#mhwilds spoilers

[ravenswcrn]

How we feelin monhun fans?

[saturnisaturnip]

Zoh Shia and Hunter 🪽

[aboredgremlin]

A thing I really love about Monster Hunter Wilds is that you are not the main character. The expedition into the forbidden lands is explicitly about research and diplomacy, not about hunting anything.

Alma is here to research the local cultures, and make diplomatic connections.

Erik and Werner are here to study the local geology and ecosystem.

Your job as a hunter is not to kill shit, but to allow the nerds to do their jobs safely, and I love that. You are just a bodyguard. An extremely skilled one, but a bodyguard none the less. I think that is great. It isn't about you.

I love the focus on the Hunter's as a research organization. It makes everything far more interesting.

[gummywyvern]

Just got born and so confused. About to throw the world's biggest tantrum

anyways i love it and im begging alma with big sad eyes to let me keep it

[autisticodogarons]

finally putting this damn blog to use again. fucking love this beast

[singleactionjack]

Mh wilds spoilers

I'm genuinely surprised how frequent it seems people are misrepresenting Nata's character arc and saying that they don't like him, every time it feels like they're actively leaving something out. I don't know if it's a lack of critical thinking or failure of narrative comprehension but idk

Like, it's not the most well written dialog but I think the kid has a pretty fleshed out set of motivations, his arc makes sense and none of it felt rushed to me.

Like, kid is in an isolated secret civilization, he doesn't know shit, he seems almost too innocent to be informed of anything. The most he seems to know is that monsters are dangerous, which seems very informed by his experiences in the intro. He doesn't know shit, his village is attacked by a terrifying creature he doesn't know much about, and his elder pushes him out of the village to "find help". His only community being presumably destroyed, everyone he cares about presumed dead, as a kid seemingly no older than 12 or something.

He gets picked up by hunters from the West or whatever, and they start an expedition to the forbidden lands because this kid is the first proof that there is /any/ civilization out there, and this traumatized child is having to be a part of this expedition because he's the only one alive they know who has any knowledge of the land. But the fucked up part is, he doesn't really know the land.

He spent the last few days (?) running scared out of his mind, luckily avoiding anything too particularly dangerous, across lands so large and dense the player needs a super fast dinosaur to navigate. The kid doesn't know much of anything about the land, only hoping he recognizes enough of the way out to see the way back home.

So you have a kid who's scared shitless, having to help an expedition to his home that /no one else/ knows about, through lands he doesn't know anything about, with the implicit expectation that his entire people are dead at the hands of a creature that still lingers in his nightmares. The glimpses of the brutality of Arkveld still plastered in his mind. And it seems until he travels with Alma and the player, this brutality has no context.

As he follows along with the party, he starts to see reasons for the behavior of monsters (which is probably subtly indicating that his home isn't a place where regular monsters live) He sees an ecosystem thriving, a cycle of life and death, things doing things to survive. This further stokes the growing hatred he has, survivors guilt and thinking he's the last survivor of Arkveld. He thinks his people are probably gone, and he can't see any reason why a creature would do that. Narratively, Arkveld isn't a Monster™️, but a Monster, who does things out of maliciousness, cruelty, with no rhyme or reason.

Later, Nata and friends actually spot his White Wraith, attacking the Apexes, draining power from Rey Dau. In this part of the story, this "Villain Arkveld" conceptualization is firm in his mind, a target of revenge for his fallen kin. He is too weak to enact any meaningful revenge, just wishing to stop Arkveld from hurting anyone else in the way his people were hurt. The Hunters he's with prevent him from doing anything reckless, but he's fully in the fuck Arkveld club.

All the while, he's still a child. Optimistic, still has hope. They're able to actually find his home, in Sild, and he (despite really thinking everyone would be dead) still calls out for Tasheen. He hopes that someone else survived the horrors he was saved from. And lo and behold, Tasheen lives, among many others. His people weren't wiped out, many did survive. Tasheen then does something that changes Nata's path directly.

Tasheen tells Nata about his people and their actual purpose/role as the ones who reside and look over this land filled with guardians, artificial monster shaped constructs who only exist to be tools for a civilization that no longer exists. And that the "White Wraith" was simply one of these creations who was behaving erratically, unable to be controlled.

Tasheen specifically does this reveal in combination with celebrating Nata for successfully escaping and getting help as something they were not supposed to be able to do. The people in Sild weren't supposed to be able to leave really, bound by duty and second hand shame from a civilization that no longer exists, but Nata was freed from that cycle of imprisonment.

In doing all this, Tasheen gives purpose for Arkveld AND Nata. No longer just a child, he was supposed to be one of these protectors. Arkveld, no longer a creature without direction, but a guardian who is acting strangely.

This information is given to him with the explicit understanding that Nata's purpose (as ascribed to him) isn't set in stone, and by him leaving and finding help he has already been given agency to be his own person and make choices his people could/would not. In this part of the narrative, the vengeance seeking Nata is largely replaced with concerned curiosity. He knows /what/ Arkveld is, but not why it's doing what it's doing.

They eventually discover a reason why. Arkveld, seemingly too powerful a construct, is attempting to revert to it's original status as the wyvern it was before extinction. Trying to engage in the behaviors it knows it should do, either from instincts or seeing other monsters in the wild. Predation, subsistence. Arkveld, as an extinct predator reinvented, has all the tools to hunt but not all the tools to survive, leading to it seemingly rampaging in acts of violence as it attempts to overcorrect by eating and hunting despite not needing to.

When Nata understands this, his perspective on Arkveld is informed and he becomes very sympathetic to it. It isn't the monster he was lead to believe. It's a creature who's agency was taken from it, that found freedom and sought to behave in a way it felt right over what it was predestined to do. In a very literal sense, Arkveld and Nata /ARE/ the same. Both are children of the ancient civilization, given purpose by people who no longer exist. They are both given opportunity to understand the outside world, and in doing so are given chances to make choices for themselves. If Nata decided to stay in Sild once he knew people were safe, this wouldn't be the case. He was given opportunity to do more and see more and he took it because his horizons were broadened. By Arkveld's attack both of them were unchained by fate.

Nata at this point starts to truly empathize with Arkveld for two reasons: one being the stuff listed above, but also his learned understanding of the ecosystem. Arkveld is just doing what any other monsters are doing. He's seen several environments where the monsters fight and struggle for survival. Arkveld is textually (for Nata) really "just like him frfr". Steeped in wylk, finally able to see the sun, able to eat the cheese (animal flesh) and be their own person.

When it is deemed Arkveld has overcorrected and is too dangerous for the ecosystem, Nata objects, but he does so purely from empathy. Before Arkveld had no purpose in its cruelty, now its cruelty is somewhat overstated and its purpose is no different from anything else. Why must it die for doing what everything else does? Why must it die when it was finally free?(Like Nata himself has come to recognize in himself)

It's very straightforward honestly. None of his arc feels rushed, he is a scared and traumatized boy who is then given new information and hope, and that hope informs his empathy. It's like if a kid grew up in a cult and his whole family got attacked by a knife guy ™️, they escape into the outside world to find out that Knife Guy was actually kidnapped and kept in his cult family basement. Knife Guy only did what they did to escape but now they're too maladjusted to society to not be knife guy other places. I'd probably feel bad for Knife Guy ™️ too if I was the kid who escaped.

[ichorandpride]

i just found out that Nu Udra, when sleeping, goes to rest in a fucking kiln pot or something and only one tentacle is sticking out

i.... this thing is adorable.... fr octopus behaviour

[worldofbalance]

i dunno...the pokemon black and white remakes are a little weird...

attempted to draw ol' zoh in a pokemon-esque style. I think they turned out rather cool.

[pigeoknight]

I may have a favorite monster hunter wilds character

template

[floodwatersblog]

reject rejoin regenerate

[soloavengers]

they’re so silly i’d die for them

[monsterhunterthings]

Omae Wa Mou Shindeiru.

Source

[aboredgremlin]

SHE'S A CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGIST?!?!?!

And her hobby is Archeology? Please marry me. Talk to me for hours about all the cool cultural stuff we are discovering. Speak to me in your pretty foreign languages. Infodump about the cool rocks you found.

[saturnisaturnip]

Guardian Seikret

[archangeltama]

[silverraes]

obsessed with this guy