#ive been playing so much metaphor where you work on becoming king | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

firewoodfigs · 3 years ago

Note

Hi!! Could you do "It was a hospital bed, and A slipped in carefully to lie beside B all night" for a Royai fic from that prompt list? Thank you!! ❤️❤️

hello anon!! thanks for the prompt aaaah I had a lot of fun toying with it in between work and the other shenanigans that have been cropping up this week <3 I hope you don't mind the somewhat unusual ending ahaha I dimly recall writing a few other fics indirectly responding to this prompt (here and here!) so I wanted to try something slightly different from my usual fare 👉🏻👈🏻 part of this was also originally from a two-shot I'm working on, tweaked to fit the prompt hehe. I hope you enjoy!!! 🥰

+++++

Riza can think of a million reasons why hospitals are awful.

First, the food. She’s not sure if it’s as nutritious as they make it out to be; there are times when she wonders if it’s even edible. She’s had worse, of course - hospital food isn’t as bad as ration bars - but she’s quickly getting tired of eating plain yoghurt and bland porridge every day, for every single meal.

Second, the stench. Riza hates that every inch of the place smells like a victim of obsessive cleanliness; she has to resist the urge to upchuck every time the door opens and the smell of chemicals and antiseptic filters in like an unwanted guest.

Third, the fact that she’s sharing a room with a man who, at this point, is behaving more like a cat on hot bricks than a disciplined soldier is quickly driving her insane. She’d readily agreed to be his caretaker, of course; Riza doubts there’s anyone else capable of dealing with his antics and ever-growing anxiety. But after hearing him sigh and toss and turn in his bed for the fifty-eighth time that night (she’d counted, because she was bored out of her wits, and there was nothing else she could do other than sleep or stare at the ceiling, per doctor’s orders), Riza decides she’s just about had enough.

She looks at him from her bed. He’s presently engaged with twiddling his thumbs, thinking out loud.

Riza sighs and rises from her bed quietly. She brings the IV stand along with her - an unnecessary inconvenience - and carefully slips into his bed once she’s made sure that the tubes and wires connected to them are tangle-free.

“I never pegged you as an opportunist, Lieutenant,” he murmurs, despite her best efforts to be discreet. “Sleeping with your commanding officer while he’s blind?”

“You could always court martial me later, sir,” Riza deadpans. “Now scoot over.”

Luckily, he obliges without much retort.

“Your wish is my command.”

Riza huffs. She adjusts the thin, scraggly piece of linen that the hospital justifies as a blanket - another downside of this shitty place - and makes sure he’s probably covered, warm.

“Three words,” she mutters.

“Eight letters?”

“Twelve, actually.”

Roy raises a brow. “What could it be?”

“Would you like to wager a guess, sir?”

“Not really.”

“You’re an idiot,” she says. Roy laughs, and it’s a tiny little sound that is so discordant with his current mood, but it’s at least genuine. “Now go to sleep.”

“Alright, alright.”

He stops fidgeting, for a while. Riza closes her eyes and attempts to fall asleep - and she actually does, for a while - at least until she hears the sheets rustling again, the movement and tension coming from beside her. She groans softly.

“You should sleep, sir.”

She feels him stiffen. Roy smiles sheepishly, looking right through her like she’s not there. It still unnerves her how this is probably going to be their new normal: him without his sight. Her as his eyes.

“Sorry.”

Riza frowns. An apology is not the answer she wants. What she wants is for him - or them both, actually - to sleep and rest and properly recuperate so that they can have a speedy recovery, so that they can get out of here as soon as possible.

“Bad dreams?” she asks, because it’s the exact same thing that’s been haunting her. (She’s lucky her throat makes it impossible for her to scream or kick up a fuss; she’d hate for Roy to stumble blindly through the room in what he probably thinks is an act of chivalry and/or heroism.)

He shrugs.

“Then and now,” he offers. His smile fades, and he lapses into an unexpected moment of vulnerability. “Hard to differentiate between day and night nowadays, too.”

And because Riza doesn’t know what to say, she simply brushes her knuckles against his.

Roy returns the gesture, drawing indiscernible patterns on the back of her hand with his bandaged one.

“Well, it’s almost midnight now, sir.”

He lets out a small laugh, but it’s painfully hollow.

Riza shifts slightly. It’s a bit of a tight squeeze - hospital beds are clearly not meant for two persons (or anything inappropriate) - but it doesn’t bother her all that much. She just wishes there’s more she can do, to comfort him. Make him feel a little less gloomy.

“It feels like I’ve been sleeping for years.”

“If it helps reduce the incidents of you falling asleep during office hours, then you should get more sleep now, while you can.”

Roy turns, like he’s searching for her, even though there’s not much closer she can be at this point. He exhales shakily. She feels his hand trembling against hers, and responds with a gentle caress. (She knows he’s still feeling guilty, probably berating himself internally about their predicament, about what transpired beforehand. And to be fair, there’s a part of her that’s still angry about all that's happened underground. They’ll probably have to talk about it, at some point, but probably not now — not when they’re both still drugged up and only half-lucid.)

“Humour me, Lieutenant.”

“What?”

“I can’t sleep,” he confesses. Dimly, Riza notes that his voice has taken on a somewhat petulant edge — like a child complaining about their bedtime, but she doesn’t comment on it. Being nearly bedridden for a week is enough to drive her nuts, too. “I’ve tried counting sheep and all that shit, and it’s just — it’s not working.”

Riza sighs. She’s tired, yes, but she’s also aware that she’s probably not going to get any sleep at this rate. She tries to think of ways to stave off his restlessness. Reading is one — she can probably bore him into sleep with a Xingese recitation (she’s gotten pretty good at that lately), but she’s technically not supposed to be talking much. Alcohol is another, but neither of them are supposed to be drinking (and besides, the only form of alcohol available in hospitals isn’t meant for human consumption). Maybe chess, then. She’s not particularly keen on playing a game of chess, now (because she just wants to sleep), but she thinks it’ll help exhaust some of his boundless energy.

“We could play a game of chess, if you want. Breda was kind enough to drop a vinyl board here in the afternoon.”

“I can’t see —“

“I’ll tell you where I move my pieces.”

He frowns, clearly not liking the idea. “You’re not supposed to be talking much, Lieutenant.”

“I’m fine,” she insists, turning to pour a cup of water for herself before continuing. “I won’t have to speak much — unless you’re being a nuisance or a cheat or a fraud.”

He laughs. “I’ll be none of those things, Lieutenant.”

“Good.”

She sets up the board on his bed and helps him sit up. Riza lets him play white.

“It’s your move, sir.”

“You’ve made yours?”

“No. You’re playing white.”

“Tough. It’ll be more embarrassing if I end up losing.”

Riza smiles. “Well, we don’t know that yet, sir.”

He opens with pawn to e4. She helps him move his pieces and parrots her movements back to him. Pawn to e4, too. Pawn to d4. Same here. A closed game, not quite like his usual aggressive style of playing.

Riza watches as he frowns with intensity. It’s probably more a test of memory than strategy for him at this point. She wonders if there’s a way he can adapt to chess, to the military’s utilitarian (and frankly unsympathetic) demands now that his sight’s impaired.

(Life is so unlike chess, Riza thinks, in spite of Roy’s silly metaphors that postulate otherwise. The rules are never fixed, and the universe is always rife with uncertainty. It’s not like chess, where you can predict your opponents’ moves if you get good enough. Neither of them had expected that he’d be here right now, losing sleep and contemplating life over a chessboard while blind.)

He clucks his tongue, reciting a series of movements from memory. The Blackmar-Diemer. Riza smiles indulgently.

Still as aggressive as ever, sir.

Of course.

The game quickly becomes a round of blitz, and though he manages to open his lines and mount a rather decent attack, it’s clear that he has trouble recalling after the eighteenth move. It's still an impressive feat, though. Better than the average layperson.

“Check,” Riza announces, conversationally. Technically, she’d had the advantage, both on the board (and in real life). It shouldn’t really count, and besides, checkmate isn’t her objective — it’s to get her commanding office to sleep.

“Well-played,” Roy hums. He’s strangely still in his bed as he closes his eyes, rubbing at his temples — presumably to ease off an oncoming migraine. It happens a lot, when he’s in deep thought, when he’s over thinking. Thinking too much for his own good. “I need to work on my recall, I think.”

“I think so too, sir.”

He laughs, but the sound is again empty, foreign. It is so at odds with his usual smirks and unbridled laughter (when he’s laughing at someone else, or a joke made at somebody’s expense), like there’s an ache beneath the surface that she cannot reach.

Roy turns slightly, bumping into his dethroned king as he adjusts himself on the bed.

She blames the sudden, uncharacteristic urge to cry on her drugged-up system.

(Riza doesn’t think she’ll ever get used to how uncommunicative his eyes are. He’s always regarded each and every one of his subordinates with respect and meaning and gratitude, but he’d simply looked over the unit as if taking inventory when they had come by earlier.

But she’ll make do, Riza thinks. She has to. She’s always known him in a way nobody else has, in a deeply intimate way, like a book she’s memorised by heart.)

They fall silent for a few minutes. His lips part a little - she knows he’s about to say something - but it snaps shut again, like he can’t bring himself to say the words.

Riza simply waits for him, like she always has; holding onto his held breath like it's the last thread of hope. She leans into his touch a little closer than necessary.

I’m right here, even if you can’t see me.

Roy smiles.

“I hope I won’t forget your face, Riza.”

#royai #royai fanfic #royai fic #sorry my lunch break is almost over so I gotta go back to work LOL but I will come back and edit this later AHAHAHAH #my new brand is 'excessive usage of chess metaphors' and man. it shows.......#lovely anon <3 #have a great week anon!!! mwahmwahmwah!!!!!!#reblogs and comments are always appreciated :")

102 notes · View notes

griftermp3 · 4 years ago

Text

The Concept of the King’s Two Bodies in David Tennant’s 2013 “Richard II”*

*yes, I know quotations isn’t correct citation for a play. it just wouldn’t let me italicize.

To begin, a little background on a concept:

“The King’s Two Bodies” is a concept that describes a king having separation between the self that is human and the self that is king--the “body natural” and “body politic,” respectively. It has its ties to Catholic Body-of-Christ symbolism, and it is also tied to the concept of the “birthright” that a king supposedly inherits when he is born. It’s fallen out of vogue in a lot of literary circles, but in Richard II, it is still highly relevant, as Richard is one of the final kings who ascends to the throne of his own “birthright” rather than rebellion, as is the case of his successor, Henry Bolingbroke/Henry IV.

One can see the concept of the king’s two bodies play out quite apparently at the end of Richard’s famous “Let’s talk of graves, of worms, and epitaphs” soliloquy, especially when he says, “Cover your heads, and mock not flesh and blood / With solemn reverence; throw away respect, / For you have mistook me all this while: / I live with bread like you, feel want, / . . . subjected thus, / How can you say to me, ‘I am a king?’” (III.ii.172-178). In this scene, Richard’s sense of self tied to the crown and, by extension, his mental stability, is shaken by the death of three of his close allies. Richard says that though he is a king, there is of course some separation between King Richard and Richard the man, and in this situation, as everything is beginning to fall apart around him, he feels only as Richard the man, momentarily detached from King Richard. How can he truly be a king if Richard the man is so fallible? If he feels grief and want, what separates him from the common man? Thus, how is the same body that “[lives] with bread” the royal body? The answer: it isn’t the same body, for there is an alternate “body” that is the body politic.

But how does this work thematically? How can a production really sell this theme and thus illustrate how King Richard’s life and sense of self falls apart?

One great example of this is the Royal Shakespeare Company’s 2013 production of Richard II.

This one, with David Tennant in the titular role. Here’s why it’s a great example.

David Tennant in the Royal Shakespeare Company’s 2013 production of Richard II uses the prop of King Richard’s crown as a more literal version of the concept of the king’s two bodies. In soliloquies about kingly power, DT puts on the crown and takes it off, or holds it in his hands. For example, in an earlier section of the “Graves, of worms, of epitaphs” soliloquy, Richard says, “For within the hollow crown / That rounds the temples of a king / Keeps Death his court, and there the antic sits, / . . . and humoured thus, / [Death] comes at the last, and with a little pin / Bores through his castle wall, and farewell, king!” (III.ii.165-167, 173-175). And at this line, DT chucks the crown, which he has been turning about in his hands, upon the ground.

In a way, it is the crown, rather than the literal Richard II (or, more accurately, David Tennant as Richard II) who is the body politic, for he uses it to punctuate a “farewell” to the king. Of course, it would be ridiculous if, at the words “Farewell, king,” the actor simply jumped off the stage, but the use of the crown as a more obvious extension of the king appears in other scenes, further cementing the crown as the singular metaphor for the true “body politic.”

The use of the crown as the metaphor for being the body politic also extends to the way the other characters treat the crown as well. For example, at the end of Richard’s soliloquy, one of his companions, the Bishop of Carlisle, reminds Richard to remember himself; this is no time for falling to pieces. To further his point, he takes the crown from where Richard has thrown it on the ground and sets it back on Richard’s head. At this point, Richard follows the Bishop’s advice and turns away from his fear and panic, and instead begins to make plans and inquire after his companions and allies. The body politic and the body natural have been reunited; Richard is king once more.

This also extends to the way that other characters interact with the crown in their own right as well, especially when DT-as-Richard offers the crown to his successor, Henry Bolingbroke. He takes the crown off of his head and he holds the crown away from his body, offering it out to Bolingbroke.

There’s one moment where both Richard and Bolingbroke have their hand holding a side of the crown, and it is in this final moment that the power has transferred. Bolingbroke finally wrests the crown from Richard, and thus, becomes king. At this final moment, Richard undergoes the ultimate divorce of the body natural and the body politic, more literally illustrated by the loss of the crown.

But what does this mean?

To me, I think this means that the transfer of power from Richard II to Henry Bolingbroke (now Henry IV) is a change in values in the throne. Richard may have had “birthright” to being king; his “body politic” was the crown that (literally) crowned him. But Richard’s successor Henry does not have the birthright, really; thus, his “body politic” and his “body natural” are just . . . his body. Yes, he participates in DT’s symbolism with the crown, but by far, Richard is the one whose beliefs and rule have so much to do with tangible artifacts like the crown and a family tree. With the departure of King Richard and of his body natural and body politic, we see a departure of the belief in the birthright and the sanctity of succession. This can be both a good and bad thing--at his ascension to the throne, Henry IV was seen as a king “for the people.” But it also can lead to civil war. With the departure of the “birthright,” we see an update in values that is a precursor to the 15th century War of the Roses, with royal families fighting for the crown and disregarding the birthright and succession that could not take place without a departure from the concept of the King’s Two Bodies. With DT’s performance of this theme in his relation to the crown prop, he propagates the theme of which Richard II is one of the final examples.

#long post #david tennant #shakespeare #richard ii #war of the roses

20 notes · View notes

heartofstanding · 4 years ago

Note

slow on the uptake and it quite sure what you have/haven't answered so: a number you haven't been asked yet but want to answer (if there is one) for the meme thing

This meme has been amazingly fruitful - I’m used to reblogging a meme and getting 0-2 responses so I’m a little stunned lol. There were 4 questions left so I did them and posted another excerpt because I could. :D

3: Does your WIP have a title? If so, explain its significance. If not, what are you calling it for now?

I have no title for the Eleanor novel. I was briefly considered “Lady of Shadows” but ended up hating it. I’m thinking I should probably try mining some of the contemporary writings about Eleanor or something like Troilus and Criseyde which plays a significant part in the narrative.

For the Henry V novels I have:

The Brittle Crown: specifically because it deals with Richard II’s deposition and the sense that there is no security in the crown.

The Bloody Field: about the Battle of Shrewsbury. I’m not totally happy with it because it’s very clearly linked to Edith Pargeter’s A Bloody Field By Shrewsbury, and, through that, Shakespeare. So I want something a bit more... my own thing.

The Deaths of Kings: about Henry IV’s physical death and Henry V’s metaphorical death as he becomes king. Again, not too happy with this one but it’s very fitting.

Sword Year: Agincourt!! I love this one.

The Perfect King: aka Ian Mortimer’s going to write a strongly worded tweet about this. In my defence, I named it that because this book is where the questions about kingship really come home to roost and one of my notes is, “the perfect king is a dead king”.

10: How would you describe your WIP’s narrative style? (1st person, 3rd person, multiple POVs, single POV, alternating chapters, etc.)

Eleanor novel: 3rd person limited, focused entirely on Eleanor, and past tense. I was playing with writing a three-POV novel with Eleanor, Humphrey and Jacqueline but it’s so damn hard to find good information about Jacqueline.

Henry V novels: 3rd person limited, Henry V’s POV. It’s currently written in present tense but I’m liking the idea of past tense more and more, especially I think because it works better when you’re covering things in summary to do a time skip.

13: Your characters are stranded on a deserted island. What happens?

Eleanor and Humphrey find a nice, comfortable spot and shag. Henry V builds a raft, and failing that, resorts to shenanigans with Richard Courtenay. Henry IV gets severely unburnt and grumpy, Richard II is trying to become a merman and is very grumpy and apart from the lack of dogs, Edward of York is in his element.

14: Have you chosen birthdays for any of your characters? If so, when are they?

Yes! So, for the Lancaster kids, I think only Hal and John have “established” and accepted birthdates and we just know rough dates for everyone else so I get to choose for them. Thomas: 19 October 1387, Humphrey: 3 October 1390 (Wikipedia gives that date, idk where they got it from), Blanche: 6 May 1392, Philippa: 26 June (iirc, the best indicator for her birth is Mary’s death, which Wikipedia says was on 4 July (tho I have my doubts it was then) - and I wrote in a WIP fic somewhere that Mary died about a week after Philippa’s death).

Eleanor has no known birthdate beyond c. 1400 and I’d pretty much settled on making her a December baby when I found out that December 24 was the feast day for Adam and Eve, which worked beautifully with the Eve motif I was working on. :D

20: Post a brief excerpt.

Richard II talking to Hal about Edward II (this is quite old and probably needs rewriting but):

‘I shudder, though, when I think of how Edward must have felt,’ Richard says. ‘He was desperate to be left alone, to do as he willed…’

Hal closes his mouth, staring down at his hands. He cannot speak out against his father, not even to Richard. And what could Richard do? The Lancastrian inheritance is Henry’s by rights, Richard could not interfere with that. He has promised Lancaster twice over, at least, that he would not.

‘He was God’s anointed,’ Richard says. ‘They owed him – everything. And they betrayed him and hurt him most grievously. Only God should remove a king, but they thought themselves an equal to God…’

Hal’s stomach churns. Treason and blasphemy – to remove God’s anointed king, blessed with sacred oils and crowned in Westminster Abbey. How could men think themselves equal to the task? How could they?

‘Do you know what happened to him?’ Richard asks.

‘He died,’ Hal says, but uncertainly. ‘Well, he must have done, otherwise, he’d be over a hundred years old…’

‘Quite,’ Richard says, shrugging one shoulder. ‘And a king cannot live long without his kingdom. To be rendered less than half of themselves…’

#the henry v novels #the eleanor novel #themalhambird #asks #text posts

8 notes · View notes

thesorrowoflizards · 4 years ago

Text

yall we deserve more fairy tale aus. more maiaphael and/or magnus fairy tale aus

the beautiful princess maia, strong in her own right but so soft and kind and she just wants to help even though she’s not in a great position to do so

brave young hero raphael questing not for the princess’s hand but to help his community, his family, his sister (but he falls in love with her anyway)

“fairy godfather” magnus, a kind wizard who helps them out and indeed helps anyone he can… and perhaps dragon alec

but like the point is—oh my god

oh no

oh no mid post

mid post the idea it hit me

literally while i was in the middle of typing trying to figure out where i was going with this

ive been, metaphorically speaking, shot blank

with the idea

maiaphael

shrek au

oh I hate this

does this make maia fiona, raphael shrek, and magnus—DONKEY?! AND ALEC THE DRAGO—ok ok so this is happening now. amazing. i just wanted a soft fairy tale au with princess maia and hero raphael and kindly wizard magnus but now here we are. shrek au. fine. if this is how it’s gonna be, fine

i guess rather than ogre he’s a vampire which is a little more subtle—perhaps instead of becoming a vampire at night she’s a werewolf? so downworlders in general rather than specifically a vampire? not quite loyal to the original story (as she became an ogre rather than just “a fairy tale creature” for a reason) but not bad—although the implication she’d like become a wolf forever isn’t great. I mean I’m sure you can play with that so it’s more like at night she becomes a werewolf—ability to transform into a wolf, eyes flash green sometimes, can do feats of supernatural strength and so on, but like. still. hm

but like ok look the point is maia is in this tower and it’s not that she’s weak, but she can’t fight a dragon on her own and she’s been taught her whole life she was supposed to be saved, get a prince charming, etc. she’s quite well read and also very isolated and probably claustrophobic as fuck now. i’m not sure how to combine her characterization with fiona’s in a way that stays loyal to her character but still makes sense in the au tbh.... [thinking emoji im too lazy to google and paste here]

and like raphael, rather than wanting everyone out of his home, perhaps is specifically trying to help his community and get more structure? obviously magnus wants to help—still can’t believe I’m making him donkey but the dragon thing is too good to pass up, although I’m basically going to completely change his role as donkey because I physically can’t handle making him the comic relief literal ass, but like, he’s had his own issues and also wants to help get the land to set up a home for everyone and help people, so he’s travelling with raphael and is like “smol angery vampire who is willing to slap a dragon to death to save his community and specifically take care of his sister? im adopting him immediately”

perhaps for shenanigans and I have. oh my god this is ridiculous but any shrek au is inherently ridiculous so I’m making this twi malec now. consider this: twi magnus on the road literally just getting the hang of his magic after an encounter with a rogue crazy princess who’s stab-happy and needed some magical help, so it’s waking up and he’s just getting in all these crazy hijinks with raphael where hypothetically he’s powerful enough to just zap them there, zoink out the dragon and win, but he can’t fucking control it so sure he can turn all the knights’ armor pink or sneeze and make it start to rain (which is a LITTLE SCARY) but like, other than randomly floating or random bursts of managing to control it in high pressure situations, it’s like. not that useful. again i can’t be clear enough he isn’t really donkey it’s just an excuse to have him travelling with raphael. i guess simon would be donkey if i were going for serious but then they’d both be in love with maia so--

also, twi magnus and raphael? fun interaction time. especially since I’m still basically doing canon maiaphael and not trying to mess with twi, there, so like. he’s kind of trying to get out of his shell more but he cares deeply about raphael (and. well. everyone) already and he juts wants to help

and then he meets the dragon guarding maia’s tower and is immediately like….. damn……… no not getting distracted by this

but the dragon, twi alec, is just like HEY THERE PRETTY BOY ;D and like. they don’t even have to fight the dragon raphael just. walks past while they make heart eyes at each other and when alec realizes they’re walking away with maia he’s just like “ok whatever but magnus you better come back and visit sweetheart I’m gonna make you the prettiest necklace and I can find you some old books on magic, I’m sure I’ve got some in my hoard somewhere—”

meanwhile on the way back magnus is kind of pining after alec but also getting a stronger handle on his magic

and raphael is getting to know the princess

and maia is getting to know raphael (she was NOT expecting a vampire and a warlock, but they’re both incredibly nice and she was REALLY REALLY BORED in that tower) and just like…. you know,,,,,,, romance begins to bloom mayhaps

now I don’t know how to like really get across that one of their main commonalities is community, because in this scenario maia wouldn’t have a pack—unless we change canon even more and I’m just not going to rn, but put a pin in that

so like, maybe she really does care about her people and she super is a people person, but she hasn’t had many chances to show that because she’s been fucking locked up and that’s kind of messed with her you know

god you know I want to include jordan and camille here but I wouldn’t even know how to—I imagine jordan could be prince charming but he doesn’t come in until later and ehhh

so like raphael (and also magnus) are really helping her with that

and she’s also helping him be less closed off and… angry isn’t quite right, but like. she kind of helps both of them open up tbh. not to erase magnus’s friends but also I love a good magnus and maia friendship? but like she’s not afraid to start conversations or ask them questions or listen to their stories (and they listen to hers which is nice because she’s been talking mostly to walls and stuffed animals for a while now and books are great but it’s not the same)

and like she’s free not to have to act like a perfect delicate princess, but she’s also free to be vulnerable and soft too you know

so like okay also lord farquaad or however you spell it I don’t care is jace. I mean obviously annoying lord tiny penis is jace. duh. (oh my god does this mean alec eats jace--?)

and like idk this is a very scattered concept—I’m not sure these communication kings would really do the main plot of shrek where an overheard misunderstood snippet of conversation leads to such a huge conflict but I mean if he was really just beginning to open up to her and then he thought she thought downworlders were disgusting or whatever (wait no that wouldn’t work because she can’t say vampires but she can’t be saying that to magnus, either—fuck I don’t know like I said it needs reworking to fit) he could be devastated enough to just be like well fuck it

AND LIKE AGAIN. DRAGON ALEC. EATS JACE. amazing. everyones like “raphael is your friend... fucking a dragon” and raphael is like “please never say those words to me again” and alec’s like (in human form, they don’t realize he’s the dragon even tho raphael does) “actually a dragon is fucking raphael’s friend” and raphael is like shut the fuck up right now

idk I feel like a lot of details make it not work but the overall concept could be fun as hell, probably mostly as a crack au

god I just wanted a fairy tale au. soft princess maia, young hero raphael, kindly wizard magnus. goin’ on a quest. savin’ people. is that too much to ask for???

my brain says yes.

#maiaphael #maia roberts #raphael santiago #malec #magnus bane #alec lightwood #shadowhunters #im so sorry #i just wanted to do a maiaphael post for ur maiaphael blog but i made this abomination and i would not blame you if you didn't reblog it

5 notes · View notes

fortunatelylori · 6 years ago

Note

What prophecies do you think will play out on the show? What will be the outcome and which character will the prophecy be about?

Hey, nonnie!

Hmmm … very interesting question. And a multi-layered one.

Of course the show will have to pay-off the prophecies it included from the books. Then there are prophecies that were not mentioned in the show but by the nature of revealing the endgame and by being ahead of the books, the show will either pay them off or at least give heavy hints for what they might be in the books. And then there are foreshadowing elements that aren’t really prophecies per se but serve a similar purpose in the narrative.

So let’s get started. Warning: this will get long.

Prophecies mentioned in the show

Azor Ahai

Melisandre: After the long summer, the darkness will fall heavy on the world. Stars will bleed. The cold breath of winter will freeze the seas and the Dead shall rise in the North. In the ancient books it’s written that a warrior shall draw a burning sword from the fire and that sword shall be Lightbringer.

This is very much in play, having been mentioned as recently as season 7 and I believe that by the end of season 8 we will have a definitive answer as to who and what Azor Ahai is.

I’ve talked about this before in this post. Here is an excerpt:

I think it’s far more likely that Azor Ahai is not a hero. He’s a villain and the elemental opposite to the Night King. R'hllor followers herald Azor Ahai’s second coming with such encouraging words as: “ he will bring an eternal summer” which sounds great if you worship fire but in reality an eternal summer is about as bad as an eternal winter. If the WWs unbalance the world by plunging it into night and winter, Azor Ahai is supposed not to bring balance back but to unbalance it in the opposite direction.

Considering the placement of Azor Ahai in complete opposition to the WW and the obsession with fire of the followers of R’hllor, I’d say that the best candidate for this position is one D*enerys Targareyen, which doesn’t sound surprising since many people theorize the same. The twist is that AA was never meant to be a hero but rather an antagonist. @trinuviel has a fantastic series regarding this topic and I would encourage you to read it. She goes into a lot more detail than I am able to provide.

One aspect of this prophecy that is not brought up in the show is Nissa Nissa:

To fight the darkness, Azor Ahai needed to forge a hero’s sword. He labored for thirty days and thirty nights until it was done. However, when he went to temper it in water, the sword broke. He was not one to give up easily, so he started over.

The second time he took fifty days and fifty nights to make the sword, even better than the first. To temper it this time, he captured a lion and drove the sword into its heart, but once more the steel shattered.

The third time, with a heavy heart, for he knew beforehand what he must do to finish the blade, he worked for a hundred days and nights until it was finished. This time, he called for his wife, Nissa Nissa, and asked her to bare her breast. He drove his sword into her living heart, her soul combining with the steel of the sword, creating Lightbringer, the Red Sword of Heroes.

People have been speculating for years on who might be the Nissa Nissa in the story but because this isn’t mentioned in the show, I’m not really sure this will be paid off. However, considering Melisandre’s obsession with blood magic and human sacrifice, I think there’s a possibility that a candidate will arise. And in my opinion, that would probably be Mel herself. She foretold her own death in season 7 and because of the nature of her arc, the relation to fire, blood and magic I can see her as a willing human sacrifice for the glory of the prophesied hero.

However, since I don’t think she is interpreting the prophecy of Azor Ahai correctly and that AA is probably not the person that will end the Long Night, I don’t think this human sacrifice in the form of Nissa Nissa 2.0 will have an effect or at least not the desired one.

In the comments section of the post I linked above, @trinuviel brought forth the idea that the story of Nissa Nissa and Lightbringer is a metaphorical set of instructions on how to forge Valyrian steel. And I have to say that’s a very intriguing idea and one that sounds very plausible to me for several reasons:

1. Valyrian steel swords are already magical swords and we know they are effective against the WWs. What could a burning sword do that these other swords can’t?

2. The Valyrians were known to practice blood magic and it’s theorized that’s where the source of most of their power came from, including their bond with dragons.

3. GRRM has purposefully pointed to the mystery surrounding the forging of Valyrian steel in story several times. There must be a pretty big reason why he hasn’t revealed how these swords are forged.

The Younger More Beautiful Queen

Maggy the Frog: Oh, yes! You’ll be queen … For a time. Then comes another. Younger. More beautiful. To cast you down and take all you hold dear.

I believe the last time Cersei mentioned her encounter with Maggy the Frog was after Myrcella was killed. So this will be paid off in season 8.

I’ve made the argument in the past that Sansa is the younger, more beautiful queen that will cast Cersei down and take all that she holds dear:

Sansa has been intimately involved in all of Cersei’s tragedies even though she is not directly responsible. She was the one that carried the poison that killed Jofferey, the war with her brother is the reason why Myrcella was sent to Dorne, Jofferey’s death leads to Tommen becoming king and eventually killing himself. And, by the end of this series, Sansa might end up as queen of the Seven Kingdoms effectively replacing Cersei.

It isn’t that Sansa is directly responsible for what happens to Cersei but that she ends up taking everything from her in a way that no one could have predicted unless you look back at the events.

There is an aspect of this prophecy that isn’t mentioned but I think will be paid off as well:

And when your tears have drowned you, the valonqar shall wrap his hands about your pale white throat and choke the life from you.

I honestly have no idea why they chose not to include this in the show since it’s part of the same conversation as the younger, more beautiful queen. They might bring it up in season 8 through another flash-back and I think that they should. Either way, I’m pretty sure we will find out who the valonqar is.

I’ve made an argument for Jaime because I think it will be a fitting end to their story and because of what Cersei told Ned about her and Jaime back in season 1:

Cersei: Jaime and I are more than brother and sister. We shared a womb. We came into this world together. We belong together.

And by that logic … they will die together. Or at least one will be the end to the other.

The Prince that was Promised

Melisandre: You should kneel before your brother. He’s the lord’s chosen. Born amidst salt and smoke.

This is a dicey one because it’s only brought up by Mel as an interchangeable title for Azor Ahai.

In the books, however, the PTWP is also brought up in relation to Rhaegar and his prophecy fulfilling quest. When D*ny visits the House of the Undying, she has a vision of her brother holding his infant son, Aegon, by Elia Martell and saying this:

Rhaegar: Aegon. What better name for a king?

Elia: Will you make a song for him?

Rhaegar: He has a song. He is the prince that was promised, and his is the song of ice and fire.

From what we know at this time, Rhaegar never brings up the Azor Ahai prophecy and we don’t know that much about the PTWP. But I tend to think these two aren’t related.

I believe the PTWP is Jon. His is the only story that is linked to both fire and ice. He is the literal product of the song of ice and fire (the son of a Targareyen and a Stark) and his story is connected to both ice and fire through out. He fights against Ice in the form of the White Walkers and he encounters both the false Azor Ahai (Stannis) and now D*ny, who is the person associated the most with fire in the series. If the Dance of Dragons 2.0 and dark D*ny theories become canon, his song of ice and fire would be his titular role in both these great wars that are about to visit Westeros. He also has “salt and smoke” imagery associated with his death (and subsequent resurrection).

So I tend to see the PTWP and AA as actually being ultimate adversaries.

What I’m doubting at the moment is whether or not the show will bother differentiating between these two. I do think that by confirming Dark D*ny and the Dance of Dragons 2.0, they will essentially pay off this prophecy but I’m not sure they’ll signal the distinction.

That’s about it on the show-included prophecies, I think.

Prophecies not mentioned in the show

The Last Hero

Legends of the north state the last hero and his companions went in search of the children of the forest during the Long Night, thousands of years ago. The only survivor of the company after attacks from giants, wights, and Others, the last hero eventually reached the children and gained their assistance. The Night’s Watch then formed and won the Battle for the Dawn. This ended the generation-long winter and sent the Others into retreat, possibly to the Land of Always Winter. The fate of the last hero is unknown

One could make an argument that this is not a prophecy but rather a story but because the Battle for the Dawn 2.0 is fast approaching, this story/prophecy will most likely be paid off in season 8.

If anyone is destined to be the hero to save the world from the Long Night that character is Bran Stark and his story is linked to the legend of the Last Hero, who is also identified as Bran the Builder. This connection is not fully established yet but I believe the characters of the Last Hero and Bran the Builder to be one and the same.

Bran is the Three Eyed Raven, he’s traveled to the Lands of Always Winter and reached the children of the forest. That’s enough evidence for me to assume that his role in season 8 and the defeat of the WWs will pay off the Legend of the Last Hero. Incidentally, Bran the Builder is mentioned in relation to our Bran by Maester Luwin in season 1.

We might also get a pay off for how the Wall and Winterfell were actually built although I do think part of this story will remain a mystery that will most likely be tackled in the Long Night prequel.

D*ny’s prophecies in the House of the Undying

… mother of dragons, daughter of death …

… mother of dragons, slayer of lies …

… mother of dragons, bride of fire …

Essentially, I believe all of these will be paid off by the Dark D*ny reveal.

three fires must you light… one for life and one for death and one to love… three mounts must you ride… one to bed and one to dread and one to love… three treasons will you know… once for blood and once for gold and once for love…

I think it was a huge mistake for the show not to include the 3 treasons prophecy in D*ny’s storyline, particularly since they included Cersei’s Younger More Beautiful Queen one. Because the three treasons prophecy works on D*ny’s psyche much in the same way it does on Cersei’s.

They both become increasingly paranoid and obsessed with these ominous predictions and are actively on the look-out for potential candidates.

However I think the pol!jon reveal will resolve the 3rd treason aspect of the prophecy as well as this:

A blue flower growing from a chink in a wall of ice, filling the air with sweetness.

A great stone beast takes wing from a smoking tower, breathing shadows.

Between the parentage reveal and Political Jon, her lover turned nephew, Jon Snow, will turn from the flower that fills the air with sweetness into the great stone beast that will oppose her.

There’s also a case to be made that the three treasons are actually treasons D*ny commits against other people, as @thelawyerthatwaspromised has detailed on her blog. And by going to war with Jon and potentially turning her back on the fight with the WWs, D*ny would essentially become a betrayer.

So either way, I think we’ll have a much clearer picture of these prophecies by the end of the show.

The dragon must have three heads

This is the continuation of the Rhaegar vision D*ny sees in the House of the Undying.

Rhaegar: He has a song. He is the prince that was promised, and his is the song of ice and fire. There must be one more. The dragon has three heads.

We don’t know much of anything about what this means or how Rhaegar thought it would link to the PTWP prophecy. I wouldn’t have included it, to be honest, if it wasn’t for the Crypts of Winterfell teaser and the staging of Jon/Arya/Sansa as a play on the original three heads of the dragon Aegon/Visenya/Rhaenys. In a previous post I said this:

The “Dragon must have 3 heads” is generally considered the reason why Rhaegar started his relationship with Lyanna and the main reason why Jon was even born. Details on this prophecy are foggy but the theory goes that at some point Rhaegar became convinced that his three children would be instrumental in saving the world and because Elia Martell was unable to bare another child after her two pregnancies, he went after teenage Lyanna Stark, thus looking to fulfill yet another prophecy: that of the Prince that was Promised whose song is the song of ice and fire.

In trying to fulfill it, Rhaegar named his children after the 3 original Targs that conquered Westeros: Elia gave him an Aegon and a Rhaenys so he went in search of his Visenya. Clearly he failed, because instead of a girl, he got a boy.

However, as GRRM points out through out his story, prophecies are tricky and the more you go out of your way to fulfill them, the more blunders you’re bound to commit. That doesn’t mean there isn’t some value to it but it will most likely come to pass in a way that you did not expect.

It makes you wonder just what the “3 heads of the dragon” might actually be about. Everyone tends to think that this prophecy is linked to the war with the WWs. However, by introducing Sansa into the mix, it changes things a bit …

What if the “Dragon must have 3 heads” prophecy isn’t related to the War of the Dawn at all but rather to the Dance of Dragons 2.0? Because in that war, Sansa would truly be instrumental: by making Jon a Stark, because of her political expertise and her strategic connections all over Westeros. So instead of creating the ultimate Targ team to face off against the apocalypse, Rhaegar not only brought down his father’s dynasty and his own in Robert’s rebellion but also created the circumstances by which, years later, his son would face off against the last scion of House Targareyen and bring about the demise of all living dragons.

While this could simply remain something that will be inferred by the way season 8 plays out, I think there’s a case to be made that we will actually get more insight here via flash-backs of Rhaegar/Lyanna.

I think it’s also possible that through these flashbacks we will find out more about the situation surrounding the abduction of Lyanna, more insight into the year they spent in the Tower of Joy and even perhaps the name that Rhaegar whispered as he lay dying on the Trident.

The Lannister gold prophecy

The wealth of the westerlands was matched, in ancient times, with the hunger of the Freehold of Valyria for precious metals, yet there seems no evidence that the dragonlords ever made contact with the lords of the Rock, Casterly or Lannister. Septon Barth speculated on the matter, referring to a Valyrian text that has since been lost, suggesting that the Freehold’s sorcerers foretold that the gold of Casterly Rock would destroy them.

This is a very obscure prophecy and I haven’t seen many people discuss it. The few that I have seen talk about this link it to the Lannister’s long lost Valyrian steel sword, Brightroar. The Valyrians, fearing this prophecy Septon Barth mentions, always refused to sell the Lannisters a sword but they managed to get their hands on one by other means:

Brightroar came into the possession of the Lannister kings in the century before the Doom of Valyria, and it is said that the weight of gold they paid for it would have been enough to raise an army.

So people speculate that it was the purchasing of this sword that lead up to the Doom of Valyria. However, I don’t really see this as a possibility because GRRM never really plays prophecies this straight.

However, one thing we do know is going to happen in season 8 is that Cersei will be acquiring the Golden Company, whose banner is simple golden cloth. She will also be paying for it with what can be described as Lannister gold.

Also since the show didn’t include the Young Griff story line, it’s not outside the realm of possibility that the GC is leaded by Jon Connington, one of Rhaegar’s best buddies and also the guy who was in love with him.

So if let’s say the GC would decide to join Jon’s forces against D*ny during the Dance of Dragons, a case can be made that Lannister Gold did in fact bring about the ultimate doom of Valyria, by killing off its last real member and putting an end to the dragons.

Then there are a few prophecies that I believe have already been paid off.

The mummer’s dragon

A cloth dragon sways on poles amidst a cheering crowd.

By essentially removing the Young Griff from the story line completely, I think the show has revealed that this young man is not Aegon Targareyen but a pretender whose lie, and life, D*ny will slay in the books.

The girl in grey prophecy

I have seen your sister in my fires, fleeing from this marriage they have made for her. Coming here, to you. A girl in grey on a dying horse, I have seen it plain as day. It has not happened yet, but it will.

I think everyone in the Jonsa fandom can agree that the girl in grey is in effect Sansa Stark and she will flee her marriage to Harry Hardyng and join Jon at the wall.

The show had Sansa fleeing her marriage to Ramsay and reaching the wall where she was reunited with a recently resurrected Jon. She was also wearing grey which is I think the show’s way of linking back to this prophecy in the books.

The Ghost of High Heart prophecies

In case anyone is not familiar with who the Ghost of High Heart is, she’s a dwarfish, albino woman who was reputed to be a woods witch in the Riverlands. Arya and the brotherhood without banners camp overnight at High Heart, to meet with the ghost to hear her tell the future, and to learn the whereabouts of Beric.

She accurately predicts a few things that have happened in both books and show. In addition, there are also these:

I dreamt of a man without a face, waiting on a bridge that swayed and swung

In the books, this is Euron hiring a Faceless Man (and potentially paying for his services with a dragon egg) to kill his brother, Balon Greyjoy, the King of the Iron Islands. In the show Euron does the deed himself, on a bridge that swayed and swung.

I dreamt of a maid at a feast with purple serpents in her hair, venom dripping from their fangs. And later I dreamt that maid again, slaying a savage giant in a castle built of snow.

This is generally believed to be about Sansa because of the poisoned hairnet she wears in her hair that eventually kills Jofferey. I’d argue that by ordering the death of Littlefinger in Winterfell (a castle in the North where there’s a lot of snow), the show has paid off the later part of this prophecy.

She also says this directly to Arya:

I see you. I see you, wolf child. Blood child. I thought it was the lord who smelled of death … You are cruel to come to my hill, cruel. I gorged on grief at Summerhall, I need none of yours. Begone from here, dark heart. Begone!

This could be nothing but the woman noticing Arya’s increasing violence and tendency towards killing but because she mentions Summerhall it’s speculated that she is referring to a future and particularly bloody event Arya will participate in. Assuming that, I would say the show has already paid that off when Arya killed off all the Freys in an act of mass murder.

This is a bit dubious, though, because of the fact that Lady Stoneheart has been cut from the show. It’s likely that it will be LS that kills off the Freys in the books and the show simply gave that particular plot point to Arya.

That doesn’t eliminate the possibility that the Ghost of High Heart is potentially referring to a future Summerhall-like event Arya will be involved in and if that is the case I fully expect the show to include it.

And finally we have what are essentially sayings that are mentioned frequently in the show but because of their implications they act like prophecy in the sense that they foreshadow future events but not in a clear cut way.

The Long Night

Melisandre: For the night is dark and full of terrors.

This is pretty self-explanatory. We’ve been told that when the WWs first came 8000 years ago, they brought a night and a winter that lasted a generation. So the WWs are back at it and are going to bring darkness and terror.

We should start preparing ourselves for at least 3 episodes of almost exclusive night time scenes. This is also supported by the actors saying that they had about 40 days worth of night time shootings which is an incredibly long time for that sort of thing.

When a Targeryen is born, the Gods flip a coin

This is obviously a saying that came about in reference to the Targeryens being or going mad more often than not.

However, at this point in the story, we have only two Targeryens left so the duality of a coin flip becomes foreshadowing for Jon and D*ny as foils.

I wish you good fortunes in the wars to come

This has only been uttered in show by adversaries, first in the Stannis/Mance conversation prior to Mance being burned alive and then in the Ned/Arthur Dane flashback. The third instance is in the Jon/D*ny good-bye scene. I don’t know about anyone else but this indicated to me … Dance of Dragons 2.0.

Sansa’s red comet prediction

The morning of King Joffrey’s name day dawned bright and windy, with the long tail of the great comet visible through the high scuttling clouds. Sansa was watching it from her tower window when Ser Arys Oakheart arrived to escort her down to the tourney grounds. “What do you think it means?” she asked him.

“Glory to your betrothed,” Ser Arys answered at once. “See how it flames across the sky today on His Grace’s name day, as if the gods themselves had raised a banner in his honor. The smallfolk have named it King Joffrey’s Comet.”

Doubtless that was what they told Joffrey; Sansa was not so sure. “I’ve heard servants calling it the Dragon’s Tail.”

“King Joffrey sits where Aegon the Dragon once sat, in the castle built by his son,” Ser Arys said. “He is the dragon’s heir - and crimson is the color of House Lannister, another sign. This comet is sent to herald Joffrey’s ascent to the throne, I have no doubt. It means that he will triumph over his enemies.”

Yeah, Jofferey wasn’t and he didn’t. If only there was a guy in this story who was the dragon’s heir and whose birth name the show incidentally spoiled as being Aegon. Glory to that guy! And to his queen!

Suffice it to say I think we will get the pay off from this scene in the form of Jonsa.

Just a small addendum before I finish: A Song of Ice and Fire is littered with prophecies, prophetic dreams, cryptic messages that can be interpreted to signal future events, etc. I probably missed a lot of them. So if there’s something you want to add here please do.

Thanks for the ask, nonnie!

#game of thrones season 8 speculation #got prophecy #jonsa #sansa stark #jon snow #anti-daenerys #arya stark #jaime lannister #cersei lannister #jaime x cersei #got speculation

94 notes · View notes

tenacious-scripturient · 6 years ago

Text

a run-down of / my thoughts on the novel ‘trade secrets’

so! i’ve recently finished this beautifully written novel by @bettsican, and am anxiously anticipating for the second book in the trilogy! (seriously, give it a read. it’s a great lgbtq+ thriller and mystery story, i promise you’ll love it!! you can find trade secrets in many places, including amazon, where it’s only $6)

as i was reading it, i noted down all the thoughts i had. it was fun, interesting, and kept me on the edge of my seat!

oh, and spoiler warning, of course.

Chapter One

okay. this is interesting. why are they in paris? or rather, why are they NOT in paris?

2080. damn.

who is cooper hall and why is he important i want to knowwwwwwww

Chapter Two

HOLY FUCK

CHAPTER ONE WAS A PROLOGUE

OKAY IF I DIDNT NEED TO BEFORE I HAVE TO READ IT NOW

-ahem- anyway

nate literally everything you think of has to relate to smoking, doesnt it?

clyde you absolutely bitch raccoon

im sort of piecing together what’s happening here? either way this is a SUPER interesting concept.

i love the idea of every word being important

nate look at you being a nice guy. testing the CAPS before giving them to ur clients

or maybe it’s just good business

but whatever

okay, so credits are money in this world. but how do people get them? obviously there’s what nate’s doing but what’s the legal way to get them? ill probably find out soon

if it wasnt explicitly said by betty that nate ends up with another guy (i forget his name. cooper?) i would have thought audry was the romantic interest

audry you loving caring hypocrite

i feel like she’s gonna be one of my favourite characters

who is this young man that dares disturb nate’s slumber

cooper? cooper.

Chapter Three

nate get up

u turtle get up and hurry down the stairs

or—okay you can fall into that drywall that works too

ohhhhh so nate is a detective. that’s interesting

i also love this idea of keeping secrets (haha trade secrets)

dude are you sure that your embarrassing entrance wasn’t the ONLY reason you blushed? ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

HEIGHT DIFFERENCE HEIGHT DIFFERENCE HEIGHT DIFFERENCE HEIGHT DIFFERENCE HEIGHT DIFFERENCE HEIGHT DIFFERENCE HEIGHT DIFFERENCE HEIG—

nate ur spending an awful lot of time looking at his features you funky little bisexual

oh damn ur smarter than u seem, just watching him take a single breath and you’re already making connections. i guess that’s why he’s a detective

im gonna assume this is cooper, even tho it never explicitly says so

i feel like we aren’t gonna get his name for a while, bc clients and whatnot and not getting attached

Chapter Four

NATE WEARS GLASSES???????

that’s kind of cute

im lowkey gay rn

anyway

NATE CALLED HIM SWEET-FACED AND PRETTY-FACED O K A Y

oh he has curly brown hair

and oh the glasses aren’t real glasses. oh. the use is actually pretty cool!

so from what im gathering civilians are people who don’t live in sanctuaries, and lemnis are people who do?

cooper sweetie why do u need so much money what have u done

nate’s pretty clever

HAH I WAS RIGHT WE AREN’T GONNA GET HIS NAME FOR A WHILE

well that’s that i guess

Chapter Five

he’s so timid awh

hehe he’s on nate’s bed

sorry

goddammit man calm down or else you’re gonna get everyone in a 5-mile radius around you arrested

wait…. zero-credit balance?? didn’t he just have a few hundred thousand credits???

OH THIS IS A FAKE PROFILE HE MADE

so cooper isn’t his real name either

Chapter Six

oh we’re back to 2080

oh they’re back in the apartment??

it was obvious before but at this point it’s confirmed that they’re going to be doing some travelling together or something

Chapter Seven

this is getting really interesting i dont wanna stop reading and type everything that comes to mind

these are gonna be shorter now hehe

“i’d been a petri dish of mixed emotions and wild chemical changes for half the day” I LOVE THAT METAPHOR LMFAO

what happened with nate’s mom

i want to know

my prediction: she wanted him to either change up or completely remove the chip bc she did something horrible? or maybe she just wanted to leave idk im bad at predictions

either way it said she was crazy

o h

that’s why he’s terrified of cutting the chip

poor nate

Chapter Eight

oh this is strangely intimate

very intimate

i feel that, because cooper has such high pain tolerance (or doesn’t show pain), he has some backstory for it

Chapter Nine

lmao nate just went off didnt he

THEIR FLIRTING IS CUTE FHJKJDLSKAJDKLSJAK

also is being lgbtq+ widely accepted as the norm in this setting? bc nate considered cooper to be flirting with him

ughhhh it’s so good so far, from the character interactions to the suspense, especially in this chapter

Chapter Ten

rude cooper is rude, rude nate is even more rude

F E D O R A

“coop”

Chapter Eleven

aw i love jimmy already—

WHAT THE FUCK COOPER

EXCUSE ME

JIMMY

WHAT

HOW COULD YOU

goddammit

what the fuck is cooper hiding

cooper oh my god

you

you’re playing a dangerous game, mate

are you really that heartless

“deceptively innocent eyes” you got that right

this chapter hurted

thanks a lot jess

Chapter Twelve

“like a weeping wound on the canvas of my home” this has got to be one of my favourite similes ever omg

the way nate’s describing cooper makes my heart hurt awh

i feel like butterflies have some sort of symbolism

maybe being ugly on the outside and beautiful on the inside, or vice versa? the vice versa was basically cooper lol

aye we finally get to meet audry!!

PEANUT BUTTER AND TRICYCLE I WANNA HEAR ABOUT THAT

i love audry omg

IT’S NATE’S BIRTHDAY?? HAPPY BIRTHDAY YA SMOKEY CONMAN

“bright eyes” is the cutest nickname ever

Chapter Thirteen

oh we’re back to 2080

wait what they’re trapped together

is this story gonna have a sad ending

please no

Chapter Fourteen

OH IT’S THE LINE ON THE COVER

i like that

nate’s back to where he left cooper

also if it wasn’t obvious before, it’s definitely obvious now that nate and cooper or gonna find each other again. hm. not sure how i feel about that

kind of pissed at cooper but also we need him for the story to progress

O H

COOPER IM ONLY KIND OF PISSED AT YOU NOW

IT MAKES SO MUCH SENSE

NATE IVE SAID IT BEFORE BUT YOU’RE PRETTY CLEVER

also who is ‘her’?

COOPER WANTS TO BECOME A?? LEMNIS?? GODDAMMIT MAN

I CAN FEEL THE PRESSURE RISING

nate’s in danger

wow this chapter is

a lot

i need a break

-cue a break-

Chapter Fifteen

i’m back

eisley is a cool last name

oh wait so even people outside of sanctuaries can become a lemniscate

i’m still not 100% sure what a lemniscate is

it’s so ironic elijah’s last name is king, but i assume you did that on purpose. i also like the slight nod to royalty by his first name

COOPER’S BACK

why hello there

Chapter Sixteen

they’re

competing

to become a lemniscate

and one of them dies

do they fight back?? is that why they end up in prison??? so many thoughts are going through my head right now

nate, your fantasy about becoming a lemniscate is surprisingly dark. i’m totally down for it

Chapter Seventeen

oh wait so joshua is cooper’s blackmailer?? Interesting that it’s a lemniscate

i keep forgetting nate is wearing glasses

cooper, my dude, calm the fuck down. you’re gonna get yourself and nate killed

it’s the return of soft™ nate

Chapter Eighteen

oh there’s another one

oh this is very ominous i don’t like

Chapter Nineteen – Twenty-One

okay i was eating while i read so i couldn’t type here but just know that these chapters were really really good

Chapter Twenty-Two

wait fuck what’s happening this is all happening so fast

cooper brought out his gun,,,, it’s aimed at ivonne,,,,,,, they’re walking,,,

OH IT WAS A FAKE KIDNAPPING

nice

i like ivonne a lot

Chapter Twenty-Three

the entire story just changed course

this isn’t just about cooper and nate anymore, it’s about a corrupt government

NATE AND COOPER ARE HOLDING HANDS AS THEY RUN THROUGH THE BARRIER THAT’S SO ROMANTIC

also the line “only the dead are ever truly free” is beautiful

THAT’S WHERE PARIS COMES IN

THEY ALL GO TO FRANCE DON’T THEY

I’m so curious to find out where this story is going

Chapter Twenty-Four

this is doin me a confusion

but tbh these hints/ visions of the future, if you could call them that, are giving just enough information to keep me super interested. props to you

Chapter Twenty-Five

AUDRY STOP TEASING NATE

just joking keep doing it, this might actually get their relationship somewhere

ivonne is definitely my favourite character so far. she reminds a little of melia from xenoblade chronicles, in that they’re both ‘royalty’ that rebel. also they’re badass and smart

oh fuck the brother is here

okay thank god he’s not an asshole

oh god things are happening again

Chapter Twenty-Six

nate stop ogling at cooper when you’re in a life-or-death situation

holy shit the lemniscate are messed up

this crew is pretty great, it sucks that it’s almost the end of the book

WAIT I FORGOT THERE’S A SECOND COMING SOON HECK YEAH

anyway

YES COOPER PULL THROUGH

awwww yiss

Chapter Twenty-Seven

O H

oh my god i ship them so hard

THEY KISSED

THIS IS SO STEAMY

this chapter was art thank you so much for this

Chapter Twenty-Eight

AHAHAH AUDRY

once again, i’d like to state how much i love her

oh the tension just grew twentyfold

this is… great

oh god nate what are you planning, you just got together with cooper and now you want to leave him?

Chapter Twenty-Nine

what’s with all the dancing?

Chapter Thirty

oh god the description

so he’s going around and giving people credits, all the while confessing things that would help the lemniscate track him down. i assume this means he’s going to die, but why?

just what are you planning?

oh we’re back to clyde, the guy who started it all. it feels full circle

Chapter Thirty-One

HE’S MAKING HIS CHIP SHOW THAT HE’S DEAD

that’s much smarter

FUCK

NATE YOU IDIOT—COOPER’S REAL NAME

SHIT NOW KING IS HERE

everything’s going downhill now isn’t it

Chapter Thirty-Two

wait that took an even darker turn

there’s so much happening right now i can’thandlethis

cooper and nate are couple goals

Chapter Thirty-Three

king isn’t as horrible as i thought

still horrible, but not a monster

NEVER MIND YOU’RE A FUCKING MONSTER WHAT IS THIS BS

cooper

actually

shot

nate

Chapter Thirty-Four

OH MY GOD

WHAT

THIS IS HOW YOU END IT

I CAN’T

HOW DARE YOU

i need the next book

like right now

what the hell

Final Thoughts

okay so this book was SO good, and so well written. like damn

aside from that horrible ending how could you do this to me

i’m joking, it was an incredible and emotional ending, i loved it and hated it at the same time

it very rarely felt static, and especially in the first half, there was a good mix of action and backstory/description. it was never boring

the story is just,,, so unique. i seriously haven’t read anything like it, EVER

the world-building?? Is?? so vast?? and insane??

the increasing tension and speed as the story progressed is perfect, i felt my heart beating faster the more i read

anyway that’s all from me

this book was amazing i cannot wait for the next

#writeblr #other writeblrs #trade secrets #phahbiyah speaks

12 notes · View notes

myfriendpokey · 6 years ago

Text

clearance sale

clearing out some of my backlog of opinions before the new year so i can start anew. in this post I have accumulated some writing scraps on the only three topics: 1. finance 2. mystery 3. location

FINANCE

i enjoyed these recent-ish posts against the idea of indie sustainability, although as someone who already works a day job i always feel a bit ambivalent about the advice to just work a day job to pay for this stuff - - like yes, absolutely, do it, BUT sell your shit too in the knowledge that the type of precarity we associate w/ creative work is already in the process of being implemented everywhere else as well (or has already been - zero hour contracts, sub-living wages etc). like i am fortunate to still have a day job which pays a living wage and leaves me time to work on my own things on the side - but this feels like an anachronism rather than an inevitability right now.. maybe my unsustainable games will help keep me afloat when my job gets automated and i have to go work in an amazon warehouse, unsustainable games for an unsustainable job, ha ha ha. video games are an exploitative bubble but so is the rest of "the market".

it is true that this is a political problem rather than one in the narrow remit of things that can be fixed with the right 10-point sales plan- - nevertheless i think the issue of trying to make even small money off these things will remain kind of pressing as, in turn, regular employment comes more and more to resemble irregularly compensated hobbyist labour.

anyway one point i found really interesting, which i think all the above posts kind of grapple with - - the idea that it's not necessarily more "realistic" to aim at selling 1000 copies rather than 100,000. i think while we make fun of the aspiring millionaires a lot of people have just been banking on the idea of a fertile middle ground between the two extremes of tiny and ludicrous amounts of sales, between boom and bust. i'm sure there are still people working in that space but it seems like it's shrinking.

one question brendan keogh asks in his piece is "why should game makers be any different [from the norm of artists, musicians etc not really making any money]?" i think this can actually be answered a little - because hobbyist game development sort of exploded in tandem with the internet itself becoming more naturalized within everyday life, because the economic basis for indie games was always centered around the internet, which means people working in indie games were always in the vicinity of the massive, startling movements of capital that the internet rendered more visible and immediate. no more were the weird vicissitudes of the market hidden behind closed doors, in boardrooms or stock quotations - now you could log onto any site and see just bewildering amounts of money suddenly funnel into the pockets of this or that individual in real time, frequently to their own surprise as well. and i think this connected to something more general - a sort of ambient awareness of financialization, the way "the financial sector" cannibalized things like industry, the greater visibility of capital not as something embedded in some specific product or set of individual practices but as a kind of weird free-floating aura arbitrarily descending or departing. enormous reservesof "general" wealth became more visible just as the benefits and stability of waged employment became yet more desolate and i think you need to see the draw of one in part as a consequence of the other.

gacha-capitalism, permanent artificial scarcity coupled with the vague, insistent prospect of fantastic gains, as long as you keep playing. which is a rhythm already enshrined in many areas of working life - broke college students and unpaid graduates hustling for eventual employment, waged workers grinding through until retirement. but it's one the enhanced immediacy and swiftness of capital on the internet intensified and extended. fabulous payouts can strike anyone at any time, in exchange for slowly bleeding out the prospect of any other kind of livelihood. much like the austerity following the financial crash which levelled so many basic social services for no particular purpose other than the hope that doing so for long enough would please the gods of prosperity to start tossing money around again. all dues, no pay.

i do think it's worth being cynical about the efforts to domesticate this process, building a fair and sustainable biome within capitalism, by using the tools of that same capitalism etc. but if the format can't be seperated from the wider world then that's something which swings both ways. for me the most interesting critical work around vgames right now is in the effort to move outside of the constant, numbing boom-and-bust cycles of capital, the idiot repetition of exhilaration and depression and exhilaration and it'll all be okay as long as we can hold out one more cycle, particularly when that's a rhythm which has been central to the development of the format from the beginning. i think anyone involved with developing videogames has probably seen multiple generations of cool shit emerge, get abruptly killed off and written out of history in accordance with market diktats, and then replaced with a new wave of cool shit whenever the investors shift gears into "expansion" mode again. a mode of thinking about and preserving what people do that stands in opposition to this is something i can easily imagine being more generally useful in the culture, as ever more areas of life and culture start becoming subject to the same questions.

MYSTERY

there's a mystery in depth and a mystery in shallowness. with depth the habitual glance of recognition goes out and falls through - you can place roughly where something is in relation to the world, but not what it's doing, not where it goes. as a presence it seems to require a new mode of attention to be recognized, which i guess is why it sometimes makes me uneasy - that challenge, the way that challenge can be moralized. are you a bad enough dude to engage with art?? if there are 100 black obelisks in a field which one do you decide to look at? and will it really turn out to be deep, or just dense?

videogames can feel like depth-worship, like the embodiment of an essentially cthonic system of values. how deep did you go and what did you see there? did you find the gold bars in pac-man? (www.mikesarcade.com/cgi-bin/spies.cgi?action=url&type=info&page=pmgoldbar.info.txt) did you see the secret ending? how far did you get into the game mechanics, into the lore? this marks the top 10 deepest players on this game. surpass them... if you dare. an ethos of diligent attention, hierarchial levels of understanding and initiate-dom, a sub-culture. and at best a maguslike dedication to altered states of consciousness that i can respect, an interest in shifting through mangled pieces of debris in search of secret mysteries. at worst the authority cults and tests of true belonging that spring up around those mysteries, whose value is in being hidden and whose guarantee is in the strenuous effort with which they must be located. paranoia about true spiritual meanings being plundered by opportunistic interlopers. stay out. get good.

the videogame has the basic opacity of the computer system and the act of engaging with this curious abyss is allegorized into dungeons, castles, mazes. trapdoors and secret corridors. one pleasure in looking up older games for me is in seeing them recognize and learn how to thematize this basic sense of mystery. in bubble bobble the obscure scoring mechanics and secret endings are cheekily perverse, arcade challenge by another means - another system to game. in king's quest there's something like a crossfertilization between the strange causal voids of the fairy tale and the adventure game: "Exit the gingerbread house and go east and east. There is a large walnut tree here. Take walnut and then open walnut to discover a gold nut. Head east and take bowl . Look bowl to see the words “fill” at the bottom. Fill and the bowl will fill up with a delicious stew." the wizardry games took the connection between mysterious game systems and occult knowledge much further - the "true" ending of wizardry iv means finding a secret chamber and answering a series of riddles based on your knowledge of the kaballah (or at least, kaballah-derived tarot interpretations).

it's easy to moralize depth - lotus eaters, magic islands. you wander through a strange land and then return to find it's 5 hours later and you forgot to eat. there's something creepy to me about depth on an industrial scale, about building huge tunnels with massive teams on forced overtime, and then a team of professional tunnel reviewers cautiously start descending on ropes and come back every so often and say, well, 20 hours in and it all looks ok, and meanwhile everybody else is jumping en masse. maybe that's more of an issue with consumer culture in general. but sometimes it feels like a way to avoid dealing with certain inherent limitations of that culture, or even limitations of art in general, by projecting those limits out to the end of ever-deeper tunnels that fewer and fewer people will ever see, the rest of them straggling back, exhausted, getting jobs. well, i can't tell you if red dead 2 is good or not. i only got 60 hours in, and i never even found all the falcons.

if the mystery of depth is having too much space for speculation to operate coherently within, the mystery of shallowness is having not enough space for speculation to operate at all: something is too manifestly there, limited, closed-off, it's hard to push it away to get some metaphorical breathing room.

i feel this way sometimes reading writers like tove jansson, flannery o'connor - SOMETHING happened, the stories are short and clear and describe some definite event without too much uncertainty, they even have "broader themes" raised - but somehow the themes feel embarrassingly outsize for the stories, and the stories remain too clearly defined to sink back into the murk of a generalized moral or experience. they feel like moral stories when you can't work out what the moral might be.

robbe-grillet on raymond roussel: "Now these chains of elucidations, extraordinarily precise, ingenious, and farfetched, appear so derisory, so disappointing, that it is as if the mystery remained intact. But it is henceforth a mystery that has been washed, emptied out, that has become unnameable. The opacity no longer hides anything. One has the impression of having found a locked drawer, then a key; and this key opens the drawer impeccably... and the drawer is empty."

there's a famous shallowness to videogames as well that's most often caught by people outside the culture - when you see the fake videogames in a comicbook, or on tv, and they're named something like "washing machine simulator 3000" or "municipal tax assailants". and part of this also stems from the computer, the history of the computer as it insinuated its way into everyday life, as a mysteriously elaborate and convoluted way of doing just impossibly banal things, like balancing chequebooks or printing text. the stubborn thingliness of not-quite-functional machines, the way the thingliness glosses and corrodes their own internal fantasies, mirrors of the basic weirdness that is human consciousness as a material fact within the world.

with my friend i used to joke about "e3" just being the dumpster behind an abandoned gamestop - all those needy longform experiences frozen into evocative trinkets. find a nonfunctional disk copy of mario odyssey and it gives you all the same delight as playing mario odyssey, only without having to. i think there's something beautiful about that flatness, that directionless object-hostility, the rejection of the grandoise hero's journey fantasies that it implies – as well as something baleful, a rejection of consciousess in general, the idea that it could take you anywhere not inside your own head.

LOCATION

why are there so many videogames about going outside? every time i've played a videogame it's been inside a room, usually a dark one, mostly while still wearing my pajamas. for me it is an internal activity. but not only do all these games take place in fields and plains, they always talk about the wonders of going on a voyage, the beauty of the great outdoors, the superiority of the wandering main characters to the slugs and layabouts who sit at home all day.... it's weird to me, i demand we move past these cloying pseudo-critiques. raymond williams once pointed out that the first pastoral was written from the perspective of a rentier daydreaming of cashing out and moving to a country home. i demand more games with the courage of their implict convictions and that if they require you to sit motionless indoors for hours they should explicitly establish and argue for a value system in which this is the best possible thing that you can do. imagine if movies were all set in dark chambers full of people sitting down - i think i can say they would be much less insipid as an artform. "all of man's problems stem from an inability to stay in his room".

(images: Gakken No O Benkyou Soft Kazu Suuji, Legend of Legaia, a Chinese bootleg cart, and ...Iru!)

#gamechat #room

28 notes · View notes

madaraism · 7 years ago

Text

Aletheia - Part III of Himeros

Αλήθεια ; Of remembering and uncovering secrets.

A/N: A mega big Australian thank you to @hellospunkiebrewster for helping me out with the finer details of New York life. Thank you everyone for all your comments, likes and reblogs. I read all of your comments and they become such a strong motivation for me to keep writing. Please read the previous parts here:

Part I - Himeros // Part II - Algea // Part IV - Apate // Part V - Hestia // Part VI - Achlys

Summary: A Queen will always turn pain into power for the sake of her country.

Pairing: Liam x Riley, Liam x Madeleine, implied Leo x Madeleine

Rating: Mature (themes and language)

Words: 4873

Inspirations for this chapter – Consequences by Camila Cabello

Tag List: @theroyalweisme @hhiggs @itzmequeenb @alicars @cocomaxley @blackcatkita @trianiasti @viktoriapetit @umccall71 @topsyturvy-dream @kawairinrin @jayjay879 @bobasheebaby @choiceswreckedme @queencatherynerhys @laniquelove @philiasperanza @hopefulmoonobject @mfackenthal @hellospunkiebrewster @boneandfur @gracepedia @alwaysmychoices

Riley settles her exhausted self onto the disagreeable couch in her living room. She takes the time to allow her eyes to wander around the small apartment.

She was forever thankful of herself not being swept up by the expenses and the noble life that she had with the Beaumont Brothers and their luxe estate. Whilst her apartment was small, she was proud with herself for being able to support herself despite the quick, unexpected changes within the past years.

Living in Cordonia seemed so long ago, yet she still remembers how being in such a grand country felt like, and somehow, New York was no longer the city of dreams that she once loved wholeheartedly.

After the grief of leaving Liam for New York had momentarily subsided when she had boarded the plane back home, she had found herself struck by the endless waves of anxiety.

Countless thoughts had raced through her head, all of which included factors that she had not spent time considering.

She remembers sitting in her airplane seat, finding herself in between quiet, hysterical sobs and anxious nail biting as she tries to calm herself down.

She had wondered where she could possibly stay once she landed. Her immediate family had passed, and any other distant relatives stayed on the other side of The States.

She had wondered what she would have to do to earn money again. The countless ballgowns, formal dresses and expensive designer outfits that served to please the court, crowd and press over the last few months had taken an expensive and heavy dent out of her bank account.

And for the briefest moment, she remembers thinking if the gossip of her life as the King’s whore would’ve reached New York as well.

She remembers the taste of metal in her mouth as she had bitten through the skin on her lip out of nervousness.

She places a trembling hand on her belly, struggling to remember how to breathe in order to calm herself down.

Life before Cordonia was already difficult as she remembers having to balance her studies and work.

And now that there was an extra pair of mouth to feed…

She remembers squeezing her eyes shut and breathing deeply. She tries with every might that she had to recall what life was like before she met Liam. Before she thought her life had changed for the better.

And she recalls minute after minute, what living in and being a New Yorker meant.

She recalls the different jobs that she has had to endure – from waitressing to being a college assistant, from a sales representative to a front desk greeter…

She swallows nervously at the uncertainty of the path in front of her, and she wonders how she even had the energy back then to attend multiple jobs in one single day.

She remembers rubbing her stomach and fiddling with the ring that Liam had given her.

She tries not to think of his peaceful, smiling face in the dingy bar that she had worked at.

Instead, she remembers thinking back to Daniel’s face. The mirth in his green eyes each time they would playfully and secretly attempt scissors-paper-rock to decide who will throw out the trash for that night or flip a coin to decide who would wait the rowdy group of drunk teens who had recently turned 21.

She remembers him complaining every waking day of summer, how if he must be working, would much rather be working on a cruise than be stuck in the gloomy indoors with inconsiderate inebriates.

She remembers swallowing thickly, her fingers still absentmindedly playing with the ring – she hopes that Daniel hasn’t forgotten about her, and perhaps can pull some favours out of him and let her sleep on his couch for a night or two.

So – Riley now sits proudly on her highly uncomfortable sofa.

New York is not a cheap city to live in.

She remembers starting out with multiple jobs over the span of the week, all pulled from favours and past connections from everywhere.

They were not the best paying jobs, but it allowed her to gain some sort of footing in The Big Apple while she lived on the bare necessities.

Now that things were slightly more stable, she was able to cut down on some of her nightly shifts to look after little one-year-old Levi.

She knows she has plenty to be thankful of so far, from her bosses being kind and considerate of the situation that she was in, to Daniel for putting up with her until she was able to get her own place to call home.

Her head turns to the phone next to her that had started ringing.

She smiles softly at the caller ID.

Out of everyone in Cordonia, Hana is the only one that Riley has fully kept in contact with, even if it was over half a year of persistent emails and calls.

She had found her heart grow weak at her desperate attempts and remembers how she broke under pressure one evening as she answers Hana’s millionth call that day.

She remembers how she had spent an hour crying into the phone with nothing to say.

She remembers finally giving in and telling her about her and Liam’s baby growing in her stomach.

And she remembers how calm, collected and supportive Hana has been over the months, calling her even more regularly to make sure she was taking her vitamins and making sure she was getting to her check ups throughout her pregnancy.

She remembers the nights that she would cry on the phone to her as she shares the first moments that she has with her baby – she recalls to Hana her first sonogram, she recalls to her the first time she finds out the gender of the baby and she recalls to her the first time she feels little Levi’s kicks in her belly.

She remembers every moment and every emotion that she encounters throughout her pregnancy. She remembers the low nights where she would whimper into the phone, wishing Liam was there with her by her side.

And she remembers how even more terrified she felt when the contractions started and how it seemed like everyone else around her in the maternity ward had someone accompanying the panting mother-to-be’s, and she was all alone, clutching at her own stomach with no one to hold on to.

She remembers how much she wished Liam was there to soothe the pain as the nurses told her to push. How she wished with every fibre of her being for Liam to be there to hold her hand, to encourage her and to wipe away the sweat on her face.

And she remembers all the little milestones that Levi has reached over the past year – his first cries for her embrace when he was a newborn, the first time that he opens his bleary eyes to look up at a beautiful smile of his mother, her face sweaty from delirious exhaustion and her own eyes filled with tears, the first time his tiny little hand wrapped their fingers around her index finger, his first crawls and first steps, his first words being ‘mama’…

Her heart aches even now when her mind lingers over in the dark place a little longer than she would’ve liked – she finds herself imagining Liam sharing these private, intimate moments with Madeleine when she announces to him that she is pregnant with their heir.

She can still feel Madeleine’s metaphorical cold hands wrapping around her throbbing heart through the unsympathetic smiles of victory painted on her face each day.

She had worked so hard to create a safe haven for herself and for Levi in their tiny apartment nestled in such a big, busy city.

And she was proud to have made it this far.

…

But now for her to actually hear the words from Hana’s mouth, to actually see Madeleine’s positively smug face standing at her door shoved her deep into the darkness that she would refuse her mind to wander into for long.

Reality can be harsh, and it bites and nips at your existence until you are no more.

Worry runs through Riley as she stands at the entranceway to her safe haven. Her body acts as a shield that blocks out the coldness of the outside world.

Defensive.

She hopes with everything in her that the Queen of Cordonia was not after her sleeping four-year-old.

She had hoped by simply running away from the source of the problem would serve as a big enough peace offering.

Perhaps not.

“…Madeleine,” She starts, not at all startled with the surprise laced in her voice.

Aside from the obvious and expected shock, Madeleine notes how Riley has grown thinner over the years. Her hollows of her cheek were slightly more prominent now, the exhaustion playing as an underlying feature on her body. Her sweatpants and sweater clung on to her even smaller frame, making it seem like they were wearing her, instead of the other way around.

Madeleine purses her lips as she moves her eyes back to meet hers.

‘Your Majesty,’ She wants to correct her.

Unimpressed with Riley’s lack of presentable attire and the use of adequate titles, Madeleine looks expectantly over her shoulder, expecting to be let in.

Madeleine can see a shadow of ridiculousness sweep over Riley’s face. Her mouth was open once more as if ready to retort at her expectant gaze.

She speaks before she can interrupt. “I don’t intend to stay for long, if that’s what you’re thinking. New York has a … peculiar smell.” She doesn’t stop herself from wrinkling her nose slightly. “…My only intention is to talk to you.”

Riley closes her mouth for what seemed like the tenth time. She looks around once more, weighing the pros and cons in her mind.

If she were going after Levi, she supposed that Madeleine would’ve brought with her a few more henchmen to do the dirty work.

And considering she was travelling alone… Riley hesitates, before stepping aside to let her in.

Riley doesn’t take any chances though. As soon as she closes the door behind the both of them, she swiftly flips down the frame that contained a picture of Levi and herself on the side table next to the door. She crosses her fingers and hopes that babysitting would be an adequate excuse for the small collection of toys over in the corner.

She eyes Madeleine’s uncomfortable frame that perched on the plastic beige chair of her small dining table from the open kitchen as she made two cups of tea.

It certainly seemed a drastic change for her. From being a Queen living in a lavish castle, with large rooms and grand ceilings, and lush, comfortable chairs… to a small apartment in New York.

Her wardrobe is probably bigger than this whole place. Riley rolls her eyes slightly before settling down the cups in front of them, making herself comfortable on the opposite side of Madeleine.

She finds it almost enjoyable to watch the hidden disgust in her face as she uses serviettes after serviettes to wipe the surrounding space and the cup in front of her – that is if she wasn’t reminded of the child growing in Madeleine’s body by the way she would occasionally press her hand against her stomach.

Riley takes a sip of the tea and returns the expectant look at Madeleine.

If she wanted to come all this way to speak, then I’ll allow her the time to speak.

Time seems to stop for Madeleine however. She allows the air around them become quiet, stuffy and awkward.

It is odd for her to find solace in such a dingy place so far from home. Her hands hug the cup in front of her, face not showing a single care in the world as Riley continues to stare.

Riley however, felt like Madeleine was a ticking time bomb in her home. Her eyes would dart over to the clock in the corner on occasion, helplessly praying that Levi would not wake up from his nap any time soon.

She decides to start.

“…Um. Congratulations.” She feels her green eyes bore into her soul. “On your pregnancy. Hana told me…”

Silence and continual stares.

Riley swallows almost nervously at the awkward situation in front of her. Her own voice is weak, barely audible. “…Liam must be happy.”

Madeleine’s green eyes finally moves away from her face as she takes a sip from the cup, lips curling slightly at the lack of intensity and flavour of the tea.

When her green eyes settle back on the woman again, they are calculating.

During the social season, Madeleine had already marvelled in part disgust at how such a commoner could poise themselves to be so ready and presentable to the daily pushes and pulls of court, press expectations, and facilitating for the public.

She had always thought she had the upper hand when she compared herself with all the other ladies that sought after Liam’s hand. Her bloodline, her training, her stoic personality and the guts to withstand everything for the sake of Cordonia.

Yet here Riley was. Some woman who sat in front of her showed the Cordonian people how to take the reins the American way.

Perhaps it was sheer luck.

Perhaps it was sheer determination.

She scoffs lightly to herself.

Riley was growing tired. She still had a shift to get to later on, groceries to buy and she had to drop Levi off to Daniel for the night. If she came all this way for a shit cup of tea… “Look, Madeleine, I’ve still got to get to work-”

“I’m stepping down as Queen.” Madeleine’s eyes were colder than anything Riley had ever experienced.

Her eyebrows were raised as she took time to process Madeleine’s words.

“What?”

Yet there are times when she proves herself to be everything but suitable. Madeleine wrinkles her nose in light distaste. She repeats herself once more, her voice unanimated.

“But aren’t you pregnant? You have what Regina wants… You have what Cordonia needs.” Riley stumbles her way through her own words, disbelief plain on her face.

Did something happen? Did Regina say something? What is Liam thinking?

“…”

When the King followed the royal physician out of the room and she had finished wiping the tears out of her eyes, Madeleine stares at nothing in particular.

The tightness in her heart and the fire burning away at her twisted insides was not a comfortable feeling.

She runs a hand through her blonde curls with frustration, green eyes concentrated on a singular spot on the carpet.

She knew being the Queen would be hard, but she had never expected how unpredictable and how unrealistic Liam could be. She had never expected how shunned away Liam could make her feel.

Leo was supposed to be the unpredictable one. The one who refused to prioritise his country over his own selfish needs to be adventurous and to explore.

Her nails on her other hand digs into her own palm, thin, crescent-like shapes appearing on her skin.

Madeleine thought she had the game in the bag right at the start when she was presented as a candidate for Liam’s social season.

Yet when that woman appeared…

Madeleine’s gaze lingered on the whiskey cup that had graced the King’s lips just moments before.

Yet when she appeared… the straight path of her future that was promised, that was expected, turned into a race up the Mount Everest of Liam’s heart and mind with an avalanche messing up her carefully planned path.

Madeleine may have won the fight, but Riley had won the war in the most unpredictable way.

She had no trouble sleeping with Liam, for the sake of Cordonia, for the sake of stability, for the sake of producing an heir.

But when he calls out Riley’s name, Madeleine claws at the sheets – not from pleasure and not from love, but from newfound anguish, jealousy and disgust.

She had thought that over the years he would tire of Riley. Now that the American had run away, he would move on and refocus his attention back to what was important.

But no. Each night when they are finished, she would cling on to the sink in her bathroom while Liam leaves her room to retrieve back into his own.

She would stare at the sad reflection in front of her, lipstick smeared, remnants of her mascara darkening the edges of her eyes, her usual perfect hair tousled up out of frustration and resentment.

Its fascinating to her how irritated she had gotten over such a small, useless matter.

She picks up the damned glass that Liam was holding prior and flings it at the wall, not caring about the quiet gasps from the palace workers.

She leaves for the only thing that her mind can think of, the emerald chiffon material of her dress a whirlwind trailing behind her.

...

His brown eyes were full of mocking laughter when Madeleine steps into his room.

His arms are wide open, sarcastic and contemptuous, awaiting the hug from her that he never receives.

“Maddy,” Neville starts, smug. “My beautiful Queen. The last time you looked this frustrated was when you were on my bed begging for me.”

“Shut up.” She half snarls, roughly tugging at his red tie and tossing it onto the floor.

“Hey now, slow down.” She wanted to wipe that disgusting grin off his face.

“Shut up.” She repeats again, the buttons from his dress shirt popping off as she pulls his shirt off.

“Darling, that was Versace.” He chuckles, not particularly offended.

“Shut up.” She pushes him down onto his bed, not caring if she had hurt him or not.

He snickers, looking up at her angry form – it wasn’t something he usually found attractive in women, but with Madeleine, it was captivating. It was something that Hana could not compete with.

“Did our sorry King not please you adequately again?”

She slaps him hard across his cheek, green eyes narrowing. “Shut. Up.”

The smug smirk never leaves his face. He rubs his cheeks as if it was the norm.

“Alright.” He croons, voice sickeningly sweet. Neville swiftly changes their positions as he pulls her down, forcing her onto all fours on the bed. His rough hand pulls her dress up and over her ass, the other in a tight fist around her hair, pulling her back into him as he fucks her.

She allows him to be in control.

When Liam sleeps with her, he will call out Riley’s name.

When Madeleine sleeps with Neville, she will call out Leo’s name.

The irony from the mess of it all… she didn’t know if she should laugh or not.

Her frustration with Liam grew over the years.

She takes it out on Neville, who doesn’t particularly mind as long as he was getting laid.

When she finds out that she is pregnant, she is not surprised.

Riley stares dumbfounded at the blonde before her.

“You’re stepping down? Because you’re pregnant?” She repeats, almost stupidly.

Madeleine’s stare is unfaltering. Her face was bland, much like the situation that she was in.

“Yes. Cordonia needs the stability from the monarchy, and their Queen being pregnant with another man’s child that is not the King’s is not a viable situation to put the country into.” Madeleine’s voice is oddly neutral, which surprises even herself.

She expected more emotion when she had realised the situation she was in, but then again, she supposes it was her own wrongdoing and misfortune for not being more compliant with Liam.

Still, she was bitter, and realistically, there was no one to blame but herself.

“My child cannot be the heir to the throne.” Madeleine finishes bluntly. Her voice is dull and her posture has wilted slightly in the plastic chair.

Multiple questions run through Riley’s head. Her mind is racing, an almost annoying buzz as she tries to process the information that Madeleine was so calmly feeding her.

What did this mean for her?

What does this mean for Cordonia?

Her stomach churns slightly, knots forming – How was Liam taking in all of this?

During this time, Madeleine keeps her eyes on her, observing. She wonders how she will handle this situation – and her small laugh to herself lacked colour and body.

Riley’s mind was not processing fast enough for court – she was rusty, considering she has been away for so long.

She wonders how long until she will take before she catches on.

So she prompts her.

“I’m stepping down before the public realises the situation I’m in. This means a divorce. With Liam.” Her eyes are still glued to her face, trained to read how the gears in people’s mind turns. “I intend to let Liam know that this child of mine is not his when I arrive back in Cordonia. He will need a new Queen to support him during his reign as King, be it from another social season or-”

“…Me.” Riley finishes for her, her voice soft. A simple, singular word, yet it is already weighted with the responsibilities, worries and complications of the crown. Her eyes wander over to the door where Levi was sleeping.

Levi is the crown prince of Cordonia.

And she realises quickly that she cannot become Queen, not when…

“But… Tariq.” She mutters, more so to herself than to Madeleine.

It is only then does Madeleine makes big movements since stepping into Riley’s apartment. She reaches down to the leather travel bag that sits next to her feet and pulls out a clearly labelled and alphabetically organised file.

She begins to explain when Riley finds herself going through extensive notes, research, and photographs on the very man that has put her in this mess.

“The situation that you were in may have been set up by Constantine and Tariq may have been unwilling to help you.” Madeleine shows every aspect of concentration and fluidity when talking factual. “However – and not very surprisingly, the sleaze was found in a similar situation a few years back. It was not a set up. My research and evidence show that he was very happy to pay money to keep things quiet.”

Riley moves her gaze up from the notes to Madeleine’s face and finds that familiar cold, manipulative smile on her red lips.

She meets her gaze and looks away almost immediately. “Of course, what you want to do with this information is up to you. However, a serious enough threat like this does a bigger damage to him than just his nobility. He will lose everything, beginning with his credibility as a respected man when it comes to business deals.”

“Why are you helping me?” Riley finds herself blurting out.

She found herself in a weird predicament. A few years ago, she was going head to head with the very woman sitting opposite her. It then moved to her being in the shadows, avoiding the same woman, and now, here she was in a completely different situation, sitting in her apartment in New York, providing evidence that could turn her life around.

The different emotions from within was starting to drown her.

“…I’m not helping you.” Madeleine stares at her, almost ridiculing her for speaking of something so unheard of in her family. “Cordonia is my home, and I love my home more than anything or anyone. Whether Liam chooses you to become his next Queen or not, is up to both your actions and his decision. I just find myself preferring you to be Queen than Olivia.”

Madeleine starts to stand up, having enough of the weak excuse of tea. It had already been a weird enough trip for her – coming all the way from Cordonia to such a crowded, complicated city. She questions how people can even possibly live here.

Riley stands up after her, “Madeleine, I… I’m not sure I can be Queen. Even if I were to clear the situation with Tariq, my reputation will still be tarnished.”

‘Imagine what Regina will say’, she implies. She can already feel the Queen Mother’s brown eyes burning into her, full of judgement, disagreement and disappointment, voice tutting.

And what about Levi? What will she say about him?

A child out of wedlock… its like feeding ravenous sharks.

And at that moment, Levi’s bedroom door opens. His small figure emerges, hands rubbing the sleep out of his eyes. “Mom…?”

The second Madeleine’s eyes gazes upon the four-year-old, she understands the similarity of the situation that she somehow found herself to be in.

Months of scorning Riley’s commoner roots and questionable actions, she finds herself in the very same situation.

She feels the familiar churning in her stomach, her heart feeling like its collapsing upon itself.

Riley can give Cordonia the one thing that I cannot.

Pitiful.

She curses at herself in her mind.

Madeleine speaks to no one in particular before Riley can. Her green eyes linger on the small pair of dark ones.

“Character speaks much more strongly than reputation. Reputation can be rebuilt, especially if it was never meant to be burnt down to begin with. And… a King that is worthy to lead his people and to shape history takes an adequate amount of years to train for. …It’s not a role that can be given to anyone overnight, nor is it worth making hasty decisions for.”

Riley understands the meaning and the weight behind Madeleine’s words. She is not convinced with herself that she will make a good Queen, and Levi was definitely still too young to be making life changing decisions.

She nibbles on her bottom lip and makes sure that her words are out of Levi’s earshot.

“Don’t tell Liam about him when you see him… Please… I’ll… I’ll do that in my own time.”

It takes a while for Madeleine to reply with a stiff nod.

When Madeleine leaves the apartment, she feels like a portion of the weight has been lifted off of her shoulders.

Riley may not think Levi is ready to know his roots, but Madeleine could already see the maturity behind his eyes.

She climbs into the car waiting for her, a hand on her flat stomach.

She does not feel like she has made a wrong decision.

Cordonia was, and always will be, the reason for her actions.

Sensible. Predictable. Contained.

It was the only way that she could punish herself for ruining her own chances of maintaining her role as Cordonia’s Queen.

A life in confinement. A life in solitude. A life away from the peering eyes of the public and the press.

For Cordonia.

Liam does not feel angry, shocked or disappointed when Madeleine breaks to him that her pregnancy is not the result of his actions.

If anything, he is thankful that she is responsible for her actions, taking control of the situation before the press catches on and before they have given an official statement that claims the child being theirs.

He feels a slither of hope in his heart for the first time in a few years as he reads Riley’s address on a small piece of card that Bastien had given him two years ago.

And he now sits in his limo, parked outside the worn down building that Riley was supposedly staying at.

Liam closes his eyes, a smile playing on his lips. He allows his mind to linger on the distant memory of her face, the softness of her skin, the musical tones of her voice, the way her body melded so comfortably into his own when they embraced, the look in her eyes when he stared into them.

He wonders if she will still look at him with such tenderness and love in her eyes.

And he feels like a little child again, with butterflies in his stomach as he sat there waiting for her to show up.

Full of nervousness, yet so full of excitement.

He makes a promise to himself to be calm and collected when he sees her.

And he breaks that promise when he sees her walking down the street towards her building a few hours later.

He finds himself bounding up towards her, his arms like magnets towards her body, pulling her into a tight embrace, afraid that she might run away from him once more.

When he manages to contain his emotions just enough to pull back to look at her face, he isn’t surprised when they both have tears.

Liam pushes her hair off her face, his hands so tender when he cups her cheek to admire her, drinking in every second of her presence.

“My love…” He is breathless as he blinks away the tears in his eyes, cursing at them for clouding up his vision in the first place. “Oh, my love… I’ve missed you. More than you could ever imagine…”

Riley misses the feeling of his face pressed into the crook of her neck almost instantly. Her voice matches his breathless one as she finally finds herself able to speak.

“Liam…”

Part 4: Apate

#liam x mc #king liam #the royal romance #king liam of cordonia #liam x riley #playchoices #playchoices fanfic #choices: the royal romance #choices: stories you play #joey writes choices #joey writes #have i redeemed myself yet

152 notes · View notes

minatsuki-on-main · 7 years ago

Text

BTB background info masterpost

BTB’s lore is hard to keep in mind so here’s a comprehensive list under the cut. Obviously, this contains every possible spoiler. This is a description of parties at play, concepts and past events (I’m not summarizing the anime’s plot in its entirety) so it’s by no means exhaustive. I’ll make more posts later with details on the characters themselves. There’s a lot more even than what I wrote here, so if you have a question about anything (even plot-related), send me an ask and there’s a chance I’ll know.

Contents:

Setting

RIS

Killer B

Jaula Blanca

Story of the Attack on Jaula Blanca

Restored Gods

Reggies

Market Maker

The Jetblack Epitaph Prophecy

Scientific Details

Erika Flick’s Death and the Dead Kyle Saga

Setting

The anime is set in a monarchy (more precisely a government led by a king) called Cremona

It’s an archipelago made up of several islands:

Most of the plot seems to happen on one of the bigger island complex on the right, but smaller ones are visited by characters in various instances too (for example Morta Island [not noted on the map] and Hols Island)

The anime is set in a timeline that deviates from ours around the 16th century but our culture and history exists in this universe up to that point (the Bible and Germany are mentioned)

The MCs seem to live in the capital city

Police and military are under the king’s supervision, as well as Market Maker

RIS (Royal Investigative Services)

Investigative division of the Royal Police

Various main characters work at the Coastal Branch (a group among RIS), specifically: Lily, Keith, Kaela, Mario, Brandon, Eric, Boris, Jean and others

This group gets assigned the case of Killer B at the beginning of the story

They’re under government supervision like every other entity

Market Maker has priority over them as an organization; they start secretly surveilling RIS and get granted access to their files by the government

The government also threatens to disband RIS (in the second half of the story) as a consequence of Keith’s disappearance after Jean’s death and RIS’s reluctance in investigating him

Killer B

Koku’s secret identity

Serial killer, his victim count is at 15 at the beginning of the anime

Murders by him are connected by him leaving behind a ‘BIIII’ shaped sign in various forms (written or carved onto surfaces, constructed from objects)

His crimes have two purposes:

Eliminating reggies involved in the Jaula Blanca attack out of revenge

Signalling to Yuna that he’s alive through their special sign (the BIIII symbol)

Story of Jaula Blanca Royal Scientific Institute

13 winged skeletons were discovered at the Jetblack Epitaph [a stone tablet with an encoded inscription on Mount Cremona] in the 16th century

They were initially thought to be gods who were humanity’s progenitors

Scientists began a research project to restore them

The king decided to politically exploit the project

Jaula Blanca was a research institute built with the funds to restore the gods but the scientists were corrupt (and presumably opium addicts)

They created the reggies (then called Promised Ones) through inbreeding (later repeated for centuries), deemed them failed byproducts and disposed of them or locked them up

The research was planned to be terminated

One researcher proposed to the king to create an organization (which would later become Market Maker) to earn money and get enough scientists to proceed with the project

The proposal was accepted

Jaula Blanca survived in order to produce reggies who became intelligence agents for the Royal Government and manipulated war and peace for money

Three cellular biologists arrived from Japan (among whom Heath Kazama Flick) and helped the project reach success

Jaula Blanca produced Koku and Yuna, successfully restored gods, then others based on them (see: the Restored Gods paragraph)

An attack against Jaula Blanca was carried out, destroying it and resulting in the deaths of most children there (see: the Story of the Attack on Jaula Blanca paragraph)

CEO at the time was Albert Puzo

Gilbert’s father

First person his son killed

His approach to research ‘softened’ gradually and got closer to Heath’s (which is why Gilbert killed him)

Story of the Attack on Jaula Blanca

Ideated and led by Gilbert Ross with the assistance of Market Maker reggies

The goal was taking Minatsuki away so Gilbert could keep him alive and manipulate him in order to use his brainwashing ability (see: the Reggies paragraph)

Took form in a sudden bombing and assault at nighttime in the time period when Koku was a child (around 10)

Heath Flick told Kirisame to watch over Koku and take him to a secret shelter, different from the one the other children were sent to

Koku was looking for Yuna instead of escaping

Eventually Heath found Koku before Kirisame could and told him to leave and that he’d find Yuna

At the same time Gilbert convinced Minatsuki to cooperate with him (see: the Jetblack Epitaph Prophecy paragraph)

Yuna was hiding in a classroom where Minatsuki (along with Izanami) found her, lied about being Koku’s brother and convinced her to come with him

Minatsuki, Izanami, Heath and Gilbert (followed by reggie soldiers) all met in the same place, where Minatsuki stabbed Heath

Gilbert left and took Minatsuki, Izanami, Yuna and Phantom Minatsuki (who had just been brainwashed by Minatsuki) with himself

Kirisame and Koku arrived at the secret shelter but were attacked by reggies

In order to protect Koku, Kirisame and some of the other restored gods sacrificed their lives

Koku went back to look for Yuna but only found their symbol on the blackboard, meaning that she had already been taken away

He found the mortally wounded Heath who gave him some pages of his notebook containing information about the gods and revealed that he could integrate the other gods’ body parts in his body (see: the Restored Gods paragraph)

Koku went back to his companions’ bodies and attached their body parts to himself

The Restored Gods

Successful experiment products from after Heath Flick’s arrival at Jaula Blanca

Actual reincarnations of the 13 winged skeletons

They were given numbers from 1 to 13

Have special body parts that can be transformed into steel called lohengrin

Koku and Yuna were created first and the others were based on them

Koku was number XIII

Resurrected Black-winged King

The gods’ appointed leader

His original special body part was his eyes (the right one was transplanted into Minatsuki; see: the Reggies paragraph) with memory manipulation and brainwashing abilities

Physically weaker than the others

Yuna was the chosen shrine maiden, number IV (written as IIII in Jaula Blanca)

Izanami was the other shrine maiden, number V

Numbers I, II and III were integrated in Koku’s body after the attack

The other gods beside him were also called Koku’s guardians and had the duty to protect him

When significant events mentioned on the Jetblack Epitaph are about to take place, Koku and Yuna undergo silver nuptial coloration which turns their hair a white-ish colour

Reggies

Short for Regulus Ginedrive Immoral Egersis

Produced by Jaula Blanca

Regarded as failed byproducts of the research to restore the gods by scientists

Reincarnations of a species of ancient demihumans created for fighting (not to be confused with the 13 restored gods)

They become unstable at age 20 with increasing murderous urges and loss of rational thought

Their weakness is blue steel, if it penetrates a part of their body it needs to be cut off and the blue steel has to be extracted (this was written in Heath’s notebook; both Koku and Keith knew about it)

The government uses them as intelligence agents (Market Maker members) and releases them into society as soon as they become uncontrollable

Having them unstable is profitable for the government as they would otherwise become too strong and leak the conspiracy behind the Jaula Blanca funds

Can remain humane for longer with the gold solution (see: the Scientific Details paragraph)

Their mental deterioration can be classified in grades (Keith rates Dead Kyle a grade-C)

The only reggie stabilized through treatment at Jaula Blanca was Minatsuki

Showed no signs of rejecting Koku’s right eye, which was transplanted into him

Could have been a dangerous military force and a basis for a vaccine to stabilize reggies so the government wanted him dead

Kept locked-up and hidden

Memory manipulation and brainwashing abilities like Koku’s

Was manipulated by Gilbert during the attack

Market Maker

Government group of intelligence agents who manipulate war and peace

Made entirely of reggies (see: the Reggies paragraph)

Main villains (Phantom Minatsuki, Laica/Real Minatsuki, Yuna, Izanami, Kamui, Kukuri, Takeru, Quinn, rabbit boy) are part of a special branch responsible for social disorder

Specialize in orchestrated crimes and wars, assassination, sabotage and infiltration

They utilize brainwashing (through Minatsuki’s eye)

Headquarters on the Moby Dick [a huge, white airship built during the war]

Members have a skull tattoo on their hand (which they usually cover up with gloves)

Involved in many gold thefts to acquire materials for the gold solution

Led by the real Minatsuki (who goes by ‘Laica’)

Want to capture Koku (Minatsuki’s personal goal)

Cooperating with Gilbert in covering up his crimes by brainwashing reggies into confessing to them, but not dependent on him

Privileged by the government over other entities

The Jetblack Epitaph Prophecy

Jetblack Epitaph: stone tablet on Mount Cremona with a codified inscription

Contains as much information as the Bible

Meaning changes according to combination and reading direction

Decoded by 12-year-old Keith Flick

Similies and metaphors

Uses ‘black’ as a synonym for ‘perfect’

Cremona’s first king defeated the original Black-winged King at the Jetblack Epitaph

Prevents Koku’s regenerative ability

Transcribed passages:

When Canopus shines bright, to the right is a new First, illegitimate spawns of the gods. Wings of pure madness will bring low the ephemeral people, and the howls of the dead will bring order to their brethren.

To the left, another Fourth. A cycle of evil slaughter. The moon of carnage traces out its eternal ellipse, and the hour the ash-colored dragon beats its wings will come at last. People of the black bones, gather ye together.

The Tale of the Two Shrine Maidens [the only unambiguous passage]: On the night of the 13th full moon the man chosen by the two shrine maidens gained power, companions and wings, and became the black-winged king. Their purpose fulfilled, the two maidens presented to him a blade that burned blue. “Decapitate one of us,” they said. The maiden whose head was cut off turned to ash and merged with the king, granting him still another power. The remaining maiden became his wife and fought at his side at Cremona’s summit, and shared his fate when the end came.

Gilbert convinced Minatsuki (when he was a kid) that if he killed Koku at the Jetblack Epitaph he would become an invincible king, a lie Minatsuki kept believing in as an adult

Scientific Details

Genetic information to revive the 13 gods comes from the Jetblack Epitaph deciphered by Keith

Inscription contains info about the form and abilities of the gods’ bones

At their 20th birthday, the reggies’ testosterone and dopamine levels get skewed (presumably high T and low dopa)

Gold solution:

Adjusts reggies’ hormonal levels

Requires actual gold to be made

Acts as a drug (probably due to being a dopamine agonist)

Withdrawal symptoms: bleeding from the eyes, mouth and nose; memory issues; increased aggressiveness; physical weakness

Can be taken orally or intravenously

Blue steel is some sort of oxidized form of steel and can be created from normal steel through heating

Erika Flick’s Death and the Dead Kyle Saga

Erika Flick

Keith’s adoptive sister

Similar to Lily physically and in character

Fell in love with a man she (in Gilbert’s opinion) shouldn’t have [implied to be Keith but never explicitly stated]

Gilbert was in love with her

Went to university with both of them

Killed by Gilbert

Dead Kyle

Nicknamed ‘Raven-haired Murder Machine’

Serial killer

Reggie

Participated in the Jaula Blanca attack

His adoptive father was a navy man and got him admitted to Ramon Psychiatric Hospital [in the Ramon Ports & Harbor District closed military area; full of reggies, Gilbert operates here too]

The one Erika’s murder was pinned on

8 years before the anime’s timeline Erika’s body was found cut-up and dumped in the mountains

Gilbert murdered her in (what appears to be) a fit of jealousy

Dead Kyle confessed (in a trial that was mostly for show) to being Erika’s killer, confirmed the murder’s location and the weapon, and passed the polygraph because of Minatsuki’s brainwashing at Gilbert’s request

Keith suspected Dead Kyle to be lying from this murder being different than his previous ones

Dead Kyle was hospitalized at Ramon Psychiatric Hospital

Eric and his team were planning to kidnap him to expose more covered-up crimes

Keith abducted him from the hospital and tortured him without authorization so Eric was forced to arrest him (which is why he was sent to the Archives Division for 7 years)

Dead Kyle escaped and was killed by Killer B (Koku) just before committing another crime

Gilbert proposed to stitch Erika’s body back together and leaked that the corpse had cedar and pine pollen on it, in order to reveal the murder’s location to Keith for his later plans

Next post will be about details on RIS members and generally people related to Keith’s side of the story; the one afterwards about restored gods and reggies. I also have a few screencaps to transcribe and theories about background events. Don’t hesitate to ask me about anything that is still unclear or correct me if I made a mistake/typo. This post might undergo updates.

Part two | Part three (soon)

#b the beginning #b: the beginning #btb #meta #masterpost #market maker #jaula blanca #i naively thought everything would fit into one post #but this is already too long #its gonna be a series of at least 2 more posts #and then some about more specific stuff #so yeah this is how the reggie and non-reggie thing works #if you wanna know how i know abt the numbers #i watched 5 seconds of onscreen schemes on loop #YOU GOTTA TRUST ME ON THIS I FELT LIKE A JACKASS REWATCHING THOSE 5 SECONDS

132 notes · View notes

squidgirlfriends · 6 years ago

Text

snippet from a little au i cooked up while visiting nyc, the

geo-jumper au

They walked in silence, Pearl keeping a watchful eye out for anybody who may have been lurking along the dead-end street where they’d been moments before.

Once they were a few blocks away, shots rang out. Pearl already had one hand moving to her dualies, secured at either side of her belt, but before she could take any action, Marina shoved her behind a nearby dumpster.

“What the hell are you—“

“It isn’t us,” Marina held a finger to her lips.

“What’s that supposed to m—mph—mrmphm!” Marina pressed her hand over Pearl’s mouth.

“If they hear your yelling, it will be us they’re after. Wait.” She whispered. Pearl glowered, huffing against Marina’s hand.

They waited for a moment, and sure enough—the Octarians were targeting someone running across the rooftops with impeccable speed. For a moment, the person disappeared. The Octarian foot soldiers relayed orders from their commander amongst each other. It was dead silent.

Just as the Octarians lowered their weapons, powerful shots rang out at practiced intervals. Exact seconds apart; one by one, the Octarians exploded into bright green ink. The person on the rooftops came back into view, running down a fire escape and disappearing before her feet hit the ground. They were alone again.

“Do you think they were a jumper?” Marina asked, letting go of Pearl and looking around.

Pearl stepped up to inspect the green ink.

“This is no normal ink… this is what they’re all whispering about back at home…” Pearl spoke quietly.

“Special ink like that… you don’t think it could be…?”

“It was most likely her. The routes she’s been taking around the city’ve been completely sporadic ever since…” Pearl trailed off. “Ever since they took her partner.”

“So that wasn’t just a rumor, then.” Marina frowned. “The Squid Sisters really have been split up?”

Pearl wiped her hand off on her jacket.

“I guess so.” She paused, looking back at Marina. “Let’s get going before there’s any more excitement around here.”

(more on the au under the cut!)

a geo-jumper (or just jumper, for short,) is a person who can bend the laws of reality, and move over large areas in basically no time. like a teleporter, i guess? but the power lies within the person, it’s not anything technology can recreate, which comes into play with the plot later on...

one has to be somehow related to a jumper to be a jumper themselves. putting it simply, it runs through the gene pool.

though, to unlock the power within oneself, a special ceremony must be performed, ending with the jumper’s first jump, usually over a small area.

on the squisters:

-they grew up with their large family in a small mountain town

-grampsy cuttlefish lived a bit farther out from the town, semi-rejected by the family, I guess? callie and marie visited him a lot, though, and he loves them lots. they love hearing his old war stories.

-cuttlefish is a jumper, and was the one who passed the power down through the family to callie and marie

on off the hook:

-pearl grew up thieving and generally fucking with some dangerous people, since her parents run one of the most dangerous organizations in Inkopolis. its not just a title, though, pearl can throw down.

-all the ones involved or somehow associated with pearl and her parents call her parents the “king and queen,” and so pearl is the princess of their underground empire

-pearl is a jumper. her parents keep it hushed up

-marina grew up as a soldier/engineer for the octarian forces. shes one of the smartest, if not the smartest, though not one of the best soldiers

-marina is not a jumper

-she left the octarian army, and ran into pearl at night. pearl took her in, eventually warmed up to her

main plot:

basically it started out more or less the same as normal splat hero mode, great turf war and shit, but the inklings lost, and octarians (under commander octavio) won, they now rule almost like a dictatorship over inkopolis. normal inklings arent affected too too much, they just have a set of rules to follow, like curfews and proper respects to octoling officers when they ask for things, or patrol the streets.

one thing you need to know about the octarians, jumper power doesn’t flow naturally in their blood. since they’re so tech-savvy (lmao,) they tried every way to recreate the same power, but they found it was quickly impossible.

for this reason, if youre an inkling jumper, youre life is a million times harder. you’re basically illegal, since octavio makes the rules and stuff, he gave himself the right to capture any jumpers found on the street. since there was no way a jumper could be recreated artificially, they figured that maybe they could find a way to transplant the natural jumper power into a new host.

by the way, you can tell a jumper is a jumper because of the bracelet-like scars around their wrists. part of their “initiation ceremony” to become a jumper requires “breaking the bonds” of reality, breaking the metaphorical chains that bind you to the rules of this reality.

once the octarian forces learned of callie and marie’s family’s power as jumpers, they raided the town, burned all the houses down and removed all the residents by splatting them and capturing their souls. callie and marie were out in the forest, upon returning home, they realized something was very wrong (the smell of smoke and such)

they ran to the only one left, grandpa cuttlefish.

he took care of them, away from the town, and trained them. this part is still a little fuzzy in my head, but after awhile cuttlefish sends them to inkopolis, where there’s a secret bar, where the jumpers convene and have nice fun, where octavio can’t find them.

they quickly make a name for themselves, working by night as rebels. the squid sisters.

rumors spread quick on the streets of inkopolis, but after successful months of pushing back the octarian forces, one half of the power duo goes missing.

the princess and her knight take notice.

anyways, this is literally super lame and ive already given up on writing the whole thing, so i figured ill just share the details, i might shit out some more little snippets in time, but we’ll see B”)

i also wrote this little summary in 3secs so pls excuse any mistakes or inconsistencies- have mercy on me yall

i think it started out as more of a squisters centric fic, but then it changed to an uber gay pearlina fic haha whoops!

#splatoon #splatoon 2 #splatoon au #geo jumper au #soph writes #soph rambles #off the hook #squid sisters #octarians #inkopolis #this is kind of dark compared to canonverse splatoon h

16 notes · View notes

trinuviel · 7 years ago

Text

Crowned with Fire – True and False Lights in A Song of Ice and Fire (part 1)

I have previous written about the notion of “false light” in ASoIaF in relation to the prophecy of The Prince that was Promised/Azor Ahai.

…we all deceive ourselves, when we want to believe. Melisandre most of all, I think. The sword is wrong, she has to know that … light without heat … an empty glamor … the sword is wrong, and the false light can only lead us deeper into darkness, Sam.” – Maester Aemon to Sam, (AFfC, Samwell IV)

The inspiration for this meta comes from both from the quote above but also from this one from the novella The Princess and the Queen:

Atop the Hill of Rhaenys, the Dragonpit wore a crown of yellow fire, burning so bright it seemed as if the sun was rising. (The Princess and the Queen)

There are two things I want to point out in relation to this quote:

There’s a fire burning so bright that it could be mistaken for the sunrise. This is a false light.

Then there’s the image of the crown of fire.

The crown of fire or the burning crown is a piece of imagery that repeated recurs in the text, both in a positive and a negative manner. In this post, I will examine the image of the crown of fire in relation to the notion of a true light.

THE LIGHTHOUSE

The image of the Dragonpit crowned with fire is a striking one – and it made recall another instance where GRRM uses the image of a building crowned with fire, only this time it is a tower:

The challengers trotted back to the south end of the lists to await their foes: Ser Abelar in silver and smoke colors, a stone watchtower on his shield, crowned with fire. (The Hedge Knight)

Ser Abelar belongs to House Hightower. Their sigil is a white tower with a flaming beacon at the top. Their words are We Light the Way. This is an incredibly important detail and it will inform much of my examination of false and true lights in relation to the imagery of burning crowns in the text.

The sigil of House Hightower refers to their ancestral seat in Oldtown: a tower so vast and impressive that it is commonly knowns as The Hightower – and the family is called House Hightower of the Hightower. The family is among the most ancient of Westeros and they are commonly believed to descend from the First Men. During the Age of Heroes, King Uther of the High Tower is said to have commissioned Brandon the Builder, the legendary founder of House Stark, or his son Brandon to build The Hightower.

(Hightower in Oldtown. Art by Ted Nasmith)

And beyond, where the Honeywine widened into Whispering Sound, rose the Hightower, its beacon fires bright against the dawn. From where it stood atop the bluffs of Battle Island, its shadow cut the city like a sword. Those born and raised in Oldtown could tell the time of day by where that shadow fell. Some claimed a man could see all the way to the Wall from the top. (AFfC, Prologue)

This description points pot that The Hightower isn’t just a holdfast of an ancient and powerful House, it is also a lighthouse! The fire that crowns the tower is a beacon that lights the dark until the break of dawn and it guides ships into safe harbor. Compared to image of the Dragonpit crowned by fire, the Hightower crowned with fire is a positive image. Whereas the burning Dragonpit is a uncontrolled, destructive and deceptive fire that only looks like the dawn, the burning beacon of the Hightower is fire harnessed for a constructive purpose: to provide light and safety in the dark. It is the difference between a false light and a true light!

Light is often associated with Truth and it is a symbolic connection that is millennia old in Western thought. Within the universe of GRRM’s world, this symbolic connection is also in play. In the cult of R’hllor, the high priest of the Red Temple in Volantis in not called the Flame of Truth and the Light of Wisdom but I’ve argued elsewhere that the priesthood of R’hllor are blinded by a false light. For them any fire contains the light of truth, whether it is a fire used for visions or a fire used to burn men and women so their purified souls can ascend into the light of R’hllor. The problem with this cult is that they are fanatics and fanatics always stares so hard into the light of a perceived “Truth” that they become blind to everything else.

Too much light blinds the eye and a fire unchecked devours.

However, let’s return to The Hightower and Old Town because the words We Light the Way refers not only to the lighthouse function of House Hightower’s holdfast but also to their role as patrons of learning. King Uthor of the High Tower’s sons King Urrigon and Prince Perrimore the Twisted were integral to the founding of the Citadel and House Hightower has remained patrons of this institution of learning ever since the founding.

Thus, on the symbolic level we have another distinction between a false and a true fire. There’s the false light of prophecy and the fanaticism of the priesthood of R’hllor versus the true light of learning. GRRM has explicitly stated that in his text, prophecy is rarely useful. Instead the meanings are often murky and misleading. That can be incredibly dangerous because if those murky meanings are being mistaken for an absolute truth then it is easy to be lead astray. Melisandre is a good example – her visions are ambigious and hard to read but she places an absolute faith in the prophecy of Azor Ahai reborn, even when she acknowledges that she can read a prophecy wrongly:

“If sometimes I have mistaken a warning for a prophecy or a prophecy for a warning, the fault lies in the reader, not the book.” - Melisandre (ASoS, Davos V)

Likewise, not all scholars are wise and not all of their work leads to the truth of things. However, there’s room for debate and dissent within a scholarly community. A scholar has to be prepared for having his theories and findings contested and he has to provide evidence for his argument. In contrast, there’s not much room for debate or dissent within the cult of R’hllor. That’s the trouble with fanatics: their truth is the only truth.

“I AM THE FIRE THAT BURNS AGAINST THE COLD, THE LIGHT THAT BRINGS THE DAWN”

The imagery of a lighthouse as a beacon against the dark, a guiding light until the break of dawn makes me think of the wows of the Night’s Watch:

"Hear my words, and bear witness to my vow,” they recited, their voices filling the twilit grove. “Night gathers, and now my watch begins. It shall not end until my death. I shall take no wife, hold no lands, father no children. I shall wear no crowns and win no glory. I shall live and die at my post. I am the sword in the darkness. I am the watcher on the walls. I am the fire that burns against the cold, the light that brings the dawn, the horn that wakes the sleepers, the shield that guards the realms of men. I pledge my life and honor to the Night’s Watch, for this night and all the nights to come.” (AGoT, Jon VI)

Furthermore, the text itself connects The Hightower in the far South with the Wall in the far North:

Some claimed a man could see all the way to the Wall from the top. (AFfC, Prologue)

This is, of course, not the literal truth but the mention of the Wall within a description of the Hightower servers to connect the two edifices in the reader’s mind. Then there’s the legend that the Hightower was built by Brandon the Builder, the same man who is credited with the building of the Wall.

A TOWER CROWNED WITH GOLD

The Hightower is not the only crowned tower in the text. In A Storm of Swords both Bran and Jon comes across a small holdfast called Queenscrown:

“The holdfast has a golden crown, see? He pointed across the lake. You could see patches of gold paint up around the crenellations. “Queen Alysanne slept there, so they painted the merlons gold in her honor.” – Bran Stark to Jojen Reed, (ASoS, Bran III)

This relates the Queenscrown tower indirectly to the Night’s Watch. The journey Queen Alysanne made North was to visit the Night’s Watch and she was so impressed by them that she had more land allotted to the Watch. This is called the New Gift. Queen Alysanne was called the Good Queen and the smallfolk painted the merlons so it would look like the golden crown she wore.

(Bran, Hodor, Meera and Jojen trying to make their way to the holdfast Queenscrown. Art by Michael Komarck)

“It is only a towerhouse. Some little lordling lived there once, with his family and a few sworn men. When raiders came he would light a beacon from the roof. Winterfell has towers three times the size of that.” […] “Men can build a lot higher than this. In Oldtown there’s a tower taller than the Wall.” – Jon Snow to Ygritte (ASoS, Jon V)

Here the Queencrown tower is directly compared to the Hightower in Oldtown. The tower crowned by fire is a beacon that guides or, in this case, warns. However, the connection with the crowned tower as a positive image (a true light) and kingship (golden crown) is an interesting one.

There are plenty of golden crowns in the text – mostly in relation to actual people wearing golden crowns, whether they be kings or pretenders, as well as heraldic sigils with golden crowns. However, there are a few examples where “a golden crown” is used metaphorically. In one of Sansa’s chapters in A Game of Thrones, Joffrey’s blonde hair is described as shining in the sun like a golden crown. Then there’s the “golden crown” that Viserys gets from Khal Drogo:

It had grown so silent in the hall that she could hear the bells in Khal Drogo's hair, chiming softly with each step he took. His bloodriders followed him, like three copper shadows. Daenerys had gone cold all over. "He says you shall have a splendid golden crown that men shall tremble to behold."

When the gold was half-melted and starting to run, Drogo reached into the flames, snatched out the pot. "Crown!" he roared. "Here. A crown for Cart King!" And upended the pot over the head of the man who had been her brother.(AGoT, Daenerys V)

Viserys’ golden crown turned out to be a false crown, one that killed him – and Joffrey’s crown of golden curls is also a deceptive image. It appears in the text right before he reveals his true nature in the confrontation with Arya and Mycah. Furthermore, Joffrey is a false king since he has no claim to the crown of Westeros. Then there’s also the fact that they both men are vicious and abusive men. Joffrey was a terrible king as would Viserys have been.

I am not entirely ready to make a definite conclusion about what the imagery of a tower crowned in gold may signify but I do find the connection an interesting one, especially since Queencrown is also compared to The Hightower, directly in terms of size and indirectly in terms of their function as a beacon of light. So you could argue that the tower crowned in gold in relation to the tower crowned by fire could signify a true king/queen. In that sense, it is interesting that this particular tower makes an appearance in one of Jon’s chapters, considering his hidden heritage. There’s an interesting passage in one of Jon’s chapters:

… a huge bolt of lightning stabbed down from the sky and touched the surface of the lake. For half a heartbeat the world was noonday bright. The clap of thunder was so loud that Ygritte gasped and covered her ears. “Did you look?” Jon asked, as the sound rolled away and the night turned black again. “Did you see?” "Yellow," she said. "Is that what you meant? Some o' them standing stones on top were yellow." "We call them merlons. They were painted gold a long time ago. This is Queenscrown."Across the lake, the tower was black again, a dim shape dimly seen. "A queen lived there?" asked Ygritte.

"A queen stayed there for a night." Old Nan had told him the story, but Maester Luwin had confirmed most of it. "Alysanne, the wife of King Jaehaerys the Conciliator. He's called the Old King because he reigned so long, but he was young when he first came to the Iron Throne. In those days, it was his wont to travel all over the realm. When he came to Winterfell, he brought his queen, six dragons, and half his court. The king had matters to discuss with his Warden of the North, and Alysanne grew bored, so she mounted her dragon Silverwing and flew north to see the Wall. This village was one of the places where she stopped. Afterward the smallfolk painted the top of their holdfast to look like the golden crown she'd worn when she spent the night among them.” (ASoS, Jon V)

The dark of the night is briefly illuminated by lightning, and in that brief flash of light Jon and Ygritte sees the golden crown on the tower, i.e. the merlons painted gold. Jon correctly identifies the tower as Queencrown and tells Ygritte the story of how it came to wear a crown. The story relates to his own ancestors, one of the rare good kings from the Targaryen dynasty: Jaeherys I “the Conciliator” and his sister-wife Good Queen Alysanne. She cared for the smallfolk and he gave the realm its first unified set of laws, among other things. In this sense, the story of Queenscrown links this particular imagery of a golden crown with a positive view of kingship – as opposed to the imagery of the golden crown in relation to Joffrey and Viserys.

THE BURNED TOWER

There is another tower that the text relates to the Lighthouse in Oldtown. However, it is done very subtly through the imagery of a specific passage in A Clash of Kings:

Behind him the broken tower stood, its summit as jagged as a crown where fire had collapsed the upper stories long ago. As the sun moved, the shadow of the tower moved as well, gradually lengthening, a black arm reaching out for Theon Greyjoy. By the time the sun touched the wall, he was in its grasp. (ACoK, Theon VI)

The tower in question is the Broken Tower of Winterfell, also called the Burned Tower. Along with the Godswood and the Crypts, the Broken Tower is one of the most distinct landmarks of Winterfell. It was once the tallest watchtower in Winterfell but it was struck by lightning and the resultant fire cause the top to cave in.

What is so interesting above is not just the image of the tower’s ragged summit resembling a crown but also the image of the tower as a giant sundial, its shadow an arm reaching out for Theon. If we compare this image with the description of the Hightower from A Feast of Crows, you can recognize the striking imagery:

Here we have the image of the tower as a sundial again but whereas the shadow of the Broken Tower is likened to an arm, the shadow of the Hightower is like a sword.

What does the Broken Tower of Winterfell have to do with this theme of beacons, true lights and golden crowns. The Broken Tower is associated with secrets, lies and truths. It is here that Bran witnesses Cersei and Jaime Lannister having sex. Jaime pushes Bran in order to keep this secret, to maintain the lie that Cersei’s children are Robert Baratheon’s children and not born of incest.

How does this relate to image of the tower as a sundial, which is the associative point between the Hightower and the Broken Tower? The quote from Theon’s chapter comes from a passage where he is trying to bluff himself out of a looming fight with Rodrik Cassel by threatening to hang his daughter Beth. This whole passage is saturated with anxiety on Theon’s part because he feels that he cannot win. The shadow of the tower thus becomes the shadow of the sundial, counting down the time to the moment of truth. Thus, on the basis on such an associative logic, the Broken Tower becomes a symbolic locus for secrets, lies and the countdown to the moment of truth.

This is where this post crosses into the territory of tinfoil. Daenerys Targaryen has several visions in the House of the Undying in Quarth. One of them goes like this:

Glowing like sunset, a red sword was raised in the hand of a blue-eyed king who cast no shadow. A cloth dragon swayed on poles amidst a cheering crowd. From a smoking tower, a great stone beast took wing, breathing shadow fire. . . . mother of dragons, slayer of lies… (ACoK, Daenerys IV)

The imagery of this passage indicates that Dany will uncover three lies (I think that in this context “slayers of lies” doesn’t signify a literal killing). What are the lies that Dany has to uncover?

The first one most likely relates to Stannis Baratheon – the blue-eyed king with a glowing red-sword. I have previously written about how Melisandre is wrong when she identifies Stannis as Azor Ahai come again and I have also explored the idea that his glowing sword is wrong as well. Here the sword is linked with the sunset rather than the dawn. Stannis’ “Lightbringer” is a false light that leads into the night and not into the dawn. Stannis as AA reborn is the first lie that Dany has to slay.

The second lie probably relates to fAegon, the young man that Varys claims to be Rhaegar Targaryen’s son and that he has had brought up as the perfect hidden prince. Many readers suspect that fAegon is not who Varys says he is, and Dany’s vision of the cloth dragons, a mummer’s dragon as she calls it, seems to support this theory.

Then there’s the third (and final) lie: The stone beast that takes wing from a smoking tower, breathing dark flame. I think that this lie represents Jon Snow’s parentage – the stone beast represents his Targaryen heritage and the smoking tower represents the Broken Tower, also called the Burned Tower. Though the Broken Tower mainly features in Bran’s and Theon’s chapters, you could argue that Jon is indirectly present through the symbolism of the crows that live in the tower – and Jon is continually called Crow during his time with the Wildlings. Whether the Broken Tower will play a literal part in the disclosure of Jon’s true parentage remains to be seen – but it’s metaphorical connection with secrets and lies (as well as its burned status) makes it a good candidate for the smoking tower in Dany’s vision.

In the next installment I’ll taker a closer look at the imagery of the burning crown in relation to the notion of the false light.

#asoaif #meta #crowned with fire #hightower #queenscrown #the broken tower #game of thrones #a song of ice and fire

120 notes · View notes

eternaleve · 8 years ago

Text

So, if you’ve had a look at my update post, I’ve not been doing much of anything lately. I’m house-bound currently because my health has been absolutely terrible as of late. My life’s on hold yet again which is very annoying because I’ve felt like it’s been on hold since university. That’s four years ago now where my luck has been terrible. Maybe’s it’s Anita Blake cursing me.

Anyway, if you know me, you’ll know that history is my thing. In fact, it’s Tudor history. I specialised in the politics of the Henrican court and I like to sharpen my brain box from time to time.

And this little show is currently up in its entirety on Netflix.

It’s rated an 8.1 on imDB and was nominated for Golden Globe awards. It was presented as being an intimate sort of revelation of the great secrets of Henry VIII’s court, the great men and great women of his life.

And this show makes me rage as only a historian can rage. This show is a burning bag of garbage that makes me incredibly angry. Not only in terms of really bad writing choices but really terrible clothing. And that there are people who made genuine efforts to try and make this accurate and include incredibly minor details of court – only for it to be absolute rubbish.

And I’m here to pour water on this burning bag of garbage. Or another, better metaphor.

Let’s throw ourselves into ‘In Cold Blood’. Our official synopsis is ‘King Henry VIII, the young and ambitious monarch of England, prepares for war with France but is dissuaded by the diplomatic manipulation of his powerful Lord Chancellor, Cardinal Wolsey, who proposes that the King sponsor a “Treaty of Universal Peace.” The harmony of the King’s domestic affairs is threatened, however, when he discovers that Elizabeth Blount, the young and beautiful lady-in-waiting to his Queen, Katherine of Aragon, is pregnant with his child.’

That’s a lot of information for one episode and it really rattles through the stuff that people all commonly associate with the Tudors. It is also really badly written. Let’s begin.

A Nonsense Beginning

The episode doesn’t really start off too well. We’re heading straight to an Italian palace (even though ‘Italy’ as a specific location did not exist in the sixteenth century) and this is not a sixteenth century palace. This is really not. This is neo-classical in the most blatant style.

This is a sixteenth century Italian palace. Much more ornate and decorative.

Sean Pertwee gets out of a carriage and his costume is wrong in so many ways. English fashion in the sixteenth century is known for its many layers, the wide silhouette, and the use of slashing to display fabrics. Sean Pertwee’s style is very reminiscent of gentlemen at the court of Elizabeth I; slim and narrow, a style that has become highly feminised. These are not the clothes of a man from the later half of the sixteenth century, not from the beginning.

The men he’s travelling to meet are much more appropriately dressed – highly decorated doublets with long overgowns. Plus hats. You’d never be out in public without a hat at this point in time. And hello baby Aiden Turner. You’re going to be in one of my favourite TV shows of all time, and then be in Poldark with its really awful rape scene. Ups and downs there.

Anyway, Sean Pertwee gets brutally taken out by the French.

This confuses me greatly. It makes for an incredibly dramatic opening, that’s for sure, and sets up that England hates the French and that is mutual. There’s animosity between the two countries which is only news if you are not European. However, early modern politics was not a brutal affair. Well, all the time. There was that time that the Dutch cannibalised someone and people were thrown out of windows in Prague, but an English ambassador would not be stabbed to death by the French in public this way. It would be incredibly stupid because it would only cause war.

This also throws up many questions to me in terms of history. When is this meant to be set? There were varying times of war and peace between England and France, and a specific year is never given in this episode. This episode swings between 1514 and 1520, and six years is a long time in politics.

And there’s the issue that Sean Pertwee is supposed to be Henry VIII’s uncle.

Right. Okay. There’s a writing choice I can simply not get my head around. Henry VIII didn’t have any uncles, and giving him one doesn’t inform his fictional character or explain what happens. It makes no logical sense – his father was an only child and if Henry VIII’s mother had surviving brothers… then they would be king. Because her father, Edward IV would have passed the throne to them.

The Poor Choices of Henry VIII

The big selling point of this show was that it’s YOUNG Henry VIII. It’s Henry as you’ve never seen him before! He’s young, he’s sexy, he’s active, and not fat and gross. In pursuit of this, the writers made a huge mistake. They made him brash, rude, and frankly abusive to Katherine. He’s a slobbering mess in this first episode, and his characterisation is all over the place.

And his clothing is fucking terrible.

Our first introduction to Henry is that he’s dressed like an acrobat. There is nothing right with his clothing. Compare him to this image of a English man from the early part of the sixteenth century (it’s later than VAGUE 1514 TO 1520 VAGUE YEAR but at least it’s English).

English fashion is bulky and layered. There’s no way Henry would not have an overgown and his clothes are just too slim. And that crown looks like ass.

I like that Henry has the most Catholic underclothes it is possible to get. I don’t like the metallic popper buttons. Buttons were not especially widespread in clothing, with most items being tied or fitted to the body. Henry VIII did not have child-friendly popper boxer shorts with Catholic detailing.

Henry is wearing only the most fashionable in cheap and common leathers! This looks like foot soldier armour. It is not anything a nobleman in Tudor England would wear. Also Katherine’s dress is terrible, but I’ll be going into the women’s fashion in a bit.

Henry VIII is FLORAL SOFA MAN!

Who doesn’t want to do physical exercise in a full suit of leather?

Love that fisherman jumper, Henners.

Throughout this episode, Jonathan Rhys Meyer makes just the weirdest choices for his performance. Ignoring the fact that he is blatantly wrong for this role, he just does weird stuff. He’s loud and obnoxious and plays Henry as a complete idiot. And the episode ends on this image. Just Henry, his pathetic little beard, staring madly at you. Thanks, director. I needed that.

A Decorated Skirt Does Not A Period Costume Make.

I get it. Tudor women’s fashion does not appear sexy to modern audiences. You have to balance out the ‘sexy’ lead and make the women appear sexy. They do this by making the worst attempt at Tudor costumes for women I’ve ever seen.

The first female character we see is in The Corridor (c) that we see consistently over the first season. They show the vast wealth and grandness of the palace of White Hall with the same terrible brick background over and over.

For a start, her waist is too high. English fashions are conical at this time, with hemlines square and farthingales round like an ice cream cone. Her hair is also loose under what appears to be a piece of lace.

‘I have a necklace in my hair for no apparent reason. Also my hair is loose, which no grown woman at the English court would ever have. Because my hair would be really fucking long and I don’t want lice.’

Katherine of Aragon, an incredibly proud and proper queen, is just lazing around with her hair loose and a nightgown. For the record, here’s Katherine at this time –

Gable hoods and trumpet sleeves. They may not be sexy but they were at the time.

I don’t know I don’t even. This screams 17th Dutch more than anything else with the huge white collar and huge great big stomacher. This is especially egregious as this is Thomas More’s wife and there’s an incredibly famous portrait of her. She should have a hood on, great big trumpet sleeves, and no huge white weird collar that is attached to her dress and not the shirt underneath which appears to also be a dress.

This dress has some huge great big puffy sleeves are are hideous. They also don’t come into English fashion for another fifteen years. The attempt at a French hood is also… weird. For a start, they’re not around at the English court from this point for about ten or so years (depending on whatever vague year this is), and what the hell? What is with all this loose hair? She’s got beautiful flowing locks that do not work with a French hood.

That’s how a French hood works. Your hair is covered because all women pretty much had their hair covered in public at this point in time and you don’t want nits. Long loose flowing hair? THAT’S HOW YOU GET NITS.

I don’t even with this. Not only is her dress terrible, with an overgown that wouldn’t be introduced to the 1550s, but what is even with that headdress? What is it meant to be? You can’t just glue fake pearls to something and call it a headdress.

So, left dress: fine, I guess, as a common gown for when you’re at home not seeing anyone. I don’t like the bustle thing at the back. It could be a bumroll, but her skirtline would be much higher and if you’re relaxed at home without a farthingale, why would you have a bumroll?

Right dress; whaaaaaattttt. That’s very Italian. The lose, low sleeves are continental and the bust line, shoulders, and curled hair make me think of Stuart/Restoration fashion, not 1510s/1520s. And that’s not even getting into whatever the bodice is. It’s a bodice for a dress, not a front-opening bra.

Everyone’s Evil Henny

Fashion aside, the point of this episode is that Henry is stupid and everyone around him is evil. No matter where he goes, from fucking (there are far more sex scenes in this episode than necessary), to playing tennis, or to the daily joust, there is someone being evil and making use of how lazy and stupid Henry is to get across their evil doing. FYI, Henry VIII was an incredibly intelligent and busy man. He did not just spend his time at the apparently daily joust.

The Duke of Buckingham is evil and planning a rebellion. He also actually looks like Henry VIII and did not launch open rebellion in real life. He wears all black throughout the show so we know he’s definitely evil.

Cardinal Wolsey is also evil because he wants peace (boo!) and is pro-French (boo!). He’s conducting what appears to be the Treaty of London, but that was 1518 and there’s stuff that takes place in varying years. Pick a date, guys. Pick a date and stick to it. He beats a guy up. It’s weird.

Thomas Boleyn is introduced and because he’s actually wearing the right clothing out of all the characters, you can tell he’s evil. Because, yeah, I love that cheap idea that terrible fiction authors peddle that the Boleyns were evil schemers working their way to the top that flies in the face of just about all knowledge of political power in the period.

Random Oddness

Why is there straw just thrown around this floor? I saw extras struggling and just kicking it into the air. It’s weird. This is the grandest palace in England. I have no idea why there’s straw everywhere.

Look at Henry mangle this pomegranate. For symbolism. And because he’s a big gross child.

Unpicking the Tudors; S1 EP1 So, if you've had a look at my update post, I've not been doing much of anything lately.

#clothing #dottie #early modern period #english history #fashion #henry viii #history #review #the tudors #tudor england

1 note · View note

mst3kproject · 8 years ago

Photo

212: Godzilla vs Megalon

The Godzilla franchise has been around a long time, and has produced some classic films. The original Godzilla: King of the Monsters was a metaphorical meditation on the monstrous acts of World War II, and the recent Godzilla Resurgence is a critique of government impotence in the face of disaster. The average MSTie, however, is much more interested in the ridiculous than the sublime, and Godzilla has given us plenty of that, too. There's Godzilla vs Biollante, in which the monster's main foe is a mutant, sentient rose bush (seriously). There's Godzilla vs the Smog Monster, in which Godzilla learned to fly using his atomic breath as a rocket (again, seriously). There's Godzilla: Final Wars, which features fish aliens and the Japanese X-Men. And we cannot possibly forget Godzilla vs Megalon.

It's impossible to describe the plot of one of these movies briefly, not without leaving out a lot of what makes them so bizarre and entertaining, so this will take several paragraphs. An unnamed country (you can't call out the USA when they're the main foreign market for your movies) has set off one too many nuclear bomb tests, and pissed off the Seatopians. Like Atlantis, the continent of Seatopia sank into the ocean long ago, and the cling-wrapped inhabitants have lived peacefully on the bottom ever since. Now, however, they've decided they can no longer allow the surface people to threaten them with our atomic nonsense. They're sending Megalon, a giant cockroach with drills for arms, to lay waste to the Earth!

You probably think that sounds absurd. Well, hold on to your tightie-whities, I'm not half done.

Being a roach, Megalon is very tough but also extremely stupid, and the Seatopians don't trust him to find the world's major cities on his own. He needs a seeing-eye robot to show him the way. The people of Seatopia (there seem to be about nine of them) can't be bothered to build such a robot themselves, so they steal one from a couple of Japanese guys whose names I never caught. These appear to be a gay couple raising their adopted son in a self-consciously futuristic house, and their robot Jet Jaguar looks kind of like a mechanical Christmas elf designed by a six-year-old Power Rangers fan. Jet Jaguar can fly, however, and apparently has GPS, so it'll do the job just fine.

After a few shenaningans and one of the worst car chases ever committed to screen (the Rex Dart: Eskimo Spy! montage is actually better-edited and has more suspenseful music), our funkadelic heroes manage to steal their robot back. The Japanese military has sent their best footage from previous Godzilla movies against Megalon, but it doesn't do any more good than it did in the films they borrowed it from. Since everybody knows that the only way to destroy a giant rubber monster is with another giant rubber monster, the main characters send Jet Jaguar to Monster Island to get Godzilla.

Meanwhile, the now leaderless Megalon has begun just stomping on random things – Godzilla will never arrive in time to prevent more people from dying! Fortunately, in the midst of all these goings-on, Jet Jaguar has developed sentience. With Godzilla on the way, the robot reprograms itself to grow to gigantic size, thus making it a match for the monster. The Seatopians counter with a bonus monster of their own, borrowing Gigan from another previous installment in the series, and no less than four giants are now duking it out in the Japanese countryside while the humans look on in amazement!

Godzilla vs Megalon is kind of the Gamera vs Guiron of the Godzilla movies. It's terrible, and nothing in it makes the slightest bit of sense, and yet you can't help being entertained by it. Everything that happens is colourful and fun, even when cities are being destroyed, and some of the miniatures are actually reasonably convincing. The scene in which Megalon breaks a dam and threatens a truck where two of the heroes are being held prisoner actually looks pretty good. Like Gamera vs Guiron, the whole thing feels like a game being played by enthusiastic children trying to one-up one another, very much as Crow and Tom Servo do in their 'invent a monster' competition.

In the eyes of a six-year-old boy, living with your uncle who builds robots and his best friend the racecar driver would sound way cooler than having your Mom around telling you to pick up your toys (and a child of that age in 1973 would probably have no idea what the relationship between the two men actually is). Jet Jaguar, and his inventor's 'futuristic' home, look like things children would come up with, and the whole Easter Island aside (which never really comes to anything) could have been thrown in by a kid who is vaguely aware that the place figures in a lot of ancient aliens theories but doesn't know anything about the people who actually live there.

The monster fights also seem very childish, at times even cartoony: Jet Jaguar spins in place until he drills himself into the ground, for example, and a moment later Godzilla takes a running start and flies through the air to deliver a kick to Megalon's belly. Different Godzilla movies have different takes on how much personality the creatures have – Godzilla vs Megalon makes them quite anthropomorphic. None of the monsters actually talk, but it almost wouldn't feel out of place if they did. Their body language and interactions suggest very human thoughts and motivations. Megalon and Gigan gang up on Jet Jaguar like bullies picking on a smaller child in the schoolyard, and Godzilla comes to the robot's rescue like a best friend. Gigan threatens to rip Jet Jaguar's head off if Godzilla comes any closer, so Godzilla must figure out how to beat the other monster from a distance. These are not the actions of animals, but they are actions children might attribute to their imaginary creations.

Is the feeling of a child's game an intentional part of the movie, as I believe it was in Gamera vs Guiron? Probably – there's at least one thing in Godzilla vs Megalon that was very definitely designed by a child, and that's the robot, Jet Jaguar. Toho had held a contest for kids to come up with a new kaiju character, and Jet Jaguar was the winning entry. Originally, Godzilla wasn't even supposed to be in the film, but the studio chickened out and put him and Gigan in the mix when they got worried that nobody would go see Jet Jaguar vs Megalon. Godzilla vs Megalon would have been a child's adventure story with or without Godzilla, and so it makes sense that the rest of it should fit the childish aesthetic of Jet Jaguar.

Godzilla films are never very subtle about their messages, and this one is no exception: its intentional theme is the idea that nuclear weapons are dangerous and will ultimately destroy us if not handled properly – an idea it seems almost everybody can agree on and yet not one that makes for very good movies (remember Superman IV: the Quest for Peace?). Here, the anti-nuke message is muddled by several storytelling decisions, most notably the very inclusion of Godzilla himself.

In any incarnation, Godzilla always at least starts out as an embodiement of nuclear destruction. In Godzilla: King of the Monsters he was a metaphor for the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In the stupid 1998 Americanization he was a nuclear test that got out of its makers' control. In Godzilla Resurgence he is implied to have arisen from the fallout of Fukushima. The idea of casting him in the role of guardian rather than destroyer thus becomes very strange when you think about it for a while, especially considering that he is a product of the imagination of only country ever actually nuked. I'm sure this is never what the writers had in mind, but it always seems as if movies in which Godzilla saves the Earth are telling us that bombing the fuck out of them will be an effective defense against alien invasions.

This gets even weirder when Godzilla's own innate symbolism is juxtaposed with the Seatopians. Seatopia is a country not unlike pre-Meiji Japan, in that it has placed itself in self-imposed isolation. These undersea people have been contentedly ignoring their neighbours for the past three million years until we started making an unavoidable nuisance of ourselves. They have a legitimate grievance and one that would find a great deal of sympathy among surface-dwellers, including our main characters – and yet they are never anything but the explicit villains of the film. What's more, their own superweapon, Megalon, is defeated by Godzilla, the living atom bomb! This is entirely at odds with the stated message of the film: it seems to say that actually, nuclear weapons are awesome, and will be used against anybody who tries to protest them! I don't think the writers thought that one through.

The Seatopians' own actions don't make a whole lot of sense, either. Japan does not build or test nuclear weapons – instead, the Japanese have embraced peaceful uses of nuclear power like almost no other nation on Earth. Why, then, should the Seatopians send Megalon to Japan? Were they aiming for the Soviet Union but got lost? Do they simply believe all the surface humans must go regardless of who has actually been setting off the fireworks? By all rights, this movie should have ended with the anti-nuclear surface-dwellers coming to an agreement with the Seatopians and working towards disarmament, but instead the idea of talking to these people and finding out what they want never occurs to anybody.

Needless to say, this is not a film that stands up to much analysis. It is much better enjoyed at a purely surface level, as eighty-one minutes of colourful, ridiculous fun for children – and on that level, I enjoy it very much.

#mst3k #reviews #godzilla vs megalon #70s #giant arthropod hours #magic voice recommends #tobor is robot spelled backwards

20 notes · View notes

ciathyzareposts · 5 years ago

Text

Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers

Fair warning: spoilers for Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers are to be found herein!

In 1989, a twenty-something professional computer programmer and frustrated horror novelist named Jane Jensen had a close encounter with King’s Quest IV that changed her life. She was so inspired by the experience of playing her first adventure game that she decided to apply for a job with Sierra Online, the company that had made it. In fact, she badgered them relentlessly until they finally hired her as a jack-of-all-trades writer in 1990.

Two and a half years later, after working her way up from writing manuals and incidental in-game dialog to co-designing the first EcoQuest game with Gano Haine and the sixth King’s Quest game with Roberta Williams, she had proved herself sufficiently in the eyes of her managers to be given a glorious opportunity: the chance to make her very own game on her own terms. It really was a once-in-a-lifetime proposition; she was to be given carte blanche by the biggest adventure developer in the industry at the height of the genre’s popularity to make exactly the game she wanted to make. Small wonder that she would so often look back upon it wistfully in later years, after the glory days of adventures games had become a distant memory.

For her big chance, Jensen proposed making a Gothic horror game unlike anything Sierra had attempted before, with a brooding and psychologically complex hero, a detailed real-world setting, and a complicated plot dripping with the lore of the occult. Interestingly, Jensen remembers her superiors being less than thrilled with the new direction. She says that Ken Williams in particular was highly skeptical of the project’s commercial viability: “Okay, I’ll let you do it, but I wish you’d come up with something happier!”

But even if Jensen’s recollections are correct, we can safely say that Sierra’s opinion changed over the year it took to make Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers. By the time it shipped on November 24, 1993, it fit in very well with a new direction being trumpeted by Ken Williams in his editorials for the company’s newsletter: a concerted focus on more “adult,” sophisticated fictions, as exemplified not only by Sins of the Fathers but by a “gritty” new Police Quest game and another, more lurid horror game which Roberta Williams had in the works. Although the older, more lighthearted and ramshackle [this, that, and the other] Quest series which had made Sierra’s name in adventure games would continue to appear for a while longer, Williams clearly saw these newer concepts as the key to a mass market he was desperately trying to unlock. Games like these were, theoretically anyway, able to appeal to demographics outside the industry’s traditional customers — to appeal to the sort of people who had hitherto preferred an evening in front of a television to one spent in front of a monitor.

Thus Sierra put a lot of resources into Sins of the Fathers‘s presentation and promotion. For example, the box became one of the last standout packages in an industry moving inexorably toward standardization on that front; in lieu of anything so dull as a rectangle, it took the shape of two mismatched but somehow conjoined triangles. Sierra even went so far as to hire Tim Curry of Rocky Horror Picture Show fame, Mark Hamill of Star Wars, and Michael Dorn of Star Trek: The Next Generation for the CD-ROM version’s voice-acting cast.

Jane Jensen with the first Gabriel Knight project’s producer and soundtrack composer Bob Holmes, who would later become her husband, and the actor Tim Curry, who provided the voice of Gabriel using a thick faux-New Orleans accent which some players judge hammy, others charming.

In the long run, the much-discussed union of Silicon Valley and Hollywood that led studios like Sierra to cast such high-profile names at considerable expense would never come to pass. In the meantime, though, the game arrived at a more modestly propitious cultural moment. Anne Rice’s Gothic vampire novels, whose tonal similarities to Sins of the Fathers were hard to miss even before Jensen began to cite them as an inspiration in interviews, were all over the bestseller lists, and Tom Cruise was soon to star in a major motion picture drawn from the first of them. Even in the broader world of games around Sierra, the influence of Rice and Gothic horror more generally was starting to make itself felt. On the tabletop, White Wolf’s Vampire: The Masquerade was exploding in popularity just as Dungeons & Dragons was falling on comparatively hard times; the early 1990s would go down in tabletop history as the only time when a rival system seriously challenged Dungeons & Dragons‘s absolute supremacy. And then there was the world of music, where dark and slinky albums from bands like the Cure and Massive Attack were selling in the millions.

Suffice to say, then, that “goth” culture in general was having a moment, and Sins of the Fathers was perfectly poised to capitalize on it. The times were certainly a far cry from just half a decade before, when Amy Briggs had proposed an Anne Rice-like horror game to her bosses at Infocom, only to be greeted with complete incomprehension.

Catching the zeitgeist paid off: Sins of the Fathers proved, if not quite the bridge to the Hollywood mainstream Ken Williams might have been longing for, one of Sierra’s most popular adventures games of its time. An unusual number of its fans were female, a demographic oddity it had in common with all of the other Gothic pop culture I’ve just mentioned. These female fans in particular seemed to get something from the game’s brooding bad-boy hero that they perhaps hadn’t realized they’d been missing. While games that used sex as a selling point were hardly unheard of in 1993, Sins of the Fathers stood out in a sea of Leisure Suit Larry and Spellcasting games for its orientation toward the female rather than the male gaze. In this respect as well, its arrival was perfectly timed, coming just as relatively more women and girls were beginning to use computers, thanks to the hype over multimedia computing that was fueling a boom in their sales.

But there was more to Sins of the Father‘s success than its arrival at an opportune moment. On the contrary: the game’s popularity has proved remarkably enduring over the decades since its release. It spawned two sequels later in the 1990s that are almost as adored as the first game, and still places regularly at or near the top of lists of “best adventure games of all time.” Then, too, it’s received an unusual amount of academic attention for a point-and-click graphic adventure in the traditional style (a genre which, lacking both the literary bona fides of textual interactive fiction and the innate ludological interest of more process-intensive genres, normally tends to get short shrift in such circles). You don’t have to search long in the academic literature to find painfully earnest grad-student essays contrasting the “numinous woman” Roberta Williams with the “millennium woman” Jane Jensen, or “exploring Gabriel as a particular instance of the Hero archetype.”

So, as a hit in its day and a hit still today with both the fans and the academics, Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers must be a pretty amazing game, right? Well… sure, in the eyes of some. For my own part, I see a lot of incongruities, not only in the game itself but in the ways it’s been received over the years. It strikes me as having been given the benefit of an awful lot of doubts, perhaps simply because there have been so very few games like it. Sins of the Fathers unquestionably represents a noble effort to stretch its medium. But is it truly a great game? And does its story really, as Sierra’s breathless press release put it back in the day, “rival the best film scripts?” Those are more complicated questions.

But before I begin to address them, we should have a look at what the game is all about, for those of you who haven’t yet had the pleasure of Gabriel Knights’s acquaintance.

Our titular hero, then, is a love-em-and-leave-em bachelor who looks a bit like James Dean and comes complete with a motorcycle, a leather jacket, and the requisite sensitive side concealed underneath his rough exterior. He lives in the backroom of the bookshop he owns in New Orleans, from which he churns out pulpy horror novels to supplement his paltry income. Grace Nakamura, a pert university student on her summer holidays, works at the bookshop as well, and also serves as Gabriel’s research assistant and verbal sparring partner, a role which comes complete with oodles of sexual tension.

Gabriel’s bedroom. What woman wouldn’t be excited to be brought back here?

Over the course of the game, Gabriel stumbles unto a centuries-old voodoo cult which has a special motivation to make him their latest human sacrifice. While he’s at it, he also falls into bed with the comely Malia, the somewhat reluctant leader of the cult. He learns amidst it all that not just voodoo spirits but many other things that go bump in the night — werewolves, vampires, etc. — are in fact real. And he learns that he’s inherited the mantle of Schattenjäger — “Shadow Hunter” — from his forefathers, and that his family’s legacy as battlers of evil stretches back to Medieval Germany. (The symbolism of his name is, as Jensen herself admits, not terribly subtle: “Gabriel” was the angel who battled Lucifer in Paradise Lost, while “Knight” means that he’s, well, a knight, at least in the metaphorical sense.) After ten days jam-packed with activity, which take him not only all around New Orleans but to Germany and Benin as well — Sins of the Fathers is a very generous game indeed in terms of length — Gabriel must choose between his love for Malia and his new role of Schattenjäger. Grace is around throughout: to serve as the good-girl contrast to the sultry Malia (again, the symbolism of her name isn’t subtle), to provide banter and research, and to pull Gabriel’s ass bodily out of the fire at least once. If Gabriel makes the right choice at the end of the game, the two forge a tentative partnership to continue the struggle against darkness even as they also continue to deny their true feelings for one another.

As we delve into what the game does well and poorly amidst all this, it strikes me as useful to break the whole edifice down along the classic divide of its interactivity versus its fiction. (If you’re feeling academic, you can refer to this dichotomy as its ludological versus its narratological components; if you’re feeling folksy, you can call it its crossword versus its narrative.) Even many of the game’s biggest fans will admit that the first item in the pairing has its problematic aspects. So, perhaps we should start there rather than diving straight into some really controversial areas. That said, be warned that the two things are hard to entirely separate from one another; Sins of the Fathers works best when the two are in harmony, while many of its problems come to the fore when the two begin to clash.

Let’s begin, though, with the things Sins of the Fathers gets right in terms of design. While I don’t know that it is, strictly speaking, impossible to lock yourself out of victory while still being able to play on, you certainly would have to be either quite negligent or quite determined to manage it at any stage before the endgame. This alone shows welcome progress for Sierra — shows that the design revolution wrought by LucasArts’s The Secret of Monkey Island was finally penetrating even this most stalwart redoubt of the old, bad way of making adventure games.

Snarking aside, we shouldn’t dismiss Jensen’s achievement here; it’s not easy to make such an intricately plot-driven game so forgiving. The best weapon in her arsenal is the use of an event-driven rather than a clock-driven timetable for advancing the plot. Each of the ten days has a set of tasks you must accomplish before the day ends, although you aren’t explicitly told what they are. You have an infinite amount of clock time to accomplish these things at your own pace. When you eventually do so — and even sometimes when you accomplish intermediate things inside each day — the plot machinery lurches forward another step or two via an expository cut scene and the interactive world around you changes to reflect it. Sins of the Fathers was by no means the first game to employ such a system; as far as I know, that honor should go to Infocom’s 1986 text adventure Ballyhoo. Yet this game uses it to better effect than just about any game that came before it. In fact, the game as a whole is really made tenable only by this technique of making the plot respond to the player’s actions rather than forcing the player to race along at the plot’s pace; the latter would be an unimaginable nightmare to grapple with in a story with this many moving parts. When it works well, which is a fair amount of the time, the plot progression feels natural and organic, like you truly are in the grip of a naturally unfolding story.

The individual puzzles that live within this framework work best when they’re in harmony with the plot and free of typical adventure-game goofiness. A good example is the multi-layered puzzle involving the Haitian rada drummers whom you keep seeing around New Orleans. Eventually, a victim of the voodoo cult tells you just before he breathes his last that the drummers are the cult’s means of communicating with one another across the city. So, you ask Grace to research the topic of rada drums. Next day, she produces a book on the subject filled with sequences encoding various words and phrases. When you “use” this book on one of the drummers, it brings up a sort of worksheet which you can use to figure out what he’s transmitting. Get it right, and you learn that a conclave is to be held that very night in a swamp outside the city.

Working out a rada-drum message.

This is an ideal puzzle: complicated but not insurmountable, immensely satisfying to solve. Best of all, solving it really does make you feel like Gabriel Knight, on the trail of a mystery which you must unravel using your own wits and whatever information you can dig up from the resources at your disposal.

Unfortunately, not all or even most of the puzzles live up to that standard. A handful are simply bad puzzles, full stop, testimonies both to the fact that every puzzle is always harder than its designer thinks it is and to Sierra’s disinterest in seeking substantive feedback on its games from actual players before releasing them. For instance, there’s the clock/lock that expects you to intuit the correct combination of rotating face and hands from a few scattered, tangential references elsewhere in the game to the number three and to dragons.

Even the rather brilliant rada-drums bit goes badly off the rails at the end of the game, when you’re suddenly expected to use a handy set of the drums to send a message of your own. This requires that you first read Jane Jensen’s mind to figure out what general message out of the dozens of possibilities she wants you to send, then read her mind again to figure out the exact grammar she wants you to use. When you get it wrong, as you inevitably will many times, the game gives you no feedback whatsoever. Are you doing the wrong thing entirely? Do you have the right idea but are sending the wrong message? Or do you just need to change up your grammar a bit? The game isn’t telling; it’s too busy killing you on every third failed attempt.

Other annoyances are the product not so much of poor puzzle as poor interface design. In contrast to contemporaneous efforts from competitors like LucasArts and Legend Entertainment, Sierra games made during this period still don’t show hot spots ripe for interaction when you mouse over a scene. So, you’re forced to click on everything indiscriminately, which most of the time leads only to the narrator intoning the same general room description over and over in her languid Caribbean patois. The scenes themselves are well-drawn, but their muted colors, combined with their relatively low resolution and the lack of a hot-spot finder, constitute something of a perfect storm for that greatest bane of the graphic adventure, the pixel hunt. One particularly egregious example of the syndrome, a snake scale you need to find at a crime scene on a beach next to Lake Pontchartrain, has become notorious as an impediment that stops absolutely every player in her tracks. It reveals the dark flip side of the game’s approach to plot chronology: that sinking feeling when the day just won’t end and you don’t know why. In this case, it’s because you missed a handful of slightly discolored pixels surrounded by a mass of similar hues — or, even if you did notice them, because you failed to click on them exactly.

You have to click right where the cursor is to learn from the narrator that “the grass has a matted appearance there.” Break out the magnifying glass!

But failings like these aren’t ultimately the most interesting to talk about, just because they were so typical and so correctable, had Sierra just instituted a set of commonsense practices that would have allowed them to make better games. Much more interesting are the places that the interactivity of Sins of the Fathers clashes jarringly with the premise of its fiction. For it’s here, we might speculate, that the game is running into more intractable problems — perhaps even running headlong into the formal limitation of the traditional graphic adventure as a storytelling medium.

Take, for example, the point early in the game when Gabriel wants to pay a visit to Malia at her palatial mansion, but, as a mere civilian, can’t get past the butler. Luckily, he happens to have a pal at the police department — in fact, his best friend in the whole world, an old college buddy named Mosley. Does he explain his dilemma to Mosley and ask for help? Of course not! This is, after all, an adventure game. He decides instead to steal Mosley’s badge. When he pays the poor fellow a visit at his office, he sees that Mosley’s badge is pinned, as usual, to his jacket. So, Gabriel sneaks over to turn up the thermostat in the office, which causes Mosley to remove the jacket and hang it over the back of his chair. Then Gabriel asks him to fetch a cup of coffee, and completes the theft while he’s out of the room. With friends like that…

Gabriel is turned away from Malia’s door…

…but no worries, he can just figure out how to steal a badge from his best friend and get inside that way.

In strictly mechanical terms, this is actually a clever puzzle, but it illustrates the tonal and thematic inconsistencies that dog the game as a whole. Sadly, puzzles like the one involving the rada drums are the exception rather than the rule. Most of the time, you’re dealing instead with arbitrary roadblocks like this one that have nothing whatsoever to do with the mystery you’re trying to solve. It becomes painfully obvious that Jensen wrote out a static story outline suitable for a movie or novel, then went back to devise the disconnected puzzles that would make a game out of it.

But puzzles like this are not only irrelevant: they’re deeply, comprehensively silly, and this silliness flies in the face of Sins of the Fathers‘s billing as a more serious, character-driven sort of experience than anything Sierra had done to date. Really, how can anyone take a character who goes around doing stuff like this seriously? You can do so, I would submit, only by mentally bifurcating the Gabriel you control in the interactive sequences from the Gabriel of the cut scenes and conversations. That may work for some — it must, given the love that’s lavished on this game by so many adventure fans — but the end result nevertheless remains creatively compromised, two halves of a work of art actively pulling against one another.

Gabriel sneaks into the backroom of a church and starts stealing from the priests. That’s normal behavior for any moodily romantic protagonist, right? Right?

It’s at points of tension like these that Sins of the Fathers raises the most interesting and perhaps troubling questions about the graphic adventure as a genre. Many of its puzzles are, as I already noted, not bad puzzles in themselves; they’re only problematic when placed in this fictional context. If Sins of the Fathers was a comedy, they’d be a perfectly natural fit. This is what I mean when I say, as I have repeatedly in the past, that comedy exerts a strong centrifugal pull on any traditional puzzle-solving adventure game. And this is why most of Sierra’s games prior to Sins of the Fathers were more or less interactive cartoons, why LucasArts strayed afield from that comfortable approach even less often than Sierra, and, indeed, why comedies have been so dominant in the annals of adventure games in general.

The question must be, then, whether the pull of comedy can be resisted — whether compromised hybrids like this one are the necessary end result of trying to make a serious graphic adventure. In short, is the path of least resistance the only viable path for an adventure designer?

For my part, I believe the genre’s tendency to collapse into comedy can be resisted, if the designer is both knowing and careful. The Lost Files of Sherlock Holmes, released the year before Sins of the Fathers, is a less heralded game than the one I write about today, but one which works better as a whole in my opinion, largely because it sticks to its guns and remains the type of fiction it advertises itself to be, eschewing goofy roadblock puzzles in favor of letting you solve the mystery at its heart. By contrast, you don’t really solve the mystery for yourself at all in Sins of the Fathers; it solves the mystery for you while you’re jumping Gabriel through all the irrelevant hoops it sets in his path.

But let’s try to set those issues aside now and engage with Sins of the Fathers strictly in terms of the fiction that lives outside the lines of its interactivity. As many of you doubtless know, I’m normally somewhat loathe to do that; it verges on a tautology to say that interactivity is the defining feature of games, and thus it seems to me that any given game’s interactivity has to work, without any qualifiers, as a necessary precondition to its being a good game. Still, if any game might be able to sneak around that rule, it ought to be this one, so often heralded as a foremost exemplar of sophisticated storytelling in a ludic context. And, indeed, it does fare better on this front in my eyes — not quite as well as some of its biggest fans claim, but better.

The first real scene of Sins of the Fathers tells us we’re in for an unusual adventure-game experience, with unusual ambitions in terms of character and plot development alike. We meet Gabriel and Grace in medias res, as the former stumbles out of his backroom bedroom to meet the latter already at her post behind the cash register in the bookstore. Over the next couple of minutes, we learn much about them as people through their banter — and, tellingly, pretty much nothing about what the real plot of the game will come to entail. This is Bilbo holding his long-expected party, Wart going out to make hay; Jane Jensen is settling in to work the long game.

https://www.filfre.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/GK.mp4

As Jensen slowly pulls back the curtain on what the game is really all about over the hours that follow, she takes Gabriel through that greatest rarity in interactive storytelling, a genuine internal character arc. The Gabriel at the end of the game, in other words, is not the one we met at the beginning, and for once the difference isn’t down to his hit points or armor class. If we can complain that we’re mostly relegated to solving goofy puzzles while said character arc plays out in the cut scenes, we can also acknowledge how remarkable it is for existing at all.

Jensen is a talented writer with a particular affinity for just the sort of snappy but revealing dialog that marks that first scene of the game. If anything, she’s better at writing these sorts of low-key “hang-out” moments than the scenes of epic confrontation. It’s refreshing to see a game with such a sense of ease about its smaller moments, given that the talents and interests of most game writers tend to run in just the opposite direction.

Then, too, Jensen has an intuitive understanding of the rhythm of effective horror. As any master of the form from Stephen King to the Duffer Brothers will happily tell you if you ask them, you can’t assault your audience with wall-to-wall terror. Good horror is rather about tension and release — the horrific crescendos fading into moments of calm and even levity, during which the audience has a chance to catch its collective breath and the knots in their stomachs have a chance to un-clench. Certainly we have to learn to know and like a story’s characters before we can feel vicarious horror at their being placed in harm’s way. Jensen understands all these things, as do the people working with her.

Indeed, the production values of Sins of the Fathers are uniformly excellent in the context of its times. The moody art perfectly complements the story Jensen has scripted, and the voice-acting cast — both the big names who head it and the smaller ones who fill out the rest of the roles — are, with only one or two exceptions, solid. The music, which was provided by the project’s producer Robert Holmes — he began dating Jensen while the game was in production, and later became her husband and constant creative partner — is catchy, memorable, and very good at setting the mood, if perhaps not hugely New Orleans in flavor. (More on that issue momentarily.)

Still, there are some significant issues with Sins of the Fathers even when it’s being judged purely as we might a work of static fiction. Many of these become apparent only gradually over time — this is definitely a game that puts its best foot forward first — but at least one of them is front and center from the very first scene. To say that much of Gabriel’s treatment of Grace hasn’t aged well hardly begins to state the case. Their scenes together often play like a public-service video from the #MeToo movement, as Gabriel sexually harasses his employee like Donald Trump with a fresh bottle of Viagra in his back pocket. Of course, Jensen really intends for Gabriel to be another instance of the archetypal charming rogue — see Solo, Han, and Jones, Indiana — and sometimes she manages to pull it off. At far too many others, though, the writing gets a little sideways, and the charming rogue veers into straight-up jerk territory. The fact that Grace is written as a smart, tough-minded young woman who can give as good as she gets doesn’t make him seem like any less of a sleazy creep, more Leisure Suit Larry than James Dean.

I’m puzzled and just a little bemused that so many academic writers who’ve taken it upon themselves to analyze the game from an explicitly feminist perspective can ignore this aspect of it entirely. I can’t help but suspect that, were Sins of the Fathers the product of a male designer, the critical dialog that surrounds it would be markedly different in some respects. I’ll leave it to you to decide whether this double standard is justified or not in light of our culture’s long history of gender inequality.

As the game continues, the writing starts to wear thin in other ways. Gabriel’s supposed torrid love affair with Malia is, to say the least, unconvincing, with none of the naturalism that marks the best of his interactions with Grace. Instead it’s in the lazy mold of too many formulaic mass-media fictions, where two attractive people fall madly in love for no discernible reason that we can identify. The writer simply tells us that they do so, by way of justifying an obligatory sex scene or two. Here, though, we don’t even get the sex scene.

Pacing also starts to become a significant problem as the game wears on. Admittedly, this is not always so much because the writer in Jane Jensen isn’t aware of its importance to effective horror as because pacing in general is just so darn difficult to control in any interactive work, especially one filled with road-blocking puzzles like this one. Even if we cut Jensen some slack on this front, however, sequences like Gabriel’s visit to Tulane University, where he’s subjected to a long non-interactive lecture that might as well be entitled “Everything Jane Jensen Learned about Voodoo but Can’t Shoehorn in Anywhere Else,” are evidence of a still fairly inexperienced writer who doesn’t have a complete handle on this essential element of storytelling and doesn’t have anyone looking over her shoulder to edit her work. She’s done her research, but hasn’t mastered the Zen-like art of letting it subtly inform her story and setting. Instead she infodumps it all over us in about the most unimaginative way you can conceive: in the form of a literal classroom lecture.

Gabriel with Professor Infodump.

The game’s depiction of New Orleans itself reveals some of the same weaknesses. Yes, Jensen gets the landmarks and the basic geography right. But I have to say, speaking as someone who loves the city dearly and has spent a fair amount of time there over the years, that the setting of the game never really feels like New Orleans. What’s missing most of all, I think, is any affinity for the music that so informs daily life in the city, giving the streets a (literal) rhythm unlike anywhere else on earth. (Robert Holmes’s soundtrack is fine and evocative in its own right; it’s just not a New Orleans soundtrack.) I was thus unsurprised to learn that Jensen never actually visited New Orleans before writing and publishing a game set there. Tellingly, her depiction has more to do with the idiosyncratic, Gothic New Orleans found in Anne Rice novels than it does with the city I know.

The plotting too gets more wobbly as time goes on. A linchpin moment comes right at the mid-point of the ten days, when Gabriel makes an ill-advised visit to one of the cult’s conclaves — in fact, the one he located via the afore-described rada-drums puzzle — and nearly gets himself killed. Somehow Grace, of all people, swoops in to rescue him; I still have no idea precisely what is supposed to have happened here, and neither, judging at least from the fan sites I’ve consulted, does anyone else. I suspect that something got cut here out of budget concerns, so perhaps it’s unfair to place this massive non sequitur at the heart of the game squarely on Jensen’s shoulders.

But other problems with the plotting aren’t as easy to find excuses for. There is, for example, the way that Gabriel can fly from New Orleans to Munich and still have hours of daylight at his disposal when he arrives on the same day. (I could dismiss this as a mere hole in Jensen’s research, the product of an American designer unfamiliar with international travel, if she hadn’t spent almost a year living in Germany prior to coming to Sierra.) In fact, the entirety of Gabriel’s whirlwind trip from the United States to Germany to Benin and back home again feels incomplete and a little half-baked, from its cartoonish German castle, which resembles a piece of discarded art from a King’s Quest game, to its tedious maze inside an uninteresting African burial mound that likewise could have been found in any of a thousand other adventure games. Jensen would have done better to keep the action in New Orleans rather than suddenly trying to turn the game into a globetrotting adventure at the eleventh hour, destroying its narrative cohesion in the process.

Suddenly we’re in… Africa? How the hell did that happen?

As in a lot of fictions of this nature, the mysteries at the heart of Sins of the Fathers are also most enticing in the game’s earlier stages than they have become by its end. To her credit, Jensen knows exactly what truths lie behind all of the mysteries and deceptions, and she’s willing to show them to us; Sins of the Fathers does have a payoff. Nevertheless, it’s all starting to feel a little banal by the time we arrive at the big climax inside the voodoo cult’s antiseptic high-tech headquarters. It’s easier to be scared of shadowy spirits of evil from the distant past than it is of voodoo bureaucrats flashing their key cards in a complex that smacks of a Bond villain’s secret hideaway.

The tribal art on the wall lets you know this is a voodoo cult’s headquarters. Somehow I never expected elevators and florescent lighting in such a place…

Many of you — especially those of you who count yourselves big fans of Sins of the Fathers — are doubtless saying by now that I’m being much, much too hard on it. And you have a point; I am holding this game’s fiction to a higher standard than I do that of most adventure games. In a sense, though, the game’s very conception of itself makes it hard for a critic to avoid doing so. It so clearly wants to be a more subtle, more narratively and thematically rich, more “adult” adventure game that I feel forced to take it at its word and hold it to that higher standard. One could say, then, that the game becomes a victim of its own towering ambitions. Certainly all my niggling criticisms shouldn’t obscure the fact that, for all that its reach does often exceed its grasp, it’s brave of the game to stretch itself so far at all.

That said, I can’t help but continue to see Sins of the Fathers more as a noble failure than a masterpiece, and I can’t keep myself from placing much of the blame at the feet of Sierra rather than Jane Jensen per se. I played it most recently with my wife, as I do many of the games I write about here. She brings a valuable perspective because she’s much, much smarter than I am but couldn’t care less about where, when, or whom the games we play came from; they’re strictly entertainments for her. At some point in the midst of playing Sins of the Fathers, she turned to me and remarked, “This would probably have been a really good game if it had been made by that other company.”

I could tell I was going to have to dig a bit to ferret out her meaning: “What other company?”

“You know, the one that made that time-travel game we played with the really nerdy guy and that twitchy girl, and the one about the dog and the bunny. I think they would have made sure everything just… worked better. You know, fixed all of the really irritating stuff, and made sure we didn’t have to look at a walkthrough all the time.”

That “other company” was, of course, LucasArts.

One part of Sins of the Fathers in particular reminds me of the differences between the two companies. There comes a point where Gabriel has to disguise himself as a priest, using a frock stolen from St. Louis Cathedral and some hair gel from his own boudoir, in order to bilk an old woman out of her knowledge of voodoo. This is, needless to say, another example of the dissonance between the game’s serious plot and goofy puzzles, but we’ve covered that ground already. What’s more relevant right now is the game’s implementation of the sequence. Every time you visit the old woman — which will likely be several times if you aren’t playing from a walkthrough — you have to laboriously prepare Gabriel’s disguise all over again. It’s tedium that exists for no good reason; you’ve solved the puzzle once, and the game ought to know you’ve solved it, so why can’t you just get on with things? I can’t imagine a LucasArts game subjecting me to this. In fact, I know it wouldn’t: there’s a similar situation in Day of the Tentacle, where, sure enough, the game whips through the necessary steps for you every time after the first.

Father Gabriel. (Sins of the fathers indeed, eh?)

This may seem a small, perhaps even petty example, but, multiplied by a hundred or a thousand, it describes why Sierra adventures — even their better, more thoughtful efforts like this one — so often wound up more grating than fun. Sins of the Fathers isn’t a bad adventure game, but it could have been so much better if Jensen had had a team around her armed with the development methodologies and testing processes that could have eliminated its pixel hunts, cleaned up its unfair and/or ill-fitting puzzles, told her when Gabriel was starting to sound more like a sexual predator than a laid-back lady’s man, and smoothed out the rough patches in its plot. None of the criticisms I’ve made of the game should be taken as a slam against Jensen, a writer with special gifts in exactly those areas where other games tend to disappoint. She just didn’t get the support she needed to reach her full potential here.

The bitter irony of it all is that LucasArts, a company that could have made Sins of the Fathers truly great, lacked the ambition to try anything like it in lieu of the cartoon comedies which they knew worked for them; meanwhile Sierra, a company with ambition in spades, lacked the necessary commitment to detail and quality. I really don’t believe, in other words, that Sins of the Father represents some limit case for the point-and-click adventure as a storytelling medium. I think merely that it represents, like all games, a grab bag of design choices, some of them more felicitous than others.

Still, if what we ended up with is the very definition of a mixed bag, it’s nevertheless one of the most interesting and important such in the history of adventure games, a game whose influence on what came later, both inside and outside of its genre, has been undeniable. I know that when I made The King of Shreds and Patches, my own attempt at a lengthy horror adventure with a serious plot, Sins of the Fathers was my most important single ludic influence, providing a bevy of useful examples both of what to do and what not to do. (For instance, I copied its trigger-driven approach to plot chronology — but I made sure to include a journal to tell the player what issues she should be working on at any given time, thereby to keep her from wandering endlessly looking for the random whatsit that would advance the time.) I know that many other designers of much more prominent games than mine have also taken much away from Sins of the Fathers.

So, should you play Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers? Absolutely. It’s a fascinating example of storytelling ambition in games, and, both in where it works and where it fails, an instructive study in design as well. A recent remake helmed by Jane Jensen herself even fixes some of the worst design flaws, although not without considerable trade-offs: the all-star cast of the original game has been replaced with less distinctive voice acting, and the new graphics, while cleaner and sharper, don’t have quite the same moody character as the old. Plague or cholera; that does seem to be the way with adventure games much of the time, doesn’t it? With this game, one might say, even more so than most of them.

The big climax. Yes, it does look a little ridiculous — but hey, they were trying.

(Sources: the book Influential Game Designers: Jane Jensen by Anastasia Salter; Sierra’s newsletter InterAction of Spring 1992, Summer 1993, and Holiday 1993; Computer Gaming World of November 1993 and March 1994. Online sources include “The Making of… The Gabriel Knight Trilogy” from Edge Online; an interview with Jane Jensen done by the old webzine The Inventory, now archived at The Gabriel Knight Pages; “Happy Birthday, Gabriel Knight“ from USgamer; Jane Jensen’s “Ask Me Anything” on Reddit. Academic pieces include “Revisiting Gabriel Knight” by Connie Veugen from The Heidelberg Journal of Religions on the Internet Volume 7; Jane Jensen’s Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers: The Numinous Woman and the Millennium Woman” by Roberta Sabbath from The Journal of Popular Culture Volume 31 Issue 1. And, last but not least, press releases, annual reports, and other internal and external documents from the Sierra archive at the Strong Museum of Play.

Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers is available for purchase both in its original version and as an enhanced modern remake.)

source http://reposts.ciathyza.com/gabriel-knight-sins-of-the-fathers/

#retro games #dos games #retro #crpg #adventure #amiga #oldcomputers #8bit #16bit #blog #repost

0 notes