to exist just to past through the narrative’s revolving door.

Brick jokes do not substitute the drive and ambition of actual dramatic suspense and rather act as an accent or way to break future tension. Callbacks can be a funny, a show entirely built on callbacks is boring.

Though King Falls AM doesn’t suffer from similar issues, it is still one of the weaker comedic shows I’ve come across. It lacks the sort of boldness Kakos rides on to exhaustion, instead leaving with unmemorable jokes in an unmemorable setting. To describe King Falls sense of humor is a challenge in itself, not because it’s especially witty or obtuse, but because it’s so by the numbers with an occasional dip into what seems to be deliberately scrutinizing jokes that can’t even pass off as genuinely edgy, that it’s either boring or insulting.

Going into more detail about how King Falls AM fails in being engaging or funny is a touch difficult because there just wasn’t much to uncover in the first place.

Though it might be a personal preference, a good comedy podcasts succeeds when its humor and its setting and stakes are all on the same page. When the humor has a massive disconnect from what we’re supposed to be concerned and truly tuning into the show for, that can cause it’s own problems. At that point, the jokes are just jokes and if they don’t land then the whole show falls apart since its support beam was never that strong to begin with.

Even if I can’t say I was in love with Wooden Overcoats and its overtly cynical vibe, it’s certainly one of the more cleverly written black comedies and pretty much masters the blend of the oldest definition of the genre. Its sense of humor and day to day issues all blend together seamlessly and is so well produced and energetic you feel a need to get invested in what new problems our characters might face.

The leads being at the short end of the stick is par of the course at this point and you can enjoy this audio drama about competing funeral homes-right away you can probably tell what makes Wooden Overcoats succeed so well as a comedic show from that description alone-as a genuinely well written black comedy that has just enough heart and character study to be more than just a pile of coffins with silly scribbles etched into the side.

Reasons why Hadron Gospel Hour and Victoriocity succeed so well in this aspect is because they’ve managed to strike this balance between lavish worlds and hearty laughs. They have issues to deal with and some sort of problem to tackle each episode, and yet it’s the way they work with their settings and goofy characters that still allow their respective shows to be perceived as lighthearted entertainment with some sort of catch or staying factor.

I love Victoriocity’s quirky humor and characters but I’m also highly invested in its element of mystery and the interesting and creative city the show takes place in that lets each episode ooze originality and inspired sets. Hadron Gospel has some hilarious banter and out-there situations, but I’m also biting my nails at the prospect of the multiverse being restored and Oppenheimer finding peace with himself after a cosmic blunder. I might come for a quick chuckle but it’s what lies beneath all the fluff that makes the jokes worth the wait.

Comedy comes in many forms and though it hasn’t quite reached its peak in the audio drama realm, at least the ones that do exist will have you laughing for more.

#podcast #audio drama #audio play #hadron gospel hour #the meat blockade #ILLUSIONOID #victoriocity #wooden overcoats #hector vs the future #kakos industries #my brother my brother and me #podcasts and

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mittensmorgul · 7 years ago

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I feel like this is probably something you have a lot of thoughts on, but you don't have to go in depth if you don't want (if you do that's also great!) Do you think about cas classifying dean as family and vice versa is a hurdle to be overcome if textual d/c is a thing that's happening? Obviously family includes your significant other, but as far as fiction, I feel like it's code for platonic feelings, because I try to think of any tv couple that started as "family" and I can't. Thanks :)

Hi! I’m sorry I’ve been sitting on this message for a couple of days, but it’s not actually something I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about. At least not specifically like this.

I mean, the first thing that came to mind at your question was @destieldrabblesdaily‘s post from back during s11 (aah, s11 gave us so much...) about how they were slowly ticking off all these things from a checklist labeled “Obstacles to Canon.”

http://mittensmorgul.tumblr.com/post/145130443365/hello-all-the-episode-did-in-general-was-tick

There are four main points on Shirley’s list, only two of which I think are so completely obvious in canon now that there’s really nothing more to say on either subject:

the vessel consent issue: It’s Cas’s body. There’s no Jimmy in there. Cas has been rebuilt and resurrected multiple times by God, died and been burned, and came back from the empty with what must be yet another entirely new physical body. That is Castiel’s body. Period. There’s no “but what if...” left to argue on this point.

the concern that the show would morph into something it’s not: the focus of the show wouldn’t somehow shift to Dean and Cas’s romantic adventures. It wouldn’t become a comedy, or exclude Sam. The tone and format of the show wouldn’t need to change at all, and that was pretty conclusively proved not only back in 11.19 with the way Jesse and Cesar’s relationship was presented, but *waves hand across all of s13* the show’s gonna do what the show’s always done. Nothing needs to change about the show’s format or structure.

The other two points might be conclusively obvious to some of us (and honestly I have personally been satisfied by how they continue to handle these issues), but there’s still ground they CAN cover toward making these things more explicit for the general audience. And I’d argue that they HAVE been doing just that consistently, and even rather explicitly now in s13:

Dean’s sexuality: Shirley’s original post covered this extremely well from where we were back in s11 (so go read that right now if you haven’t already). I’ve added a heck of a lot to my Dean Is Bi tag since 11.19, so I’d argue that at the very least it’s not something they’ve tried to back away from over the last few seasons. They may not have come out and explicitly said it in so many words, but the show has continued to escalate the subtext to the point where even the general audience has been noticing it in droves.

The Bromance Zone: Back in Shirley’s original post, this was accepted as fairly conclusively evident from Dean’s pining for Cas back in s11, and how it was made painfully and explicitly clear in 11.18... but whoa have we ever had a lot of logs thrown on the bromance pyre since then. And I think this is the point you’re concerned about in your question above.

You stated you couldn’t think of a single romantic couple in fiction that began as “family” or, I suppose in this case as “found family,” or “family of choice.” But I’d like to suggest that most successful romantic couples do begin as friends, regardless of whether they consider each other “family” before their relationship becomes romantic.

Confession time: I have never watched the show Friends, but I believe they considered themselves a sort of found family, right? And there was at least one pair of them that were actually brother and sister? And didn’t several of them become romantically involved by the end of the series? I remember seeing posts to this effect, but correct me if I’m wrong...

Another canon ship that’s often been paralleled to destiel is Castle/Beckett. If you’ve never watched Castle, they’re a pretty textbook enemies to friends to lovers to HEA, and it took like five seasons for them to get to that point. Thing is, the nature of the work they did together (police work) created the same sort of “found family” feelings that the Winchesters’ collection of allies and friends has. And their relationship included so many of the same tropes that Dean and Cas has... right down to the “deathbed love confessions,” amnesia, miscommunication, mutual pining... you name it... And we thought FIVE YEARS was a slow burn. Thing is, every time they seemed to get close to making some sort of dramatic love confession, for years, they’d back down at the last moment for one reason or another. For YEARS, they settled for what could arguably be considered a sort of familial closeness, because that’s all they thought they could have. Circumstance just kept stepping in the way...

So on that note, I’d argue that practically EVERY slow burn romantic endgame story progressed through this “awkward found family” stage. They’re closer than what could be called “friends” in the strictest platonic sense of the word, but short of confessing undying romantic love and attraction, the strongest word in their vocabulary for the care and affection they feel they’re allowed to demonstrate to one another is family.

So back to Supernatural...

S12 approached this issue from two directions for most of the season, with a Compare/Contrast using Mary’s story paralleled to Castiel’s for most of the season, showing us a distinct difference between what FAMILY feels and does for one another, and whatever the heck it is that Dean and Cas feel and do for one another. On the other side of the coin, they doubled down on demonstrating the blatant differences from how Sam sees Cas as a brother, and how Dean sees Cas as a /////brother/////. It was demonstrated over and over again that despite using the same word to describe what Cas is to them, it’s unequivocally DIFFERENT for Dean. That leaves us to wonder WHY.

12.10 makes it clear what the angels believe Dean is to Cas, his “human weakness.” We were shown Dean’s feelings for and connection to Cas, that Dean refused to save himself from Ishim when he knew that using the banishing sigil could possibly have injured Cas further, or even killed him. It wasn’t a risk he was willing to take. That moment may have been a small part of that episode, but right there, Dean had no reason to believe that Ishim wasn’t about to murder him. He surrendered his own life for Cas.

12.12 has Cas’s deathbed love confession, which people are still debating from a linguistic standpoint. But I’d argue that the fact we’re able to debate it at all is even further evidence that it’s something that we’re supposed to be thinking about, and wondering about. Or else why would it even be a debate in the first place.

12.15 has Cas disappearing back to Heaven, the ambiguous phone call moment where Sam hangs up with Mary and signs off with “Love you,” while Dean hangs up with Cas. Loads of us had a holy hell did Dean just say that??? moment and had to rewind to confirm that it was Sam saying it to Mary. Because of that debate left over from 12.12. Again, the fact that we all had to stop and blink at the implication shows that something is definitely different now.

Which brings us to freaking 12.19 and the goddamned mixtape. No amount of Bro and Pal and Buddy on Dean’s part can negate “It’s a gift, you keep those.” Sorry folks, them’s the rules.

And can we talk for a moment about how explicitly clear s13 has made Dean’s feelings, his grief that he textually admitted by yelling it all in Sam’s face was all about Cas. Grief so powerful it somehow activated Jack’s powers (which he had no control of at that point and didn’t even understand that his powers had any part in Cas’s resurrection even after 13.06) and poked Cas awake in the Empty.

And then we have 13.06. I still haven’t recovered from 13.06.

The connection between Dean and Cas intensifies in 13.07, both through Dean giving Cas that same line from 12.10 (Don’t do anything stupid) which he clarified back in s12 wasn’t borne of anger, but of worry. Worry that 12.12 had honed into love, and 13.01 punched us all in the face with as Dean broke down and screamed his grief at God. I mean, the differences between how Sam considers Cas “family” and how Dean does is inarguable at this point.

I’d suggest that the definition of “family” isn’t so much something the show needs to clarify at this point, but something that’s been written all over the last season and a half in invisible ink, and all they need to do at this point is hold it up to a light bulb for the entire text to become clearly visible to everyone.

#the scheherazade of supernatural #destiel #the destiel #there really aren't any textual obstacles at this point #dean winchester is bilingual #revenge of the subtext #spn s13 #spn 11.19 #spn 11.18 #spn 13.01 #spn 13.06 #spn 13.04 #spn 12.10 #spn 12.12 #spn 12.19 #spn 13.07 #Anonymous

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ookamikasumi-writer · 3 years ago

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Just say NO to Author Intrusion

The Fourth Wall is the Audience. -- Every time the writer addresses their story's audience --their Readers-- they are violating the fourth dimension, or wall, of that story's Reality.

These violations are known as: Author Intrusions.

Author Intrusions show up as little comments that express the author's personal feelings on what's happening in their story, or heavily hint at things to come during the story.

Author Intrusions are a Bad Idea.

----------- DISCLAIMER: This is how I was taught to write for publication purposes by my professional editors. If you don't want to do it this way -- Don't. (Less competition for me.)

WHY Author Intrusions are a Bad Idea.

Author Intrusions jar the Reader out of the mental movie they've generated while reading because the Author keeps rudely shoving them out of the story to remind them that They know something the Reader doesn't.Compare it to watching a movie you haven't seen before with a friend that won't shut up about how cool the next scene is.

See this shit? This is Author Intrusion.

Identifying Author Intrusions:

The most common form of Author Intrusion is when the writer plants overly-obvious hints of things to come addressed directly to the Reader.

Examples:

In hindsight, he would be thankful for his overreaction.

Unfortunately, his choices had truly never been his own.

If only they'd realized how wrong they were.

These are normally found at the end of a chapter, or book, but I've also seen them posted smack in the middle of a scene in progress.They had no idea what consequences their choice would bring.

I have been told that these particular intrusions are meant to be a form of Foreshadowing.

This shit is NOT Foreshadowing.

True Foreshadowing symbolically hints at things to come. It Does Not point-blank TELL the Reader that something is coming.

More on actual Foreshadowing: TV Tropes: Foreshadowing

I have also been told that this form of Author Intrusion is supposed to create suspense and entice the Reader to read the next installment.

This shit does NOT create Suspense either.

The truth is, this sort of cheap-assed teaser-spoiler Does Not add suspense because it entirely Removes the surprise factor of what is coming.

Suspense is about Anticipation. It's about waiting for 'the other shoe to fall'. When an author point-blank announces that there's another shoe, all that lovely anticipation is halved because the Reader now knows for a fact that this shoe WILL fall -- that something IS going to happen.

THINK: How can anyone be surprised if they're already expecting a surprise?

If you want to create Suspense, don't TELL the Reader outright that something is going to happen. Instead, SHOW IT by planting Clues; the butcher knife was missing from the kitchen drawer, and give Hints through ominous Sounds, creeping Shadows, character Body Language, and stilted Dialogue that something is going to happen.

Authors: Keep Your Opinions to Yourself!

The next most common form of Author Intrusion happens when the writer just can't keep their personal comments about certain characters, or what's happening in their story to themselves.

This is particularly virulent in fan-fics written by new writers who get over-excited about what they're writing.

Cut that shit out!

Literally, cut all that shit Out of your work.

Us readers do not want anyone interrupting our stories with their opinions, feelings, or comments about the story we're reading. That includes comments from the Author. Save that crap for the Author Notes.

However...

"Lines like those (in my fan fiction anyway) are actually meant as red flags; a sort of, "Hey, pay attention, I'm doing something over here!" This is because, in the...years I've been writing fan fiction, I've noticed that the majority of 'new readers' (i.e. those new to fan fiction,) will not pay attention [to what they're reading] and will inundate me with questions that are easily answered if they did. With lines like those thrown in, the questions are fewer and I don't have to waste time explaining things that don't need explanations." -- Annoyed FF Writer

While all that might sound like a good excuse -- it really Isn't.

When the author inserts comments about a character or situation happening right there in the middle of the story just to make it easier for lazy-assed readers to figure out what's going on, those comments are nothing more than Spoilers for the rest of us.

Spoiling the Story for Lazy-Assed Readers -- is a BAD IDEA.

While some readers love to be babied like that, the rest of us readers don't. The rest of us are paying close attention and we love ferreting out the author's little hints exposed by the plot's progression and character reveals. We are reading specifically to discover what the heck is going on.

Spoilers strip all the suspense and discovery --the most enjoyable parts of the story-- right out.

I don't know about you, but once all the surprises are gone from a story, I have no reason to keep reading that story.

Fixing Spoilers

If the Reader doesn't get what happened and the information to set them straight IS NOT actually present in the story, then yeah, the Writer messed up.

To fix this, they should REWRITE and REPOST the Relevant Chapter ASAP! NOT answer their reader's query with any comment beyond, "Oh crap! Let me fix that real quick!"

If the Reader doesn't get what happened and the information to set them straight IS actually present in the story, meaning; the Reader simply missed it the first time around, then the Reader messed up -- not the Writer.

When this happens, the Writer should answer their query by politely telling that reader to Read the Chapter Again a little more carefully. NOT by giving them Spoilers!

Seriously, professional authors don't cater to that crap, neither should fan-fic writers.

The only thing catering to lazy-assed readers does is encourage those readers to bug other writers for spoilers -- and us other writers don't appreciate it.

As for Breaking the Fourth wall...

Or is he?

Deadpool: Not actually Breaking the Fourth Wall. He is Narrating his own story.

Yes, Deadpool does address his audience throughout his comic books and movies. In his comics he even comments on the textboxes around him.

Deadpool also freely admits that he's not exactly Sane.

However, addressing his readers, or watchers, or even his text boxes doesn't change the fact that Deadpool is The Point of View Character in both his comics and his movies. He's the one telling the tale. He's expected to comment on everything and everyone around him because that's what POV Characters do.

Deadpool just happens to be narrating his story out loud to the voices, and text boxes, in his own head. That there happens to actually be an audience of readers and movie watchers is entirely incidental.

Now if Stan Lee; the main author of Marvel Comics, popped into Deadpool's story, that would be Author Intrusion--

Oh, wait... He did.

A...tasteful example of Author Intrusion. AKA: The Cameo.

Narration is Not Author Intrusion

The Narrator is The Point of View Character observing --and commenting on-- their part of the tale. If done Right, what is narrated is colored by that POV Character's thoughts, opinions, and comments about what is happening around them.

Breaking the 4th Wall? Nope, just 1st Person POV.

Narration is not Author Intrusion because the author isn't telling the story, the POV Character is.

Deadpool, in both the comics and in his movies, uses First Person Point of View Narration. First Person POV can look like the character is Breaking the Fourth Wall, but they really aren't because Narration is supposed to address the audience. Think in terms of diary entries, or in Deadpool's case, a massive Selfie Video.

The only time Narration should ever be colored by the author's opinions is in a Self-Insert story where the author is the POV character--

-- or in a Fairy Tale.

Fairy Tales were originally told Orally. They were spoken and acted out by a storyteller directly to their audience. The storyteller's opinions of what was happening were part of the act, rather like the Master of Ceremony for a play. When these tales were eventually written down by collectors, such as the Brothers Grimm, they wrote them in the oral style --author intrusions included-- simply because that's how they were told to the collectors.

Later writers, like Hans Christian Anderson, wanted their tales to be labelled Fairy Tales, so they used this oral style specifically so their stories would blend in with the much older collected Grimm's stories.

However, if the story is not a Fairy Tale--

Don't Interrupt Your Readers!

Written stories are viewed in the imagination like a movie. So when the author pops in a comment to make their personal opinions known, it throws the reader out of the movie they're watching in their imaginations because someone is talking to them.

"But the whole story is the author's opinion!"

That's right, a writers has their whole story to express their personal opinions, so there is absolutely No Need for the author to interrupt their readers with additional comments on anything at all during the story.

If a writer absolutely positively must comment on what's happening in their story, an Author Note is where that shit belongs --or their personal blog, or whatever social media floats their boat-- nowhere else.

Author Intrusions: -- If you're Not writing a Fairy Tale -- Don't Do It.

Unless you're Stan Lee. (He can intrude wherever he likes.)

#writing fiction #writing tips #writing tricks

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summerlimit · 6 years ago

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Video Games Are Stupid And So Am Me or Why I Won’t Be Playing Nier: Automata

Like many other post-post-modern media consumers, I sometimes enjoy watching a stranger play a video game by way of the internet. I don’t appreciate a stranger’s commentary or reactions, I just sometimes lack the strength & mental fortitude after a long day, to press all those buttons, all those times, yet I still want to be entertained. Sometimes I watch a game that I likely wouldn’t buy myself. That was how I was introduced to Nier: Automata.

I wanted to see a player dance their character around, violently slicing and shooting, without having to learn any of those complicated combo inputs. I wanted to wind down to a stream of smooth & shiny graphics, on my dim phone, with headphones in, while my wife watched The Bachelorette or The Voice or some other thing.

While watching a stranger play Nier: Automata, I was charmed by certain aspects of the game: the celebrating robots of the theme park, the music, the fluidity of motion. I enjoy myself a twin-stick shooter from time to time, and I pride myself on having a decent tolerance for gundam stuff. Especially, I liked that the game continues and changes after the end credits. Replayability, like the New Game+ in the Souls series is a big selling point for me.

So it happened. I entertained the idea of purchasing Nier: Automata. What would that look like? I pictured myself, playing my Playstation 4 on the big TV in the living room. Then I imagined my wife’s face when she saw me playing as the main character, 2B, a loli anime robot in high heels and a short skirt. In that moment, I realized video games are stupid and so am me.

The internet echo chamber had dubbed Nier: Automata a game worthy of any exaggeration of praise. I had accepted that and kept moving. Then I got a YouTube suggestion - a video on Nier: Automata by a channel named “Games As Literature”. I had already watched a Wisecrack video that delved into the philosophical motif of the game. I understood that Nier: Automata was a game that wanted to get inside a player’s head and have them question their actions within the game, and maybe make a statement about the world, as art is wont to do. However, due to my recent revelation that video games are stupid, the video by “Games As Literature” got me bristled before I even watched it. I wasn’t surprised when it contained the following quote:

“Nier: Automata is more than a fun game, or a good story, or a pretty soundtrack - it’s the kind of experience that wants to try and change your life. And honestly, if you let it, and devote the amount of intellectual and emotional effort it clearly wants you to, I think it genuinely could accomplish that goal.”

What I want to say is that, if one devotes intellectual and emotional effort toward reading the Wikipedia entry on “Philosophy”, one’s life has an equal chance of changing, but that is not what my point is. My point is that video games are stupid, and so am me.

Ever since Psycho Mantis, nerds have been inverting their skulls whenever a video game deviates from the banality we’ve come to expect. What if these coins I’ve been collecting have been a metaphor for capitalism? Does dying in a video game have any meaning in regard to my own mortality? Have the overwhelming majority of my life’s experiences been virtual?

Many games have sought to ruin our escapist release with some kind of deep underlying meaning or twist. Gamers, at the same time, have been changing and being changed by games. All the while, the lessons and changes that’ve been happening may not have been what we thought. How are we, as a group, myself included, so quick to label a collection of embarrassing anime tropes a philosophical opus? Did we need a video game to teach us life lessons, rather than, say, a philosophy book?

I think the issue isn’t that the philosophy and lessons of Nier: Automata are shallow, but rather that we’ve been taught to not see the forest for the trees. The medium is the message, and the medium is stupid. A video game where you fight robots with a big sword, dressed in lingerie is stupid. It doesn’t matter if Nier: Automata changes me, if at the end I’ve spent 20-60 hours as a robot-killing, sword-wielding anime sex doll. If I am different by the end, yet the medium is invisible to me, then surely I have not changed in any meaningful way.

And how is that not okay? In an effort to lift a video game into the pantheon of high art (or maybe a flailing attempt to be taken seriously in spite of our hobby) we lost our sense of humor. Big swords & bonkers costumes are fun and stupid. Giant robots are fun and stupid. Video games are stupid and so am me.

#Nier: Automata #video games

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hcmj · 7 years ago

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HCMJ’s Favorite Albums of 2017!

Listen to a mix featuring these albums here: HCMJ’s 2017 End Of Year Mix

Honorable Mentions:

Carla dal Forno - The Garden

GFOTY - GFOTYBUCKS

ミスト M Y S T - 緑の目

Nmesh - Pharma

Black Marble - It’s Immaterial

Leyland Kirby - We, so tired of all the darkness in our lives

世界は80年代に終了しました - People Lead Such Busy Lives

Virtual Vice - Sanctuary Runner

Golden Living Room - Autoscopy

DESIRE - STAQQ OVERFLO

20) World War - Soundsystem

Distorted Redrum rhythms dripping with gabbery, housey, bounceable goodness. Every moment is more relentless than the last, with strange electronic and sometimes nightmarish sound elements effortlessly woven into the complicated crescendos that comprise each track.

STREAM/DOWNLOAD

19) Curved Light - Quartzsite

It’s rare to find a synth album that isn’t endlessly droning or cheekily nostalgic. Quartzsite utilizes slow-attack expansive pads alongside stabby knob turners without falling into the tropes that have been turned over time and time again over the last decade. Subtle but fast tempo percussive elements ticking beneath pure white pads and icy synthfalls of pure crystal.

STREAM/DOWNLOAD

18) Geo Metro - Ravage2099

Fellow Philadelphia artist Geo Metro dropped this dense debut on Tiger Blood Tapes earlier this year. His shows are always foggy headthumpers with mind melting realtime sampling, deep drones, dancing rhythmic enigmas and astral melodies. None of this was lost in translation to magnetic tape, the bubbling pulse of beyond - a spiritual guide.

STREAM/DOWNLOAD

17) Disasteradio - Sweatshop

Another incredible performance I was fortunate to witness this year was Eyeliner AKA Disasteradio. His on stage MIDI splicing with its gravity-increasing, vocoded, show-stopping finale was exhilarating and inspiring. All of that energy, bombast, and humor can be found on Sweatshop. There’s also a high level of musicianship - touching upon 90′s FM video game music, new wave DEVO synthpop, and moments like “Unleash The Free TV Revolt” which echo Daft Punk vocoder jams. Playful and reflective of what childhood in the early 90′s actually felt like.

STREAM/DOWNLOAD

16) x.y.r. - Labyrinth

x.y.r. could keep putting albums out like this every year until I die and I would still count them among my favorites. No one does lo-fi synth music the way he does - his unique musical character pulses and wanders in this fuzzy maze.

STREAM/DOWNLOAD

15) Computer Graphics - Lo-Fi

This collection of hazy house jams was a lens back through time. Flashbacks of downloading strange electronic artists off LimeWire in the early 00′s, sinking endless frustrated hours into PixelJunk Eden, and now dancing around my house with Computer Graphics bumping. It’s just as dreamy and hypnotic as you’d hope.

STREAM/DOWNLOAD

14) Nico Niquo - In A Silent Way

Taking a step away from the “darkwebwave” of 2015′s Epitaph, Nico Niquo explores more expansive snow plains on In A Silent Way. Gone are the stabbing vocal samples an occasional swirling rhythmic patterning - in their place is Eno-esque slow burners with that rise and fall like the breaths of a sleeping frost giant against moments of purity and silence.

STREAM/DOWNLOAD

13) Arca - Arca

Arca’s 3rd full length is thick and operatic. Like haunted ballroom music with a broken falsetto whispering in your ear, being engulfed in underwater explosions, or watching the credits roll on your own life. It’s sometimes oppressively stark, sometimes intimately vulnerable, and always entrancing. I was initially pulled in by the video premiere for the masterpiece “Desafio.”

VIDEO STREAM

12) Nyoi Plunger - Poiret Status

Playful and full of detail, twisted and bent as it’s pulled into a black hole and spit out again. Poiret Status is always teetering on the edge of a nightmare. Strange voices laugh and coo, like being trapped in a realm ruled by the manifestation of fear, or a dance hall where your very physicality is distorted, warped, and twisted as time becomes unhinged and there’s nothing left to hold onto.

STREAM/DOWNLOAD

11) The Caretaker - Everywhere at the end of time - Stages 2 & 3

Discovering Leyland Kirby’s work was a turning point in my life. Over the last decade release after release of both haunted ballroom music as The Caretaker and reflective synth/piano music as himself have becomes markers for the years of my life. This year we received the next two stages of the dementia simulation of Everywhere at the end of time. The flowers have wilted, and the darkening mind is displayed with a poignant beauty.

STREAM/DOWNLOAD

10) TVVIN_PINEZ_M4LL - orz

More than half a decade after the wave rose and fell, torch bearers continue to twist the pop of the past to express new ideas and add their emotional mark to the blockchain of internet music. In the case of the prolific TVVIN_PINEZ_M4LL, orz uses vaporwave techniques and traditions as a framework for an emotionally radiant, deeply personal love story. Bursting with raw emotion and feelings of NUWRLD.

STREAM/DOWNLOAD

09) Various - Even Further

It feels weird putting a remix compilation on one of these lists, but the Zoom Lens label tribute to Infinity Shred is one of those rare moments when a compilation isn’t just a total mishmash of whatever happened to be thrown into the pot. A fitting showcase of the LA label’s diverse palette of sound, from Berserk ost aping to widescreen chiptune bliss - heavy beats and the brightest black leather darkness that is worthy of Infinity Shred’s cinematic scope.

STREAM/DOWNLOAD

08) FIRE-TOOLZ - INTERBEING

Metal-screeches in empty halls drip over post-eccojam synth operas, spastic crystalline outbursts, and high-tempo-high-energy half pipe spaceship rides with broken bits of sound and a cyberpunk sheen. Songs completely split open with massive bombardments of noise and an endless layering of digital artifacts. A labyrinth of glitched out modernity.

STREAM/DOWNLOAD

07) Koeosaeme - Sonorant

Fast and full of neck-breaking spins, Sonorant alongside Nyoi Plunger’s Poiret Status were two of the most forward-looking albums I heard this year. With the endless tiny pattering of a billion bits of music playing up against unnatural arrangements of bizarre rhythmic breaks and supernatural harmony. Part sound sculpture part audio apocalypse.

STREAM/DOWNLOAD

06) Piper Spray - r.i.p.

When pieces of you die and slowly fall away, they leave a trail of memories in their wake. Piper Spray, one of my favorite artists of the last decade, has been prolific and mysterious - even elusive. His entire body of work has since been deleted from his bandcamp and only this retrospective release that looks back at the last 7 years of his output and life in 6 tracks remains. Full of noise, pain, frustration - with a touch of sorrow and sweetness we are given once last glimpse into the nostalgia for a place we’ve never known. His music has been my constant companion on my own personal journey these last 7 years. RIP Piper Spray.

STREAM/DOWNLOAD

05) Euglossine - Sharp Time

It wasn’t until I was lucky enough to play a show with Stany Bebe AKA Euglossine that I discovered to my amazement that the majority of the sounds on this album were performed on MIDI guitar. The sound blips and pan flutes expressed with metronomic precision on a real guitar having its note data interpreted by a MIDI conversion box. Mind blowing musicianship and sprawling melodic composition.

STREAM/DOWNLOAD

04) Giant Claw - Soft Channel

I couldn’t stop listening to Soft Channel this year! The culmination of everything that has come before and a wide leap into the future. Orchestral fragmentation in a thick rainbow of sound that breathes and pulses - the sound design is mind blowing, frantic and brilliantly produced. It’s a crisp and meticulously designed new height.

STREAM/DOWNLOAD

03) Marcus Fjellström - Skelektikon

It’s hard to believe it’s been 7 years since Marcus Fjellström’s Schattenspieler was listed as my favorite album of 2010 (on the inaugural annotated list!). Now, all these years later, we were finally treated with a proper followup - and tragically lost Fjellström himself. Skelektikon is a remarkable swansong, picking up where Schattenspieler left off - diving deeper into the anxiety ridden halls of darkness. Larger orchestral arrangements pop up, tape flutter constantly threatening to snap the dread to a sudden end. There’s is a sometimes darkly romantic turn to its harmonic movements however - a humanizing touch that makes the ghosts that much more terrifying.

STREAM/DOWNLOAD

02) Sour Gout - I S O L A T E

It doesn’t matter how you get there, only how good the ideas are. I S O L A T E may be built out of a collection of new age and incidental music samples, but its collages give a sense of a deep personal expression. Saccharin guitar, C418-esque piano phrases, and blankets of emotional vulnerability eventually fall into the uneasy loneliness of the 15 minute title track. The empty soul that was once full, bordering on brooding but very soft to lay in. I found myself keeping this one on loop for hours at a time.

STREAM/DOWNLOAD

01) Machine Girl - ...BECAUSE I’M YOUNG ARROGANT AND HATE EVERYTHING YOU STAND FOR

Machine Girl puts on a really incredible/brutal show - and the recorded version of that experience loses none of the warped maelstrom of sound that makes them so viscerally intense. Heavy industrial punk with face smashing breakdowns peppering every track - like moments of floating in violence as you’re torn apart by passing gravity wells. Disillusioned anger with the musical chops and temperament of someone who grew up listening to Phantasy Star Online music - it was my favorite album of 2017!

STREAM/DOWNLOAD

9 notes · View notes

nphofrph · 8 years ago

Photo

NPHofRPH’s Sing-Along Glossary of Roleplay Terms

The quintessential dictionary for the new RPer, or the veteran RPer who wants to get caught up on all the new-fangled slang them young folks are using.

(Note: does not actually come with any particular melody, but feel free to make one up as you go and hum it.)

1x1: A roleplay between just two people, you and your partner.

2x2: A roleplay between four characters. Not sure why it’s referred to this way. I guess the characters are all supposed to have paired up by the end of it?

4x4: Wait, are we stilling pairing them up, or can this just be eight characters?

32x32: Apparently we just like dividing by two in this neck of the woods.

Activity Check: A time when the admins go through the characters of a roleplay and make sure that they’re all still posting and haven’t run away from home.

Admin: The manager or moderator of a roleplay group; the one who’s in charge of creating the roleplay and keeping it running.

Angst: Piling on the hurt - usually emotional, sometimes physical - for your character to endure. Really fun. You should try it. Be a malevolent god.

Anon Hate: A message someone sends anonymously detailing why they despise you and what they’ve done to your mother, or threatening you in some way. Honestly, it’s hard to be threatened by that little gray fella with the sunglasses, but okay.

Apartment RP: A roleplay in which all or most of the characters live in a single apartment building.

Application: A description of your character to submit in order to be considered to join a roleplay group. Like a job interview, but not as painful.

Appless RP: A roleplay where you don’t have to fill out an application. Just insert a couple of details about your character onto a little form and you’re in. Quality may vary.

Ask Meme: A post containing a list of questions for others to send to your character.

AU: Alternate universe. This is where the characters of the work are placed in a setting or scenario not present in canon. For example, characters who are superheroes in their canon work meeting as ordinary high school students instead.

Backstory: The events of a character’s life that occurred before the beginning of the roleplay. Doesn’t have to be tragic. Is usually tragic.

Bandom RP: A roleplay in which the characters are in a band. It’s a pun, see. A portmanteau of “band” and “fandom”, I think. I’m assuming. I mean, I’m not a roleplay etymologist or anything.

Bio RP: A roleplay in which a detailed description of the character’s background and personality is required in the application.

Blogroll: A page which displays all the blogs that a user is following.

BroTP: Like an OTP (see below), except for best buddies instead of romantic partners.

Bubble Roleplaying: Roleplaying with only a select few characters or members in a group RP setting and ignoring the others.

Canon: The stuff that the original writer of a work made. For an RP group, this consists of the plot, additional info, and any characters made by the admins intended to be a part of the overall story. For other works, it’s simply everything that occurs in the work.

CBR: Could be related. Two faceclaims who could play biological family members.

Celebrity RP: A roleplay in which you play actual celebrities as characters. These exist for some reason.

Charrie: Short for character. Not to be confused with Carrie, a Stephen King novel in which a girl gets a bit power-crazy with her telekinesis.

City RP: A roleplay in which the plot takes place in a single city as its primary or only setting. Like a town RP, but the buildings are taller.

Closed Starter: A starter made for a particular blog to reply to. Sure, you can still reply to it if it wasn’t intended for you, but it’ll just lead to secondhand embarrassment for all involved.

Contained Theme: A theme that is frightened. It tries to hide from predators by curling up and making itself smaller.

Crackship: A relationship between two characters whose pairing seems unlikely or absurd.

Crackship Gifs: Gifs of two characters edited together so that it appears the characters are interacting with each other.

Crossover: A work consisting of elements from two or more works or fandoms.

Cross-tagging: Tagging a post with related things that are not actually in the post. For example, tagging a picture of Wonder Woman with ‘#superman’. Don’t do this. It’s all of the annoying.

CW: Content Warning. Same as trigger warning. See below.

Defiantly: Definitely, but misspelled.

DM: Dungeon Master. The person who is in charge of - wait, hang on, wrong type of roleplay. Sorry about that. Move along.

Drabble: Technically it’s a story of exactly 100 words, but it’s more used to just refer to a very short standalone piece about a character or characters in a particular single scenario.

Dry Docking: The opposite of shipping. When two characters who are a couple in canon are either broken up or were never together in the first place in your fan work or RP.

Event: In a roleplay group, an occurrence in the story in which all characters can participate. Also can be several days in which the verse is altered, such as a Future Week or other AU.

Exclusive: In a fandom-related independent RP, when the mun will RP with only one version of a particular character. For example, an indie RP playing Hermione Granger only interacts with a single indie Ron Weasley blog, and others who play Ron must go elsewhere.

FxF: A romantic pairing between two female characters, usually in 1x1 roleplay.

Face-chaser: Someone who pursues a roleplay or ship with a character based on their faceclaim instead of their characterization or the writing.

Faceclaim/FC: A real-life person used to represent what a roleplay character looks like.

Faceless Gifs/Images: Gifs or images that can be used in roleplaying regardless of the character’s faceclaim, since a person’s face is not visible or present in the gif or image.

Female Ban: An element in some works of dystopian fiction wherein the government or other higher power attempts to suppress a population by eliminating females and thus making it hard to procreate... Hang on, no, I’ve just been informed that it’s when an RP doesn’t allow any more female characters to be added to the group. Presumably, male bans exist too, but I think that’s just an urban legend.

First Look: A type of review based on a quick glance over the roleplay and what first impressions the reviewer gleaned from it.

Floating Timeline: A concept in roleplay that suggests that events in threads that are being written at a particular time do not necessarily take place in that time in-story. So, if a character has multiple ongoing threads, they are not actually in multiple places at once.

Fluff: Scenes that do not involve any significant obstacle and instead are intended to give the characters time to just have fun and be cute together.

Gif Chat: A type of roleplay thread in which each post is accompanied by a gif to illustrate the character.

Gif Hunt: Collection of gifs gathered from throughout tumblr or from various sources.

Gif Icons: Collection of gifs that are 100x100 pixels in size. Sometimes people make them 90x90 or 75x75 for what I can only assume are unsavory purposes. Don’t let your guard down around those things.

Gif Pack: Collection of gifs in which all of the gifs are made by the person posting the pack, and usually are all from the same source (the same movie, TV episode, etc.)

Godmodding: Collectively refers to powerplaying, metagaming, or both. See below.

Gore: Explicit and/or graphic violence and blood. A challenge to see how many synonyms for “red” you know.

Gossip Blog: A blog affiliated with a roleplay group that talks about and passes judgment on the characters. Sometimes can be fun, if managed well, but often creates all species of drama.

Headcanon: Something that an individual or fandom believes to be true about a story or character, even though it is not shown to be the case in the canon work.

Hiatus: Taking a break from roleplaying due to real life occurrences taking priority. As if anything could be more important than finishing those replies, pfft! The nerve.

IC: In-character. The actions, thoughts, and posts of the character; the stuff that occurs in the roleplay proper.

Icons: Also called static icons, a 100x100 image of the character or faceclaim used to illustrate the character in lieu of gifs.

I’m sorry, what did you say?: An extremely vague starter. For some reason, people keep making this starter, despite it annoying and frustrating people. Like an Alvin and the Chipmunks film.

Independent RP/Indie RP: A roleplay blog or character not associated with any particular established RP group.

IRL: In real life. Don’t worry, you won’t have to use this one often. Nothing ever happens in real life.

Kik: Something that I recently learned is not a dating site, as I had thought. This is all I know.

KRP: A roleplay that uses K-Pop artists as faceclaims exclusively or nearly exclusively. This community has some terminology of its own that I don’t know, but most of it’s similar to the rest of the RPC.

Label: A brief descriptor or trope used to describe a character in an application. Some examples are The Scholar, The Heartbreaker, The Intrepid Reporter, The Lizard Tamer, etc.

Literate RP: An RP that is highly writing-focused and requires longer posts and replies than other roleplays. Despite the misleading name, it is not actually saying that other roleplays are illiterate.

LSRP: Legit Serious Roleplay. Same as Literate RP. Yes, this acronym is ridiculous, just roll with it.

MxM: A romantic pairing between two male characters, usually in 1x1 roleplay.

Magic Anon/M!A: A post for which you invite others to make your character take on a certain trait or action for a select period of time.

Main: In a group, the blog that contains all of the information and updates for the roleplay. Home base, basically.

Manip: A graphic edit of two faceclaims in which they are photoshopped to look like they’re in a picture together.

Mary Sue: A character whose unreasonable ease or difficulty in overcoming obstacles, forming relationships, and/or gaining accolades runs contrary to the intent of the writer and makes it difficult for the reader to get invested in the story or character arc. Also, apparently, a term used to refer to any female character you don’t like.

Mature RP: A roleplay that may contain dark or adult themes, and thus doesn’t allow players under the age of 18. Seriously, if you’re under 18, don’t lie about your age. That’s a dick move.

Meme: A post that features small prompts that others can send in to begin a thread. Elsewhere on the internet, this term refers to drawings of sad frogs.

Metagaming: Letting your character have in-character knowledge that they shouldn’t logically possess, just because the mun has it.

Mod: Another term for admin. We could never settle on one term for them. It’s like the couch vs. sofa dilemma.

Moodboard: A collection of images or gifs used to sum up a character’s personality.

Multifandom: Similar to Crossover, although usually used to refer to a work with elements from three or more works or fandoms.

Multi-Storyline/Multiverse: In independent roleplay, when the character exists in more than one universe at once, such that threads with a character do not impact the events of threads with a different character.

Mumu: Multi-muse. In which a single blog is used to play more than one character.

Mun: The writer/roleplayer. The person who’s controlling the character. You. This is you. Use this power wisely.

Muse: The character that you roleplay. Also, a Greek goddess who presided over the arts, although this definition is usually irrelevant in roleplay.

Musing: Posts that represent the character’s personality, history, or thoughts in someway, such as aesthetic photos, songs, or philosophical rants.

Mutuals: Blogs on tumblr that are both following each other.

MW: Most wanted. A character or faceclaim that admins or members in a group would really like someone to play.

NoTP: When some people think that two characters would make a good couple, and you would like to stab those people with a fork for being so stupid.

Novella: Very long format for roleplaying, in which responses should contain several paragraphs of writing. Don’t worry, you don’t actually have to write a novella; a reply shorter than 20,000 words is still acceptable.

NPC: Non-playable character. A character who is present in the roleplay’s universe, but is not played by any one particular writer.

NPH of RPH: That’s me!

NSFW: Not safe for work. Nudity, sex, graphic violence. Basically, the stuff that you absolutely don’t want to come across while browsing at the public library.

OC: Original character. A character you make that is not part of the canon or not pre-written for the RP group.

One-liner: Roleplay consisting of only a single line or a few short lines. Sometimes referred to as “action roleplay” wherein actions are interspersed with speech. For example: “*Enters the room and throws confetti into the air.* I have arrived!”

OOC: Out of character. Can be used to denote that the writer is currently speaking or posting as themselves, rather than as a character, or be used to point out that a character does not act that way in canon, what are you doing, goddamnit.

Open Character: A pre-made character in a group who is currently not being played by any member of the group.

Open Starter: A starter that any character is allowed to reply to.

Original RP: A roleplay in which the plot and characters come from the admins’ and players’ creations rather than another source.

OTP: One true pairing. The ship that you love more than all the other ships. Except that most people have at least twelve OTPs, so...

OT3: One true threesome. Like an OTP, except there are three people.

Para: Relatively longer posts, consisting of full-bodied paragraphs or multiple paragraphs.

Playby: Another word for Faceclaim. Used more outside of Tumblr. See the couch vs. sofa debate.

Plot Bunny: A story that you would like to play out or see others play out through roleplay.

Plot Drop: A significant detail or event of the overarching story in a group RP that causes some change to the lives of the characters.

Powerplaying: Controlling another player’s character without their permission.

Private: In indie RP, a blog that only interacts with mutuals.

Promo: A post used to advertise a roleplay group or account.

PSD: Photoshop Data file. A type of file that’s designed to be edited on Photoshop or other image editing programs. It comes with the image separated into layers, so that different parts of the image, such as a background, a border, or text, can be edited separately.

Revamped: Extreme Makeover, Roleplay Edition.

RP: Roleplay.

RPA: Roleplay Advice. Like roleplay help, except, I dunno, maybe fewer resources, more questions answered? This one’s falling into disuse a bit. Oh, also Roleplay Assistant.

RPC: Roleplay Community. The group of us weirdos here who roleplay instead of just posting funny text posts and photographs of flowers like normal people. Alternatively, Roleplay Critic, a blog that reviews roleplays.

RPCHA: Um, Roleplay Critic/Helper/Advice. Seems a little over the top, but all right.

RPCW: Roleplay Critic Writer, I guess? I think. Same as roleplay critic. Think it’s used to differentiate from Roleplay Community.

RPG: Roleplay group. A group. That roleplays. Also can mean roleplaying game, or rocket-propelled grenade.

RPH: Roleplay Help. A blog that offers resources and answers questions to help people with roleplaying.

RPO: Roleplay Opinions. A blog that reviews roleplays. It doesn’t count as RPO if you just have opinions; you need to share them with the class.

RPT: Roleplay Talk. A blog that talks about roleplays and the roleplay community.

RPWCTOHA: This doesn’t stand for anything yet, but it’s only a matter of time.

Sample Para: A few paragraphs of your writing you include as an example as your work when you apply for a roleplay group. Do not just copy and paste a passage from Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Cask of Amontillado.” The admins will probably notice.

Secrets RP: A roleplay in which every character has a secret. These secrets are all listed together on a page in the RP, but it’s not revealed which character has which secret; that’s up to the other characters to figure out on their own through interactions.

Selective: For independent RP, when the mun does not roleplay indiscriminately with every blog or character that offers, but rather picks and chooses partners based on personal preference or certain criteria.

Self-insert: A character who is a fictionalized version of the mun/author, with little to no change from their actual self. If they die in the game, they die in real life.

Self-para: When your character wanders away from the group for a bit to engage in their own sidequest or navel-gazing. Good times.

Semi-appless RP: A roleplay that sits on an ever-sliding scale, requiring more detail in an application than an appless RP, but less than a bio RP.

Semi-hiatus: Like a hiatus, except that you might still show up to the blog on occasion and do a little bit of activity. When your real life is busy, but you’re just that determined to roleplay.

Semi-selective: For independent RP, a blog that’s not quite as selective as a selective blog, but still maintains the right to refuse service to customers should they so choose.

Semi-truck: A truck that’s not as much truck as a regular truck.

Shipping: Holding up hand-puppet versions of two characters and forcing them to make out.

Shoutout: A brief advertisement for a roleplay group (or occasionally other blogs) that can be submitted to the ask box of a help blog.

Skeleton RP: A roleplay in which some details are given for the roles being offered by the group, but the applicant fills in the rest, usually writing the body of the character bio. Alternatively, a roleplay in which every character is literally a skeleton.

Smut: Sex. Doing the do. The horizontal tango. Bumping uglies. Woohooing. Written out in all of its gory detail. Not worth going to jail for, so for the love of all that is holy, don’t do it if you’re under 18.

Starboarding: Shipping a one-sided ship. When you want one character to be in love with another, but don’t necessarily want the feelings to be returned. The most relatable type of ship, honestly. More people should RP it.

Starter: The first post in a thread, one that is used to kick off a scene in roleplaying. Usually, especially in a group, anyone is allowed to reply and start a thread from that point.

Starter Call: A post that people like or reblog in order to request a starter from the person who posted it.

Supernatural RP: A roleplay consisting of paranormal elements such as magical creatures, witchcraft, etc. Not a roleplay about the TV show Supernatural, although I guess such a roleplay would use this tag too. This is a problem the showrunners should have foreseen.

Taken Character: A character in a roleplay group who is currently being played by a group member.

Task: In a group, a (usually optional) prompt or project that can be used for character development.

Thread: The series of posts and replies to said post that make up a scene between characters in a roleplay.

Time Skip: Usually indicated by a line break, this is when a thread moves from one scene to another without covering the time in between.

Town RP: A roleplay in which the plot takes place in a single town as its primary or only setting. Like a city RP, but the buildings are shorter.

Trigger: Something that makes a user anxious, panicky, or otherwise very upset when they see it on their dashboard without warning. Tag these. No, I don’t care if it doesn’t fit your tagging aesthetic, just tag them.

Tumblr: You are here.

TW: Trigger Warning. Used in a tag to indicate that the post contains content that may be a trigger. Please format as “#[trigger] tw”. Not “#tw: [trigger]”, and definitely not “#☾-*.:｡-❝✿~~ tw ~~✿&&♛”.

Twitter RP: A roleplay that uses Twitter as its primary platform. Don’t ask me how. I can’t even figure out how to use Twitter for its intended purpose.

Urban RP: A roleplay focused primarily on PoC (person of color) characters in a city setting. Often uses musicians such as hip-hop or rap artists as faceclaims.

UTP: Up to player. An acronym used in skeletons to indicated that part of the bio can be chosen by the applicant.

Verse: Short for universe. A character’s world or timeline.

WID: What I do. A list or page on a help blog that lists what services the blog offers.

X-kit: A browser extension that’s popular within the RPC. It works to make tumblr usable again every time the staff creates a new bug and calls it a feature.

#rph #rpc #roleplay help #rp help #roleplay terms #roleplay 101

228 notes · View notes

tanadrin · 7 years ago

Text

(Warning: talking about things I have no expertise of, or indeed any kind of comprehensive knowledge)

I’m interested in the way our perceptions of magic differ from actual magic, and in general, how different the pseudo-historical “ISO Standard Fantasy Setting” differs from the thing it supposedly imitates. What it actually imitates is, of course, a certain genre of Romantic literature recycled through D&D (or through Tolkien then D&D again, or Tolkien, his imitators, and D&D), and closely related works. The conventional tropes of modern high fantasy were established in a relatively short period, even compared to hard SF, in the middle of the 20th century. They don't much resemble either their immediate predecessors (Dunsany, for instance) or their supposed source material (actual medieval literature) except in very very superficial ways--knights on horseback, for instance, things called faeries.

Sometimes there's back-contamination, where our erroneous impression of the past as conveyed by pseudo-historical settings in fantasy literature (Medieval Tymes, if you like) color our perception of *actual* historical periods. The video game Crusader Kings 2, for instance, feels much more like an ISO Standard Fantasy Setting that happens to be set in Europe than it does the actual Middle Ages (and this is before they added the admittedly silly Monks and Mystics expansion, which adds a whole new level of tongue-in-cheekness to a game that already played around a lot with its source material). There's very little use of medieval art or architecture in CK2, or even direct imitations of it; even less medieval music. THere's a lot of imitation, though, of what we *think* the middle ages should look like based on fantasy literature and its derivatives--which is why the Elder Scrolls and Song of Ice and Fire mods work so well with the base game's style, since in a way they're truer to the spirit of CK2 than actual history is. Both those works--Martin's especially--are firmly embedded in pseudomedievalism, and built on the ISO Standard Fantasy Setting in different ways.

But let's talk about magic in particular, which is a mainstay of the fantasy genre outside high fantasy, but which I feel, as a reader, tends to be treated in common ways across very diverse works of genre fiction. Here I'll include video games like the Elder Scrolls, traditional games like Dungeons and Dragons, novels of low fantasy (The Dresden Files, Harry Potter) and novels of high (Chronicles of Amber, China Mieville's Bas-Lag books, Discworld, Codex Alera). Every one, I contend, against our intuitions on the subject, while formally fantasy resembles science fiction in its treatment of magic; that is to say, magic is treated as an element of the world, and bears far more relationship to our modern conception of the natural order and of the natural world than any traditional form of magic. Magic is gone; magic has been killed stone dead. With very, very few exceptions, anything we think of as "magic" in film, books, TV, comics, etc., is really a form of not-magic, a kind of exotic naturalism, and at some point between the Renaissance and the industrial revolution, our cultural understanding of the world shifted so much that we (read "the people reading this post, not every human alive") became unable to conceive of magic as it was traditionally understood.

First off: in anthropological and philological terms, magic is a broad and vague label for a huge variety of practices from various cultures in various times and places, founded more or less in common quirks of human psychology, and without a single coherent definition. It's a collection, not a system; "systems" of magic are modern inventions, though there are definitely various kinds of magical traditions from different cultures. If you pick up a book like "The Book of Magic: From Antiquity to the Enlightenment" (Penguin, 2016; ed. and trans. Brian Copenhaver), you can look at a nice cross-section of different references to and discussions of magic from Biblical, Classical, Persian, Medieval, and Renaissance sources. Obviously, there's a lot going on that's different in each text, but a couple common themes emerge, I think.

First of all, you can classify most forms of these "magics" into discrete categories: divination through randomness or omens (entrails, crows, smoke, dreams, the stars); theurgy, or appeals to higher powers like angels (or accusations of appeals to powers like demons), which is big in medieval magic; speaking with the dead or with spirits (e.g., necromancy); and medicine. None of these are distinct, and none of these are distinctly magic, by which I mean many or most of these categories blend into one another and to other activities like cooking, worship, healing, or scholarship, and a strong "natural" versus "supernatural" dichotomy does not seem evident, especially in ancient sources like Plato, Pliny, and the Old Testament.

I think it's important to remember that a systematized explanation for how the world works was lacking for most of human history; you might see salt dissolve in water and precipitate out again, and fire burn things and acid eat them away, but knowing nothing about atoms or chemical reactions or the various electromagnetic and atomic forces which govern most human-level behavior of particles (to say nothing of the gravitational forces which dominate the heavens), it makes perfect sense to speak of the material universe being sustained and governed on an ongoing basis by the direct intervention of God, or spirits, or gods, who act according to consistent principles; in these circumstances, a denial of free will and a statement of absolute Divine control of the physical world isn't just a philosophical position, it's a productive explanation of minute details of life that otherwise lack compelling ones. Even if, as Plato and Pliny, you are more systematic about things and posit that sympathy operates between objects and can produce effects at a distance, much as one musical instrument can be caused to resonate by another, absent understanding of sound (and air molecules) or light or the particles and fields which mediate the electromagnetic or graviational forces, you still need to posit things like daimons and spirits as the actors which actually transmit such connections; and there is inevitably a tendency to personalize such things, even if you're not entirely anthropomorphizing them.

(Likewise, if you notice study of the heavens is capable of predicting things like eclipses and the tides, you may reason that it's capable of predicting other things, like whether you're going to win this war--after all, the moon seems to have an effect on the tides, why shouldn't it have an effect on human beings? Astrology isn't just primitive astronomy; it blends with astronomy in a perfectly seamless fashion.)

*How* magic works is not distinct from *what you do to make it work*. The two are the same; the former does not exist as a separate concept. A spell is performative, not in the sense that it's fake, but in the sense that saying "I take you to be my husband" actually marries you to the person standing next to you if the circumstances are valid.

So substances might have inherent properties; how those properties interact with one another and with the body is going to belong to the same category of knowledge as how the planets affect individual persons or spells affect your neighbor's cow, i.e., the fundamental mechanisms remain mysteries. Thus, medicine blends seamlessly with other kinds of magic, with ritual and with religion. Praying for your son to get better and putting a salve on his forehead aren't entirely distinct actions; thus, medical treatments from the middle ages contain a mix of what seems to us like perfectly sensible actions (mash up this plant and eat it) and insanity that nobody could possibly believe helps (then bury the rest in a cornfield and say verses from the Bible over it). And because other kinds of magic can help or harm, and medicine can help or harm, medicine is prone to being viewed as a kind of malicious magic: it's no coincidence that our word "pharmacy, pharmeceutical" comes from the same Greek word used to translate "witch," as in "thou shalt not suffer a witch to live": pharmakeos, i.e., a poisoner. In fact, all the vocabulary around magic-users is a pile of confusion, a conflation of different kinds of action that don't fit neatly with modern notions of A Wizard. "Witch" is from a word originally meaning "diviner;" in the Middle Ages and early Modern period it seemed to be understood as one who invokes the power of supernatural beings to do evil things--note that the crime of witchcraft was because witches necessarily consorted with the *devil*, not because they used magic per se (presumably, power from God or the angels was OK--and indeed, grimoires like the Lesser Key of Solomon talk about magic from these sources, and emphasize the necessity of moral purity in order to get the spells to work). "Maleficium," in Latin, originally just meant "evildoer," however that evil was done; likewise, mekashefah, the word (originally feminine) which "witch" translates in the above Bible verse. The "witch" of Endor is not at all a crone; she's an apparently respectable woman capable of furnishing Saul and his men with a decent meal, and the term the Bible actually uses is "sho'el 'ov" - i.e., one who knows how to ask ghosts questions.

(With the exception of necromancy, little distinction is in fact made in the Old Testament between kinds of supernatural power; e.g., in Exodus the magic of the Egyptians is depicted as illegitemate, but no less efficacious for that. Magic plainly works, even if it's wrong.)

Charms, spells, and incantations are more often than not about invoking a specific power: gods, in Greek and Roman magic, God and his angels in Christian. (Pliny divides magic into medicine, astrology, and religion; the first two, he says, produce predictions which corroborate divination--as stated above, astrology is not entirely distinct from divination for obvious reasons.) Later, alchemy begins to produce actual theories of matter; but it's still not at all distinct from the kind of magic that involves invoking higher powers.

So what *isn't* magic? That's considerably easier to answer than what is: when you look at the kinds of things that look like magic to us moderns, it becomes easy to recognize the ways in which scientism has so preoccupied our way of viewing the world that it becomes inextricable even from our supposedly "magical" fantasy.

Magic isn't sufficiently advanced technology, for one, or a highly refined and subtle art (Tolkien; he knew this, obviously, and wasn't going for magic-qua-magic). Magic isn't *energy*, or a *force* or a *field*; these things are the language of *science,* of electromagnetics and gravity and atoms (contra Jim Butcher, Terry Pratchett, and every video game ever). It's not local variations in the natural law (as a distinction between natural law, human law, and especially moral law actually *isn't* that clear cut). It's not telekinesis or ESP, however those are caused! Remember, these are pseudo-*science*, they were invented in the scientific era. If you're an ancient using magic to make objects move, you're not "moving it with your mind." You might be invoking spirits to move it for you, but *you* are not doing it with some invisible arm. Magic isn't beams of light or deadly green lasers. It's also not some kind of metaphysical illusion. Sure, magicians have been denounced as tricksters and illusionists all throughout history, but if there's deception in magic, it is good old-fashioned sleight of hand--maybe your court magician replaced his staff with a snake when nobody was looking. It's not a ghost-snake you can put your hand through, though.

A fantasy story using traditional notions of magic would involve attitudes pretty alien and unsatisfying to a lot of modern fantasy readers: a close connection between the physical and moral world, little attention to *how* things worked, and more attention to what you *did* to make things work, nothing like a systematized, sciencified magic, and a blend so close between magic, religion, and nature that they are entirely indistinguishable.

None of this is to say that the traditional F&SF conception of magic is wrong or bad somehow; it fits our modern sensibilities quite nicely and makes for compelling stories. But don't make the mistake of confusing these functionally-distant reinterpretations of history for how people actually used to understand the world.

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bushy-haired-know-it-all · 8 years ago

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Humanity in Space

hfy- Stands for Humanity Fuck Yeah. General humans in space stuff. New tag, may not include older posts yet but I’m working on it

Space Australia- Posts that are about Earth being the Australia of Galaxy. Meaning, posts that refer to Earth as a terrifying ball of death and danger. Usually accompanied by humans being pretty chill about it. (Basically the same thing as Death World)

Death World- Posts about humans being chill about deadly weather and dangerous creatures while aliens panic. Based off the idea that “you don’t know you’re from a death world until you leave it” (Basically the same thing as Space Australia)

Space Orcs- Posts about how humans are like the Terminators/Reavers of the universe. Sometimes we are considered big and ugly, but in these posts we are always the toughest thing in the room and impossible to kill.

Humans in Space - General tag about what humanity is like in space. This (probably) covers the older posts that hfy tag doesn’t.

Human Reputation- What it says on the tin. Posts about the reputation humanity earns among the stars. Sometimes we’re like the giant cats or dogs of the universe, sometimes we’re the species of mad scientists and MacGyvers. And sometimes we’re just the species that invented bagels. (See Space Orcs, Humans Are Weird, Hold My Beer and Watch This, Bagel Planet, and Rocket Heart)

Humans Are Weird- Posts about what makes humanity stand out compared to all of the other species. This is everything from “humans can throw things” and “humans can see the color blue” to “humans will bond with a fucking rock if you leave them alone too long” and “humans are unafraid of death, God, and dismemberment while in the pursuit of Justice/Freedom/Caffine.”

Human Biology Is Terrifying- Posts that focus on human biology setting us apart from other species. This includes periods, losing teeth, breaking bones, eating everything, prosthetic limbs, organ transplants, and our ability to take punch. All of these posts are basically aliens discovering we drink poison, breathe death, and are made of terror, pain, and nightmares.

Hold My Beer and Watch This- This is the idea that humanity is that guy at the galactic party. You know, the guy who takes his shirt off and tells you to hold his beer while he attempts to jump off the roof, on to the trampoline, and into the pool.

‘Why don’t you just jump into the pool?’ You ask.

He does not understand the question.

In these posts we tell other species to hold our stuff while we go try something ridiculous and possibly dangerous. Why? Because we can, it sounds like fun, and we want to see what happens.

Aliens: Meet Human Culture- This is where aliens are introduced to all the interesting parts of human culture. Features aliens not understanding how we could have so many, as well as specific elements, such as horror films, sports, and figures of speech. (See Space Cultures Collide)

Space Cultures Collide- When aspects of alien culture collide with aspects of human culture. (See Aliens: meet Human Culture)

Rocket Heart- A particularly lovely label (which came from here) which describes a person who has amazing adventures does many wonderful things, but also always dies young. The whole “if you burn bright, you’ll burn fast” idea. I’ve also started applying it to the heroic part of humanity who is willing to sacrifice their lives for a stranger, because it just seems to fit.

Bagel Planet- Off-shoot of Human Reputation. These posts feature humanity’s defining feature being something rather mundane. Like being known as the planet that invented bagels. (I also occasionally use this as a general tag for earth related stuff, so it overlaps with Death World and Space Australia)

Highlights from HFY Reddit- This is where I’m collecting my favorite stories from the hfy thread on Reddit. You can always go through and read them all yourself, its not like I can stop you or anything. I’m just sharing the ones I liked.

Stabby the Space Roomba- It is an ordinary roomba with a knife duct-taped to the top of it. Why you ask? I don’t know, it just sounded cool. Originally came from this post and then grew from there. Often falls under Hold My Beer and Watch This or Humans are Weird. In other news, Stabby is Universal.

Humans Are Friend Shaped- In this tag, humanity will move heaven and hell to protect their friends. So what they only met 5 minutes ago, friendship is friendship right? Dangerous bloodthirsty beast? I don’t know what you’re talking about, his name is Fluffy and we love him. (There is some overlap with Rocket Heart here) Here is some TV Trope examples. This tag also includes the idea that friendship is humanity’s “thing.”

In other words, humans make a lot of new friends. From there, either we become the scary mom friend species or another group of aliens becomes the scary mom friend for us.

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