#its amazing how in the show they can exaggerate proportions and perspective as much as they want and it fits perfectly

[zeldareyesblog]

Bayonetta 2: The Controversial Witch Trials

**This was a responsive essay that I had written back in February 24, 2020 and revised on March 1st, 2020 for “Introduction to Composition” college class. Yes, I got an A+ on this.** 

                            Bayonetta 2: The Controversial Witch Trials

           In Giuseppe Nelva’s article, “Bayonetta 2’s “Over-Sexualization” Complaint: A Perfect Example of What’s Wrong with Modern Reviews”, I  found the reviews of the game to be unfair because Bayonetta 2 was judged based on the amount of provocative imagery it contained rather than Platinum Games’ improvement from the first Bayonetta’s gameplay, mechanics, and creative execution. Nelva’s concerns were the same as mine because we believed that no videogame should be judged by the amount of controversial content it has. Instead, video games should be judged if the video game’s creators have exceeded beyond expectations to entertain the players.

Video game reviewers are needed to help companies like Platinum Games improve their work ethic, so that the next video game they make from that specific series would not feature the same issues again. However, we have big video game reviewers like Polygon, who has judged this video game based on its “blatant over-sexualization” rather than Bayonetta 2 game’s execution as quoted from article, “I won’t guess why the blatant over-sexualization is still there, often more intensely than before. But it causes an otherwise great game to require a much bigger mental compromise to enjoy.” Even though a 7.5 out 10 would not be considered an awful rating for Bayonetta 2, it deserved more than that and it also deserved a more objective review rather than a subjective review despite the obvious adult content mentioned by Polygon’s throughout most of the review. While Bayonetta 2 did include sexual themes and references throughout the franchise and characters as much as strong language and violence is concerned, should it be used to solely judge the merits of a videogame? What if the creators of Bayonetta 2 intentionally put the controversial content there to show how our virtuous boundaries could be broken under harsh circumstances, but can still become a strong, wise, and beautiful person against all odds?

           To be honest though, I did understand that when my mother and I bought this video game from GameStop just last year during the holiday semester break as my New Year’s Eve present when I was 19 years old, she and I were both already aware of the  content.  Such as female characters being portrayed in a sexualized manner with extremely exaggerated proportions displayed in tight-fitting suits while in combat. There were also female characters being stripped of those suits for a brief amount of time to summon “infernal demons” as an aid in combat for huger enemies until their wicked weaves covered their private parts, and the innuendos spoken while the female characters interact with male characters in advance. However, the reason my mother approved of me playing that game, regardless of the adult content, was because she took her time to educate me about such content prior to succeeding my first semester in college. Because of our mother-daughter conversations,  it was still pointless to judge the game based on its own provocative content and more on how it has executed itself as an entertainment medium as a result. Unlike most parents that I met who let my friends play M-rated video games before they completed their secondary education and reached the appropriate age, my mother never let me play any M-rated game until I completed my secondary education and when I reached the appropriate age of 17 years old or older according to the Entertainment Ratings Software Board (ESRB) guidelines because she believed that proper  education and parental guidance would develop a real sense of maturity and high tolerance on all adult content that I would be exposed to in the future and she was right about that.

           Furthermore, when I compared my now adult self to the friends that played a variety of M-rated videogames while they were underaged and still in middle school a very long time ago, I remembered that they were complete hyperactive chatterboxes to the point of aggravation, became more aggressive in their gaming habits and personalities, and even learned new curse words that I have never even heard before. When it came to sexually suggestive content in mature-rated video games, my old middle school friends did not seem to process that kind of content in a composed and civilized manner which resulted in them having some misogynistic and judgmental views of women, especially fictional video game women like Bayonetta who had self-confidence on and off the battlefield and remained fearless in her sexuality and beauty. Although, I did not blame M-rated video games alone because I knew that it was obviously the parents who enabled their underaged children to play those mature-rated video games since they were impatient and did not take the time to teach their kids about what kind of content they could be getting themselves into if they bought the game no matter how entertaining it was, and why they should not expose themselves to it until they are at the appropriate age anyways.

           Moving on, Nelva has mentioned in his article that “What should be reflected, first and foremost, in a review’s content and in its score is the game’s quality, and while several aspects of “quality” are subjective, there are also many that aren’t. Production values are an example: graphics, animation, audio, textures, effects; Those are objective aspects of a game’s value that should not be overlooked.” As somebody that has owned and played this video game series, in my perspective I think that Bayonetta 2 has exceeded expectations from the Bayonetta 1 when it came to smooth gameplay mechanics – being able to reduce the amount of constant button pressing to fully complete charging attacks. Not only that, but Platinum Games has provided extra abilities for players such as giving Bayonetta the ability to glide on higher platforms with her Madama Butterfly Wings after jumping upwards and a variety of random “hack and slash” combo attacks on all bosses and mini bosses that will leave the players in suspense on what Bayonetta would do next, and included online gameplay levels and offline quests that challenge the players’ skills after completion of the story mode. The graphics and textures of Bayonetta 2 were beautifully executed to even reach cinematic levels of gaming throughout cutscenes and gameplay with the camera angles strategically displayed on the entire environment, and used closeups appropriately on the characters to present details on their unusual cosmetic makeup, clothing designs, and accessories as the characters communicated with each other. As for audio, the music soundtrack provided a mysterious, foreboding, yet epic emotions that could keep all players on edge and interested in the story mode. Furthermore, the dialogue between the characters was uniquely portrayed and ranged from what strong, young women and men would realistically say or react if they had encountered any enemies based on their three-dimensional personalities.  If videogame players were tight on budget to own a headset, they could still experience the same amount of interactive and immersive fantasy-adventure gaming that Bayonetta 2 has provided as an entertainment product that would keep the players entertained for many years to come.

           That objective review I made would convince so many young adult audiences to play Bayonetta 2. Eventually, it would have gained plenty of new fans to move this game up the ranks from being stuck in the “under rated” games category to gain widespread popularity. Never had I put in my own opinion on Bayonetta 2’s provocative content, because I know that judging a game based on what kind of adult material it had was not my job as a reviewer and I already assumed that my audience knows better what kind of material they would get themselves into before buying the game to begin with.

          What amazed me now was how the world wanted to showcase diversity and promote less censorship in the entertainment industry. Although, once we get what we asked for there are a lot of negative people out there on the internet that make so-called entertainment reviews to talk about how the characters in a television show, movie, or videogame do not fit their own beliefs.  According to Nelva, “It saddens me that between the many calls for diversity we’ve seen lately, some actually fly in the face of diversity itself by implying that games that celebrate sexuality and beauty like Bayonetta 2 should not exist or are not worth playing and enjoying.” This quote was a reminder to me that I should not judge any video game based on the number of suggestive themes it contains, but if it exceeded my expectations on quality video game entertainment.

         Overall, I believed that Bayonetta 2 was a compelling video game that unfortunately received a bad reputation since huge video game reviewers like Polygon judged this video game based on the amount of provocative content it contained rather than the actual gameplay and creative execution itself. The creators behind Bayonetta 2 were considered artists because they told a narrative story and designed characters beyond our own imagination and made money from our fascination in this fantasy, action, and adventure game. Besides that, the purpose of video games was to provide another form of quality entertainment that all young adult audiences could enjoy at their own leisure time and Bayonetta 2 would have been one of those videogames if we had better reviewers that judged it based on gameplay and performance, instead of content.

  Works Cited

Nelva, Giuseppe. “Bayonetta 2's ‘Over-Sexualization’ Complaint: A Perfect Example of What's Wrong with Modern Reviews.” DualShockers, DualShockers, 17 Oct. 2014, www.dualshockers.com/bayonetta-2s-over-sexualization-complaint-a-perfect-example-of-whats-wrong-with-modern-reviews/.

[drink-n-watch]

I can’t believe the season is winding down already. Seems like it just started! Well at least we still have a bit more Fire Force to go and boy is it stepping up its endgame. Last week was a brilliant show of atmospheric manipulation through colour and sound deprivation.

This week?

It’s all about skewed perspectives and creeping shadows. Let me tell you right now, it worked out well. Possibly even more impressive on a visual front and that is saying a whole lot. o wonder I’m having such a hard time keeping these gallery posts reasonable. I also talk about the story over on 100 Word Anime.

It says something that this opening act, with Obi, Vulcan, Lisa and Giovanni and bathed in a striking red light with forced downwards perspectives that make Lisa look all tiny and out of control and sketch style art break scenes, is potentially the least visually inventive sequence of the episode.

Something along the lines of, please make more anime you guys, you do amazing work with visual mediums and you understand so well the subtleties of telling the story beyond the script.

I have occasionally been told I put too much emphasis on the production of anime. And to that I say, I beg to differ!

This is where things start getting interesting…er. Shinra’s little break from reality is very visually heavy handed and on the nose but Fire Force’s comical cartoonish style and intense colours can carry that easily.

Also I love any appearance by little Shinrs’s cape. It’s one of the most emotional visual markers in the series and it’s a great bit of character establishment. We didn’t get to see it at all in the last flashback so it’s telling that it’s an integral part of how Shinra sees himself. In many ways he’s quite similar to Arthur and that’s adorable! Just so freking adorable.

The big bloody circle (circles in general are a pattern that comes up a lot this week) really reminded me of Berserk. I guess it should have reminded me of Ringu but instead that downward reaching hand looked like the brand of sacrifice to me. And I think that fits in better thematically.

See what I mean about circles?

One of my issues this weeks is that moving shadows don’t really show up in screencaps. The episode was full of very harsh shadows that just swept across the scenes, distorting mouvement, or creating some where there was none, and warping proportions.

It was a frantic , confusing effect that made it difficult to really fully grasp the images we were seeing without nauseating motion sickness. The only time I’ve seen anything similar in anime, and too a much lesser degree, was drifters that also enjoyed very blunt shadows and I think the 7th instalment of the Garden of Sinners. I consider both of these works production powerhouses ans honestly, I think Fire Force did this particular effect better. It grabbed my attention during quieter scenes and completely riveted me to the screen during action sequences.

Sho and Shinra’s showdown (say that six times fast), didn’t only play with light and shadows. I also played with speed.  As in it went for almost stationary slow motion to hyper speed impossible to flow fast motion. When you combine that with the Blue tone with red accents palette, the exaggerated light and the actual high speed animation, you had a set piecce that was absolutely mesmerizing.

Fights have always looked good in Fire Force. It’s obviously been a priority for animators. And I can name a few that are worth seeking out if you’re a fan of animation. But few use as many elements as this week’s confrontation between Shinra and Sho. How that translates into your enjoyment of watching it is personal, but on a purely technical level, I thought it was an absolute thrill. O.k., I also just enjoyed watching it.

I like that the colour drain here is a blown out blue/white shade as opposed to last week’s grey. It makes the effect look completely different. Whereas I found last week a little suffocating and sort of melancholy. Like someone trying to illustrate PTSD. This week is bleak and unnerving, like an anxiety attack. I’m not selling this well.

Just as they did last week, colours slowly start to creep back in as the episode comes to an end for a return to some normalcy. Well kinda. The final scene is a soft cliffhanger after all.

I like how they use Victor’s ridiculous facial expressions to create a break in the tension. His reaction and lines are all perfectly reasonable but his face is so expressive (as faces tend to be in this series) and the camera really focuses on it.

The episode bookends with scenery of Shinra’s nightmare world and I’ve decided to the the same for this post.

  Fire Force Episode 21 – Like a Moth to a Flame – Gallery I can't believe the season is winding down already. Seems like it just started! Well at least we still have a bit more Fire Force to go and boy is it stepping up its endgame.

[pa0231leonedwards]

Proposal.

My film is the classic story of boy meets girl. If that girl were a serial murderer and that boy was completely unaware of that. We begin, as every short lived romance does, in a bar. Our main man Julian is standing at the bar minding his own business when all of a sudden in she comes, Mia, the girl Julian desperately wants to spend at least the next 2 weeks or so with. Julian decides to make a move and she seems interested. Go get her tiger. So they leave together and while they're walking Julian decides to take a look at his social media accounts because he needs to keep up the appearance that his life is way more interesting than it actually is. Unfortunately for him this means he misses some vital signs that his new companion may be more than she seems. A wanted poster featuring someone who looks awfully like Mia, The screens in a TV store broadcasting a news report of a suspected female killer who has left at least 14 people dead. It's amazing how important a short walk can be, everybody needs fresh air and life saving information.

2 days pass. Julian is assessing a blank space on his apartment wall. Mia has found a hammer that she thinks would look really good embedded in Julian's skull. So she sneaks up behind him and swings down the hammer. At around this time Julian turns around and see's Mia seemingly giving him a hammer, Which just so happens to be what he's looking for, What luck! Julian takes them hammer and uses it to hang the professionally taken picture of himself he had commissioned a few months back. Now his home is truly something to behold. Mia however doesn’t seem too impressed, She needs more time to plan her next move.  

A week passes. Mia has observed Julian's behaviour and has a new plan. She goes to the kitchen and finds Julians half filled beverage. She's going to refill it for him, She gets the bleach and her special salt shaker filled with poison (strychnine to be specific) and makes him a 'special' drink. Excitedly Julian returns and grabs his drink. He turns around and trips over his own laces, smashing the glass and spilling the mixture everywhere. Another failed attempt from Mia.

A further 4 days go by. This time Mia is determined, why bother with subtlety anyway? Julian is busy testing out some new headphones, Mia approaches him from behind and lines up her gun with the back of his head. She's getting excited, this can't possibly go wrong. Just as she pulls the trigger Julian reaches for his coffee and Mia misses. Julian somehow hasn’t noticed, how loud are those things anyway? No big deal, she'll just shoot again. So she lines up her shot again and pulls the trigger... Nothing. She pulls again and again, still nothing. No bullets. Irritated Mia throws the gun through a window.

The next day. Mia isn't around but Julian isn't too worried, He's got Facebook to keep him company and he's making himself a delicious meal for one. While responding to a particularly amusing status on his phone he reaches for what feels like salt, applies it heavily to his food and places it back on the shelf. We however can see it is actually Mia's poison from earlier. Julian does not notice and sits down to eat. Some time passes and we see only Julian's cod motionless body sprawled across his couch. Rest in peace.

My idea was subject to a few changes over the course of the module. Originally my idea was darker and more serious which I decided I would struggle to actually write. In the beginning it was about a girl who is attacked by and proceeds to fall in love with a serial killer and she goes to extreme effort to track him down only to be killed upon their meeting. I think the most obvious flaw in that idea is its portrayal of a woman as the victim who is silly enough survive an encounter with and then actively try to date a serial killer. Somehow this didn’t cross my mind until it was brought to my attention in a group presentation so I decided to rethink things. It was suggested that I swap the genders of my killer and my victim around. I like this idea because it lines up with the popularity of the 'Harley Quinn' bad girl type characters. From there on the killers character didn’t change much, her goal was simple. The victim however changed quite a lot. Initially I was thinking about making him so pathetic and so desperate that an attempt on his life could be interpreted as a sign of affection in his eyes. But as a person with no experience with stockholm syndrome or abusive relationships I didn’t really know how to justify the character behaving like this. Due to this I opted to make him completely oblivious to all the violent tendencies displayed in his presence and for some reason I thought this idea was quite funny. I sort of turned him into this character that could not be put down in his own way, somehow avoiding every attempt on his life completely by accident. This decision changed the attitude I approached this project with, I feel really it lightened up my idea and made it far more fun to create ideas for because I like the fun I can have with a dark comedy.  

I also shortened the original idea, The first draft spent lots of time having the main character track down the killer which again, I wouldn’t know how to make interesting or how to write it, I've never had to track anyone down before and nor do I wish to. So instead of having some convoluted multi layered plot to predict where the killer could be found I made my characters meet at the very start. This worked well in the new idea I had because it allowed me to get straight to the interesting parts of my film. I feel like this heightened the pace and helped keep my idea at least somewhat entertaining.  

When I was coming up with my ideas I wanted people to be on Mia's side. I wanted viewers to want Julian to die. I think I have failed in this. I didn’t make his actions outrageous enough for him to be viewed negatively, he doesn’t really do anything wrong. We know he's vain enough to hang a picture of his face on his apartment wall but other than that he just seems like a regular guy. Maybe a little too distracted by his phone and a little too dense to notice he's dating a murderer but other than that he's not a bad guy, He's just kind of a dope. I feel I should have really exaggerated some of his behaviors to a fault.  On the other hand Mia doesn’t come across as likeable enough for people to side with her. She's kind of just a one note character all she does is try to kill him and get frustrated when she fails. I really should have gave her a motive to try and get people to want her to win or at least made her funnier to watch so people would enjoy her acts of evil more than whatever Julian gets up to. Ideally I would have liked my characters to have more of a dynamic, Julian should have been easier to hate and Mia should have been funnier to watch.

I feel I also should have spent longer on my characters from a design perspective. More specifically Julians design because there are slight differences between the initial designs and the way I drew him in the animatic. Even within the animatic I couldn't seem to keep him as consistent as I was keeping Mia. Maybe he needed some more visual quirks or just something to make him more recognizable. There are the proportions of my characters too, they keep changing which makes it a little confusing when it comes to the height or weight of my characters. I also believe I should have settled on a visual style more unique in its appearance, just for the sake of looking a little different to things that already exist. I feel like I also should have spent more time thinking about how the locations they visited would look. For the most part I made them up as I went along and wasn’t sure how these rooms and streets really fit together at all.

The animatic I produced was very short. I believe that it shows my story in a way that is clear enough to get the basics but I think some of the visual gags may go unnoticed. I probably could have stood to make certain shots last longer just so exactly what was happening was slightly clearer. I did however enjoy producing it, it gave me a chance to experiment with storytelling and come up with an idea that I actually really like and I feel shows more of my personality than some of the other work I have produced, which is nice.  

My film is fairly easy to break down into the 3 act structure. The first act is fairly short and consists of my characters meeting for the first time and leaving the bar to start the period of their lives together, dropping hints that Mia may be more violent than she lets on. This leads nicely into the second act which immediately confirms these suspicions. Act two is the series of murders Mia attempts to commit on Julian, all the while he remains completely unaware. And finally the third act which is also fairly short. It starts with Julian on his phone while making food and because he isn't giving the cooking his full attention he accidentally applies Mia's leftover poison to his meal which he then proceeds to eat. This in the end proves to be the thing that kills him. His own attention span.  

Following the changes I made and despite the flaws there are in my work I believe it would have potential if it were to be made. I'm aware the joke here would not be successful in longer productions at least not without adding more to both the joke and the story itself but  I do think the idea at its core is strong enough to entertain someone to at least a substandard level for between five and ten minutes. This is because I believe that finding out how Julian is going to avoid death this time around is engaging enough for a short form film. For instance the roadrunner cartoons are mostly based around a similar joke, How will Roadrunner escape Wile E. Coyote? I'm just using the slightly darker tone of humans and murder rather than animals the food chain. Darker takes on comedy have also proven highly successful in the past among people of all ages, younger people can enjoy films like 'The Addams Family' while there are aso productions definitely not for children such as 'Shaun Of The Dead'. This is evidence that the combination of darkness and comedy can work well. So using this to boil my idea down would result in a darker take on the roadrunner, which sounds like a decent premise to me at least.