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attleboy · 2 years ago

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i thought too hard about insect motifs got a little silly and made... a lot lmao these versions of the characters are from @sm-baby's amazing digital carnival au!! full images and rambling about insect choices are gonna get stuck under the cut... it'll be a bit long and i will be putting photos of real bugs down there so be mindful

pomni: "butterfly"

inspirational species are black swallowtails mostly for the shape, and malay red harlequins mostly for the pattern

carnival pomni's actually the one that kickstarted this whole set... i drew her hat in a way that reminded me of butterflies, went "wait...", then i fully leaned into it :)

jax: "centipede"

there was no specific species for jax. without being able to use color, they were too similar to pick any out... i have included a giant centipede just for reference though since it was mainly larger centipedes i used for inspiration

anddd there's a little bonus sketch for how pre-sentience jax might've looked with a centipede outfit... he gets a bug scarf and some goggles!

ragatha: "ladybug"

inspirational species was the twice-stabbed ladybug chosen because the inverted color scheme looked the best out of all the ones i tried, and also because it's a metal name and we know ragatha's good with a knife... stabby stab... i did add more than two spots to the dress though, it just looks cooler lol

gangle: "spider"

inspiration was the spinybacked orb weaver which i was absolutely ecstatic to find because come on that is the perfect spider for gangle like look at it!! it looks like her mask, it's got red, it's got gold on the limbs, literally twinning

zooble: "mantis"

inspiration was the spiny flower mantis which, like with gangle, i feel is pretty much perfect for zooble... they come in many colors (including pink), have abstract patterns, and it gave me the excuse to cover zooble in spikes :D fun

and no kaufmo because i'm lazy and he's dead (sorry kaufmo fans but am i wrong), and the rest don't have bug names that i know of?

i still want to draw the carnival characters in their regular looks sometime, i just got really really inspired by the idea of secret skins and bug-themed outfits and went a liiittle haywire :P

anyways if you read all that you're a real one and you've got too much time on your hands... if you didn't, i understand, i get wordy, sorry :'D okay i think that's all byeee

#the amazing digital circus #the amazing digital carnival #carnival au #tadc #pomni #jax #ragatha #gangle #zooble #bugs #spiders #gif #my art #my fancy art

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prayerith · 2 years ago

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oh god i’m thinking about cloud’s sweet little string motif in crisis core again and how it’s referenced in “the price of freedom” (the track) and it makes me want to yell

#i could talk about the use of motif in crisis core all day #both the motifs returning from ff7 and the new ones #like god. jesus.#not to MENTION the overarching banora theme and the ways it’s interpolated throughout the game #the one from the title screen #but yeah cloud’s little strings……they’re a little melancholy but mostly *sweet* and high pitched

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loathemetc · 1 month ago

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Some thoughts on leitmotifs in Deltarune Chapters 3 and 4.

Now that I've played the game and had time to let my thoughts stir a bit, I think it's about time I start getting them out there. Obviously there are a lot of musical motifs throughout the game but I wanna talk about three of them specifically.

The first would be the lost girl motif. While in Chapter 2 it was mostly just used in direct relation to Noelle, we see it being used a lot more for emotional moments when she's not around in chapters 3 and 4. Most notably it features in Raise Up Your Bat, the song from the rhythm game segment. Tenna talks about December and the music video channel she used to watch right before this, and the song was first mentioned in the "currently listening to" section on Noelle's blog, implying that this is an in universe song that Dess was a fan of. The fact that said song features the motif therefore makes me think that it's the origin of the motif. Lost Girl plays at such emotional moments because in a way, it's the ghost of Dess's favorite song haunting the narrative. And I just think that's neat.

Second is the so-called freedom motif that plays in direct relation to the secret bosses. In Chapters 1 and 2 this plays in THE WORLD REVOLVING and BIG SHOT, the secret boss fight themes for both Jevil and Spamton respectively, as well as The Circus and Dialtone, two other songs related to them. In Chapter 4 again this motif plays in the fight with the Hammer of Justice, in the song called... Hammer of Justice. And again this is a secret boss fight, where the "Air crackles with freedom." Pretty straight forward.

But strangely, this motif doesn't obviously play in Chapter 3. There's a short string of notes in the Knight's battle theme, Black Knife, that sounds kind of like it? Which would make sense, given the Knight holds a shadow crystal just like those other three bosses, but it's not enough for me to really make an conclusion on. But the Knight having the shadow crystal and no one else in chapter 3 having one is interesting right? Almost as if it's the one who's been handing them out, but since this whole chapter is about waiting for the Knight to arrive, there was no time for it to give a shadow crystal to Ramb.

Weirdly though, it does play a second time in Chapter 4. And this is a double spoiler warning, if you've beaten Chapter 4 but haven't reloaded your save after beating it, go do that right now, you're missing out on something major if you don't and I'm going to be talking about it.

Went and did that? Alright, cool.

So that was a pretty fun extra boss right? Good time was had by all. But you probably noticed that despite being some sort of secret boss, there was no freedom motif in the song Catswing, and no shadow crystal. Which again makes sense, these are just more Chapter 3 darkners. So why am I even talking about this?

Well, one of the mini games you unlock after this, BATTAT, has its own song called Air Waves. And this one... does, have the freedom motif...? Which is weird right. Still no shadow crystal, and this isn't even a boss fight. But there's that song. The only weird thing about this game is that it does seem to be an actual fleshed out version of the cat clicking mini game from the sweepstakes update and just like that game, the IMAGE_FRIEND smile can appear here too. Which is certainly weird, but the IMAGE_FRIEND smile appears twice in Chapter 3 and once in Chapter 2 with no freedom motif attached.

I could make a guess here, like maybe the Mike conspiracy board calling direct attention to Kris's dislike of Asgore's conspiracy board is a tease for a real Mike secret boss in chapter 5, but I was kind of under the impression that the giant realistic microphone was the real Mike, so I don't really know.

It's worth noting that the mini games names seem to be french words, Jongler and Pluey being Jongleur and Pluis, french for Juggler and Rain respectively. My french has never been that good though so while Battat definitely sounds like a french word I can't really put my finger on it. It's probably also just a word that describes the mini game though. Probably doesn't mean anything deep but if it secretly does hey at least I mentioned it.

Okay that was too many paragraphs about the freedom motif. Air Waves is weird. Really damn good track though. The drum line is also like one note off from Bad Apple's which is funny. Moving on!

So notably while the freedom motif is tied to the secret bosses, Chapter 3 does have a secret boss track that lacks the motif. BURNING EYES, the theme of the fight with... Eram? The shadow mantle? It's hard to know really whether to trust a track name or sprite file name on what to call this thing because the game gives us nothing to work with really. It's a strange and irregular boss battle, with Zelda-like gameplay and against a character we can't even identify at all. But despite that, the theme does give us something to work with, a motif. Just not the freedom motif.

It's... Power of NEO.

And I know what you're thinking, I thought we were done with Spamton NEO. And I think we are. But Spamton NEO is not the only reference to NEO in Deltarune. Jevil, Queen, and Tenna all mention it. THE TRUE AND NEO CHAOS, Noelle creating a neo dark fountain, NEO shows, NEO programs. Queen and Tenna use it just like a stand-in for new but that's what makes the choice of words so conspicuous.

You could argue, sure, that Jevil, Queen, and Tenna are all characters who have history with Spamton. The fight for the shadow mantle even comes soon after a scene where Tenna talks about this. But I think there's something a lot bigger here than just an Undertale reference. I think we gotta ask ourselves something.

What IS the power of NEO?

In Undertale the motif plays twice I believe. In the fights with Undyne the Undying and Mettaton NEO, both people determined to protect everyone from being killed by you. Now Mettaton did a pretty poor job at that but it's the thought that counts, right? You could make the argument that the power of NEO is determination, Queen even uses the word when referring to Noelle creating a dark fountain, the power to create, to make new?

But does this really work for where this motif plays in Deltarune? In the case of BURNING EYES, definitely not. BIG SHOT is interesting though because it plays in two contexts, and the weird route context could arguably put Spamton in the same spot as Undyne, but his motivations are far more selfish.

But let's try looking at it from another perspective. For a long time people have suggested that MEGALOVANIA isn't Sans's theme but rather the theme of the player, or Chara, or whatever. A theme of violence, of malice. But what if that's actually Power of NEO? After all, in Undertale it only plays against bosses on the no mercy route. In Deltarune, not only is Spamton a violent malicious and selfish person, but you're also forced to fight him on the game's own version of the no mercy route. And of course, Spamton is pretty famous for comparing Kris to himself.

The fight for the shadow mantle has dialogue that is all the way up this alley. "There! That's what I wanted to see. Flickering red, like pretty little flames... Your eyes can't hide it Kris. Without play... The knife grows dull. Haha... well, enough of that. We both have work to do." Getting the Shadow Mantle and using it to get through the Knight fight even puts you on the path to being able to kill the titan spawn instead of purifying them, so I've heard. I haven't actually beaten the Knight yet. I'm sorry it's really hard. But if that's the work that has to be done... The mantle or eram or whatever even accuses Kris of enjoying what we did in the weird route, knowing they could say it wasn't really them. It's hard to say how accurate of a character judgement this is, though. Because genuinely what the fuck is this fight. I'm losing my mind.

It's honestly really hard to conclude anything at this point about what the power of NEO is exactly, but I feel like we'll be hearing about it more in the future. It curiously isn't mentioned at all in Chapter 4 from what I can remember, but it's also a chapter with several main antagonists who don't speak at all and a secret boss who didn't even look at his shadow crystal, so.

NEO means new, of course, we can't forget that when thinking about this. I believe there was someone who wanted us to create a new future with them...?

Curiouser and curiouser.

Of course I'm also obligated to mention that the IMAGE_FRIEND smile appears in the shadow mantle fight as well, what even is up with that thing. It's pink and yellow eyes tie directly to Spamton's glasses and the buttons on the oddcontroller, and the Hammer of Justice mentions Chapter 5 will be about a field of pink and gold, so... I guess we'll find out.

MINOR EDIT: Apparently on the Switch 2 version of the game, the mini games are slightly different, with Battat and Jongler being replaced by Air Waves and Main Performance. Obviously the song "Air Waves" plays in the game Air Waves here instead of Battat. As far as I can tell the IMAGE_FRIEND smile doesn't appear here at all, but it is by far the most pink and yellow of all the mini games. So this doesn't really change much but it's definitely worth noting, so I did.

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metanarrates · 6 months ago

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Hello. Sorry if this a stupid question u can ignore if u want.

How can someone get better at media analysis? Besides obviously reading a lot.

Im asking this bc im in a point where im aware of my own lack of tools to analyze stories, but i don't know where to get them or how to get better in general. How did you learn to analyze media? There's any specific book, essay, author, etc that you recommend? Somewhere to start?

I'm asking you because you are genuinely the person who has the best takes on this site. Thank you for you work!

it sounds like a cop-out answer but it's always felt like a skill I acquired mostly thru reading a ton, and by paying a lot of attention in high school literature classes. because of that I can't promise that I'm necessarily equipped to be a good teacher or that i know good resources. HOWEVER! let me run some potential advice to you based on the shit i get a lot of mileage out of

first off, a lot of literary analysis is about pattern recognition! not just pattern recognition in-text, but out-of-text as well. how does this work relate to its genre? real-world history? does it have parallels between real-life situations? that kind of thing.

which is a big concept to just describe off the bat, so let me break it down further!

in literature, there is the concept of something called literary devices - they are some of the basic building blocks in how a story is delivered mechanically and via subtext. have you ever heard of a motif? that is a literary device. it's a pattern established in the text in order to further the storytelling! and here is a list of a ton of common literary devices - I'd recommend reading the article. it breaks down a lot of commonly used ones in prose and poetry and explains their usage.

personally, I don't find all the literary devices I've learned about in school to be the most useful to my analytical hobbies online. motifs, themes, and metaphors are useful and dissecting them can bring a lot to the table, but a lot of other devices are mostly like fun bonus trivia for me to notice when reading. however, memorizing those terms and trying to notice them in the things you read does have a distinct benefit - it encourages you to start noticing patterns, and to start thinking of the mechanical way a story is built. sure, thinking about how the prose is constructed might not help you understand the story much more, but it does make you start thinking about how things like prose contribute to the greater feeling of a piece, or how the formatting of a piece contributes to its overall narrative. you'll start developing this habit of picking out little things about a text, which is useful.

other forms of in-text pattern recognition can be about things like characterization! how does a character react to a certain situation? is it consistent with how they usually behave? what might that tell you about how they think? do they have tells that show when they're not being trustworthy? does their viewpoint always match what is happening on screen? what ideas do they have about how the world works? how are they influenced by other people in their lives? by social contexts that might exist? by situations that have affected them? (on that note, how do situations affect other situations?)

another one is just straight-up noticing themes in a work. is there a certain idea that keeps getting brought up? what is the work trying to say about that idea? if it's being brought up often, it's probably worth paying attention to!

that goes for any pattern, actually. if you notice something, it's worth thinking about why it might be there. try considering things like potential subtext, or what a technique might be trying to convey to a reader. even if you can't explain why every element of a text is there, you'll often gain something by trying to think about why something exists in a story.

^ sometimes the answer to that question is not always "because it's intentional" or even "because it was a good choice for the storytelling." authors frequently make choices that suck shit (I am a known complainer about choices that suck shit.) that's also worth thinking about. english classes won't encourage this line of thinking, because they're trying to get you to approach texts with intentional thought instead of writing them off. I appreciate that goal, genuinely, but I do think it hampers people's enthusiasm for analysis if they're not also being encouraged to analyze why they think something doesn't work well in a story. sometimes something sucks and it makes new students mad if they're not allowed to talk about it sucking! I'll get into that later - knowing how and why something doesn't work is also a valuable skill. being an informed and analytical hater will get you far in life.

so that's in-work literary analysis. id also recommend annotating your pages/pdfs or keeping a notebook if you want to close-read a work. keeping track of your thoughts while reading even if they're not "clever" or whatever encourages you to pay attention to a text and to draw patterns. it's very useful!

now, for out-of-work literary analysis! it's worth synthesizing something within its context. what social settings did this work come from? was it commenting on something in real life? is it responding to some aspects of history or current events? how does it relate to its genre? does it deviate from genre trends, commentate on them, or overall conform to its genre? where did the literary techniques it's using come from - does it have any big stylistic influences? is it referencing any other texts?

and if you don't know the answer to a bunch of these questions and want to know, RESEARCH IS YOUR FRIEND! look up historical events and social movements if you're reading a work from a place or time you're not familiar with. if you don't know much about a genre, look into what are considered common genre elements! see if you can find anyone talking about artistic movements, or read the texts that a work might be referencing! all of these things will give you a far more holistic view of a work.

as for your own personal reaction to & understanding of a work... so I've given the advice before that it's good to think about your own personal reactions to a story, and what you enjoy or dislike about it. while this is true that a lot of this is a baseline jumping-off point on how I personally conduct analysis, it's incomplete advice. you should not just be thinking about what you enjoy or dislike - you should also be thinking about why it works or doesn't work for you. if you've gotten a better grasp on story mechanics by practicing the types of pattern recognition i recognized above, you can start digging into how those storytelling techniques have affected you. did you enjoy this part of a story? what made it work well? what techniques built tension, or delivered well on conflict? what about if you thought it sucked? what aspects of storytelling might have failed?

sometimes the answer to this is highly subjective and personal. I'm slightly romance-averse because I am aromantic, so a lot of romance plots will simply bore me or actively annoy me. I try not to let that personal taste factor too much into serious critiques, though of course I will talk about why I find something boring and lament it wasn't done better lol. we're only human. just be aware of those personal taste quirks and factor them into analysis because it will help you be a bit more objective lol

but if it's not fully influenced by personal taste, you should get in the habit of building little theses about why a story affected you in a certain way. for example, "I felt bored and tired at this point in a plot, which may be due to poor pacing & handling of conflict." or "I felt excited at this point in the plot, because established tensions continued to get more complex and captured my interest." or "I liked this plot point because it iterated on an established theme in a way that brought interesting angles to how the story handled the theme." again, it's just a good way to think about how and why storytelling functions.

uh let's see what else. analysis is a collaborative activity! you can learn a lot from seeing how other people analyze! if you enjoy something a lot, try looking into scholarly articles on it, or youtube videos, or essays online! develop opinions also about how THOSE articles and essays etc conduct analysis, and why you might think those analyses are correct or incorrect! sometimes analyses suck shit and developing a counterargument will help you think harder about the topic in question! think about audience reactions and how those are created by the text! talk to friends! send asks to meta blogs you really like maybe sometimes

find angles of analysis that interest and excite you! if you're interested in feminist lenses on a work, or racial lenses, or philosophical lenses, look into how people conduct those sort of analyses on other works. (eg. search feminist analysis of hamlet, or something similar so you can learn how that style of analysis generally functions) and then try applying those lenses to the story you're looking at. a lot of analysts have a toolkit of lenses they tend to cycle through when approaching a new text - it might not be a bad idea to acquire a few favored lenses of your own.

also, most of my advice is literary advice, since you can broadly apply many skills you learn in literary analysis to any other form of storytelling, but if you're looking at another medium, like a game or cartoon, maybe look up some stuff about things like ludonarrative storytelling or visual storytelling! familiarizing yourself with the specific techniques common to a certain medium will only help you get better at understanding what you're seeing.

above all else, approach everything with intellectual curiosity and sincerity. even if you're sincerely curious about why something sucks, letting yourself gain information and potentially learning something new or being humbled in the process will help you grow. it's okay to not have all the answers, or to just be flat-out wrong sometimes. continuing to practice is a valuable intellectual pursuit even if it can mean feeling a tad stupid sometimes. don't be scared to ask questions. get comfortable sometimes with the fact that the answer you'll arrive at after a lot of thought and effort will be "I don't fully know." sometimes you don't know and that can be valuable in its own right!

thank you for the ask, and I hope you find this helpful!

#narrates #thanks for the kind ask! i feel a little humbled by your faith in me aha #this may be a bit scattershot. its 2 am. might update later with more thoughts idk #nyway i feel like a lot of lit classes even in college don't tell you why they're teaching you things that might feel superfluous #hopefully this lays out why certain seemingly superfluous elements of literary education can be valuable #the thing esp about giving theses and having a supporting argument... its not just because teachers need to see an essay or whatever #the point is to make you think about a text and then follow thru by performing analysis #and supporting that analysis w/ evidence from the text #u don't have to write essays but developing that mindset IS helpful. support ur conclusions yknow?#anyway thanks again hope it's illuminating

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ponyboyssophie · 6 months ago

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Love iconography in Sorry We're Closed (2024)

As the Angel of Love in this game is represented by a horse-chimera, there was a lot of care put into using horses to symbolize love & relationships. There's the obvious theme of Dream Eater plastering his realm with paintings, statues, and artifacts about Chamuel and other random places like the crypt using his visage too, but I'm mostly gonna talk about something a bit more abstract.

Sorry We're Closed uses hearts as its primary symbolism for love; but it also uses a less mainstream visual motif to show us how it matters to the characters. Horse. :)

To start with, each episode of Dying Petals starts out with a shot of a horse painting, before zooming out to bring in the characters.

Shots of the characters talking will usually be accompanied by one or two paintings. This is where we first see horses associated with relationships.

[There are TWO SEPERATE paintings behind them, yknow, just in case you don't notice the first.]

You might know that the story represents Michelle's love life, (quite literally as Epiphany is played by her actual ex; the story mimics their conflict and break up) but this room also becomes the place where Michelle solidifies her destiny, whether she chooses new love, her ex, or something else.

Also, notice how the painting behind Canary is much bigger than the one behind Epiphany. This is still true when accounting for perspective.

Although the biggest (and brightest) horse painting is off-screen.

You can see it behind Chamuel on the final day, next to his door that allows you to choose love.

The Carousel.

In the scene where we watch the duchess execute a woman for lying about her 'love' for the Duchess to save her life, there is a carousel-style horse in the background.

This is, I believe, the first time we see this horse carousel, and it appears with a bleeding heart. An empty spot where there used to be something. Love is not here.

The Duchesses room.

On the outside, you see paintings of Dream Eater and Chamuel.

I used to think a lot of the paintings around the game were random - like maybe they were just filler. There's a lot of repetition of the same images over and over again, but I've come to understand it is its own visual language.

The Duchess seems to place a big focus on these two around the hotel - who are "quite infamous" in the supernatural community. There's the obvious connection to taboo love here, but I think it's also an example of a demon being able to resist the change of love. Which might explain the hierarchy here of Dream Eater being on the top/larger. More value is placed on Dream Eater, who holds onto the past.

[Spoilers for inside the Duchesses room]

Straight off the bat, you start to notice a trend in this room. This is where I started picking up on the meanings behind certain pieces and noticing the emphasis on horses throughout the game, especially in regards to the Duchess. It might feel like maybe they just like horses - having a picture book with horses or framed paintings all over their room seems like more of an interest, but it continues to entwine them in the language of love.

Also - I won't go into this too deeply but the repetitive paintings of the Duchess, especially the close ups of their eye/features, is a parallel to the fractured, disjointed images of Chamuels face that represent his 'mortalisation' and get more and more frequent (and also, violent) the further he gets into his struggle with love. It implies to me that the Duchess has already begun this process, or at least reflects how they've been fractured by love as well.

Ironically, the picture of the lead singer of Michelle's favourite band, who they brought to the hotel to make her feel more at home is right next to it. It's not mentioned if the Duchess was already a fan, or if they checked it out because of Michelle/how much they love her outfit (fish fight shirt included!) :)

Here we see the horse with the bleeding heart again.

Over their clean, neat bed which is kind of a mix between elegant hotel opulence and rusty torture chamber imagery (the case on the left side of the bed..... if you know you know). Their room itself is a beautiful illusion that seeks to cover up for their one weakness, but it still shows through.

You also find some assorted Duchess-themed artifacts.

Notably, the missing heart fragment. T.A.D says this is "said to be what remains of the Duchesses heart after the incident."

(There's also the presence of Dying Petals in the Duchesses room, but that's a topic for another post.)

I also find it interesting that they has these on their shelf. A visual reference to Dream Eater fighting himself, maybe?

[Also, Bonus A La Mode games reference. Or, the Duchesses version of the warriors that I've just now realised is a reference to the devs logo]

Hotel Ascent is when things start to get more... surreal.

There's a repeated trial throughout this area where, to pass to the next room, you have to charge your heartbreaker before shooting the heart of the horse statue. The first instance of this is also accompanied by a literal anatomical heart you have to shoot to charge it up.

Usually, it's aggressively defended by giant roller-spikes and/or enemy hordes. The Duchess doesn't want you to break past their barriers and into their heart, that's for sure.

This is the opening scene for the final boss fight.

The statues stay in the background for the whole fight. Notice how these ones no longer have arrows jutting from their chests.

(We also see these weird abstract horses from the start of hotel ascent again - even they have a true form which can only be seen with the third eye.)

Other uses in the game.

I think Dream Eater's Palace would take up wayy too much, so I'll skip it. It's already something that is canonically brought to attention in-game so Iif you've played it of course you'll already know how obsessed this guy is with, uh, horses, and what that says about him. :)

There is also a picture of Dream Eater (a.k.a "a forlorn being") in the church where Benedict and Robyn (the OTHER angel/demon relationship) spend most of their time together. You can imagine it's not on the side Beloved chooses to hang around haha.

Oakley doesn't have anything in his diner as far as I know, but Darrel does have two paintings of the earlier picture of Duchess riding a horse in his bar.

He has other Duchess paintings also, likely because they're his boss, but this feels very in-place in the bar for a reason.

It does mean that all three relationships in the game have some connection to Dream Eater/Chamuel imagery. Some of it may be coincidence, but I thought I'd mention this anyway as it solidifies the connection to love.

Okay fine I'll talk about the crypt.

The examples/relationships I've used here are romantic in nature, but it's worth noting there are excessive amount of Chamuel statues in the crypt as well. A crypt that belonged to a broken family, that has mostly covered up it's traces of said family after Gabriella took revenge on her parents. Traces of angels are systematically replaced with demonic imagery, as though Gabriella was insulted by the appearance of love being featured so heavily throughout her families tomb. You might see love in the past (using your third eye), but it's disappeared/fractured.

So what's up with the horses?

I already kind of mentioned this at the start, but in this fictional world the concept of love and horses are pretty much inherently linked through Chamuel, so I appreciate how they leaned into this by making it sort of a cultural concept of love.

Horses can be seen as a symbol of love historically, but generally the cultural zeitgeist uses something a bit more fragile and delicate, like doves or rabbits.

It reminds me of Disco Elysium, where love is understood through the lungs rather than the heart due to it's association with Dolores Dei; a pseudo-religious symbol who was just a deified historical figure. Changing what love 'looks' like in a way that serves the story. It shows how well-intergrated Dream Eater and Chamuel are in the world-building and story. They represent the fear of change, and the consequent leap of faith you need to embrace that change. Something the Duchess needs.

Why not use horses? It still feels childlike and nostalgic. They're strong, lively creatures who still exist as prey animals to be hunted - the Duchess doesn't want to be hunted. They want to hunt.

And, life didn't really go that way for them.

By the way I lied earlier, not every episode of Dying Petals has a horse painting. In the Duchess route, during the final episode when Epiphany and Canary break up, they are cramped into the only corner of the room that doesn't have horses. I guess Michelle really did move on from Leslie. :)

#sorry we're closed #sorry were closed #long post #meta #analysis #swc spoilers #not spoiler free #possibly even the most spoiler-infested swc post on tumblr so far #read at your own risk #the duchess swc #michelle swc #dream eater swc #chamuel swc #swc analysis #i might have missed stuff and theres a lot ive left out intentionally but #this has been running around in the back of my mind for a whole week so #yeehaw! so to speak #if anyone else has stuff to add please do. please talk to me about this game

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dragonpropaganda · 1 year ago

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The Architecture of Rain World: Layers of History

A major theme in Rain World's world design that often goes overlooked is the theme of, as James Primate, the level designer, composer and writer calls it, "Layers of History." This is about how the places in the game feel lived-in, and as though they have been built over each other. Here's what he said on the matter as far back as 2014!

The best example of this is Subterranean, the final area of the base game and a climax of the theme. Subterranean is pretty cleanly slpit vertically, there's the modern subway built over the ancient ruins, which are themselves built over the primordial ruins of the depths. Piercing through these layers is Filtration System, a high tech intrusion that cuts through the ground and visibly drills through the ceiling of the depths.

Two Sprouts, Twelve Brackets, the friendly local ghost, tells the player of the "bones of forgotten civilisations, heaped like so many sticks," highlighting this theme of layering as one of the first impressions the player gets of Subterranean. Barely minutes later, the player enters the room SB_H02, where the modern train lines crumble away into a cavern filled with older ruins, which themselves are invaded by the head machines seen prior in outskirts and farm arrays, some of which appear to have been installed destructively into the ruins, some breaking through floors.

These layers flow into each other, highlighting each other's decrepit state.

The filtration system, most likely the latest "layer," is always set apart from the spaces around it. At its top, the train tunnels give way to a vast chasm, where filtration system stands as a tower over the trains, while at the bottom in depths, it penetrates the ceiling of the temple, a destructive presence. (it's also a parallel to the way the leg does something similar in memory crypts, subterranean is full of callbacks like that!)

Filtration system is an interesting kind of transition, in that it is much later and more advanced than both of the areas it cuts between. This is a really interesting choice from James! It would be more "natural" to transition smoothly from the caves of upper subterranean to the depths, but by putting filtration system in between, the two are clearly demarcated as separate. The difference in era becomes palpable, the player has truly found something different and strange.

Depths itself is, obviously, the oldest layer not only of subterranean but of the game itself. The architecture of Depths has little to do with the rest of the game around it, it's a clear sign of the forgotten civilisations that our friend Two Sprouts, Twelve Brackets showed us, there's not actually that much to say about it itself, it's mostly about how it interacts with the other layers of subterranean.

That said, Subterranean is far from the only case of the theme of layers of history. It's present as soon as the player starts the game!

The very first room of the game, SU_C04, is seemingly a cave. It is below the surface, the shapes of it are distinctly amorphous rather than geometric. (well. kind of, it doesn't do a very good job of hiding the tile grid with its 45 degree angles.)

But let's take a closer look, shall we?

See that ground? it's made of bricks. The entire cave area of outskirts is characterised by this, the "chaotic stone" masonry asset is mixed with brickwork, unlike the surface ruins which are mostly stone. This, seemingly, is an inversion of common sense! The caves are bricks and the buildings are stone. This is not, however, a strange and unique aspect but a recurring motif.

This occurs enough in the game for it to be clearly intentional, but why would materials such as bricks be used in otherwise natural looking terrain?

The answer lies in the "Layers of History" theme. This is in fact, something that happens in real life, and it's called a tell

To be specific, a tell is a kind of mound formed by settlements building over the ruins of previous iterations of themselves. Centuries of rubble and detritus form until a hill grows from the city. Cities such as Troy and Jericho are famous examples. The connections to the layers of history theme are pretty clear here, I think. Cities growing, then dying, then becoming the bedrock of the next city. The ground, then, is made of bricks, because the ground is the rubble of past buildings. The bones of forgotten civilisations, heaped like so many sticks!

#rain world #rainworld #rain world lore #rainworld lore #rw lore #rw #subterranean my beloved #thank you to videocult for making the first survival game themed around stratigraphy and new york city rats #i would've gone on for another paragraph about how OE relates to this but like.#that's dlc stuff #and i still think of the dlc stuff as modded content lol #better to keep it separate #also this analysis is not comprehensive! the layers of history stuff is common throughout #there's farm arrays there's the relationship between shaded citadel and five pebbles there's the stuff buried under garbage wastes #so much more #unfortunately i do not have much energy lol

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asneakyfox · 2 months ago

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on babygirlification

ok. this will get to ofmd. but damsels in distress have been a big deal in the western literary tradition for a very long time, right? goes all the way back to, idk, maybe perseus & andromeda? and this motif has been very widely criticized by feminists (yes mostly a specific subset of them, we're getting to that), for how it casts the female character as entirely passive and helpless and reliant on a male lead to rescue her, and that it's corrosive as a cultural narrative to teach girls that their chief virtue is being helpless in a beautiful way that inspires men to take care of you, rather than believing in your own competence and agency to solve the problems you face without needing to rely on a male caretaker. and also that these stories are often not really about the damsel: the female character's helplessness and her peril are just plot devices that exist to give the male lead a reason to prove his own power and agency by rescuing her.

and then other feminists, mostly women of color, started pushing back on this, pointing out that the classic damsel in distress is not only always a woman she's always a white woman. women of color (especially but not exclusively black women) by and large are not portrayed in white supremacy culture as beautifully helpless, they are stereotyped as strong and independent, and while there are some nice things about being viewed as strong it means people are less willing to see when you need help and offer it. and there's also a widespread sense that beautiful helpless white women are worthy of being protected where other people aren't.

if you are a person who's been told all your life that you are helpless, lacking in agency, that you need someone else to rescue you from your problems, then seeing someone like you in a damsel-in-distress plotline looks disempowering. If you have the opposite problem - if you have always been viewed as so strong and capable that nobody else can ever see when you need help, and you have spent your whole life solving your own problems by your own agency because of it - then the damsel looks a lot more like a kind of power fantasy, a fantasy of for once finally being seen by someone else as worthy of rescue.

here's the part where we get to ofmd and ed babygirl teach but i'm going to put it under a cut because this is getting long.

this context is important to ofmd and how we talk about ed. because the reason people find it so compelling to portray ed as something of a damsel has a lot to do with him being very very firmly in the second category. partly because he is a man of color but also it is a theme that is emphasized constantly throughout his arc and his backstory.

the most pivotal event in ed's life, the thing his whole character arc hinges around, is when he killed his father. he was a child and he lived in constant fear and the two people in the world he should have been able to rely on to take care of him were no help at all - his father was the source of the danger and his mother was someone he had to protect and he went and solved the whole problem himself, on his own, by doing something nobody should ever have to do at any age, something most people wouldn't be capable of no matter how necessary it was, at the age of maybe fourteen.

being able to do this came at a cost. it left him deeply emotionally scarred, in a way that fundamentally changed his own self-image and crippled his ability to form meaningful relationships and in a lot of ways was the first domino that led to a nearly successful suicide attempt thirty years later. but he did solve the immediate problem. and that's the big pattern for ed's whole life, he is entirely capable of solving any external challenge he ever faces but it comes at really serious cost to his mental health.

ed has coping methods that are adequate for all the external problems he normally deals with. this specifically includes his worst moments we see him face during the show. first mate being verbally abusive and threatening his life? he's got a solution for that: make that guy eat a toe. white people being racist to his face? have fang skin them with a snail fork then toss them overboard. the times we see ed fail at solving an external problem it's either because it's a challenge he's literally never faced at all before (making breakfast in bed for your bf) or it's an unusual circumstance where the solution he'd normally use can't work (leap year) or both (french party boat). probably if he did face those circumstances regularly he'd figure something out, because that's what he always does! but his solutions come at a price and that price is making him hate himself and want to die.

ed can save himself. he can do anything, just like he says. but he shouldn't have to. he's been saving himself all on his own, over and over and over again, for his whole life, and he's so tired of it, and that's why it means so much to him that stede is the first person ever to look at him and see someone who deserves to be taken care of.

(btw this doesn't mean it's inherently racist to write a story where a character of color can't solve their own problems and does need someone else to help them - that's something that can be empowering too, knowing you don't have to not need help in order to justify getting it - although you'd want to tread very very carefully with it if the character who helps them is white! but that's very much not at all the story canon gives us with ed, and it's a bit suspicious when fandom insists on turning ed's story into that other one.)

anyway that for me is the big thing to remember in fic, when writing about the ways stede takes care of ed. even in a modern au, for me at least, to translate the way their dynamic works in canon, it's important that whatever problems ed regularly faces in his life, he's got ways to solve them before he meets stede. if izzy yells at him at work, if a doctor he visits is racist to him, if someone threatens violence against him, he 's not going to just sit there and take it if stede's not there. he has ways to deal with all those situations - but while the coping methods he uses work to solve the problem they also cause him very severe stress. that's why it means so much to him when he finds he's got someone like stede to have his back at those times. that's a big theme in their relationship and it's something that's super important to both of them but the importance is not that ed can't solve for himself the problems stede helps him with.

(at least, the external problems. ed can't turn into a mermaid. but that's a different kind of thing.)

#ofmd meta #ed babygirl teach #being a fandom is suffering #🦊

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