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kalesandfails · 5 years ago

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i like my body/ and it is not your body

My weekend was great, thanks! I ran ten miles each morning, and running is the closest I get to approximating what it feels like to have properly firing neurons. I listened to two loves of my life, Jon Lovett and Stacy Abrams (about whom I will write more another time, but don’t wait for that; go give her project to resist voter suppression your money here). I read books to the literal piles of humans I have made, dizzy with the sheer acreage of their cheeks. I had a conversation with my autistic preschooler about Ariel — the first proper conversation my daughter has ever initiated with me.

So, I’m doing okay right now, thanks for not asking while I proceed to say some stuff.

I’m saying this not because my voice is the one that needs to be uplifted in a conversation about either fat-shaming or ectopic pregnancies, but because I went to bed thinking about the distressing common thread between the current weird preoccupation of other seemingly uninvolved parties with the two phenomena. And because, while I think James Cordon, God among men, gets this, and I know that other survivors of miscarriages, ectopic pregnancies, and the million other situations in which abortion has been a Godsend — as in, the best option or only tenable option for a specific human being at a specific point in time —I’m just thinking that maybe the people who need to hear it, literally cannot hear it enough, or from enough people, until they have plunked their toned, tailored-suit-wearing man asses into some comfortable seats, ones from which it is somewhat labor-intensive to emerge, and sat a round or two out.

The first is this: you, fat-shamer, and you, pro-lifer who, surprisingly, is willing to “let God decide” if a college student with a fertilized egg threatening to rupture her fallopian tube and kill her should live or not — since the role your God presumably had in supplying the skill and technology to save her life wasn’t a clear enough sign of His will, and despite the fact that God apparently can’t be trusted to supply Her children with appropriate sexual and gender identities — you get a single body and that is your body. And that body, and control of that body, are just going to need to be enough.

Look: there’s no reason to believe that someone who is insulting people over their weight has any strategic goal related to either health or weight loss. To claim otherwise, to walk back your antagonistic bullshit with a sanctimonious “but I’m concerned for [their] health!” : this a is mindbogglingly bad-faith argument. Because the human being you are shaming, or, honestly, any person acquainted with how people feel when you’re shitty to them, will point out that humiliating people and promoting discrimination against them doesn’t effectively motivate them to change their behavior, let alone the physical body they inhabit, and you will say — what, that it should?

At that point, it will become clear that what you, the fat-shamer, want, is for these people to change their bodies in response to your comments about whether or not they can see their penises or get laid or give you an erection; that, basically, what you are doing is doubling down on a system in which if you are a woman, you should feel embarrassed and subhuman if your body is an inadequately hot commodity for the consumption of this unnamed but all-important (male) consumer. (You, right? It’s you to whom we’re trying to make our bodies presentable?)

And if you, the fat-shamed, are a man, your worth is still determined by men, this time the ones who supposedly know how successful you are at getting women to have sex with you based on their opinions of your body, and who have decided that this is the metric by which your worth is established. (Side note: straight guys who know so much about what women want, I’m guessing you don’t want to rethink your premise that your estimation of other guys’ bodies is the one that matters when determining what women find attractive, but it would behoove you to do so. If there were one thing women don’t like (there’s not!), it would be straight guys mansplaining our sexuality to us).

Basically, what fat shaming is about in your sixties (because that is how old Bill Mayer is, friends!) is what fat shaming is about in sixth grade. It’s just one more way that a certain group of people, a group with relatively more power than others and a deep fear of losing it, maintain that power by saying: I am going to tell you what matters, and I am going to tell you whether or not you have that thing that matters, and I am going to make it so painful for you to not have it that you will remake your body to get me off your back, because it is weirdly important to me to exert this control over you.

My furtive eighth grade crush got fat shamed in middle school, and he was pretty fat. But, you know, so did I, and I’ve never had a medical doctor express concern for my weight. Discouragingly, it barely registered with them when I was losing my hair and hadn’t had a period in a year. But other helpful randos, from grandmas to girls in my gymnastics class, started calling me fat at age four, and the only way I was able to stop them was to self-regulate so effectively that by the time I went to college, I was throwing up when I “lost control” and chewed too many pieces of Juicy Fruit.

That’s the goal of fat-shaming, fat-shamers: someone who has accepted your right to tell them who they are and what their worth so unreservedly that she can graduate Phi Beta Kappa on the one hand, but still believe that she is “too fat to sit down” on her graduation night. And — as one person with a running leitmotif I like to call “pathological need for control” running through my adolescence and early adulthood to another —- can I suggest you slow your roll and take a look in your own goddamn mirror?

I can’t speak to why a person might experience exerting control over the bodies of other people as catharsis, why what they need to self regulate is to make someone else feel worthless. I can only imagine that this bullshit behavior comes from the same sense of existential dread that makes two missed days at the gym feel like that a night in one of those sky cells on Game of Thrones to me. But I can be compassionate towards you and also take a hard pass when it comes to “tolerating” your “opinions” about the value of people around you, or your right to patrol the size of their bodies or to determine that they need to be harassed into having a body you like better. Your feeling about thigh gaps or whatever is your deal, but the fact that you think other people should be treated badly or should endanger their health in an effort to make their bodies acceptable to you is also, 100%, your deal, and not the problem or the responsibility of the people in those bodies. Take your body and do whatever you want with it, but shut the mouth part of it first.

Similarly: I’m not going to explain to anyone why a fertilized egg in one’s fallopian tube is 1. not a viable pregnancy and 2. not something to “watchfully wait" over. “Watchful waiting” is appropriate when the risks of intervention are significant, or the benefits unclear, or both. In the very few cases in which this might be what a doctor would advise, that decision is made though a cost-benefit analysis with the mother, because the mother is the patient being treated. There is no “child’s life” to consider because, as with any pregnancy, but maybe especially an entirely nonviable one, there is no child yet.

If you are anything but shocked by the idea that someone should be expected to “wait and see” if their medically treatable and potentially fatal medical condition will kill them or not because of how another person, living in another body, feels about the situation, then you don’t give a shit about life. Not the life of that woman, which you are endangering. Not the lives of any existing children she has or partner she has or parents or students or siblings or friends. What you are saying, again, is that you decide what this woman’s life is worth — and your expectation is that she accept that when it comes down to it, your random feelings about her body both define the value of that body and should be factored into the clinical decision making of her medical provider.

As with our fat-shamers above, I’m just wondering where it came from, this idea that you’re entitled to control the bodies of other human beings, and the weirdly aggressive efforts to do so.

Are you ok, Representative? It seems to me you are not.

It doesn’t even matter that an ectopic pregnancy is not viable. Because pro-life arguments are about “preserving life” the way fat-shaming is about “promoting health”: that is to say, they’re not about that at all. It’s about being unwilling to either take responsibility for working out whatever damage you have, or to acknowledge that the way you are choosing to work that damage out is by violently exerting control over the bodies and lives of others.

Forcing a woman to carry a pregnancy she doesn’t want is violent whether that pregnancy is only somewhat likely, as it is in the case of a viable pregnancy carried in a country with the highest material mortality rate in the developed world, or pretty effing likely, as in the case where the pregnancy is lodged in a tube that will not accomodate it. When you legally compel another human being to risk her life carrying a pregnancy in her body because of how you feel, that is violent.

I want to have compassion for you, person who sees no better option than hurting other people to deal with whatever it is life has handed you. I’m something of a poster child for irrational or detractive ways of dealing with the parts of the world I don’t like: see above, where a teenage permutation of me was vomiting gum bile. But I also feel like we don’t serve anyone by looking the other way while they evade the responsibly we all have to handle our own shit.

Certainly you get that, right? If a person’s body size, the pregnancy they carry, their health status, are all issues of personal responsibility, surely you, too, can own up to the fact that you have this thing where, instead of overdoing it at the buffet — or, I don’t know, getting pregnant in the wrong part of your body? — you insist that other people’s bodies should be altered to your specifications, and that you should decide if those bodies are fed, or wear shorts, or receive medical care. You can acknowledge that this is a weirder and less palatable approach to managing your dark feelings than is eating too many carbs or whatever it is you think we’re all doing with our insufficiently controlled, overweight, inconveniently fertile bodies. You can set aside that weight-loss tea you’re sipping and consider that maybe, the one who’s “ready for a change” is you.

#james corden #fatshaming ectopic pregancies bodies

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langernameohnebedeutung · 5 years ago

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I heard you wrote a really long story/novel in 9th grade and I want to hear more

oh god oh god oh godYeah I did, it was...insanely long. Like, I knew it was long and the last time someone asked me about it on here I actually went back to my old laptop and dug it out again to find an excerpt and it’s so. fucking. long. I’m not at home right now so I can’t tell you from the top of my head how long it is because I keep repressing that, but however long you think it might be? It’s longer than that. My biggest question about this work is where Young Me got the energy and time from (oh right because I stopped doing my homework in 7th grade) And I didn’t even finish it. I knew how it was supposed to end (I had a very detailed outline) but the whole thing died somewhere along the way.The thing is...it’s really cringy thinking back on it, but I’m still glad I wrote it because it taught me so much about writing conventions and how to use them and when not to use them. Because I think the biggest problem with the book is (aside from being painfully adolescent and edgy) is that I was just driven by what I thought a novel had to be like to be taken seriously and my point of reference were either really old books or contemporary mainstream. I just tried to go through these moves, whether the story benefited from it or not.The basic plot was very simple: There is this group of four girls (each having like. 1 or 1.5 character traits. One was smart but rude, the other painfully nice but a dumb, the third one horny and the fourth one was really all about protecting animals over humans. Like...those were basically 90% of their personalities. At least bitter and horny become a couple and have actual character development but it’s still really flat). Girl 1 finds out that her neighbour is very abusive towards his son and wants to help him but no one takes her seriously because they live in a small town and everyone likes the neighbour, so they end up working with the neighbour’s brother to get the boy out of the town. So...honestly, summarising it like that, it could have been a good story, if I hadn’t made the whole thing painfully fake-deep, off-tone and almost unreadable, because I thought that was what a Good Novel(TM) had to be like.- It takes place in the US, in a small town. The thing is... I felt that a story worth reading had to take place in the USA or at least an English-speaking country. Because that’s where basically everything I cared about took place and all German books I knew where The Classics and regional crime thrillers which I found “cringy”. But the problem is, that I didn’t know much about rural American culture beyond some movie stereotypes (I talk a lot about corn. There is corn. A lot of corn. Did I mention corn?) so a lot of it - the school, the houses, the way the neighbours interact with each other - are all very European/German. Mind you, I did my research, but it’s all very theoretical with little sense of cultural differences.

- I just...tried to cram every socially relevant subject into this story, even if I didn’t have room to actually develop it and usually in the most ham-fisted way possible. Plus I was young and didn’t have much sense of ...development. So many references are very specific to the time period it was written in and would already puzzle people reading it today, I think.

- Everything is over-described. I can’t stress this enough how much I described everything. As I said, one of the biggest issues with the story is that I tried to take every advice of writing ever uttered to heart and I really did that with “Show Don’t Tell” and “don’t just describe, write about feelings”. Character turns their head and looks at a wall: 3 paragraphs about the wall, how the wall makes them feel, how long the wall has been there, what they know about the wall, the state of the wallpaper, which room is on the other side, which their favourite wall in the room is, how they would paint it if they had the choice etc. Character climbs over a fence - structural integrity of the fence. material of the fence. What the fence looks like. Which neighbour built this fence. The hedgehog the person found under that fence 9 years ago and how the relationship with that hedgehog developed and how it changed her view on the fence. And all that smack in the middle of scenes that are supposed to progress the story. Personally, I get impatient when writers over-describe something but a part of me thought: oh, okay, that’s what a novel has to be like, I have to over-describe anything for people to take it serious. So I described everything.

- So much stuff that doesn’t add anything to the story, the characters etc. Mind you, I’m not a fan of erasing everything that doesn’t advance the story. I like reading more about the characters and their world etc. But it didn’t even do that. So much stuff that is just there to give you an absolutely perfect, detailed view of everyone’s life. This story takes place over months and you would get descriptions of daily lives including time stamps before each new paragraph. Chapters were between 6,000 and 20,000 words long.

- Every once in awhile I was like: Oh, I didn’t do anything with that character for a while but they’re important to this story so people have to remember they exist and I’d have them do something utterly random that doesn’t have anything to do with the plot except that every character would mention at some point: “Oh did you hear about THAT?” and never mention it again.

- I valued symbolism over ... making sense. Because in school we would always sit down and analysis metaphors and leitmotifs and parallels, I thought that was the most essential part of a story and more essential than to just. tell a story. And honestly that was part of the reason why it stopped being fun writing this (apart from being so over-detailed that I was never getting anywhere. Like I had a cool outline but I couldn’t get anywhere because I was describing over one and a half pages how that one chick felt about pasta and who makes the best pasta in her family and the way the consistency of the sauce changed over time -MAYBE IT WOULDN’T CHANGE IF YOU JUST STARTED EATING DUMB BITC-) because I couldn’t say anything like - it was warm - or - she wore her hair in a ponytail - without cross-referencing if I attributed higher meaning to any of that.

- It’s just...every genre. And don’t get me wrong, I still hate the idea that you have to adhere to the rules of a single genre, but I really tried to cram every tone and every genre into one story and the result was all over the place.

So yeah that’s the making of Snow White

#nonfandom #personal #writing #abuse mention #cw abuse #Anonymous

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aion-rsa · 4 years ago

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Zack Snyder’s Justice League: Why Wonder Woman and the Amazons Have a New Theme

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Tom Holkenborg wants to take an entirely different spin on the music we associate with Diana Prince, aka Wonder Woman. To be sure, the famous electric cello theme composed by Hans Zimmer, whom Holkenborg collaborated with on the score to Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice (2016), still appears in Zack Snyder’s Justice League. Yet this time around, the Dutch composer, who is also known as Junkie XL, was looking to bring out a different side of Wonder Woman’s personality, not to mention Zack Snyder’s decidedly more ancient interpretation of the Amazons.

“It does use that [Zimmer] riff,” Holkenborg says when we sit down for a Zoom roundtable interview. “But what was missing, potentially, in an earlier approach is that everything Diana does is covered with a blanket of being feminine and being respectful that she’s a woman. My answer [to that] is, ‘Have you actually seen how she kicks ass?’ She takes a whole army out by herself. It’s like why are we softening up her music? If anything it should be the roughest of all of them.”

Hence when you hear the “Wonder Woman Theme” in the Snyder Cut next week, it will be familiar but more guttural, as if it’s consumed by a drive to cut straight for the throat. It also is not the only Wonder Woman theme in the movie. In fact, a more regal and ethereal leitmotif plays just as often for Diana and the rest of the Amazons—it’s a piece of music that relies on choral chants and lamentations. With obvious eastern and Mediterranean influences, it might better resemble the music in Ridley Scott’s Gladiator than it does traditional superhero movies.

Says Holkenborg, “I made the music very tough for her at times, and way more emotional than the original was, because I infused her theme with a lot of world music elements. There’s a lot of Amazon clan tribe in there, where she comes from. And it’s such a strong clan and it has such an old quality to it; they’ve always been here and they always will be here. That’s the philosophy, so the music needed to [feel like] it breathes for thousands of years, forwards and backwards at the same time.”

He adds, “That’s the quality world music has for me. It’s always been, it will always be. Whereas a hip electronic sound [will have you say], ‘Yeah, that was great in 1988, wasn’t it?’ But not so much in 2006. And whatever Trap music you come up with in 2020 will sound horribly dated in five years when nobody is even interested anymore in Trap.”

These are just a few of the thoughts Holkenborg has had on his mind since last spring when he began work on what HBO Max has dubbed Zack Snyder’s Justice League. It’s been a bittersweet process for the composer, who worked as an assistant to Zimmer on Man of Steel (2013) before evolving in his relationship to co-composer on Batman v Superman. With Justice League, he was always intended to be the solo composer, following up his celebrated Mad Max: Fury Road score by ushering in the sound for the next era of the DCEU. But it was not to be.

When Snyder felt obligated to step away from Justice League, resulting in Joss Whedon taking over for extensive reshoots, Holkenborg knew his time in the DCEU was also over. Danny Elfman ultimately took on composer duties, throwing out Zimmer and Holkenborg’s themes from the previous DC films in favor of reprising John Williams’ iconic Superman theme, as well as Elfman’s own work on Batman (1989).

“I just want to point out that I’ve never seen the Joss Whedon version,” Holkenborg tells me. “It was too painful for me to watch that. And I don’t mean painful that I wouldn’t like the film because of its merits as a film, but purely for the fact that Zack and I were not working on it.”

But the chance to scale what the Holkenborg calls “Mount Everest” came again when fans made history by convincing a studio, or at least its parent company, WarnerMedia, to invest in letting Snyder finish his vision. It also meant Holkenborg is returning to the DCEU, albeit under different circumstances.

“When I played the music that I started on in 2016, I finished maybe 50 percent of the film. But back in the day it was a two-hour film, and now we’re talking about a four hour and 20-minute film.” The nature of the beast had obviously grown. Additionally, Holkenborg was also haunted by one of the key reasons for his and Snyder’s departure—the death of Snyder’s daughter. The composer ultimately dubbed the music he wrote four years ago as coming from a “painful time period,” and he wanted to start from scratch.

“I called Zack and I said, ‘Do you mind if I start over?’ And he said, ‘No by all means.’ He wasn’t necessarily married to anything we cooked up in those days, and he also added, ‘Keep in mind when you start the shackles are off.’” By shackles, Snyder meant pleasing anyone other than themselves.

Says Holkenborg, “There was no interference of studios and producers on this particular film, which… is extremely unique. This only happens to final cut directors like George Miller, James Cameron, Peter Jackson, and Chris Nolan, for instance. So I’m lucky to work with a few of those.”

And thanks to the Snyder Cut, the four-hour version’s namesake is also added to that list. Nevertheless, it was an odd experience composing a four-hour epic during a pandemic. It’s why Holkenborg scored much of the film from his own house with one bass, a keytar, and a handful of other instruments lying around.

Says Holkenborg, “When you work on a film like this, and you hear the film score and you see the movie, you would think, ‘Oh a movie like that, you could only write music for that if you have a massive studio with 20 assistants and the most expensive engineers, and microphones that are half a million dollars each.’ Clearly no, you can do it with a lot less. My setup is not that fancy anyway… I never really liked the clean designs, multimillion-dollar studios. It’s not for me. Just give me a house, throw the furniture out, and put some instruments in. Very simple. It’s always been like that.”

Between that and Snyder’s vision being undiluted, this might just be the purest process yet. It’s certainly one that brings back Zimmer’s bittersweet Superman theme from Man of Steel and Batman v Superman, and marries it with a larger universe of gods and monsters, as aurally imagined by Holkenborg. The age of Snyder’s heroes comes at last.

Zack Snyder’s Justice League premieres on HBO Max on Thursday, March 18.

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#aion-rsa #Den of Geek

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mei-be · 4 years ago

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I decided that this year, I will make a resolution. This in itself is a bit revolutionary, because I’ve always been the anti-traditionalist, anti-precedent, just anti-. This year is different, because it started off in a fever pitch, whined to a rotten crescendo, and now is whimpering to a close. At the literal beginning of this year, my mental and physical health had taken a major shit in the proverbial bed. I started the New Year terrified, and sick with worry. I had been hospitalized against my will, in a psych ward, and found myself creeping through a very real life version of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. I had a delusional roommate, haunted by The Man, who watched her and hurt her. Hurt her though food, through medicine, invaded her life, drained her bank accounts, made it so she couldn’t sleep. Now that I was her roommate, he was watching me too, and I couldn’t close any doors, take a shower, or shut my eyes. There was the drooling, heavy lidded non-verbal man, who shuffled through the hallways attached to an IV, and had one hand permanently lifted and dangling. There was the angry kid, who yelled obscenities, and complained about the bullshit, his medication, how he was treated, only to periodically break down in tears and screaming, and had to go into the Quiet Room. The Quiet Room was a very small space, complete with bed decked out in restraints. The only thing missing was the padded walls and the straight jacket. But that would be undignified. A nurse stood behind a little window, distributing drugs at specific times. I asked her why she broke the pills out of the blister pack, into a paper cup, and tipped the paper cup into my waiting hand. Why not just break the pills from the blister pack into my hand. It’s the same amount of touching by the both of us, and then they could reduce that additional waste and cost. My mind works like that. She didn’t know, that’s how they did it.

That week felt like a month, just like this year felt like a new lifetime. Since then, I’ve been going to therapy, seeing doctors, paying attention to my diet, getting regular sleep, and working on the rats nest that is my brain. It’s what you do, and it’s all good and healthy and mindful, and positive. But what I’ve been really struggling with, is the anxiety. My anxiety rips through me like a cancer. It denatures and decays every day, no matter when it arises. All the good I ever did is wiped away, and I’m left with grime and ash. It used to stay in my head, but now it’s ventured out mycelium-esque threads into my body. It makes me weak, it takes the ground out from under me, my heart machine over heats, my fulel expels and lays wasted, my body-cage aches...

It is what it is.

I am circling the drain. I’ve been here before, I’ve seen this movie, and the ending does no justice. Leitmotifs are small, recurring, characteristic of a composition; so much so that they become the composition. I don’t want to be this ring-cycle, I wont cement this reality through repetition. And so, I’ve decided to wage an attack on this misery. An attack in the form of a Happiness War, to make the goal of happiness as if it were a life or death situation. To furiously, religiously, and zealously seek Happiness with an intensity alike to terror; only matched by the ferocity of the terror inside.

So I make a stand, I screw my courage to the sticking place and screw my fear and stick it to my panic. I choose, I chase, I become a champion of happiness. It is the only choice. I remember a story I once heard. A man was telling his friend about hunting rhino in Africa. It had been a long hunt, and he had finally come to meet his prey. The rhino was a dense, black, death machine of a beast. He fired, but missed. His second shot jammed the rifle. Panicked, he looked around, there was nothing but grass in every direction. No weapon, no tree, no rocks to climb. Just grass, heat, and angry rhino. He could hear the rhino’s approach like thunder, he could very nearly feel the animals hot breath on his neck. Entranced in the tale, his friend asked, “So what did you do?” “I climbed a tree right in the nick of time!” He said. “What tree?”, the friend asked, “You said there was no tree!” “Don’t you see?”, answered the man, “There has to be a tree, there is always a tree, you have to look for it, but that is the point of my story. There is always a tree. Find the tree.”

I take constant support and inspiration from this story. Where there is life, there are more stories. So you do the damn thing until it’s dead, or you are. Never give up, never surrender. There is always another way, even when the rhino is upon you. It is always darkest before the dawn, you just hold on. Find the tree.

Part 1. Gratitude

I did an informal poll, and asked my friends on social media some questions about Happiness. It’s a pretty banal question, and definitely leads to a lot of cliches and derivative content. But even though the question has been asked so many times, to the point of being historical, it still echos in the collective heads of many. So here we go, here we go, here we go again. The way that I research and make decisions is such: I read as much as I can about my subject, and disregard the biases of each individual body of work, even though I know that there are definite biases. Instead, I look for repetition. Despite people’s stance or mediated perceptions, I believe that there are certain, close to absolute truths that will emerge, if given enough experience or exposure. This way of digesting information began when I was grade school aged, and learned about the Free Marketplace Theory. Basically, you give everyone a chance, and the quality items will rise to the top, and prove themselves by their worth. No monopolies, no deceitful practices, no bull. This sounds like a great way to go about scholarly work, but you can imagine me trying to buy sponges, or find recipes, or, most everyday things.

So, one of the threads of commonality that I noticed when asking people about their Happiness, is gratitude. Either as a precursor or an after effect, I see a theme of being happy because of what you have. Interestingly enough, it seems that gratitude is interwoven with a sense of, “It could be worse, but it isn’t”. This strikes me as odd, because it seems that a sense of misery, or acute un-Happiness, is necessary for Happiness to exist. One of my friends wrote this, “Hammocks without spiders. Water when I’m thirsty. Really cold soda on a hot day.” This seems like a simple, light-hearted, cute statement, but look at the profound presence of suffering. To experience the relaxation of a lovely hammock, she apparently had previously experienced a hammock that came with spiders. Good god. That seems like a nightmarish exercise in vulnerability. Yet, it is that horror, that leads her to appreciate each spider-free hammock session, and even more; to list it as one of the top things that make her happy. We run from misery, we avoid it, we do everything we can to keep it at bay. But it’s the other side of happiness. To experience Happiness, apparently you have had to sit in the Shit for a while. I’ve thought about the Shit before, and have come to this similar conclusion. When you are faced with the question of, “Why is this happening to me?” Or the ever-popular, “ Why do bad things happen to good people?”, perhaps the answer is, “So they can learn to be very fucking Happy”.

Two key takeaways here: 1. Caveat- The bad things, the Shit, cannot kill you. If it does, then the conversation is over. Don’t let it kill you, if you can. Rage, rage against the dying of the light. Where there is life, there is hope, and more story. For those of us who suffer from suicidal tendencies or ideation, this is a point that needs to be made, for we are the ones in the strange position of being both powerless, and the only one with the power over our lives. 2. The Shit cannot become your life. If the Shit is all you see when you look around, you can never gain perspective. You won’t be able to learn from it if you can’t get some sort of distance. Distance, or progress, is the very mechanism of the story. The shit is your conflict, and conflict is the very catalyst that moves the story, into its rising action and climax. In other, plainer words, that Shit has to move, man. A story that ends before or at its climax is bullshit. It’s an artsy literary move, but for me, that’s just lazy writing. Having your audience choose their own ending saves you from having to write THE ENTIRE REST OF THE STORY. Work that Shit, move through that Shit, don’t let it be everything. That’s just shitty.

2. Progress

A therapy that I’ve just began exploring is ACT, or Acceptance and Commitment Therapy. If you’ve ever even dipped a toe into any sort of counseling or self help, chances are, you’ve come across some form of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. It’s like the Gold Standard of psychological treatment. It’s based on the idea that your psychological and behavioral issues are based in faulty thinking and or behavior. It’s rooted in repetition, an endless cycle of catching bad thoughts, and turning them into better ones. Often, you literally find the opposite of that negative thought, or look for evidence to support or deny it. You also try to find origins or deeper causes of the negative behavior. The idea is that if you do these exercises long enough, the repetition forms new connections, and new habits. It’s super boring. It works. ACT takes a lot of the same models found in CBT, with one difference. Instead of fighting your negative thoughts, you first accept them. It’s in the name. So, you still go through the rigamorole of identifying your negative thoughts, and trying to find their origins and evidences. However, one deviation that I’ve found really helpful is that there is no way not to choose. By not doing something, you are choosing NOT that thing. Given that you’ve already made a choice, acknowledge that choice. Now that you’ve made a stance, decide the quality of that stance. If you are someone like me, who’s fight, flight, or freeze sympathetic nervous system most often chooses to freeze, and when frozen, reconciles itself into the form of a panic attack, this mode of CHOICE makes a huge difference. Let me lay it out for you in this example:

Conflict: I don’t know what to do with my life, I’m aimless, unmotiviated, torn. It’s too late for me, I can’t do it, I’m not good enough.

Assuming you’ve already gone through your basic reframing thoughts, positive thoughts, SMART goals checklist, you might end with something that looks like this.

I don’t know if getting a Nursing Degree is right for me. It makes sense, and I’ve already put a lot of effort into it, but it’s not what I love. I love foraging, herbalism and dietetics. However, those fields are not sustainable, feasible, or a good fiscal degree. I don’t know what to do.

But today, right now, I am currently not actively pursuing a nursing degree. So, today, I’ve chosen not to pursue a nursing degree.

For some people and some situations, this in and of itself, brings a deep clarity, a relief, and a resolution. But if it doesn’t...

Acknowledge your choice: For the next week, I choose to not pursue a nursing degree. I’m not going to exert energy thinking about it, arguing with myself about it, it is a non issue. I am not pursuing this. What’s left? The foraging, the herbalism, the dietetics. This is your stance.

Now that you’ve made that stance, think about the quality. What kind of herbalist am I going to be? How far am I going to take this? What opportunities can I find?

The idea here is that you’ve redirected the energy you would have spent arguing with yourself, and instead are now pointed toward a more productive path. You may circle back to the original decision, but now, you’ve moved forward in the journey instead of being stuck at the beginning quandary. You’ve expanded.

3. Presence

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kylydian · 7 years ago

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Music and Cross Art Discipline in Games: Bridging the Gap

Video games take a lot of different artistic disciplines and make something cohesive. That might have been the most redundant statement I’ve ever said... In video games, you have developers, writers, artists, composers, sound designers, modelers, marketers and oh so many people who add artistic direction to the vision. Many times, these disciplines come together to create something amazing, but so many times does it feel that music is just added on top. I believe that the music of a game should encompass all that a game is, and that the game should also encompass all that the music is. The same could be said about the art and music, or art and game, or story and music, or any combination of disciplines! The game wouldn’t exist without the art, so likewise should the game not exist without music or purposeful lack of music.

Now I just sound pretentious….

Artistic disciplines have been combined for millennia, most notably through dance, drama, and music, but now have expanded to encompass all art forms within the last couple centuries. However, video games are an extremely new medium in the annuals of time. So often do you play a game that has good music, but has music that simply exists. While this music may be great, all too often does it fall back in our mind as we dismiss the soundtrack. But what about the great soundtracks? Why do we remember soundtracks that are deemed incredible? I’m of the belief that we remember these because they present music as being equal to everything else in the game. It’s almost like the music is so present that it’s fighting the art, sound, story and the game itself, while also working together with them to make a better product.

So how do we achieve these seemingly effortless mergers of the arts like you see in Super Mario Galaxy, Nier Automata and Persona 5? There’s many ways to do this, but I think most people’s gut response would be through trial and error. Don’t get me wrong, trial and error are part of it. But I think there’s something more. Something less obvious. You can understand art without actually understanding it. In cases like this, if we look on the surface we’re already dooming ourselves to the same monotony that so many other games fall into musically. I think the answer lies in understanding each other.

As composers, we have an idea of where we want music to fall in the spectrum of a project, but developers also have an idea about this. We need to understand the visions of developers, and where our music falls in a creation mindset within the world we’re creating. However, this is pretty obvious. We’re hired to help bring a vision to life. The key to a breakthrough is that developers also need to understand the vision of the composer. Composers have an idea of how a game is going to sound, and there needs to be a supportive back and forth between dev and composer, between dev and artist, and even between composer and artist. Everyone needs to have the same vision.

There’s an incredible GDC talk from Mick Gordon, the composer of the 2016 reboot of Doom that describes this relationship much better than I ever could.

To summarize it briefly, Gordon was presented with a very clear, but impossible vision. The vision was so clear that he realized he needed to approach the entire project from a different angle. When he originally thought he found the answer, he was told that his unique idea wasn’t good enough, but that he was on the right track and to keep trying. This instantly validated the work, the person, and the vision while also allowing the developers to say that this wasn’t what they had in mind. He went back to the drawing board and found the answer to the “Doom Instrument” that is heavily featured in the game. In turn, the sound team said they didn’t want guitars in the soundtrack. Slowly Gordon began to implement guitars into the soundtrack, telling them, “Guys this is Doom. You need guitars.” He also had a vision of what the soundtrack needed to sound like. This is a perfect example of composer, developer, and the sound team working together to create something that was truly fitting. The soundtrack to Doom 2016 was one of the most appropriate soundtracks in recent memory, and it wasn’t only because it was metal as fuck. The different teams worked together, and continuously verified each other work. To make a cohesive game across the arts, taking the time to understand each other’s vision is absolutely imperative.

The visual arts tend to not struggle as much in communicating. Don’t get me wrong, it still happens all the time. But if you think about the amount of times an average person looks at something critically versus listens to something critically you’ll notice there’s a huge difference in frequency. If developers don’t like a model or a piece of art, they’re going to easily be able to say “Hey, I wasn’t really thinking that for the claw. I was thinking more of a tiger claw instead of a bear.” As humans, we pass visual criticism all the time, doing so somewhat accurately, even without a direct understanding of visual art. That’s because it’s normal to us. For music and sound though, not everyone is equipped with this skill set. Most people have preferences on music, and can tell if they like or don’t like a piece. But if a developer doesn’t like a track we write, it’s all too common to hear back “I don’t like this, I don’t know what it is, but something needs to change.” And as musicians we’re sitting here and are asking ourselves “Oh god. What did we do wrong? Was the melody bad? Maybe the harmony was repetitive? No that can’t be it, the harmony was pretty varied. Maybe the mix was unbalanced? Did they not like the use of trombone over a more traditional string melody?” And we have no idea what to fix or how to make our client happy. Often when I reply back to responses like this, I’m greeted with something like “I don’t really know how to describe it. It was a little low.”

“What was a little low? Was the bass too soft? Should the melody be higher? Do I need to put it in a higher key?” Our thoughts race again, until we ask:

“What do you mean by ‘a little low’?”

“I don’t know, you’re the composer.”

This is so counterproductive.

When talking with developers, I find it very beneficial to set up some key terms about music that make communication much more effective. These can vary from vocabulary terms, musical ideas, instruments, genres, or literally anything about music. I’ll generally try to establish different key terms depending on the project, because each one is different.

The situation presented above might have been prevented if we took the time to talk with the developers to find a mutual understanding about music. If we had done this, the first time they might have been able to say “Hey, I thought that the lowest bass instrument was pitched too low. Could you maybe bring that up a bit?” This is much easier for us as musicians to understand. By this we instantly know that that our lowest instrument was too low in pitch, and that we might need to bring it up an octave. Obviously, this still isn’t too specific for composers, but we now know what the problem is, and we can devise a plan to fix it.

And granted, sometimes I don’t have to do this! One thing I really liked, was about a month ago someone I’m working with told me “I’d really like it if we could begin to implement some leitmotif ideas into this track.”

Bam. That’s a winner right there.

But just imagine what would have happened if the developer didn’t know how to articulate this. I don’t want to think about it…

And this same kind of tactic can be employed with all types of disciplines within the game industry. The music should compliment all other forms of art in a game. When possible, I like to run the music by everyone in the team to get their opinions. There’s going to be one person who has the final say, but if everyone is aware of what you’re doing, I think it’s beneficial for the entire team.

I try to start writing music only after I see visual art for what it is I’m writing for, and a plot summary for the game or scene. I can’t do this at all times, but I feel that my music is much more appropriate when I’m able to do that. In turn, my music then can influence the art and gameplay.

Granted this is just what I prefer to do, everyone has a different process.

So. Takeaways

For Developers

· Communicate your vision with everyone on the team

· Listen to everyone else’s take on the vision, but remember in the end it’s your project

· Validate the work of not only composers, but every creative discipline

· Provide pointed and directed feedback

· If you don’t understand how to articulate something, ask your creatives for advice

For Composers

· Writing truly fitting music comes from sharing the same vision as the entire team

· Take the time to understand the vision of everyone, and also make your interpretation known

· Educate those who aren’t able to provide detailed feedback on music or sound

· Be flexible on the needs and wants of the team

What it all boils down to is understanding the vision of the team. Everyone will have opinions on what the project should look like, but to create truly immersive experiences that I would call complete packages, everyone needs to have the same or a similar vision. Communication and education is key for creating industry defining games.

Games are shared knowledge, and shared dreams. Make them that way.

We’re creators, let’s create something great.

#Video Games #Video Game Developer #Video Game Development #Video Game Music #Music #Art #teamwork #indie dev #indie music #indie game #ost #soundtrack #arts #Kylydian

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theabominableblogger · 7 years ago

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My Reaction to “Wonder Woman”

My skin is clear. My crops are growing. Everything is well and good.

Reaction and screams found below.

Holy smokes the new DC logo

It’s straight out of Justice League Unlimited and I LOVE IT!

That’s the Louvre.

Check out that Wayne Enterprises logo!

The photo!

Themyscira looks so cool! I’m getting a Gondor from LOTR vibe from it but it’s all girls and no Denethor stand-in.

Little Diana is so flippin’ cute!

THAT WAS AN ARMADILLO! There’s armadillos on this island!

Man, Princess Buttercup (Robin Wright) grew up and kicked ass.

Ares looks like the bastard child of that one horned helmet dude from Skyrim and Sauron from LOTR

This backstory about the gods is great

The music so far is fantastic as well.

“You’re stronger than you believe!” And braver than you seem. And smarter than you think.

Connie Nielsen and Robin Wright are amazing as Hippolyta and Antiope so far

Gal Gadot!

That one Amazon flinching in the background though is totally me

Steve!!

The braid Diana has in her hair is really pretty.

Aw, they cut out that shot of her diving into the ocean.

Oh snap.

OK, this is straight out of “The Little Mermaid”

Steve’s literal first word to Diana upon seeing her is “Ah.”

I’m in love

“They [the Amazons] got guns, right?” Ah, no, no they don’t.

Aah no!

THIS IS AMAZING!!

SHE (Antiope) LITERALLY PLANTS HER ARROWS IN THE GROUND AND USES IT AS A QUIVER!!

*SCREAM*

WOOO HIPPOLYTA!!!

NOOOOO!!!

Uh... Steve...

The Lasso!

“I’m a spYYYYY!!”

Doctor Poison’s face prosthetic is a really nice touch

WAIT SOMEONE’S IN THERE!! GAAAHHHH!!

Way to go, Captain Kirk

That’s Danny Huston as the main German dude, isn’t it?

Go help, Diana...

“But you’re [Diana] an Amazon like the rest of us.” Excuse me, what?

STEVE PLAYING IN A HOT TUB LIKE A LITTLE KID!! :D

“I am... above average.” That’s amazing.

Steve, put some pants on for Pete’s sake.

I legit thought Diana was not talking about the watch if you know what I mean.

I am getting so many feels from this movie it’s insane.

Hey, bull. No seriously, there’s an actual bull.

THIS MUSIC!!

What’s the inscription on the sword say?

I like how the Wonder Woman armor is conveniently blue and red.

Aw schnap the cavalry

The headband was Antiope’s!

The feeeellllssss....

Wait, so is Diana the Godkiller weapon then? She’s gotta be.

“I’m the man who can!” Oh my gosh.

This dialogue is so great and this little back-and-forth innuendo between Diana and Steve is so cute and glorious and I am enjoying every minute of it.

“Well that’s neat.” I freaking love this movie.

“When it comes to procreation, men are essential, but for pleasure, not necessary.” HOT DANG MOVIE!

Danny Huston in this scene looks like a bulldog.

[Huston rubs the back of his hand down Dr. Poison’s cheek] Noooope...

WHAT?!? WHAT WAS THAT?!?

This is straight out of “Pocahontas II”

“Eyes to yourself, that’s enough.” Steve Trevor, defending women since 1918.

Diana cooing over a baby! Protect this woman at all costs!

OK, I am definitely buying this movie when it comes out on DVD.

Fashion! Show!

Outfit number 226?!?

OH MY GOSH THEY MATCH!!

Guys, I LOVE THIS MOVIE.

Etta is so freaking pure in this scene.

“Ah, it’s the bad guy convention.” I freaking love this man.

Etta wielding the sword!

Steve: Stay here.

Diana: OK (sneaks in anyway)

Well, hello David Thewlis...

Diana’s “bitch be serious?” face toward the British intelligence officer is great...

I feel like I can charge into a battle after finishing this movie. Anybody wanna join me? The more, the merrier.

So, I already had it spoiled for me that David Thewlis is Ares and seeing him sit nice and proper and talking about a proposed armistice is low key brilliant.

Whoa wait what Diana knows freaking Spanish?

Charlie’s accent is nothing short of amazing.

“I am both frightened and aroused.” Guys, have I mentioned that I love this movie?

HE BOUGHT HER ICE CREAM!!! I’M DYING FROM THIS CUTENESS!

Obligatory nuns.

Der little tugboat though.

That one Nazi general’s mustache is something straight out of a Snidely Whiplash cartoon.

Danny Huston, your accent’s slippin’

They [Dr. Poison and Luddendorf] even share an evil giggle together!

Is that a purple hat on Chief or is that the lighting?

No, not the baby!

This movie actually offers a really refreshing take on war overall and everyone’s opinions on it and it’s both heartbreaking and great.

What’s sad is that I can understand the Spanish that lady in the trench is saying.

The dramatic slow-mo of her taking her hair down... Elsa, eat your heart out.

SHOOKETH TO THY CORE.

That’s it. That’s it. I’m downloading the OST.

HER THEME!!

SLOW MOTION....

A TANK! SHE FREAKING THREW A TANK!!

*externally screaming*

Steve, don’t.

SHE LEAPED INTO A CHAPEL AND SAVED THE TOWN!!

THE PICTURE!!

Aah Sameer!

Steve literally pulled the “Sorry, I can’t hear you” excuse on freaking Ares on a freaking landline telephone.

You two love each other, dang it.

The chemistry between Gal Gadot and Chris Pine is freaking spectacular.

Urge... to download... OST... so... strong...

*screaming internally*

*screaming externally*

KISS DAMMIT!

Wait... are they gonna... do the do that we want them to do?

YEESSS!! And it was nothing explicit either and really subtle and I appreciate that.

The ragamuffin troupe (Sameer, Charlie, and Chief) call Steve “Steven”

Steve: Don’t do anything

Diana: OK (sneaks in anyway)

OH MY GOD STEVE’S GERMAN ACCENT!

This is straight out of “Indiana Jones” and it’s amazing.

DIANA STOLE THAT LADY’S DRESS!!

OH MY GOD STEVE I FREAKING LOVE YOU!

Why does Dr. Maru remind me of Alana Bloom from “Hannibal” but a lot more demure?

STEVE!

“Extra-ordinary.” Ah... Steve... your fake accent’s slippin’...

Diana...

How is she keeping her sword tucked in her dress? Does she have her armor on underneath it? OK, she does, nevermind.

Do I hear a certain leitmotif coming up?

Is her theme in Minor?!? Cause that’s awesome.

What the heck is that stuff that Luddendorf is breathing in? Is it like a really early prototype of Venom?

Well dang.

Diana, that ain’t Ares.

Steve’s speech to Diana about how not everyone is good is perfect. Just perfect.

Ummm...

Oh. Snap. Son.

(Steve and the Ragamuffin Troupe wear gas masks to sneak in) Are you my mummy?

Get. The. Crap. Out.

Ares just pulled a Stealth Hi-Bye. Twice in a row.

Diana’s the Godkiller. Called it.

I can’t get over the fact that Remus Lupin is the villain of this movie. Just have him ditch the woolly caterpillar mustache.

Wait so does Ares know that WWII still happens? And that every other major war after that happens?

WHERE’S THE AUDIO BETWEEN THEM?!?

Aand another Steve sacrifices himself via an airplane and saves the world. *slams head on desk*

Ares freaking created his armor out of the wreckage around him. If that’s not a great visual representation of war, then I don’t know what is.

“Is that all you have to offer?” Nope.

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!! THEY DESERVE TO BE TOGETHER DANG IT!!

You did not just disrespect Steve in front of Diana.

“I can save today. You can save the world.” Gaahh!!

“I wish we had more time. I love you.” Gone. I’m done. My heart has exited my chest cavity and has sailed out the window.

Y’know, I could say that Gary Oldman could also make a great Ares but he’s known for playing bad guys and with David Thewlis, you never expect him being the bad guy.

This lighting is amazing.

Well, that final battle was... short.

Aaw Etta!

She thanked Bruce for giving her the photo and Steve’s watch!!

WOOOO!!!

Four for you, Allan Heinberg! You go, Allan Heinberg!

#the blogger reacts #Wonder Woman #steve trevor #wonder woman spoilers #ww spoilers #ww #wonder woman movie #gal gadot #chris pine #connie nielsen #robin wright #david thewlis #allan heinberg

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kaialone · 8 years ago

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I’m gonna ramble about Ganon(dorf) for a bit

Proceed if you’re interested (I wrote a lot)

Okay so I don’t even know how to start this, I’ll just go.

(note that I’ll mention the timeline in this, please dont think that I dont know that the timeline could be changed at any moment should nintendo feel ike it, I just like semi-going by currently established canon. Also please note that I got no problem with people who dont feel like following the timeline for any reason, to each their own.)

I kinda really like the fact that Ganondorf is said to be a reincarnation of Demise, because, idk, somehow the idea of powerful demons needing to reincarnate into human form for some reason, and then once they have this form and live that life they start having human feelings and emotions and start struggling with what they want to be and maybe end up becoming good guys, is just somethign I really enjoy.

(If that sounds weirdly specific, Great Demon King Piccolo from Dragonball is one character with that kinda arc that I love.)

And then of course, one of the most interesting things about Ganondorf, imo, is how in the three different timeline branches, you got one incarnation of Ganondorf who turns out very different in each branch.

Something I always like is to just kinda, look at the different “last words” Ganondorf has in each timeline branch, and what they really mean for each of them:

"The wind... it is... blowing."

“I am the Evil King, Ganon...”

“The history of light and shadow will be written in blood!”

(though this gets a bit muddled in the Downfall Timeline, as technically Ganon died in ALttP, but was revived in OoX,´, which I see as his true death for now, but then again we dunno if any Ganons after that where him revived or reborn so *shrug*)

But first we should talk about the guy that “grows up” to be these other three.

I mean, personally I think no matter how you look at it, OoT!Ganondorf did lots of bad stuff, and wasnt a good ruler to the Gerudo (I dont mind different interpretations at all though), but I do think his initial intentions were good like we hear him talk about in WW, but lets not get ahead of ourselves here.

OoT!Ganondorf doesn’t really end up helping the Gerudo once he actually takes over Hyrule (all the Gerudo are still over in the desert, cept for maybe Iron Knuckles) and its heavily implied all the Gerudo were brainwashed to some extent (The carpenters note that the Gerudo seem nicer, post-Twinrova’s defeat), and Nabooru, who was very respected among the Gerudo, was explicitly against Ganondorf, but then brainwashed into submission.

Like even if you think Twinrova did all that without him knowing, not noticing your parents brainwashing your people doesnt exactly make you a good leader.

Adding to that, if A Link to the Past’s backstory is to be believed (and the timeline is not said to split until Link falls in the final battle) then, Ganondorf entered the hiding place of the Triforce alongside fellow thieves of his, and ended up killing them all so he could have the Triforce for himself.

Buuut before you think I’m just gonna talk about how bad OoT!Ganondorf is, like, I still think he genuinely wanted to help his people (at first) and that everything WW!Ganondorf says does represent his true feelings, and that at some point, he just really wanted to do something good.

I think its interesting to think about why that presumably changed for a while, wether you think its the usual getting mad with power, getting to close to the “dark side” or whatever with all the dark magic going on, or being groomed into this role by Twinrova, or all of that, or something else entirely.

I mean, he definitely did some bad stuff before that too, but in the context of Ganondorf being a reincarnation of Demise, I wonder if it could be possible that either seeing Link and/or Zelda or laying eyes on the Triforce ended up having some effect on him, like awakening some part of Demise within him so to speak, contributing to him losing sight of his initial goals and getting more about power in general.

Notably post timeskip Ganondorf seems to use a lot more monsters/dmemons to do his bidding than before, but this could easily just be the difficulty spike for the player.

Idk if this sounds cheap to people somehow, but I remember a popular theory being that the Triforce of Power turned him evil so, its not that different imo.

Of course, in the final battle we see OoT!Ganondorf become Ganon, presumably for the very first time, but honestly? The transformation itself isn’t that important to me, as it just feels like a visual representation of the downfall Ganondorf had undergone already anyway.

And then, when he is defeated, he infamously curses Link, and ZELDA, and THE SAGES, vowing to kill their descendants once he breaks free from the seal and all...

...which leads into who is everyone’s favorite Ganondorf, and rightfully so, WW!Ganondorf.

Before going into the present day of WW, there is its backstory, which is very interesting to me, cause you just gotta think, how do we go from a guy like OoT!Ganon to WW!Ganon?

At some point after OoT but before WW, Ganondorf’s threat became reality, he broke out of the seal and tried taking over Hyrule once more.

But I cant help but wonder how it mustve felt for him. I picture him for years, decades, centuries maybe, sealed away, picturing his revenge, imagining how great it’ll feel to get free and eradicate the descendants of Link and Zelda, and finally making Hyrule his.

But when he was freed, he likely found a Hyrule that was different from how he remembered it. Notably, there would be no hero, nor descendants of his for him to exact revenge upon. And while we know that a princess seems to have had existed at the time, who knows if she was “a Zelda”, if you wanna call them that.

I just imagine it wouldve felt a lot less satisfying that he imagined, heck, probably wouldve felt more like he was robbed if his chance to take revenge.

And who knows what even happened to the Gerudo by that point? I know lack of them in Wind Waker doesnt mean they are extinct, but for all we know they couldve left hyrule altogether? (Like they seem to have done between OoT and TP, and mightve done post OoT in the Downfall timeline, if you dont think they went extinct)

Overall I could see what Ganondorf mightve pictured/wanted to be his most glorious moment, his long awaited return, mightve just ended up feeling kinda empty.

Not that I think he wouldve done a complete 180 already because of that, but I could see it leaving him in a bit of a shock.

Adding to that, now just as he is about to conquer Hyrule for real, the gods decide to destroy it, essentially. Or at least, thats how Ganondorf felt about the situation, given how he speaks of it in the game. Its like the gods are playing with him, everytime Hyrule is just within his graps, they take it from him.

The flood mustve felt especially terrible for him, cause the way he saw it, it mustve been something like the goddesses saying “we’d rather just end hyrule and kill all its people than have you be its ruler”. What a slap in the face, to put it lightly.

After that, getting sealed away again, and all the stuff I mentioned above, probably gave him time and opportunity to reflect upon his life so far, and the future too.

I dont think that in WW, Ganondorf was just “going through the motions”, and just trying to finish what he started because he had no choice at this point. I do think he still genuinely wanted to try and conquer Hyrule, its just that he has had some time to think about it, a bit more about why he wanted it, and about what he did wrong before, and regretting those mistakes.

Like for example, he really doesnt seem like he wants to harm Link and Zelda anymore, if he can help it. He could be hating them, still furious for what happened during OoT, but he doesnt seem to be.

One of these days I wanna talk about all the contrasts and parallels WW seems to draw to Zelda games that came before it, especially OoT, but for this bit I just wanna mention this one thing.

How in OoT you confront Ganondorf, who smugly plays his leitmotif on the organ, the sound of which growing louder the further you approach his chamber. His back pointed at the entrance which he knows the hero will emerge from. Zelda, encase in a crytal, hangs above him like a trophy, like the hero bait she is to him at this point.

And then in WW, his leitmotif plays in his final dungeon, but actually grow more quiet the closer you get to him. That already makes you feel like, while it invokes OoTs atmoosphere, it actually turns it on its head. And then, when you do cofront him, “Zelda” is instead peacefully sleeping in a bed, (presumably Ganondorfs bed?) with him calmly sitting by her side, watching over her. He doesn’t face Link directly as he enters, but isnt completely turned away from his either.

Of course this scene still has some creepy atmosphere to it, especially when he starts reading her mind, but maaaan, the contrast to OoT (and games that came before it) just GETS ME everytime I just think about it.

Ahhh, I could go on and on like, you all know this stuff, you all thought about him in this game so much, didnt you?

I really hope nintendo will choose to give another Ganondorf this kinda depth, and maybe even just play with the idea of Ganondorf taking on a different role than “final boss” in a Zelda title. I would love that.

Now, let’s turn the clock wayyy back to when Ganon fought Link, and talk about the timeline that occurs when Link is actually killed by him.

To me, this is kinda of the “original” timeline, for various reasons, but I don’t wanna distract from our main man here too long.

In this version of the events, Ganon manages to actually aquire the full Triforce in the final battle of OoT, and causes quite a bit of misery before the Sages finally manage to seal him away in this version, too. But because he is so powerful with the Triforce and all that, it ends up costing a lot more lives to finally get to that point.

Now from that point on, this Ganon seems to just kinda rule the Dark World, a twisted “evil” version of Hyrule of his own creation. And of course most notably, either because of this worlds properties, or his general state of being, this Ganon seemingly always stays in beast form from that point on.

Sadly this one doesnt talk too much (though he is very much capable of doing so), so we dont get much of a grasp on his character.

To me, ALttP!Ganon feels like somewhere in the middle when it comes to Ganons. Despite his bestial appearance, he doesnt seem as blind with power and rage as TP!Ganondorf, maybe cause he doesnt call himself a god or something. But he of course is nowhere near WW!Ganondorf in terms of reasons and having reflecting upon his past.

Either way, it is clear that he is not happy with just ruling his very own personal Hyrule, filled with damned people that have become monsters like him, as in ALttP he does attempt to break his seal and go back to the World of Light

This might just be out of greed, but you could also imagine he might simply be unhappy in this demonic world, or even scared? Given how we see that some inhabitants of this land lose their humanity to such an extent that they’re turning into things like trees, maybe even completely losing their sense of self?

One of the more curious things about ALttP!Ganon is his relationship to Agahnim. No one is entirely sure what they are to one another.

In some of the mangas, Agahnim is portrayed as a human who gets possessed or turned by Ganon in some shape or form, and this portrayal is popular from what I’ve seen.

But in the actual game, Agahnim is described as being Ganon’s alter-ego. The term used in the japanese version is “bunshin”, which can mean a lot of things, including alter-ego or even reincarnation, but in the context of the Zelda franchise, there is another part in the series where it is used. In Phantom Hourglass, Oshus is described as being the “bunshin” of the Ocean King. So, if we assume Agahnim works the same way, his consiusness would have to be exactly Ganon’s, right? Of course that doesn’t mean other interpretations can’t exist, I myself am not even sure what to think.

The usage of the word bunshin does imply that to some extent, Agahnim literally was a part, or offshot of Ganon. So froma certain point of view, we could add his character to Ganons, if we wanted to.

Something that intrigues me though is that in the Downfall Timeline, we never see Ganon in human form again. Could this be related to Agahnim? Maybe not exactly literally but symbolIcally?

Did Ganon split the humanity he had left off of himself, because that was the only part of him that could exit the Dark World before the seal was lifted?

If so, did Agahnim dying have any effect on him? Or did whatever Agahnim was in the end just return to him?

So much to think about here, ahh.

Of cours, ALttP!Ganon then gets killed by Link in their battle. Not sealed away, just flat out killed.

Normally this would probably be the end, but of course OoX happened, in which Twinrova tried to revive him, but didnt quite succeed.

Ganon is revived as a seemingly mindless beast, only actualy talking in his final moments, which is the quote from earlier.

In the japanese version, this quote is written entirely in katakana, which can indicate that its pronounced weirdly somehow, in cases like this likely because he had a hard time forming the words at all.

He also refers to himself as a Demon King in japanese, but that term hadn’t caught on in the english versions of the games yet.

Okay so, as I kinda mentioned above, this Ganon’s story gets a bit muddled from this point on.

Sometime after ALttP, but before ALbW, ALbW’s backstory (which is not ALttP) occurs, during which a hero fights a Ganon, who is then sealed away by him, the princess and the sages, but we dont know if this Ganon is the same, just revived again, or an entirely new incarnation.

But you could argue that it hardly matters, cause he barely does anything in the game, essentially acting as a power boost for Yuga...

However, there is a theory that he might do more than that actually.

So, according to this theory, Yuga actually was completely loyal to Hilda, and its only by fusing with Ganon that he starts wanting to betray, due to Ganons influence. The theory is nice in the sense that it makes Yuga more of an opposite of Ganon than he seems if you take the game at face value, and gives Ganon more to do. Depending on your interpretation, Yuga might just be influenced by Ganon, or they literally fuse into a being that is just as much Ganon as it is Yuga.

But of course that is just a minor theory, and you dont have to like it, naturally.

After that we get HF and AoL!Ganon, who is said to be more of a mindless beast as this point, no trace left of the human he used to be.

A rather sad fate.

Again it is unclear if this is the same Ganon, revived yet again, or maybe (anotehr) reincarnation.

But if its the former, you can only assume that, even if you dont think Agahnim dying had any effect on Ganon, just forcing him to ressurect over and over instead of letting him reincarnate properly, must’ve done quite the number on Ganon.

Somehow thinking about this version of Ganon in particular makes me think about the cursed boars in Princess Mononoke, who where lost to their anger. Especially the moment when the Wolf faces the Old Boar, who we have seen slowly lose his self at this point, and she almost pitifully says “Can’t you even speak anymore?” to him.

It almost feels like Downfall Timeline!Ganon is cursed by fate, in a sense. Not really in-universe either, but out of universe too!

History is already written (the first two games are already out) and thus Ganon has to follow the path that is already set for him, become what he will be in the future (what he is in the first two games), a frightening monster that terrorizes this kingdom of Hyrule for the sake of power, with no humanity in him (him having been human wasnt part of his character at the time the first two games where released)

I wonder if the demons failing to get Links blood in 2 will mark the end of this Ganon? (I hope not)

It was kinda nice to see BotW seemingly do somewhat of a modern take on this kinda idea of Ganon, something that has become little more than destruction of Hyrule in pyhsical form. I could see people place BotW as post- AoL for that reason, even.

And well, rolling back time yet again, we go to the last way OoT!Ganondorf turned out, which is TP!Ganondorf...

....who, compared to the others, actually has a bit more of a complicated “set-up” that kickstarts his character.

When Link gets send back in time at the end of OoT, his Tiforce of Courage breaks apart into the pieces we find in WW, presumably because Link was literally removed from that reality as he possessed it?

Then upon his arrival in the new Child Timeline, Link immediately gets the Triforce of Courage of THAT timeline, presumably cause he is in a state of being where he is meant to have a Triforce Piece of Courage?

Well, regardless of what you believe to be the cause, this is what happens, and as a result, the other two Triforce pieces choose Zelda and Ganondorf to bear them and end up residing in them. Thats how the pieces ended up with the three without the Sacred Realm being entered in this version of the events.

Link ends up warning Zelda and the king of the events that will transpire in the future, and thus Ganondorf loses the trust of the king and is unable to set his plan from OoT into motion.

Its a bit vague, but sometime after that Ganondorf starts a direct attack towards Hyrule, but gets captured and put on trial.

And as you know, as he was about to be executed, the Triforce of Power activated and saved him from death.

Now I am not sure if this is true, but I think up until that point, Ganondorf didn’t even know he had it.

But wether he discovered he had it now, or the moment it fist came to him, one thing I am sure of, he mustve felt so great for it. Cause he has no idea that a time travelling Link caused this to happen, right? From his perspective, the power of the gods just came to him like that because he is that great! And then, he cant even die as a result of this? He is literally immortal? Well, he must be the dang chosen one, right?

No wonder he got all god complex in this one!

Something I´m kinda interested in is how this guy spend years, likely centuries, in the Twillight Realm, and if his form in there is any indication, not exactly in physical form either, I mean isnt it implied he HAD to mae use of Zant like that in order to be able to have a physical form like that?

Ultimately TP!Ganondorf just is a lot like OoT!Ganondorf if you think about it, just kinda taken to a more extreme. He is no longer just human, but has transcended humanity much further than OoT!Ganondorf has, and feels superior to everyone because of it.

He is absolute in his own eyes, he is a god, his eventual victory is certain, his battle with the hero just a formality at this point.

And he sticks to that mindset until the very end, even as he is stabbed and fatally wounded by Link. It only makes sense, he couldnt be stopped by this before, why would it stop him now?

Of course the events that follow are rather vague, and people argue about what it means to this day, but I think it ultimately boils down to Ganondorf biting of more than he can chew, overestimating his own power. Or rather, what he thinks is his own power, cause its not even his.

From the moment he was impaled by the sword of the sage, Ganondorf has been a dead man.

He has only been kept alive afterwards through the power of others, the gods, and Zant as well.

This power was not his, and thus it could just leave him just as quick as it came to him.

The imagine of Zant snapping his neck, to me, either just refers to the fact that with Zant dead, who acted as Ganondorf anchor of sorts, Ganondorf himself dies as well, or it refers to the fact that Ganondorf, who saw himself as a god and superior to everything, was ultimately just as much of a mortal and simple being than the very person who worshipped him as a deity the most.

Yes, you could call Zant the very person that made Ganondorf a god in the first place, in more ways than one, so without him, Ganondorf is a god no more. And he dies just like any mortal would.

Ultimately this Ganondorf story feels like a story of hubris.

Simple, but neat.

(Its interesting like, its almost like, TP!Ganondorf was a human who longed to be a god, and WW!Ganondorf was like a god who longed to be human?)

But, do not think it ends here...

We’ve looked at all the people that OoT!Ganondorf grew up to be, but that isn’t all the Ganons there is, the story of Ganon actually continues further down the Child Timeline.

Yes, this brings us to FSA!Ganon, or as I sometimes like to call him, Ganon II.

I understand that most probably never played this game, and I probably won’t blow your minds if I tell you Ganon doesn’t actually do much in this game but, I still like to think about him.

He’s actually a proper reincarnation of TP!Ganondorf, folowing the latter’s death at the end of TP.

From some dialouge in-game we know a little bit about his past. Like his past life, he was a boy born to the Gerudo people, and was named Ganondorf.

Interestingly, in this game, the Gerdudo dont actually say that every 100 years a male child is born, they that every 100 years a “special” child is born, and of course Ganondorf was that special child. They still mention the “only man” part, but it doesnt come up with the “every 100 years” line.

Notably it also doesnt seem that Ganondorf was supposed to be their king, and it doesnt seem like they ever treated him like a king, they only mention he was supposed to be the protector of the Gerudo people and the desert.

This is just speculation, but perhaps, after what happened to the first Ganondorf, the Gerudo people decided it wasnt a good idea to treat the sole male like a king just because.

The Gerudo in the game tell you that the older Ganndorf became, the more twisted and obsessed with power he became, and eventually he started breaking their laws, too.

When he entered the forbidden pyramid, the Gerudo basically considered him banished from their tribe, but also didnt think he would ever survive in there and presumed him to be dead.

The Gerudo in this game really only talk badly about Ganondorf, which probably makes sense if he really just did bad stuff to them, but its a very stark contrast to OoT where the Gerudo seemed to just let Ganondorf get away with everything, kinda.

Something I wonder about if maybe like, Ganondorf wasn’t exactly treated well by the Gerudo, out of fear of him turning out like the old Ganondorf, or if Ganondorf just turned bad all on his own. Or maybe a mixture of both?

What is sorta interesting is the story of how this one came to be Ganon, which is that within the pyramid, he found a certain Trident, which is implied to have caused him to “awake as Ganon”, so to speak, as he picked it up. This is the inscription found with the Trident:

“Seek...you...the world? Seek you...power? Does your...soul...despise peace and...thirst for... more? Does your soul...cry... for...destruction and... conquest? We...grant you...power to ...ruin...the world. The power of...darkness. Evil...spirit of magic trident. You are...the... King of Darkness.“

The trident feels like it has more out of universe meaning than in-universe (though I do headcanon it to be a reincarnated ghirahim somehow, because I can). The trident being a weapon that franchise-wise is heavily associated with Ganon, and notably Ganon only, as Ganondorf is never really seen wielding a literal trident.

This Ganondorf picks up the trident, and with it the legacy of the interpretations of Ganons that came in the games before this one, so to speak.

I´m sorry for this part being so unstructured, but interestingly, Ganondorf is this game is referred to as “ancient demon reborn”, or something like “instrument of evil reborn” in japanese, hinting that even at the time of the game’s release, this Ganon was probably intended to be the reincarnation of a previous evil, likely a previous Ganon, of course.

What I wonder about is how much this Ganon is aware of that, though. When he grew up, becoming more and more twisted, did he know? Did he know he was the reincarnation of a villain that had previously plagued Hyrule? Did he feel his hatred? Did he know whose it was, or did he consider it his own? Or was it simply his own?

And when he picked up the trident, and transformed into a demon beast, did he understand what this meant? What he was? Did he ever obtain any memories of his past self, even?

Something that hints that this /might/ be the case is Shadow Link.

Now Shadow Link is not actually created by the dark mirror from the evil part of Link’s heart as the english localization suggest. Instead its created from the evil part of Ganon’s heart, using the dark mirror. It is said that through the mirror,the hatred and evil of Ganondorf, throughout time, took on the shape of Link. Likely because the hero is a major subject of Ganondorf’s hatred.

The fact that this happened when FSA!Ganon used the mirror, despite himself never having met Link up until that point, hints that he might, at least subconsiously, harbor the memories of his past incarnations?

But really, as usual there is a lot open to interpretation.

I´m just so intrigued, like in this timeline there is a “second Ganon”, a Ganon that came “after”, someone who had to take on this cruel legacy.

And, with that we have now talked about all the Ganon(dorf)s that have existed in the franchise to this day, not counting stuff like BS Zelda and the CDI-Games.

If you stuck around until this point, thank you so much, you’re too kind!

But also thanks to everyone that just skimmed this or looked it over briefly, I hope this wall of text did something for you.

(Sorry for any typos I... type too fast when I get excited about a topic.)

#legend of zelda #ganon #ganondorf

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