#same creator / universe

[marypsue]

Man, it's cool and all if you see a metaphor for marginalisation in the monstrous, and if you want the power fantasy of 'what if you could just eat anybody who threatened you/pissed you off'. Me too.

However, as soon as you start saying 'no, these monsters are a 1:1 on Specific Marginalised Group, and you have to treat them in the fiction like they are directly representative of real human members of the marginalised group', BUT you also, in the fiction, make them hurt/kill/eat humans? And then try to shame me, your audience, for noticing or engaging with the bit where they kill people, because you made them directly representative of a real-world marginalised group? You have lost me, and also, I think, the plot.

[aquanutart]

Nyaha~! Caught in my electroweb! ♡

[puppyeared]

i feel like im not making any sense but does anyone else feel like there are stories that let u run with them and ones that spell everything out for you

[front-facing-pokemon]

[paranormaljones]

I totally hear and understand everyone saying that parts of My Adventures with Superman feel rushed and that they wish they would take more time to expand on certain things, but I do want to remind people that this is likely not a storytelling problem. It's probably due to what the current climate surrounding animation is: a hellscape. Countless series getting cancelled left and right, streaming platforms removing pre-existing series and not even letting the CREATORS have access to them, to the point where the creators are ENCOURAGING PIRACY. Having to wonder every day whether they'll be renewed, or if their story has to come to an immediate, undeserved, and non-negotiable end because "not enough people binged the entire season in one day". It's insane.

I think the creators of MAwS are working their asses off trying to tell as much of this story as they can and praying that they don't end up on the chopping block. It is deeply sad that animated series are given half a chance to survive nowadays. We all wish things were different. Hopefully they will be soon. But right now, I really think that the MAwS team is doing the absolute best they can given the current climate surrounding them.

[thequeenintheeast]

I like that the creative team behind Hellverse admitted Hazbin Hotel is an organized plot driven story. Helluva Boss is character driven and world building.

[totaleclipse573]

Redesigned the Supreme, so take the art XD

[jewishcissiekj]

wait why does older Omega look so different than Emerie Karr??? they're literally clones so????

[erstwhilesparrow]

i've been thinking about maps and how they're inherently tricky little liars. you know that story about the emperor who wanted a 1:1 scale map of his entire kingdom, but creating that map required them to perfectly replicate the entire kingdom, at the exact same size as the kingdom? you see how that's kind of useless and how maps kind of have to leave things out for us to get any of the usual navigational help out of them? someone has to make decisions about what gets left out. what's important enough to be included. how things and places get represented. modern day maps loooove to promise objectivity and accuracy, but maps have stories and beliefs and historical contexts embedded in them no matter how hard you try to get away from those things. but this also means you can use them to tell interesting stories! how a thing is depicted on a map tells you things about the person / people responsible for its production!

due to being who i am, i think about this a lot in relation to empires smp. the kinds of maps that could be produced as the landscape of the world changes. the way that the in-game maps allow for a kind of instantaneous transfer of information over literally any distance via map copies. the extremely fixed and limited point of view provided by the in-game maps. the biases and interests of the cartographers of any given empire.

some (many) scattered thoughts in list format under the cut:

the particular idea that spurred this post: topographical maps of the regions surrounding the cod empire and mythland -- the way intensity of colour / shading and the choice of scale could be used to emphasize or gloss over the ravine separating them -- the ravine like a scar on the page, deep and dark, or the ravine like a neat line bracketed by the two other neat lines of the empires' respective walls. there are easy enough to guess reasons for who would want to create each type of map and why; tells you something about how each empire responded to the separation and war.

maps of pixandria from above -- i think a lot about how fwhip took copies of maps that the other empires had on display and put them up in his base so he would be able to see immediately if any of them start building something new. i think a lot about how when i was looking at minecraft maps of pixandria, big chunks of it just blended into the desert sand because pix was building with sandstone and i wasn't at all used to seeing pixandria from anything but ground-level. i think a lot about how this could add an extra element to how pixandria is supposed to have a bustling city under the anthill, and how fwhip's secret base is also underground, and how yeah, that's just A Cool Thing People Do Sometimes, but if it's so dangerously simple to get information about the surface of the world... how might people respond to that? consider spycraft in the empires. consider clever tricks and countermeasures. (consider s2, katherine's kingdom is falling apart, and her response, among other things, is to collect maps of her neighbours' territories. what's she worried about?)

itinerary maps -- maps have not always been bird's-eye view and carefully made to scale! itinerary maps were designed for travellers, and interested in accurately displaying the relative length of one's journey from one place to another, as well as the landmarks that one might see along the way (take a look at the Tabula Peutingeriana -- are you aware it's showing you italy?) -- in the context of empires, what types of journeys are so common that there might be demand for itinerary maps? who makes them, who uses them, what's considered a major landmark in this area and also does every mapmaker in this region consider that thing to be a major landmark? can you make something a major landmark by representing it on a map? (consider the turn of phrase about putting oneself on the map. who might want this, or not want this? the conspicuous absences in a map can also be telling. huh. i wonder how often that raid farm impulse built shows up on an empire's map in season 2.)

the usefulness of a given perspective -- kind of related to itinerary maps, i wonder how much more use you can get out of an in-game map when you have elytra? the emperors pretty much all have elytra, and the emperors often keep in-game maps of their empires. is there something there? what might it suggest about the expected use of those in-game maps?

self-aggrandizement -- another anecdote i think about all the time (and this one might be anecdotal sorry take it with a grain of salt) is the one where jesuit missionaries went to china and managed to convince some chinese nobles to trust them more after showing them a world map in the ortelian style, because chinese maps at that point mostly showed china as disproportionately large and at the center of the map, with europe (and the threat of barbarian invasion) dangerously close, and this map... didn't do that! consider how maps can create a nation or empire's sense of itself. the cod empire and mythland, always so fucking careful about the clarity of their borders. mezalea that looks massive on one map and is shoved off to the side in another. pixandrian maps that are cross-sections and not views from above. maps from the crystal cliffs that emphasize the mountain ranges like a jagged warning.

shape of the map -- hey did you know medieval european maps were often circular, with jerusalem in the center and the rest of the world split into asia, africa, and europe? you know maps can be different shapes, and this can tell you about what the creator thought was important (i don't remember exactly how circles are important to christianity but it was something about the perfection of god, maybe?) and how they understood the world? you think it could tell you something about where the map was meant to be used (a big circular map was probably meant to go on display!) and who was meant to see it? (ha, if you live in minecraft, what shape do you think the world is?)

questions and answers -- stuff like "who made this? to what end? under what influences?" are questions i have been specifically taught to ask about maps that i am presented with. in the context of empires worldbuilding, there's a really fun inversion where you do not have to work from the map to the context, but from the context to the map that might result from it. you can do cool things with this!! i am sure of it!!

[zetsubou-shita]

actually this is pretty important frame that means that he dont want hiyo to be around while she is alive. ig adashitoka didn't want to capture circumstances of her death, after which yato will get her as shinki.

[moinsbienquekaworu]

Full sketchbook page of younger Constant doodles. I am rotating this OC like never before

[give-grian-rights]

head in hands. trying to look through the yjtv tag. i KNOW the show has its shitty moments i KNOW it has moments where it kinda sucks and is Weird towards the source materials but PLEASEE.E PLEASEEEE SO MUCH OF THE TAG IS FULL OF HATE

[rathayibacter]

thinking a lot about how IMMORTALITY squeezes a ton of meaning out of being a game. like, theoretically, you could get all the same themes and significance from watching all the footage once or twice, in order, all the way through. after all, that's kinda how previous game by the studio Her Story was: there was a full picture, and it was waiting for you to put all the pieces together so you could see it.

but IMMORTALITY's a bit different. the thing that you perceive to be the big mystery actually isn't that hard to solve, and is really just a couple stops to check off along your much longer journey of understanding. and so much of that is thanks to the specific mechanic of how you uncover new clips. you click on something in the shot, and you're brought to another shot with the same object, or a shot related to that object, or a shot thematically linked to that object. you're navigating via the Kuleshov Effect, and that means you're constantly, inevitably creating meaning through how you interact with the game.

like, super minor, non-spoiler-y example: there's a set of scenes connected by a cat. you see a cat in one scene and click on it, and you're taken to the rehearsal of a scene that will have that cat, but they aren't using the animal actor yet cuz it's just rehearsal. you're brought to the moment that an actress is leaning down and petting where the cat will be, at some point, later. it's a cute little move by the game designers, cuz yeah, these scenes are connected by that cat you clicked on, but not literally, only in the final product.

but then i clicked on the space where the cat would be, and it took me to another scene, once again with the actual cat. and isn't that funny. isn't that interesting. of course it makes sense in hindsight, right? we're traveling via cinematic language, and in rehearsal there's no difference between a cat and an empty bit of floor where the script tells you a cat will be. you gotta treat that empty space like there's a cat there, or else the whole thing falls apart.

this isn't a significant moment in the game. none of the three clips involved really matter that much. but like, at the same time, by connecting these three pretty empty filler scenes in this way, by taking you from a cat to a not-cat to a cat, and telling you that they're all equivalent, the game is making a pretty strong thematic declaration, one that would be completely absent if you'd just watched these three clips separately, in the parts of the movie that they belong in.

not every player is gonna read that deeply into this moment, just as i havent read this deeply into most of the other connections ive made in my so-far 12 and a half hours with the game. some folks will read something completely different into it (there's a pretty fun discussion you could have about it happening in 2 Of Everything specifically, playing into the mistaken identities plot via Schrödinger's cat). some players won't even find that connection at all! there's enough redundancy in everything here that nobody needs to find every possible point of interaction to finish or understand the game. and all that's kinda the beauty of it, right? there's a million ways to examine this text, to work your way through the enormous tower of information you're presented with, and every single one of those paths is gonna create unique meaning. they've taken the process of interpreting art and made it a game mechanic, without hamstringing the actual act of interpretation in the process. the game says "hey, in order to see everything, you're gonna have to make connections," but never forces your hand in what those connections have to be. it's absolutely fascinating.

[occatorcreator]

Alan's wife would probably check on Alan whenever she can as her husband is in the computer and it's probably very jarring for Alan

Most likely, she and anyone else would be reasonably worried.

I will be honest I am unsure how to answer questions regarding Alan's wife given that she's not exactly a character in the universe. Like you only hear her calling Alan off screen and that's it. She's not like the Animator who has a presence and actions in the universe (and man I know the character version has the same name as the creator of the series, but it still feels weird for me to refer to the Animator as Alan.)

It just feels weird for me to speculate on someone who's a real person.

[finalhaunts]

If anybody wants some good psychological horror go check out lost in vivo. It's definitely heavily inspired by silent hill but it's so unique in its own special little ways that it's amazing on its own even when knowing of its inspirations. Its a first person shooter tho if that turns anyone off

[the-acid-pear]

Honestly the place where mascot horror fails is that they think all they have to do is sell toys, but in reality to sell toys you need a fandom. And how do you get a fandom? Easy. Give them characters to ship. It's an infallible technique.