#the catacombs one based on my true experiences playing

[merry-fagoland]

[digital-dhampirs]

thank you very much for the ask, @kachowwwww !

I did do a covernalysis for Vol 3, which you can read here: [https://digital-dhampirs.tumblr.com/post/168641851375/here-it-is-the-beautiful-twosome-vanitas-no ], but after staring at the cover of the volume for a little while I’ve started to notice some stuff I didn’t see way back in my original post from 2017. So! I will be doing an all new (hopefully improved) covernalysis four years later! oh by the holy glow of the blue moon it’s been four years

this is technically a part 2, but it’s completely separate from the first part! feel free to just read one or the other..!

VnC Volume 3 covernalysis: part 2

Volume 3 is our first cover featuring multiple characters together, and boy is it a fantastic way to start the trend! Vanitas and Noé lie peacefully in a pool of water, a golden frame between them. There is a Lot going on here, so let’s get started with breaking down the frame!

Volume 3’s golden frame is absolutely dripping in Chasseur imagery— the frame is decorated with stacks of skulls similar to those in the catacombs, the design in the frame’s corners is just like the Chasseurs’ six- winged sword symbol, and at the top of the frame we see the high- ranking vampire skull Roland shows our protagonists in chapter 14. Vol 3 contains chapters 11 through 15 of the manga— the time leading up to and the beginning of Vanitas and Noé’s adventures in the catacombs— so these Chasseur designs seem very relevant. We see one of those ever- present butterflies perched on the dead vampire’s skull, a symbol of transformation and rebirth.

We also see daisies growing in one section of the frame, possibly symbolizing innocence, purity, rebirth, fidelity, and/ or new beginnings. Maybe these daisies symbolize the new developments for Vanitas and Noé’s relationship during and after the events in the catacombs? Or maybe they’re a callback to an old Celtic myth in which daisies grew to console parents after the loss of a child? Or maybe something else!

The other plant featured on this frame is ivy— a symbol of attachment, immortality, fidelity, and eternity. Both daisies and ivy have something to do with eternal life and eternal faithfulness, which is very interesting considering Vanitas’s eventual demise. Ivy is a plant that holds on to things and doesn’t let go, which is pretty neat considering the events of chapter 53..!

There’s one last part of the volume 3 frame I want to mention before moving on to the rest of the cover— the skeletal hands adorning it. Two of the hands are holding the inside edges of the frame, reminiscent of the hands on Vanitas’s frame in volume 1, and two more are holding the vampire skull in a manner eerily similar to the way the Teacher’s hands frame Noé’s face on the cover of Volume 2.

The volume 3 frame has a lot of lil details combining aspects of Vanitas and Noé’s frames from the two previous volumes— the rectangular shape of Vani’s frame with the skull at the top, the row of beads and stick bone decoration thingys (if anyone knows what those things are please tell me I’ve been wondering what they are for literal years at this point) from Noé’s frame, the skeleton hands from volume 1 in the Teacher’s position from volume 2… the Volume 3 frame might have a lot of chasseur elements, but it’s also a combination of Vanitas and Noé’s symbolic details, once again indicating the pair’s developing relationship.

And with that I think we’re finally done with the frame! Now it’s time to tackle the main subject of this ask, the boys themselves.

Vanitas, smirking, shows his mark from Luna to the viewer. The Book of Vanitas rests on his stomach, and he has two more marks of possession on display— Jeanne’s mark, which is bright red, and a duller purple mark on the other side of his neck. We don’t know who this third mark is from yet, but just based on the mark’s color palette it seems pretty likely it’s from Noé. Unlike the marks from Luna and Jeanne, though, the purple mark isn’t leaking out onto Vanitas’s clothes— it’s just there, like a bruise, and the only place its color is really echoed is on the Book. I don’t really know what this means and I suspect we won’t find out until Noé drinks Vanitas’s blood in uhm… chapter… 105… but it’s a notable difference nonetheless!

Moving from Vanitas to his partner in crime! Noé is lying above Vanitas, with the chain from the Book of Vanitas wrapped around his arm. He’s wearing the comfortable sleep clothes he wore in chapter 11 and seems to be calmly watching Vani as the latter shows off his mark from Luna. Noé’s right hand is resting on the Book of Vanitas’s chain, but he isn’t trying to remove it or snap it, he’s just touching it.

The chain around Noé’s arm reminds me quite a bit of another piece of official art,

But on the Volume 3 cover, the chain around Noé’s arm is Noé’s classic purple-magenta color, rather than Vanitas’s cobalt blue like it is in the official art. This difference in color (along with the drastically different poses between the cover and the official art) makes the official art look far more aggressive and confrontational, while the cover image looks much more peaceful and relaxed despite the chain.

The chain’s color on the Vol 3 cover makes me think that, unlike in the official art, Noé is in control of what’s going on and is choosing to keep things this way. He could get rid of the chain at any time, but keeps it wrapped around his arm. In a way, it’s tying him and Vanitas together rather than dragging them apart.

So we’ve covered the frame, we’ve talked about our protagonists… all that’s left to talk about from this cover is the background/ whatever’s going on with the water Noé and Vani are lying in! And honestly? This is another one of those things I have no ideas about. Water symbolizes a lot of things— life, purity, the moon, transformation, and a whole lot more. But I don’t quite know why Vanitas and Noé are lying in it beyond ‘it looks very pretty’.

One thing I do know for sure, though, is that there are shards of glass lying in the water with the boys. Where might those shards have come from…? My best guess is that the frame between Vani and Noé was originally a complete mirror or picture frame made out of glass, but at some point it was shattered, and now the boys are able to lie down side by side between it.

The internal walls separating Noé and Vanitas start to crumble with their argument during the ball and conversation on the roof, and fall apart a bit more during their time in the catacombs. It’ll still be a very very long time before they can even approach the idea of fully understanding each other, but at this point in the manga they’re slowly getting closer and learning to walk side by side.

Annnnnd with that, I think this covernalysis is complete! For now. Thank you so much for reading this ridiculously wordy covernalysis, and thanks again for this ask! Thinking over a cover again four years after my initial analysis was a truly unique experience— maybe in 2025 I’ll come back to this cover one more time and cringe at this analysis the same way I’m currently cringing over my 2017 cover breakdown. Hope you enjoyed this meta/ analysis/ confused rambling thing!

Fun Fact

This volume’s inside cover features the lovely Dominique! Domi doesn’t feature too heavily in this volume, but she plays a major role in Chapter 12, and we learn a lot about her true feelings for Noé during the chapters she’s in. The color scheme of this inside cover is particularly notable when compared with the vibrant yellow and magenta of Domi’s volume 8 cover— Domi isn’t exactly colorless here, but she’s definitely quite desaturated compared to her volume 8 appearance. The magenta color reflecting on her hair and bow actually seems quite close to.. that… faded………. purple….

[cozy-the-overlord]

Dances and Daggers

Summary: The Summer Festival is upon Asgard, as is the tradition of the dagger ceremony, where each unmarried gentleman chooses a lady to bestow with the honor of carrying his dagger for the night. As Prince Thor’s betrothed, Teki’s only goal is to accept his dagger with grace and hope that her violent stepfather doesn’t find fault with her in the process. But Prince Thor is unpredictable, and when he ignores his engagement on a whim Teki finds herself in a desperate situation. Luckily, Thor isn’t the only prince in Asgard…

Pairing: Loki x Original Female Character

Chapter 18: The End

Previous Chapter  |  

Word Count: 1,793

A/N: Oh my goodness, we're here. We're at the last chapter. I can't believe it. Thank you all so much for reading and liking and commenting-- you've all made the last seventeen weeks absolutely wonderful, and I'm so grateful :)

TW: Mentions of violence, child abuse, description of a dead body

Tags: @lucywrites02 @gaitwae @moumouton4 @berriemalfoy @whatafuckingdumbass @sophlubbwriting

if you want to be tagged, feel free to just send me an ask/message! :)

Read it on Ao3!

The Winter Festival was in full swing. Teki surveyed the crowd from her place on the royal platform. She still wasn’t entirely comfortable sitting so high above everyone else, but the spot wasn’t anywhere near as unnerving as she had first found it. Besides her, Brant munched contentedly on the meat she had chopped into tiny pieces for him. In the beginning, he had been so frightened of sitting atop the podium that he was afraid to even ask her to cut his food, but after several months he had grown quite at ease with the whole thing.

“Teki!” he’d whisper excitedly, pulling on her sleeve. ”You can see everyone in the hall from here!”

She couldn’t help but grin.

On her other side, Loki grasped her hand.

“Would you like to dance?”

Teki returned his eager smile. “Of course!”

People parted for them as he led her through the crowd, the skirt of her emerald dress billowing around her legs, a silky cloud of green. Loki’s dagger hung at her hip. She had been wearing it every night as of late. It brought a strange sort of tranquility to feel it at her side, something that she hadn’t thought was every possible. It had been hard to look at it at first, to hold it in her hands and know that it had allowed her to take a life. Osvald’s blank stare haunted her whenever she closed her eyes.

But … there was something powerful in it as well, something she couldn’t quite explain. For so long, she had been this helpless little girl who kept her head down and hands clasped in her lap, whose only defense had ever been to close her eyes and hope for the danger to pass, but now … she wasn’t. Everyone knew about her now, not as the fiancé to a prince who held no interest in her, but as a survivor who vanquished the monster who murdered her father. It was an odd feeling. Teki had never expected to command respect of any kind from her fellow Asgardians—even with a future as queen she had always known that she’d exist only in Thor’s shadow—but now, people bowed their heads when she passed.

Loki pulled her on to the dance floor with a twirl, grinning as her dress fanned out around her. Teki giggled.

“Remember the first time you asked me to dance?” she asked suddenly. It seemed eons ago that he had first found her crying on the balcony, and yet somehow it had only been less than a year.

The prince nodded. “I was so nervous,” he confided as he held her closer to him.

Teki laughed incredulously. “You were nervous!”

“I was!” he insisted. “You seemed so sad. I wanted to make you feel better, but I was afraid I was only making things worse.” He paused. “And you were meant for Thor, so I wasn’t certain I’d even be welcome.”

She sighed. That seemed eons ago too—a time where Loki didn’t know her better than she knew herself.

“Well,” she mumbled, cheeks burning. “You’re always welcome.”

He laughed. “Good to know.”

Teki laughed as well, but she hoped he knew how true her words were. She didn’t know what she would have done without Loki these past few months. He had been by her side throughout all the insanity that had followed her mother’s arrest and her stepfather’s demise, whether it was something as grand as testifying before the court that Osvald was killed in self-defense or as simple as sitting next to her at her piano as she played the first few lines of the piece she was composing herself.

He had been with her when she received word that they had found what they believed to be her father’s skeletal remains. Her mother’s confession had included the details of where and how Steinn’s body had been disposed of, down to the gory details that Teki had never wanted to know, how they dismembered him so Osvald could sneak him off world in a rugsack and bury him on Alfheim. Teki’s only attempt to read through the whole thing had ended with her coughing up her breakfast into a chamber pot.

But thanks to Áslaug’s description, they knew where to look, and within a fortnight they found him. Peeling back that blanket to look at her father’s remains had been an experience she couldn’t quite describe. The two felt so disconnected—how could a man so larger than life who she could picture so clearly in her memory be reduced to nothing but a box of dusty bones? For several hours, all she felt was numbness. It wasn’t until late that night that the reality truly struck her. Brant stumbled into her room to find hunched over on her bed, sobbing ferociously into her pillowcase.

They held a funeral for him. It was nothing elaborate, there wasn’t a big production or a huge crowd in attendance, but it was something. Teki didn’t know the next thing about archery, so instead of shooting a flaming arrow, she lit his pyre with a torch before sending it across the water. They probably could’ve gotten a professional archer for it—Loki had offered to shoot it himself—but it had to be her. Teki couldn’t explain it, but it had to be her.

She sighed as her father drifted across the waterfall, across the threshold beyond. It was as if an invisible weight she had carried with her since she was small had floated away as well. He could rest easy now, high in Valhalla. Perhaps she could too.

But there was one thing stopping her from embracing that peace.

Teki followed the guard down through the catacombs of ancient stone, head low. It seemed colder down here, far below the palace. At least, she told herself that’s why she was shivering.

Behind translucent shields of glowing light, prisoners loomed at her as they passed. Teki kept her eyes straight ahead. Based on their biting leers, she got the feeling that they didn’t see a lot of visitors around here.

Her mother sat on the cot in the corner of her cell, picking at her nails. For a moment, Teki almost didn’t recognize her. Her hair was loose around her shoulders, her dress plain and shapeless. She couldn’t recall the last time she had seen her mother without her face painted.

Her eyes had lit up when she noticed Teki lingering on the other side of the ray shield.

“Tekla!” she smiled, her voice hoarse. “I hoped you’d come to see me!”

She wasn’t lying. Áslaug had been sending messages to her daughter through the guards nearly every day since she had been arrested, begging her to pay her a visit.

“You realize you don’t have to do it, right?” Loki had asked her. “You’re not beholden to that woman in any way. If you never want to see her again, you don’t have to.”

Teki knew that. And a part of her would be perfectly content to live out her life without her mother ever being in it. But there was another part that wanted to know what Áslaug could possibly have to say to her.

At first, it didn’t seem like much. “How’s Brant?” she asked after a moment of awkward silence.

“He’s well.” Teki’s voice was stiff. When she first decided to visit her mother, she had told herself she’d be polite. But now, looking at her sitting there pretending as if she had ever given a damn about either of her children, Teki decided she’d settle for civil.

Still, her mother continued on in her bubbly, fake happy voice. “Lovely dress.” She gestured to her emerald gown. “So it’s true then? You’re marrying the other one?”

Teki nodded.

Áslaug breathed a chuckle, shaking her head. “All of that, and you’re not even going to be queen.” She let out a sigh. “I suppose the Norns need a good laugh every now and then.”

“I don’t see anything to laugh about.”

“No, you wouldn’t. Look, I know you hate me,” she paused, as if waiting for Teki to contradict her. Teki only stared ahead in stony silence. She huffed. “I want you to understand, everything I did, I did for you.”

Teki raised her eyebrows. “You killed my father for me?”

“I had to!” Her mother sprung to her feet, leaning as close to the shield as she could without touching it. “Tekla, he didn’t care about your future! We had the chance to make you the most powerful woman in the Nine Realms, and he wanted to let it pass by. Would you be able to forgive me if I hadn’t taken that opportunity?”

“It would have been easier than forgiving you for murdering my father.”

She huffed. “Tekla—”

“What about Osvald?” Teki interrupted. “Did you marry him for me too?”

Her mother sighed. “I didn’t realize what he was like. Had I known—”

“You knew damn well what he was like,” she snapped. “He was willing to kill—”

“For me!” Áslaug pressed her hands to her chest. “He was willing to kill for me. That’s hardly something a woman should pass up.”

“No.” Teki inhaled. Her mother seemed so desperate to convince her, to convince herself that she believed what she was saying. She almost pitied her. “He was willing to kill for what you could give him. He loved you as much as you loved my father.”

Her mother frowned at her. “You’re angry with me now,” she said. “But one day you’ll understand. You’ll wake up and realize that everything you have today, everything you are today, is because of me.”

“You’re wrong,” Teki retorted. “I am what I am today in spite of you, not because.” She let out a shaky breath, motioning towards the guard that she was ready to leave. She met her mother’s glare with a firm stare of her own.

“Goodbye, Mama.” There was nothing else left to say.

The song was changing, morphing from the upbeat strings to the more somber piano solo.

Loki pulled her closer. “Do you want to go to the lake?” he whispered in her ear.

She laughed, cocking her head. “Are you going to push me in?”

“Of course not! Believe me, I learned my lesson with that one.”

“Uh-huh.” Brant was waving at her from the podium. She waved back with a grin. Loki stood beside her, eyebrows raised expectantly. Teki grabbed his hand. “Well, what are you waiting for, my prince? Lead the way!”

This is it, she realized as they scurried through the hallways, giggling like a pair of toddlers.

This is what happiness feels like.

[imreallyhereforkataang]

On The Southern Raiders

Several months ago, a fellow ATLA-consumer asked me the following in reference to TSR:

I came across a post (on tumblr, what a surprise!) the other day saying that Aang never seemed to care about Katara’s feelings revolving around her mom. […] Do you think people genuinely interpreted Aang’s actions like that? Simply by watching? Or are they purposely misconstruing it?

I responded with the vast majority of what follows. It was a while afterwards that I rejoined the fandom for long enough to see the massive spectrum of takes on The Southern Raiders that continues to be put out on the daily.

There seems to be this recurring idea that Aang’s actions in TSR demonstrate that, not only did Aang “never care about Katara’s pain” regarding her mother, but also that he was “forcing his morals on her,” etc. On the topic of whether people honestly believe this to be in Aang’s character or see him this way deliberately, I think sometimes they jump to the conclusion that Aang didn’t care because it stems from a misconstrued interpretation of Aang and Katara as individuals and their dynamic as presented in the show, which may extend to the belief that Aang doesn’t give back what Katara gives to him. In general, I can see how someone might form that impression, but they’re missing some key contextual pieces.

Just a quick disclaimer: This is (obviously) a look into TSR and dives into Katara and Aang, both as individuals and together. I try to make this fairly objective while relaying my own opinions, but this will subsequently hold pro-Kataang rhetoric, platonic or no. Additionally, because this is TSR we’re talking about, I do allude to elements here that mold into what I see as ‘specific common misconceptions about Z*tara’s romantic compatibility based off this one particular episode.’ Why are these relevant? Because there is a clear trend where the people trying to put Aang down or even demonize him for this episode are often pro-canon!Z*tara advocates. To be clear, I don’t have an issue with people who ship them for fun outside of canon, so if you like romantic Z*tara but also appreciate Aang, any perceived digs are not directed towards you! But I think some of these things are worth mentioning here in the interest of examining TSR and Aang-bashing.

(Also fair warning that this is nearing 7k words.)

So, with that out of the way:

I briefly mentioned how people can misinterpret Katara and Aang’s back-and-forths in terms of emotional support, and I feel like that starts with Katara.

Katara is a naturally caring person and earnestly reaches outward to empathize with people. She’s extremely perceptive when someone is hurting (the only one to look concerned when Aang showed gripes about killing Ozai in The Phoenix King) and is often seen as the nurturing character who will coax others to talk about their inner struggles (she does this with Toph in The Runaway and Zuko in The Old Masters, for instance).

Time and time again, when Aang has struggled on his Avatar journey, Katara has been the one to get him to open up and articulate his turmoil, ultimately supporting him or convincing him that there is still hope for better days. She’s been there for him at all times, from The Storm to The Avatar State to Bitter Work to The Serpent’s Pass to The Awakening and beyond, exercising patience and care. It’s a role she undertakes, and as Aang is our main character and undergoing, arguably (I guess? But to me inarguably), the most of everyone in the gaang, it makes sense that Katara, given her empathetic nature and their strong bond, will often be the one expressing true concern for Aang.

So we know that when Aang struggles, which we understandably see a lot of, Katara is his rock. But what about giving back when Katara struggles?

When it comes to Katara’s share of turmoil, the death of her mother and how it continues to impact her is one of her greatest sources of pain. Honestly, it might be one of the only times we actually watch her struggle on her own, as Katara tends to be a powerful self-advocate (see: The Waterbending Master). The thing is, even though Katara has mentioned losing her mother several times throughout the series, and of course she always sounds regretful when it’s brought up, she tends to keep the rawness of her associated sorrow bottled up. Almost every time Katara mentions the death of her mother, it’s been, in very Katara-like fashion, to express understanding towards others. With the exception of @Zuko in the crystal catacombs and TSR, she only brings up her own grief to empathize (@Aang in The Southern Air Temple to prepare him for the genocide and show understanding when he grieves, @Haru in Imprisoned when Haru talks about connecting with his father, @Jet in Jet when he talks about losing his own parents to the Fire Nation, and @Hama in The Puppetmaster when talking about losing members of the Southern Water Tribe). Really, The Crossroads of Destiny and TSR are the only times Katara actually brings up her own pain for the sake of bringing up her own pain, and it’s not often that we see her physically break down over it like we do in the former.

Katara isn’t the sort of person to bring up her turmoil simply for her own needs, or because she realizes it’s weighing on her heavily in that moment. It’s a sore spot that’s changed her behavior (as Sokka explains in The Runaway), making her grow up faster, and that she’s continued to carry for years and years. And yet, again, before The Southern Raiders, we never watched her actively cry over her mother except for when she was alone in The Swamp and with Zuko in The Crossroads of Destiny (and also perhaps when she was alone in The Runaway).

Thus, The Southern Raiders is an interesting episode because it’s where those feelings Katara has been harboring are fully brought to the surface and, in extent, it’s the episode where we see Katara at her lowest point. All of that pain is made fresh and present, the murder no longer feeling like something that happened long ago with, as she believed, no available ends to tie (“Now that I know he’s out there, now that I know we can find him, I feel like I have no choice”), and it causes her to lose sight of herself. That’s not only starkly reflected in her decision to bloodbend, but also in how she doubts that anyone understands her pain.

Katara undermines Sokka’s hurt at the same loss she’s experienced and forgets all the struggle that Aang has had to endure from the start. Not only does he know how it feels to lose a parental figure (Gyatso) to the Fire Nation and not have been able to help (“My people needed me and I wasn’t there to help”; “I’m not the helpless little girl I was when they came”), but he also knows how it feels to lose an entire culture (something only Katara and Hama have similar experience with). And Katara knows this – she’s the one he’s expressed the most of his grief to, and yet here she forgets that. So we can already see how this opportunity Zuko has given Katara, the chance to find her mother’s killer and the anticipation that she feels from it, is bringing out a darker side of her that, unlike the Katara we know and that she wants to be, does not empathize or pause to understand. She’s so engrossed in her own pain, for the first time in so long, that she can’t see beyond it.

In consequence to this episode being about Katara’s emotional journey, I think The Southern Raiders is the most opportune time to observe who will give Katara what she has always displayed towards others. When a character undergoes the level of hurt Katara expresses here, it’s usually she who reaches out to that person, but now it’s her turn to be emotionally compromised. Now we get to see who steps up to the plate.

A lot of people conclude that this person is Zuko. That he’s the one who will reach out to her and connect with her emotionally to help her deal with that pain. I do agree that Zuko played a vital role in Katara’s emotional journey here – he was the catalyst for it. He had an established motivation to get off her bad side and onto her good side, a possible solution alluded to him, and knowledge that comes with hailing from the Fire Nation to go forth with his idea. And he does, and he’s physically there to help Katara through its execution.

However, Zuko making the effort to give Katara this opportunity does not reflect a lack of effort on Aang’s part. Firstly, because, as explained, Aang didn’t see how raw this pain still was to Katara. At this point, Zuko had been on the receiving end of two beratements where Katara angrily mentioned her mother’s death. Aang was not, nor did he witness these incidents. Aang understood the significance of her necklace (Bato of the Water Tribe) and looked concerned for her when she mentioned her vision (The Swamp), but Katara never seemed to express to Aang just how raw her mother’s death still felt, just as Sokka never did. She mentions it in The Southern Air Temple, but their topic of discussion was the Fire Nation killing the airbenders, and Aang was trying to fend off the idea that they might have committed genocide against his people. Considering context, there’s no reason to fault Aang for any of the things he did on this issue, or a lack thereof.

Just as Katara and Sokka thought, Aang probably believed it was a concluded topic in terms of active response. It was something that happened years ago, Aang was in an iceberg at the time, and neither Katara nor Sokka nor Aang thought it was something to go back on and revisit. When Katara yelled at Zuko, she never suggested looking for the killer. And again with that quote, “Now that I know he’s out there,” I don’t think hunting for the man was on anyone’s mind. As a viewer, it was never on my mind, either.

What Zuko had that the rest of Team Avatar did not was direction and knowledge on how they could potentially track down this specific Fire Nation military official. Even Sokka, who could remember the emblem of the Southern Raiders and underwent the same loss Katara did, not only seemed to have no intention of tracking his mother’s murderer, but also took Aang’s side when Zuko and Katara explained what they were planning to do.

Which supports the next point – regarding how Aang responded to the idea once it was out there.

Quick tangent, but it’s a scene like this that shows how Aang’s feelings for Katara have matured. The way he reacts to Katara in The Southern Raiders conveys how he knows she’s not perfect, he knows she can make mistakes, and even if, to some, he comes off as trying to hinder her on this sensitive topic, he overtly wants what’s best for her.

Aang recognizes the change in Katara’s demeanor when she approaches him about borrowing Appa. He seems to notice that something is off about her energy, probably to this extent for the first time, just as for the audience, and his instinct is not to step out of her way and “stay on her good side,” but to try and assess the situation before he lets her go in the condition she’s in. Katara is undeniably not thinking clearly during this scene, nor for much of the episode’s proceedings, given her tone, expressions, words, and intent. She’s undergoing, just as Aang says, “unbelievable pain and rage” (callback to The Avatar State; “for the people who love you, watching you be in that much rage and pain is really scary”). Aang understands where Katara is coming from, and he offers her his two cents, but he doesn’t “force” them on her, either.

Watching how Aang’s expression changes between looking at Zuko and Katara, he appears intent and almost stern towards the former. But for Katara, he’s first treading the waters, then concerned and earnest. Aang doesn’t shame Katara for her dark rhetoric or tell her what she should or shouldn’t do, but tries to help her regain some control of her emotions (“Katara, you sound like Jet” – he knows this side of Katara isn’t truly her, or who she wants to be, and this comment might serve to give her insight as to how she sounds) and then offers Katara a choice. Aang makes light of an option that she’s overlooked upon having this opportunity, and he tries to explain why the road she’s going down, the way she’s choosing to handle the situation, is self-destructive. All in all, he’s looking out for her. In his own way, he’s doing for Katara what Katara would have done for him.

I think it’s made fairly clear that, had Katara killed Yon Rha, (who, while, yes, is vile and got away with murder, was also defenseless against Katara by the time she caught up with him), she would’ve regretted her decision. The frightening thing is that I don’t believe she would have accepted that regret from herself, either. It would always remain a blemish in her energy (mind you, not because murder will inherently do this to everyone in ATLA, but it would to Katara specifically given her nature), something that would make her forever carry a bit of that darkness we so rarely see from her, much heavier and more permanent than withholding forgiveness, instead of following “Let your anger out, and then let it go.”

Here’s the thing people seem to forget about TSR: Canon shows us that Aang’s method for handling the situation is beneficial to Katara. It’s true that Zuko was the catalyst for this journey and he was there to help Katara see it through, but it isn’t true to say that Aang didn’t do her a favor by reaching out and being honest with her before they left. Remember the ultimate note on this side story: “You were right about what Katara needed. Violence wasn’t the answer.” The narrative teaches us that Aang was correct on this front – maybe not for everyone, but he wasn’t trying to nudge everyone. He was trying to nudge Katara.

I recently acquired the official DVD commentary for The Southern Raiders. I’ve transcribed relevant points on the end of this post if you’d like to read them in full, but Bryan and Andrea Romano (voice director) talk about how “even though Aang is sort of not in this story very much, to me his presence is in all of these scenes ‘cause you know he’s like, the little angel on her shoulder”; “I agree with you, he is with her through this entire journey she goes through.”

The fact that what Aang said resonated with Katara when it mattered – Katara, who becomes stubborn when she feels strongly about something, who doesn’t let anyone stop her when she disagrees with them, who is going through the most raw, emotional turbulence we have seen her in throughout the show –, the fact that Katara ultimately agreed with Aang’s words, that his words were the aid she needed in realizing there was a decision in either killing Yon Rha or sparing him, hugely states that Aang was there for Katara. Aang helped her see she had a choice for her own sake when her mind was clouded by pain and rage. You don’t need supplementary commentary to see that – Katara was seriously considering revenge, Zuko was leaning towards punishing Yon Rha but, for the most part, staying out of the decision (though based on the two back-and-forths he had with Aang before they left and his reaction to Katara walking away from bloodbending the wrong man, he didn’t realize how detrimental to Katara killing Yon Rha would be – his intention when giving Katara this opportunity was ultimately to gain some ground with her, and while he shares a sense of her pain, he doesn’t foresee what the nature of this journey will do to impact Katara specifically, which I get since he hardly knows her), and so it was ultimately Aang who helped Katara find her path even when he wasn’t there with her physically.

People can argue that Aang was forcing his morals on Katara, but he wasn’t. He was offering valid wisdom, yet pressing enough to hope that she’d actually listen and maybe react, as she did, rather than Aang simply standing back. It would’ve been easy for Aang to do nothing (like he said) and not risk coming off as unconcerned about her feelings, like he did to some viewers, because we know how Aang feels about Katara and that he doesn’t want to create rifts between them. But he risked stirring them, in her volatile state, in order to get his point across, if it meant that in consequence there would be a better chance Katara wouldn’t make the mistake that he knows would haunt her after this foreign mood of hers has passed. Aang isn’t about to let her go without trying to help her, even when she seems to not want help. It’s not in Katara’s nature to seek emotional support, and the audience has never seen her like this, but Aang recognizes that she needs the nudge (which, had her mind been clearer, she’d apparently agree with over her idea of revenge) and gives it openly and hopefully, even when she isn’t in a receptive state (or so it seemed). Again, Aang’s “morals” in this case of murder turned out to be, as he suspected, compatible with Katara’s as well as Sokka’s, so clearly he did a good thing there.

I think some people believe that Aang “forces his morals” on Katara because they’re under the impression that Aang’s concern is the general idea that she will kill somebody, the persons involved being irrelevant. That he’s acting selfishly and, in the interest of aligning with his own ideals, doesn’t want the girl he loves to be “corrupted.” This sort of mindset that “he’s against killing, so he won’t let Katara have this” leads to the conclusion that he’s not giving her the free reign to make her own choice.

However, this idea is debunked again and again in the episode. Aang says, clear as day, “I wasn’t planning to [try and stop you]. This is a journey you need to take. You need to face this man. But when you do, please don’t choose revenge” as Katara turns away from him to go, and Aang stands back and watches with concern. He’s not being “forceful” – he’s being honest, like Katara’s been for him, and even supportive. If Aang really wanted to ensure that Katara followed his own morals, if he were actually not giving her free reign, he would’ve either disallowed Katara and Zuko from taking Appa or gone along with them. Aang could’ve justified joining the mission – it is his bison and that would split up the gaang evenly. He could’ve forced himself on this journey and used the time before meeting Yon Rha to monitor Katara like a chaperone, believing he’s just trying to help and making sure she doesn’t get hurt.

And yet he doesn’t. He lets Katara do this, and his parting words continue to be what he hopes she’ll choose. But his final action, letting her set off with Appa and leaving him behind, means that he’s leaving the decision up to her.

I feel like people completely forget some segments of the episode. Like how Sokka says “I think Aang might be right” and doesn’t go on the journey that he has as much reason to embark on as Katara does. Or how Katara literally says right before departing, “Thanks for understanding, Aang.”

Aang’s stance on Katara getting revenge goes beyond Aang just being against killing – he’s not voicing his opinion out of defense of Yon Rha or because he doesn’t want to love someone who went against his morals. He’s doing it because he knows what Katara’s going through and he doesn’t want her to have to face the consequences of letting the pain get the better of her. He’s trying to help her from going down a dark road, not for himself, but for her, because he knows her and knows this is something she would regret.

So when Katara tells him later that she didn’t forgive Yon Rha, Aang doesn’t push her or ask questions. He’s glad – and proud – that she didn’t do something that would’ve permanently hurt her, and beyond that, she could dissent from his morals as she liked. When Aang saw Katara after her trip, the first thing he did was run to her purely to ask if she was okay, not to discover whether she killed; he already knew from Zuko.

Bottom line is that Aang cared about her feelings. Particularly the feelings of the Katara she normally is, the Katara she means to be, the Katara who doesn’t bloodbend or unempathize, the Katara who’s hurting and whose pain is getting the better of her. Aang saw what was happening and did what he could to help, nudging her on the path she needed when her vision was clouded (sounds like Katara helping Aang when he’s in the Avatar State. Again, The Southern Raiders provides an instance of Aang giving back to Katara what she’s given to him, like with The Desert/The Serpent’s Pass, his pain from which Aang pointed out in “How do you think I felt about the sandbenders when they stole Appa?”).

Overall, people might honestly interpret Aang as being unsympathetic this episode, and I can see how from a superficial standpoint. But by doing so, they’re missing the significance of Aang’s choice to reach out and the importance it played in helping Katara conserve her own image of herself. She bloodbends someone – not even confirming that it’s the right person, first – in a rush of pain and rage after practically swearing it off less than ten episodes ago, so she clearly loses some semblance of herself during this episode, and it’s Aang who makes the most effort to help her find balance without getting in the way of her search. Ultimately, Aang’s role in TSR demonstrates how well he understands her personally, as well as his ability to step back and let her make her own decisions while still offering a viewpoint that her pain prevents her from seeing.

—-

Okay, big breath. Halfway through. I’d like to talk in more depth about how Aang understands Katara’s position.

I was thinking once again about Aang saying, “I do understand. You’re feeling unbelievable pain and rage. How do you think I felt about the sandbenders when they stole Appa? How do you think I felt about the Fire Nation when I found out what happened to my people?” As presented to us, those two incidents had several things in common.

Aang went into the Avatar State due to intense emotion, as opposed to a life/death situation, and caused mass destruction that risked placing harm on others. And both of these times, Katara was the one to pull him out of that state. An important thing to note is that there’s one other moment very similar, but not identical, to these, which took place in The Avatar State. Just like in The Southern Air Temple and The Desert, Aang entered the Avatar State due to intense emotion, out of anguish when losing Katara. But the difference here was the amount of destruction caused. When Aang lost control of himself, he went through with hurting the people in his vicinity, and when he came out of that state, he hated to see what he’d done. Aang told Katara that he hoped she’d never have to see him like that again, and he hoped it for himself, too (but, of course, she did see him like that again in The Desert).

What I’m trying to show here is that Katara losing herself to her “pain and rage” in The Southern Raiders parallels Aang losing himself to his “rage and pain” in The Avatar State, not just in The Southern Air Temple and The Desert, as he directly references. But why am I so adamant about The Avatar State as opposed to those other two episodes?

Because we saw the lasting effect that The Avatar State had on Aang. There are many analyses out there that explain how Aang has had to struggle with control over his vast power, oftentimes depicting it as something he’s afraid of. For so long, Aang fears the Avatar State, what he’s capable of while in it, and how he can’t regulate his actions when it occurs. This conflict comes up time and time again, and a huge part of his character arc is involved with that struggle.

But again, for the significance of The Avatar State episode specifically, I was thinking about chakras in The Guru. From his Earth Chakra, we see that Aang continues to fear himself in the Avatar State, and from his Water Chakra, we see that one of his two greatest sources of guilt is that he lost control of himself in The Avatar State due to his rage and pain, lamenting that he “hurt all of those people” (the other being that he ran away, which, as mentioned before, is tied with his guilt at not being there to help and isn’t unlike the anguish Katara must feel now at not having been able to help her mother, get her father’s help fast enough, etc.). Pathik tells him that, in order to open his Water Chakra, to absolve the guilt and let the pleasure flow, “you need to forgive yourself.”

So here we have this idea that forgiveness is the key step to opening a person’s Water Chakra. Water, symbolizing pleasure and healing. “It’s easy to do nothing, but it’s hard to forgive.” “Forgiveness is the first step you have to take to begin healing.” These things Aang says in The Southern Raiders reflect what Pathik taught him about the Water Chakra.

Forgiving oneself is (obviously) different from forgiving your mother’s killer, but with this insight it’s clear that Aang personally understands how it feels to let your pain and rage get the better of you, and how it hurts deeply to face the consequences of your actions once the moment has passed. He recognizes that Katara is in a state not unlike the one he’s in when he loses control (“I do understand”) and he doesn’t want that for her. He wants Katara to be able to regain control of her actions and navigate out of her clouded vision so that she can make the choice that’s right for her. Aang is trying to help Katara see the pieces she’s missing, like how Katara does for Aang when he’s in the Avatar State.

Forgiveness is a necessary step in order to heal, and maybe it wasn’t a choice Katara ultimately made, but that was a decision Aang accepted. She didn’t kill Yon Rha, she didn’t have to now struggle with guilt or having to admit to that guilt, and she didn’t have to be faced with the strenuous task of forgiving herself for something she definitely would not have wanted to admit needed forgiving for. She saved herself from the pain that could have resulted from her own actions, because Aang helped her see she had a choice. When it mattered, when she was about to deliver the final blow, Aang’s words helped her pull out of that emotion-induced near-equivalent of an “Avatar State.”

To me it’s really fascinating to see the connections between these incidents – The Southern Raiders plus the three episodes where Aang enters the Avatar State out of emotion/rage (almost four if you count The Storm, but he manages to contain it when Katara calls out). The way these arcs parallel each other (“I went through the same thing when I lost my mom”; “How do you think I felt about the Fire Nation?”; “Watching you be in that much rage and pain is really scary…I can’t watch you do this to yourself”; “As you watch your enemy go down, you’re being poisoned yourself”) and ultimately culminate in acts of mercy. It’s incredible how Aang and Katara are able to reach each other when they’re in their emotional states, and know what the other needs and who they are when they lose themselves.

In addition, I also think Andrea’s point about how Aang “teaches” Katara is further reflective of the impact Aang has on the people around him. I’ve seen many circulating posts about how Aang hailing from the time before the war and being raised by the Air Nomads allows him to bring a unique, positive influence to those around him who, in contrast, grew up in war-time and were most likely (Bumi is an exception) never alive in the time of the Air Nomads. However, along with the lightheartedness and fun (see: The Avatar Returns and The Headband), this also includes the specific wisdom and peacekeeping ways of the airbenders that became lost in the war, and that Aang symbolically ends the war with: An act of mercy, thus showcasing the survival and triumph of the Air Nomads as well as the Avatar. In TSR, Aang shares this wisdom with Katara – that the choice exists, and there is strength in not choosing revenge and electing forgiveness if she so resonated with it.

[Click here]    

—-

Back to the original question –

It may be possible that if someone were to overlook some characterizations and watch The Southern Raiders episodically, as opposed to as part of a whole arc, then they might genuinely form the impression that Aang is in the wrong here. I think I myself might’ve been a bit surprised by his approach when I was younger (though Katara’s attitude was also very surprising and even unsettling), but that was also at an age where I didn’t really understand the severity of the situation and just how much Katara was drifting from herself, or what killing Yon Rha could do to her, or, simply, in that volatile state, what she needed to hear.

I’ll be honest (drawing from personal experience, not sure if others relate) – I think as a child, one may not see the episode as intended because, unlike many other episodes, the takeaway lessons in The Southern Raiders are either expressed through words or an instance of not doing something (the instant where Katara doesn’t kill Yon Rha, since not doing something is less stark to a child than doing something). It’s a gray story in terms of right/wrong, and when you’re young, I can see why those lessons are misinterpreted because the viewer gets so caught up in the adrenaline rush of the action in this episode, the stealth, the bloodbending, the frightening amount of anger in Katara. It consumes most of the viewing experience, and within all that, the ultimate big lesson that “Violence wasn’t the answer” might get missed because violence or violent intent constituted almost all of the runtime. I see people who don’t remember this episode as a commentary on vengeance/forgiveness/the middle ground, but as “the one where Katara and Zuko got super badass."

Getting older, The Southern Raiders is such a gruesome episode. I now see the crucial, ‘quieter’ points that I overlooked as a child. Things like Sokka siding with Aang, Katara thanking Aang for his understanding, Zuko ultimately agreeing with Aang’s assessment of what Katara needed. Sad thing is that some people don’t appear to see this episode the way it was intended in time. TSR requests a perceptive mind from its audience, and some people don’t seem open to that.

I feel that this episode is often treated as shedding light on canon romantic Z*tara for similar reasons as to why people might miss the lessons – Zuko and Katara look cool and badass, on their way to kill a man. It’s exciting to see them working together, the nature of the mission is intriguing, but understanding subtext means acknowledging the tragic underlining of the episode, that it’s painful, that it’s Katara’s journey. It’s disappointing to me when some people chalk up Zuko and Katara’s relationship to being “badass” and “sexy” as a result of The Southern Raiders. It feels out-of-context, caught up in the “coolness” of this episode and misinterpreting physical synchrony as emotional, especially since their dynamic changes anyhow after Katara forgives him.

The episode presents very clearly that Zuko wasn’t right in his assumption about what Katara needed. Again, not necessarily his fault, although his comments about "Air Temple preschool,” “Guru Goody-Goody,” and forgiveness being “the same as doing nothing” display his skepticism of going the peaceful route (though this is curious to me given how often he showed mercy towards Zhao). He honestly didn’t realize the implications this journey would have on Katara, but by the end of the episode, I think it’s safe to say Zuko learned that Aang knew what he was talking about. Aang, whose whole nation and father figure were killed, and yet was able to forgive. Who could see how Katara was responding to the information Zuko gave her.

That’s not to discount Zuko’s role here. Maybe Katara did need closure, and Aang did say “This is a journey you need to take” (although, I do wonder, as Aang asked originally, what it ultimately accomplished. I get that Katara felt like she needed to take the opportunity once Zuko handed it to her, “Now that I know we can find him,” but if Zuko had never brought it up, would things be different? I hope it accomplished something in regards to Katara’s turmoil – perhaps she was able to forgive herself in that she could finally confront the man who did this, when all those years ago she came back with help “too late” – but at least she forgave Zuko in consequence), but this journey was so emotionally turbulent for Katara, heavy to the point where she wasn’t even herself anymore (as said in The Avatar State, “I saw you get so upset that you weren’t even you”).

Therefore, I personally find that simplifying TSR into “Katara and Zuko being cool” to the point where people glorify the way Katara acts in this episode insulting to her character, simply because I don’t enjoy watching deep pain morph Katara into becoming something she dislikes (see: Bloodbending and how it’s often glamorized in fandom). To me, it’s not as if she’s honing something akin to her inner strength. Katara is an extremely powerful character, which is shown time and time again, and her power comes from her physical capabilities as well as her inner strength. “Hope is something you give yourself. That is the meaning of inner strength.” Bam, Katara right there. “I don’t know if it’s because I’m too weak to do it or if it’s because I’m strong enough not to.” As is a theme in this show, there is a strength in restraint.

In her right mind, Katara would be horrified by her actions in The Southern Raiders, or at least what her ultimate intention was, and if people more closely understood Katara as she is, then I feel like they’d agree. As Aang did.

—-

Do I think there are people out there who deliberately reimagine TSR as ‘the episode where Aang was a “self-righteous prick” to Katara’? Yes, absolutely. As for motivation, I can’t really think of any reason for trying to make Aang look bad besides trying to make him look bad in comparison to another character (i.e. Zuko here), or maybe people have their own personal reasons for disagreeing with Aang’s sentiment while forgetting that Katara ultimately does not (in regards to the killing). Or maybe people just dislike main characters who manage to uphold their morals and it goes in-hand with those who think Aang should’ve killed Ozai.

—-

Honestly, there’s a lot more that can be said on the topic in regards to what Katara learned about herself in TSR, as such might be reflected in her active choice to spare Azula in Avatar Aang (which Bryan notes in his commentary: “Katara also finding a peaceful means” in reference to Aang), but frankly I’m kind of exhausted so I’m gonna leave this half-baked copy-and-paste from something I wrote earlier this month:

I feel like the only people Katara has harbored legitimately murderous thoughts towards have been Yon Rha (her mother’s killer) and Zuko and Azula (Aang’s killers, indirectly and directly), indicated by that unique energy she’s carried around those three that we don’t see a lot from her, where her voice becomes lower and the weight of her words more threatening (also the fact that she issued clear death threats to the first two).  

For the final Agni Kai, Zuko planned on ending Azula. He goaded her into using lightning and intended to redirect it at her (he didn’t want to, of course, as Bryke noted, but that was the decision). So it’s striking to me when Katara, despite having a very opportune chance to end Azula and knowing Zuko wouldn’t have judged her for it since he was about to do the same, makes the active choice to keep her alive. Katara could have unfrozen herself and gotten to Zuko immediately, but instead she took the time to restrain Azula and allow her to live. And I do believe that a part of the decision was made clearer to her after the events of TSR. Katara realized, subconsciously or no, what she isn’t, and that she’d try to preserve Azula if she could despite how much she might hate her for what she did last season.

—-

DVD Commentary for The Southern Raiders

[…]

Andrea Romano: This is where she does bloodbending, right? So scary!

Bryan Konietzko: It’s this dark skill that she reluctantly learned in episode 3x08. And there’s another important lesson – it’s like, once you have power over someone, are you strong enough not to use it? Or, use restraint in life?

Dante Basco: […] The thought of bloodbending is an idea that – it’s just crazy! Like, the average television or Nickelodeon show […] is not thinking about bloodbending. But yet it’s a very possible situation in this world, and I think that’s what makes it so exciting for people who watch the show.

Michael Dante DiMartino: Yeah and it’s not a skill that they take very – or certainly that Katara takes – lightly. It’s a very serious proposition to do that on somebody.

AR: And it’s not treated lightly. Here she is, she’s so close to being out of control. And that’s what adds so much to the drama of it, is, we think, she could really lose it here and really do something that she regrets for the rest of her life. But she manages to hold herself.

[…]

BK: We see that she’s unbalanced emotionally, and so that’s what’s coming out.

AR: […] But we can only hope she’ll make the right choice. (Imploringly) Use your powers for good!

BK: I love that, even though Aang is sort of not in this story very much, to me his presence is in all of these scenes ‘cause you know he’s like, the little angel on her shoulder-

AR: Absolutely, yeah.

BK: -y'know, that she’s ignoring at this time. And so, to me it really is a story about Aang because it’s like, it’s just about him trying to have influence over her actions from afar – just, by not telling her what she has to do, but just by gently suggesting what she try to achieve with this journey.

AR: It really is a juxtaposition there, where the young Aang sort of tells her, like a parent, go ahead, go out and do what you have to do, but please, I hope that you choose forgiveness rather than revenge. And here he is the young one, and she is the older one who should be, sort of, teaching him and in fact they switch and he teaches her. So I agree with you, he is with her through this entire journey she goes through.

BK: I think it’s also interesting that, if you look on paper, Aang has lost a lot more than Katara has, and he sort of gently reminds her of this. He’s like, 'Hey, my whole culture was wiped out. Everyone I’ve ever known was wiped out.’ And uh, but as we all know in real life, you can’t really quantify suffering. It’s really a personal thing and everybody…everybody’s situation, when your own world kinda crumbles, it seems like the whole world’s falling apart. You can’t really equate these things. And so, we just see Katara lost in a very human moment in this episode.

AR: I love that scene. So dramatic. You just go 'Oh no – don’t do it! Don’t do it!’

[…]

—-

DVD Commentary for Avatar Aang

[…]

Bryke: It’s sort of like a multi-stage thing. He releases his emotions, these raw feelings of anger and wrath, and then learns to control them and rise above them. […] We obviously wanted a cool moment of Aang in the Avatar State, and it was kinda finding that right story beat for him. And in this case it was him being the totally wrathful, vengeful version of the Avatar […] But it’s really not Aang. It’s really this energy that has kinda taken over him. He’s not in control at this point. […]

So, can kind of recognize this Kung Fu move he’s doing. It’s what he was having nightmares about in 2x01, as he feared being this sort of wrathful, y'know, Hand of the Avatar. That was that same kind of […] chopping motion in those 2x01 nightmare scenes. […]

I feel like that’s his defining moment. That’s why we call this episode Avatar Aang. […] He’s finally learned to control the energy. […] He’s controlling it, he’s not letting it control him. […]

[yukinojou]

I already squeed quite a bit on Twitter, but turns out my Shadow and Bone thoughts demand longform. So that was a 40+ tweet thread or using my Tumblr for an original post for once.

I was wary about the Shadow and Bone adaptation the way I'm usually wary about good books being adapted onscreen. It was amplified because my actual favourites are the Six of Crows books, and because the American-based movie complex has a bad track record of doing anything based on Eastern Europe. 8 episodes in 3 days should tell you how much I loved it - the moment I finished, I wanted more.

First, the technical praise:

Damn but the plotting is tight. It took me a while to realised it's based on heist movie bones, where every little thing (The Freaking Bullet!) is important. The story fulfills its promises and manages not to bore at the same time - it delights by the way they're fulfilled. I called out a few plot developments moments before they happened, and I was happy about it. Such a joy after so many series where "not doing what viewers expect" led to plot holes and lack of sense. It might be an upside to the streaming model after all.

From a dramatic point of view I can tell all the reasons for all the changes, especially providing additional outsider points of view on Ravka (Crows) and letting viewers see Mal for themselves the way he only comes across in later books.

Speaking of which, this is a masterclass in rewriting a story draft. SaB was Bardugo's first, and having read later books you can really see where she didn't quite dare to break the YA rules yet, especially Single POV that necessitated a tight focus on Alina's often negative feelings rather than the big picture and a triangle that felt a bit forced. The world in the series is so much bigger, the way Bardugo could finally paint it when SaB success gave her more creative freedom, and some structural choices feel familiar too. It's a combination of various choices by crew and cast, but the end result meshes together so tightly and naturally.

Visuals! Especially the war parts because Every Soviet Movie Ever, but also the clothes (I would kill for Nina's blouse in the bar), the jewelry, the interiors. The stag was so very beautiful. And a deep commitment to a coherent aesthetic for each character and setting.

Look, you can do a serious fantasy series with colours! Both skin colours and bright sets and clothing! And all scenes were well lit enough to know what's going on, even in the Fold!

Representation (aka I Am Emotion)

To start with: I was born behind the Iron Curtain, in the last years of the Cold War. The Curtain was always permeable to some extent, and we have always been aware that while we have talented artists of our own, we never had the budgets and polish of the Anglosphere Entertainment Machine. So we watched a hell of a lot of American visual storytelling especially because yeah, you can tell we don't have the budgets. 90s and 2000s especially, it's getting better now.

In American stories, the BEST case scenario for Eastern European representation is the Big Dumb Pole, the ethnic stereotype Americans don't even notice they use, where the punchline is that his English is bad or that he grew up outside Anglo culture. Other than that, it's criminals, beggars, sex trafficking victims, refugees. Sure, we may look similar (except we really really don't, not if you're raised here and see the distinct lack of all those long-jawed Anglo faces), but we are not and have never been the West, never mind America. It's probably better for younger people now, but I was raised under rationing and passport bans. Star Trek and Beverly Hills 90210 were exactly as foreign to me.

The first ever character I really identified with was Susan Ivanova in Babylon 5 (written by J. Michael Straczynski, yay behind-camera representation). This was a Russian Jewish woman very much in charge, in the way of strong women I know so well, not taking any bullshit, not repressing her feminity. I recognised her bones, she could be my cousin. The sheer relief of it. There have been few such occasions since.

The reason I picked up Shadow and Bone in the first place was recommendations from other Polish people. I've had no problems finding representation in Eastern European books because wow our scene is strong in SFF especially, but it's always a treat to find a book in English that gets it. And Leigh gets it, the bones of our culture, and I could even look past the grammar issue (dear gods and Americans, Starkova for a woman, Morozov for a guy) that really irked me because of the love for the setting and the characters, the weaving in of religion/mysticism (we never laicisized the same way as the West, natch), the understanding of how deep are the scars left in a nation at war for centuries. The books are precious to me, they and Arden's Winternight and Novik's Spinning Silver.

To sum up: Shadow and Bone the Netflix series gets it. You can tell just how much they've immersed themselves in Eastern European culture and media, it comes across so well in visuals and writing and characters. Not just the obvious bits (though the WWII propaganda posters gave me a giggle), but the palaces, the additional plotlines and characters, the costumes, the attitudes. About the only thing missing in the soldier scenes was someone singing and/or quoting poetry.

I will blame the Apparat's lack of beard on filming in a non-Orthodox country. Poland's Catholic too, but I very much imagined him as an Orthodox patriarch, possibly because I read the books shortly after a visit to Pecherska Lavra in Kiev and the labyrinthine holy catacombs there. Small quibble, not my religion, not my place to speak.

(I've seen discussion on the issues with biracial representation in the show, which is visceral and apparently based on bad experiences of one of the show writers in a way that's caused pain to other Asian and biracial people. I'm not qualified to speak on those parts, other that Eastern Europe is... yeah. Racist in subtly different ways. If anything, the treatment of the Suli as explained in Six of Crows always read so very true of the way Roma are treated, and even sanitised.)

And now for the spoiler-filled bits:

Kaz and Inej. I mean... just THEM. So many props to the actors, the writers, the bloody goat.

I adore the fact the only people who get to have sex in the show are Jesper and a very lucky stablehand.

Ben Barnes needs either an award or a kick. The man's acting choices and puppy eyes are as epic as his hair.

So Much Love for Alina initiating the kiss. Her book characterisation makes sense, she's so trapped in her own head because she has no time to process everything that's happening, but grabbing life by the lapels is a much more active choice. Still not making the relationship equal, but closer to it.

Speaking of, Kaz's constant awareness of how unequal his relationship with Inej is, and attempts to give her agency. I'm really curious how his touch issues come across to someone who doesn't know the backstory there.

Feodor and his actor. He looks exactly like the pre-war heartthrob Adolf Dymsza, a specific upper-class Polish ethnic type that's much rarer now that, well, Nazis killed millions of Polish intellectuals in their attempt to reduce us to unskilled labour only. The faces he makes are the Best.

Nina!! Nina is perfect, those cheekbones, that cheek, I was giggling myself silly half the time. I cannot wait to see Danielle Galligan take on the challenge of Nina's plotline in Six of Crows and Crooked Kingdom, she'll kill us dead.

I already mentioned that the writers fixed Mal's absence from the first book, but Mal in general! The haircut gives him a kind of rugby charm, and Archie Renaux is outstanding at emoting without talking. Honestly, all the casting in this series is inspired, but him in particular.

Extra bonus: Howard Charles and Luke Pasqualino playing so very much against the type of the swaggering Musketeers I saw them play last. Arken dropping the mask at the end... Howard Charles is love.

I can't believe not only was Milo's bullet a plot point, but the fact Alina was wearing a particularly sparkly hair ornament in a long series of beautiful hair ornaments was a plot point.

In conclusion: so much love, and next three season NOW please. Okay, give me a week to reread the books, and an extra day because new Murderbot drops tomorrow...

[decadenceisnomore]

Info

- Frisk: The Fallen Child. * It's a curious child, but gets afraid pretty easily. Items: Broken Stick and Bandage. Stats: 2 ATK 5 DEF 20 HP - Flowey: Your Only Friend * A scared Desert Flower/Black Flower. * Tries to attack Frisk, but soon he joins Frisk on their journey. * Usually hums classical music when bored Stats: 3 ATK 1 DEF ?? HP His themes are "Your Only Friend", "Your Only Savior" and "FINALE" - Napstablook: The Lonely Beat Maker * Not really feeling up to. sorry. His theme is "Espiritual Strife" - Toriel: The Guardian Of The Decaying Catacombs * Can act super protective with Frisk, but is a sweet person to anyone who is nice with them. * She bakes Cheesecakes, but she isn't really good at it so she bakes a pie instead. * Won't let you leave that easily. * Nobody have ever saw her without the hood, that covers half of her face with a shadow. * Loves reading suspense and horror books. Stats: 75 ATK 55 DEF 450 HP Her theme is "Heartattack" - Sans: The Easiest Enemy...? * Always trying to earn some money so he can sustain his brother and himself. * Really enjoys telling puns, mostly involving dark humour or imature humour. * Sells chili dogs for high prices, but usually making discounts to his friends. * His favorite drink is Mayonnese. * He calls frisk "Poker-face" and "My Safe Box" * The judgement eye is blind. Stats: HP 1 ATK 1 DEF 2 His themes are "smells like rotten bones.", "Song That Will Play When Sans Judges You", "There is a storm somewhere" and "Sentence." Check: He won't lose to a stupid child that easily. - Papyrus: The Evilest and Coolest Skeleton * Wants to be a part of the Royal Guard, but got rejected 5 times in a row for being too stupid. * Loves making puzzles and traps, but mostly fails on making his traps actually harmful. * He cooks meatballs, but sometimes he tries to cook spaghetti or lasagna, but always fails to cook it. * Likes to say "Nyar har har" * Hates seeing sans smoking, but he always tries to not just slap his cigar * He got his scar and battle body while fighting undyne and supposely winning. Stats: ATK 40 DEF 30 HP 750 His themes are "Facing The True Evil" and "Sharpboned Cataclysm" Check: Likes to laugh like a goofy maniac. - Undyne: The Black Eyed Hero...? * She is the capitain of the Royal Guard. * On one of her fights, she got injured on her eyes, making her get hyphema on both eyes. * She liked to play piano, but stopped after the situation of the underground got a bit worse. * She doesn't use much armor, meaning why her body is full of scars and marks. * After the fight she had with Papyrus, they don't talk much like before. * She thinks sans is a weirdo and is a little afraid of what he hides. Stats: ATK 60 DEF 30 HP 2000 Her themes are "Agonizing Spears Of Fear" and "Confronting The Most Malignent Hero" - Alphys: The Royal Scientist * As said, she is the Royal Scientist of the underground, got promoted after the previous scientist disappeared. * Even tho she might look like a mad scientist, she is pretty chill, but sometimes she might get a bit out of control during her experiments. * Loves to eat spicy noodles and watching she buys illegaly. * As undertale alphys, she is romantic attracted to Undyne, but she can hide her attracting better than her undertale counterpart. * She was the one who created Mettatron, but didn't really worked well on him. Stats: Unknown Her theme is "Alphys..." - Mettatron: A Broken Robot * Was the first experiment of Alphys that actually worked. * His humanoid body is just a prototype. * When on box form, he have four hands with destroyed arms, that are just connected to each other by some unknown liquid. * While on EX Form, smoke comes out of some of his orifices, mostly because his body is overheating. * He have a whole brand called MTT Enterprise. * Usully his brand makes every type of stuff, but usually focus on the food market. Stats: HP 9999 (Box)    ATK 40 (Box)    DEF 300 (Box)       HP 2000 (EX)    ATK 64 (EX)    DEF 40 (EX)       HP 30000 (NEO)    ATK 90 (NEO)    DEF 5 (NEO) His themes are "Metal Slammer", "Tragic Death By Charm" and "The Lethal Power of NEO" - Muffet: The Negotiatior * She is still as greedy as undertale muffet, but she have great administration skills. * She owns a sodas and snacks brand named "Muffety's Sweets Inc." * Her brand is Mettaton's biggest competitor. * She have a small shop hidden at the Decaying Ruins. Stats: ATK 45 DEF 20 HP 135O Her theme is: "Arachno Swing" - Asgore: The King of The Underground * Haven't appeared to the public in a while. * His garden is full of Black Flowers/Desert Flowers. * He says that he likes how his garden looks like a huge hole. * He won't let Frisk get out that easily. Stats: ATK 100 DEF 100 HP 4000 His themes are "Foran deres konge" and "THE KING ASGORE." - Asriel: ... * The King and Queen's son. Stats: ATK ∞ DEF ∞ HP 9999 His themes are "His old theme...", "Destruction and Despair", "BURN!" and "SAVE the world" Decadent Society's basic story: Once upon a time, there was two races, monsters and humans One day by the monsters greediness, a war broke between the two races But unfortunately, the humans ended victorious They took a huge indemnity from the monsters and sealed them in the underground Mount Ynadd 20XX Legendes say that whoever climbs the mysterious mountain never comes back Basic information about the locations Forgotten Palace: ruins replacement, once the first hideout for the monster kind, now just an abandoned castle, it's dark but there is a lot of plants growing there, with huge trees included Foggyville: snowdin replacement, the most poor city of the underground, contains a small amount of establishments and has most just houses, instead of snow, there is a lot of fog, but is still as cold as snowdin... somehow Submerged: waterfall replacement, once a decent city, now completely flooded by the sudden unending rain, contains ruined/submerged buildings, with just some specific locations still not submerged VolcanoNation: hotland replacement, an industry only location, with both abandoned and still working buildings, the location of muffet's and mettaton's brand industries The CORE: still da core, is powered by the volcano's lava, might turn off at any moment as the volcano is in risk of dying Capital: the most rich city, based around Brooklyn on it's 80's Precious Home: new home replacement, a small and dark house All of the info was made between July 13, 2020 and September 21, 2020

[alternativewinxcontinuity]

(I’m the one who just sent an ask about Musa but I hadn’t finished yet whoops) do you think she would have problems with her magic underwater or is fighting in water a more common occurrence she might have prepared for. (Would it change in the infinite ocean) Also what do you think about bloom struggling underwater at first (because water conducts heat away from a source better than air) Let me know your thoughts?

Hi! You know how Musa has trouble with her powers working underground in S2 (maybe it was just in Shadowhaunt idk) because of different frequencies and how the air resonates? Do you think she’d have a similar problem underwater 

- [missing text from misfired Ask]

Part of the problem with being underground would be the reverberation, the way sounds bounced back off of the uneven surfaces, but Musa would have some experience with music halls and other inside places that would have helped her get a handle on things if she'd had the time to do so. 

A second part of the problem is the mineral makeup of the caverns, we see crystal structures further in and different crystals have different reaction to vibrations ('new agey' sounding but true), this might have thrown her off a little as well. 

The combination of unknown surfaces (in both shape and composition) would have made it difficult but: this is literally the only time we see her have trouble underground in this way. 

In the first three seasons the group is underground a couple of times, in season 1 they take the catacombs to Cloudtower but we don't see anything more than the girls walking for a few seconds, so it might just not have come up? By the end of the season all of the Winx are in Shadowhaunt and have no apparent trouble, even Flora who had trouble because “there are no living plants down here” which means the writers either forgot, or the girls have been receiving some off screen training to learn how to accommodate  the problem. 

Or the Charmix somehow compensates for them. It should be noted that the reason Musa 'had trouble' was because she threw a sonic bomb into a crevasse in the wall which is always going to destabilise a cave, normal sonar-like attacks would have had less destructive force in their backlash and ended up more like too loud echoes most likely. 

-

When it comes to being underwater, I think Musa actually would have had an easier time adapting than some of the others. 

Aisha obviously would have had little to no problem, and for Musa she would have only had to adjust for the difference in how fast and far sound travels through water as opposed to air, water being a better conductor for sound and allowing it to travel further would basically just strengthen her spells. 

Her home on Melody is shown to be close to a whale site, which suggests Musa is familiar with the concept of underwater sonar and she may even had dabbled with it previously. 

It's hard to say how much trouble Tecna would or should be having adapting to the two environments, I think 4Kids had her unable to even transform, but the other translation don't even mention Tecna being part of the illusionary test Faragonda puts Flora and Musa through in season 2. Despite often being away from obvious technology, (I'm thinking specifically of her time in Omega) Tecna has never seemed to suffer for its lack. 

Flora might have difficulty underwater, since her reasoning for the underground was the lack of plants, it would be interesting to know how much her powers depend on the specific plants around her and whether or not she'd be familiar enough with aquatic plants to realistically adjust her powers accordingly. 

Bloom and Stella realistically should have struggled the most with the change to water. Bloom because of the change in thermal conductivity and because, you know, water is not historically good for fire, and Stella because the speed of light is different in water and changes depending on any  kind of 'contaminant' whether organic or mineral, it would also affect how the light dispersed. 

While Bloom might be able to compensate once she gets used to the difference, (and it would probably take a while) Stella would likely always have a little trouble. 

This of course is all depending on how much 'structural integrity' magic actually gives the spells, how much it does beyond stopping any backlash on the caster and ensuring the energy makes it to the target. (Or next closest surface.) 

The Harmonix and Sirenix are specifically meant for underwater use, so it's likely they come with something that would be considered 'auto correct' for the spells, lessening the difficulty of adjusting for water resistance, water composition and other factors. 

By the time the Winx made it to the Infinite Ocean they'd been on several sub-aquatic adventures and would have been reasonably adjusted to the basics of underwater magic, but given that the Infinite Ocean is supposed to be an ocean which is infinite, there's a chance it has a much higher water pressure than the other oceans they've visited which would have affected all of them a little. 

Admittedly that should be compensated for by the Sirenix, but they might still have to relearn a few steps in their adjustments. It's hard to say whether Alfea would offer a class or classes which deal with learning how to adapt to various environmental impacts on a power type, on the one hand: aquatic Forms exist which should do the job for you, but on the other hand: those Forms have been basically cursed for like, 20 years. 

-

I'm sorry, this is more rambling and incoherent than I wanted, there's just so much left unmentioned in canon that it makes it hard to really discuss these sorts of finer magic details. 

If we go with hard cartoon canon, then the only time the Winx had real trouble underwater was when they dove too deep and water pressure made their wings useless, but even that brings into question: was that a normal thing for all fairies (doubtful since season 3 happened partially underwater), or a specific weakness of the Believix form? 

Since they get their upgrade and go, does that mean the Form compensates for them, or was there some off screen teething problems we didn't get to see? 

Then there's the question of: okay, my specific elemental type doesn't historically do well underwater, but fairies have non-elemental spells which I know several of, how do they fare?

- 

If we're talking Alt Con then I can throw all kinds of things out there like: 

Harmonix and Sirenix compensate for the high pressure of the water, where other Forms are designed to account for low air pressure (or in Astralix/Cosmix case – the vacuum of space), so past a certain depth all non-aquatic Forms suffer for it. 

Part of the Forms is adjusting the structural integrity of spells to work better (or more in line with what a fairy expects) in their specific environment. (So when (underwater) Musa aims a sonic boom here, it goes here instead of blasting everywhere plus a mile extra, or Bloom aims there and her fire based spell makes it there because the spell was insulated for the journey between points A and B.) 

Past a certain depth in the ocean, water doesn't boil, the pressure's too high, the atoms can't move apart properly, but in shallows? Oh you better believe Bloom once tried to 'fire off' a spell and had it flash boil a crap ton of water which exploded on her, Stella has absolutely blinded herself, and yes, once as a child Musa nearly deafened herself while playing with whales.

(Because yes, Alfea has classes on environmental adaptability of elemental based spells, because: “just because specialty Forms exist, it doesn’t mean you’ll have the time to go and get it before you need it, and sometimes getting it is more trouble than it’s worth.”)

[the-concession-stand]

Recommendations!: Netflix

I get asked a lot for recommendations. With that in mind I wanted to start a new feature here at Concession Stand called “Recommendations!” which will be a list of 10 or so movies on any given streaming service or maybe even physical media. For the first of these let’s go with the biggest service out there, Netflix.

(These are in no particular order)

10. Tucker and Dale Vs. Evil

Genre: Horror, Comedy

Released: 2010

Starring:  Alan Tudyk, Tyler Labine, and Katrina Bowden

Synopsis: A group of college kids go camping near where Tucker and Dale, two redneck friends, have purchased a cabin in the woods. When one of the college kids falls and hits there head and is taken in by Tucker and Dale, a misunderstanding spirals out of control.

My Thoughts: Probably the pinnacle of horror comedy this movie nails it on all fronts. It’s hilarious, intense at points, and delivers an amazing story that would be good even without the comedy.

9. As Above So Below

Genre: Horror

Released: 2014

Starring: Perdita Weeks and Ben Feldman

Synopsis: A group of explorers travel into the catacombs of Paris where they discover dark secrets and what may be an entrance to hell itself.

My Thoughts: This. Movie. Is. Intense. I know a lot of people will be turned off by the hand-camera aspect of it, but it’s not just a gimmick, it works in this movie. it’s one of the few movies that really stuck with me and got genuinely creepy.

8. Creep

Genre: Horror

Released: 2014

Starring: Mark Duplass and Patrick Brice

Synopsis: A videographer takes a one-day job to record the last words of a dying man, however when the man starts to behave strangely the videographer has to question the mans true motives

My Thoughts: Another hand-camera movie, but again it works in and for this movies benefit. Another one where one scene in particular really got me with a true what the hell am I watching holy crap moment. It and it’s sequel are worth your time.

7. Enemy

Genre: Drama, Thriller

Released: 2013

Starring: Jake Gyllenhaal

Synopsis: A college professor discovers an exact look alike for himself in a movie. After hunting him down and learning of the others life, things spiral out of control

My Thoughts: I gotta prefece this movie wont be for everyone, it’s weird. A lot of it wont make sense on first viewing. HOWEVER, this to me is why it’s so good, it’s one you’re gonna wanna look up what other people got from it and talk about it with your friends. Also you get double Gyllenhaal so that’s always a plus.

6. Super Dark Times

Genre: Crime, Drama

Released: 2017

Starring: Owen Campbell, Charlie Tahan, and Elizabeth Cappuccino

Synopsis: Two teenagers experience a gruesome accident that leads to a cover-up and a secret that drives a wedge between them and knocks them into a world of escalating paranoia and violence.

My Thoughts: This one came out of nowhere and I’m disappointed more people haven’t discovered it yet, it’s a great crime thriller. The kids in it are phenomenal in the roles and can be genuinely scary with how good they play these kids who have to cover-up something horrible. Go in blind to it and I assure you you wont be disappointed.

5. Good Time

Genre: Drama, Crime

Released: 2017

Starring: Robert Pattinson, Benny Safdie, and Jennifer Jason Leigh

Synopsis: After his brother is arrested in a robbery gone wrong, a man has one night to try to get him out of jail by any means necessary

My Thoughts: I’m so glad “Uncut Gems” was such as hit for the Safdie brothers because hopefully that means more people will look into “Good Time”. This is the movie I will forever throw out whenever anyone wants to question Robert Pattinson’s acting abilities. He disappears into this role as a criminal. So many great things here, the acting, directing, score. 

4. Green Room

Genre: Horror

Released: 2015

Starring: Anton Yelchin, Imogen Poots, oh and Patrick Stewart as the head neo-nazi (yes seriously)

Synopsis: On the tour that took them to the west, a D.C. based punk band ends up inadvertently playing a neo-nazi club. When one of the members enters the green room after they have packed up, he discovers a murder and the band ends up in a stand off with the neo-nazis.

My Thoughts: Oh Green Room, how I love you. Just writing this I want to immediately go watch it again. I’ve recommended this movie a lot and everyone whose seen it has come back saying they loved it. It is the definition of an edge of your seat thriller. Also, did I mention the beloved Patrick Stewart plays a neo-nazi?!? it’s wild. He said in an interview that just reading the script he had to turn on all the lights and kept looking out his window.

3. 13 Sins

Genre: Thriller

Released: 2014

Starring: Mark Webber and Ron Perlman

Synopsis: After receiving a strange phone-call promising him riches if he can complete 13 task, a man is sent on a disturbing journey where each task is more sinister than the last.       

My Thoughts: Another one that came out of nowhere, I hadn’t even heard of it before watching but man did I love it. It’s a great thriller that really sucks you in and makes you worried for the characters and invested in everything happening. Also makes you question what you would do in their shoes. There is a lot of those “do something crazy for money” movies out there but this is hands down the best.

2. The Invitation

Genre: Horror, Suspense

Released: 2015

Starring: Logan Marshall-Green, Tammy Blanchard, and Michiel Huisman

Synopsis: A man and his new girlfriend are invited to a get together at his ex-wife’s house with all his old friends. However, the true intentions of the host are unknown.

My Thoughts: This movie reminded me why I love movies. I was so happy after watching and just remembering why movies can be so great. While it may not be as ambiguous if the host are actually dark or normal, I assure you you will just love the ride.

1. The Guest

Genre: Action, Thriller

Released: 2014

Starring: Dan Stevens and Maika Monroe

Synopsis: A mysterious man shows up at the house of a family whose son has recently died in the military. Claiming to be a friend of the sons, the man gets closer and closer to the family, however not all is as it seems with this new mystery man.

My Thoughts: I have been singing this movies praises since 2014. Made by the same team behind “You’re Next” it’s really hard to decide which is better. What I do know is Dan Stevens kills it in this movie and it’s one hell of a ride.

So those are just some of the great hidden gems on Netflix. I had a lot of fun doing this and may just do another one going over another 10 on Netflix or another streaming service. Let me know which you would like!

[kieranconveyma]

4.Narrative Theory and Interactive Narratives: Notes

What is narrative ?

Dictionary definition:  narrative [na-ra-tiv], a telling of some true or fictitious event or connected sequence of events, recounted by a narrator to a narratee (although there may be more than one of each)... A narrative will consist of a set of events (the story) recounted in a process of narration (or discourse), in which the events are selected and arranged in a particular order (the plot). The category of narratives includes both the shortest accounts of events (e.g. the cat sat on the mat, or a brief news item) and the longest historical or biographical works, diaries, travelogues, etc., as well as novels, ballads, epics, short stories, and other fictional forms.Chris Baldick, Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990, p. 145.

Telling stories as a human tendancy

Animals vs Humans - Only humans tell stories (as far as we know)

Stories surround us. In childhood we learn fairy tales and myths. As we grow up, we read short stories, novels, history, and biography. Religion, philosophy and science often present their doctrines through exemplary stories... Plays tells stories, as do films, television shows, comic books, paintings, dance, and many other cultural phenomena. Much of our conversation is taken up with stories of one sort or another – recalling an event from the past or telling a joke. Even newspaper articles are called ‘stories’, and when we ask for an explanation, we may say, ‘What’s the story?’ We cannot escape even by going to sleep, since we often experience our dreams as little narratives, and we recall and retell the dreams in the shape of stories. Perhaps narrative is a fundamental way that humans make sense of the world (Bordwell and Thompson, 1993: 64).Bordwell, D., and Thompson, K. (1993). Film Art: An Introduction. London: McGraw-Hill.

Is narrative just ‘stories’? How do we tell stories? E.g. voice, print, video and , who do we tell them to? 

What is a narrative?

●The way in which a story is told (in both fictional and non-fictional media texts)

●Plot and narrative are not the same thing. 

Plot = what happened and why, causal link

Narrative = history of events or a sequence Narrative has a temporal dimension

Aristotles dramatic unities

Time - the action should cover no more than 24 hours 

■Place - a single physical space

■Action - a  play should follow just one main action

Over 2000 years later, Bordwell and Thompson (1993) identify three core components of narrative:

●  time

●  space

●causation

 ‘a chain of events in a cause-effect relationship occurring in time and space’ (Bordwell and Thompson1993: 65) Traditional narratives 

Cook, P. (1985) The Cinema Book. London: British Film Institute

Experimental narratives

■  non-linear causation

■  lack of clear narrative closure (‘open’ or ambiguous endings)

■  disruption of dramatic unities (slippage of location, event, time, illogicality, strangeness)

■‘flat’, contradictory, or superficial characters

■Typically seen in non-realist modes such as surrealism - but also relevant to new media forms...

Vladimir Propp (1895-1970)

■Analysed over 100 Russian fairy tales and folk stories in the 1920s

■Focused on characters and their actions

■Highly influential in literary studies, film studies, interactive theory and games theory

■  31 narrative functions or narratemes, e.g. ‘A member of a family leaves home’, ‘Hero and villain join in direct combat’

■  8 character types

The hero

The villain 

The princess

The dispatcher

The donor

The helper

The father

The false hero

Todorov (1939 - 2017) - Equilibrium

Levi-Strauss (1908 - 2009) Binary oppositions Social anthropologist who studied myths in tribal cultures Values and beliefs of a culture are expressed in the form of binary oppositions. 

Good vs Evil

Peace vs War  

Light vs Darkness

Man vs Nature

Man vs Woman

Young vs Old

Rich vs Poor

Reason vs Passion

Revealing underlying themes and symbolic oppositions in media texts.

What about the relationship between games and narrative. Great narrative =great game?

Games and narrative - a continium

Games and narrative:opposing elements? 

Are narrative and interactivity antithetical? 

Does interactivity harm storytelling?

Does storytelling harm interactivity? 

Two separate fields

Narratology: Emerges from literary theory. Concerned with narrative 

Ludology: Specific to game studies. Concerned with interactivity. Salen, K and Zimmerman, E. (2006) The Game Design Reader: A Rules of Play Anthology. London: MIT press.

The role of the player: first-hand experience “unlike literature, games are not about the Other, they are about the Self. Games focus on self-mastery and exploration of the external world” Aarseth, Espen (2004). 

‘Genre trouble: narrativism and the art of simulation.” First person: new media as story, performance, and game. Ed. Noah Wardrip-Fruin & Pat Harrigan.Cambridge: The MIT Press.

"The reader/viewer needs an emotional motivation for investing energy in the movie or book; we need a human actant to identify with. This is probably also true for the computer game, only this actant is always present - it is the player" (Juul, 2001).Juul, J. (2001) Games Telling Stories: A brief note on game and narrative. Vol. 1, Issue 1. [Online] July, 2001. Available from : GameStudies.org http://www.gamestudies.org/0101/juul-gts/Participation

"The player is not an external observer. Observers are passive, the player is active. If the player does not act, there will be no game, and therefore no session at all" (Frasca,1999).

My Boyfriend Came Back from the War (Olia Lialina 1996) 

Narrative and Database ■ video games as huge databases of data from which the journey of the player is selected

■ traditionally narrative and database are ‘natural enemies’:

■According to Manovich, in new media forms they work together.Manovich, L. (2002) The Language of New Media. London: MITPress.

Aarseth’s (1997) ‘ergodic’ narrative

 ■ergon - ‘work

’■hodos - ‘path’

Finding your way through by choosing between alternatives. Aarseth, E. J. (1997) Cybertext. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. “Games and narratives share some structural traits. Nevertheless, my point is that: 

1) Games and stories actually do not translate to each other in the way that novels and movies do. 

2) There is an inherent conflict between the now of the interaction and the past or "prior" of the narrative. You can't have narration and interactivity at the same time; there is no such thing as a continuously interactive story” Juul, J. (2001) ‘Games Telling stories?’ Game Studies the international journal of computer volume 1, issue 1 game research “Games and narratives share some structural traits. Nevertheless, my point is that: 

1) Games and stories actually do not translate to each other in the way that novels and movies do. 

2) There is an inherent conflict between the now of the interaction and the past or "prior" of the narrative. You can't have narration and interactivity at the same time; there is no such thing as a continuously interactive story” Juul, J. (2001) ‘Games Telling stories?’ Game Studies the international journal of computer volume 1, issue 1 game research Narrative and Environment It’s not enough to have a story, games have to build a whole environment to interact with. Game narratives essentially create worlds “forming the game narrative literature into a model of player experience” (Qin, Rau & Salvendy, 2009). Qin, H., Rau, P., Salvendy, G. (2009) Measuring Player Immersion in the Computer Game Narrative. In : Entertainment Computing - ICEC 2007. Springer Berlin Heidelberg.

99 Rooms (Kim Köster, Richard Schumann, StephanSchulz and Johannes Buenemann 2004)

Path structures of interactive narratives

1.The Complete Graph

2.The Network

3.The Tree

Ryan, Marie Laure, (2003). Narrative as Virtual Reality. The John Hopkins University Press. 

The complete graph all nodes are connected and the reader has complete freedom of navigation The network“ Standard structure of literary hypertext. Reader’s movements are neither completely free nor limited to a single course” The tree one path has been taken at a time 

Elfland Catacombs (1981) 

Embedded and emergent narrative 

Embedded narrative - already exists prior interaction. Experienced as context.

Emergent narrative - emerges from interaction. Based on individual interaction with the game. Game design can combine the two in different ways. ‘the term narrative has such a wide range of contradictory meanings and associations for different people and in different theories that it is practically meaningless unless specified in greater detail.’Jesper Juul, Half-Real: Video Games between Real Rules and Fictional Worlds,London & Cambridge MASS: MIT Press, 2005, pp. 156-157.

‘the term narrative has such a wide range of contradictory meanings and associations for different people and in different theories that it is practically meaningless unless specified in greater detail.’Jesper Juul, Half-Real: Video Games between Real Rules and Fictional Worlds,London & Cambridge MASS: MIT Press, 2005, pp. 156-157.

6 meanings of narrative (Juul)

1. Narrative as the presentation of a number of events –As storytelling in its original sense

2. Narrative as a fixed and predetermined sequence of events

3. Narrative as a specific type of sequence of events

4. Narrative as a specific type of theme

5. Narrative as any kind of setting or fictional world

6. Narrative as the way we make sense of the world

[arthistorycuriosity]

My Cabinet of Curiosities

My cabinet of curiosities from top left clockwise: Farewell to Kings by Rush, an apple head with human hair, a watch from Paris, a bear claw, my father’s tooth, my cat, my great-grandma’s silverware from the 1930′s, letters from my penpal in Germany, my TI-84, and The Vancouver Province announcing Barack Obama’s first presidential election win. All these items are displayed in a vintage trunk.  Farewell to Kings Album

Closer to the Heart by Neil Peart

And the men who hold high places Must be the ones who start To mold a new reality Closer to the heart Closer to the heart

The blacksmith and the artist Reflect it in their art They forge their creativity Closer to the heart Yes, closer to the heart

Philosophers and plowmen Each must know his part To sow a new mentality Closer to the heart (Peart, 1977)

The Farewell to Kings album represents music, Canadian culture, literature, and sexism. Rush is my favourite band. They are a Canadian rock band. Their members are Geddy Lee, Alex Lifeson, and Neil Peart. Sadly, Peart passed away due to brain cancer in January, 2020. All three band members are intellectuals, especially Peart, who is a published author. The Farewell to Kings album art is a scene of post-atomic destruction with a doll representation of a king in the foreground who looks broken and dead, with his crown in the rubble near a destroyed bunker, with industrial pollution and a cityscape in the background. Many of the songs’ lyrics are war protest songs. The album title is also a reference to the novel, A Farewell to Arms, in which Hemmingway’s character walks away from World War I, because he is about to be unjustly executed. The character escapes with his girlfriend (who later dies in childbirth) (Hemingway, 1957). Peart also lost a wife and child. Rush is one of the most successful-ever touring bands, members of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, recipients of the Order of Canada, and holders of honorary PhD’s (Ankeny, 2020).  However, can you see something wrong with Peart’s lyrics? The lyrics have such a positive sentiment, to live a life true to one’s feelings, yet Peart always employs the universal “he”. Not surprisingly, most of Rush’s fans are white, nerdy males. (At least that is the stereotype.) I would almost rather hear about Motley Crue’s treatment of groupies than suffer Rush’s utter absence of the female. So, it is with ambivalence that I present this token of my favourite band.

Apple Head

People indigenous to the Amazon rainforest originally shrunk heads to frighten off enemies and to compel the spirits of their enemies to serve them. When western cultures contacted these people, they prized the heads as travel mementos which obviously caused more killing (Santillan, 2020). My shrunken head is an apple. My dad’s friend carved it about twenty-five years ago and he attached a lock of his sister’s hair. Over the years it has hardened and blackened. It is just over an inch in diameter and has acquired a sheen over the years. Its face is laughing and its hair is ash blonde. We joke about it and say that people will think that we are into witchcraft. My dad talks about it protecting him on the road (because it normally hangs in his minivan) and I think he might half believe it. The significance of the head is to represent the study of cultures, and to remind me that when somebody else’s culture seems repugnant, adding mine to the mix can make things worse. It also represents my own irreverence toward all things supernatural, because nothing could be less sinister than a silly apple, even if it looks kind of creepy. Watch

This pocket watch represents my travels to Europe. It is silver and the cover depicts the Eiffel Tower. The word Paris is embossed onto it in cursive. It has floral and beaded detailing around its face. The numerals are Arabic and its hands are lightweight and simple. I bought this watch at Versailles when I was nine years old. On that occasion, I went to France with my family and we saw the Eiffel Tower, the Louvre, Versailles, Beaune, Nimes, and Carcassonne. The rich history of the French Revolution impressed me because I kept thinking about the guillotine, which killed the nobles whose images I viewed and whose homes I visited. On my second trip to Europe, I went alone as a nineteen-year-old student. I studied in Berlin at Humboldt University. Everywhere I went, there were remnants of the Holocaust. After that shocking experience, I traveled to Strasbourg by train to visit friends. My hosts and I watched the July 14 fireworks, even though there had been terrorism in Nice the year before. From Strasbourg, I took the high-speed train to Paris and visited the catacombs, the Eiffel Tower, Notre Dame, the Louvre and Montmartre. While I was in Paris, I stayed with wealthy friends of my Strasbourg hosts. They were nice to me. I felt like I was their daughter. They had an impressive house and the whole downstairs was just for me. I had a super fancy bathroom. For dinner we had sausage or something. Afterwards, they asked me if I liked cheese and I said yes, so they brought me a huge selection of cheeses, all of which I sampled, despite being lactose intolerant! Later, I was glad to have the downstairs suite to myself. Anyway, the significance of this watch is to remind me of a history that is so much bigger and more horrifying than what I can normally mentally process. It also reminds me of my ability to act outside of my comfort zone. Bear Claw

In Indigenous cultures, especially here in British Columbia, bear claws represent protection, leadership, strength and healing (The Ancient Symbol, 2020). This bear claw was given to my mom by an Indigenous man in Pemberton. The base of the claw is amber-coloured, whereas the portion that protruded from the paw is charcoal-coloured. It is curved and has a slight hump on the inside. It resembles a dead fish with its head cut off. It is roughly an inch and a half long. The pointed end could definitely tear you to bits. The man who gave it to my mom had watched her band play at the pub, and they had conversed during the band’s break. At the end of the night, the fellow presented her with this bear claw, which is hardly what she would wear for jewelry, because she is not partial to hunting, but she sensed his generosity and sincerity and so she thanked him and kept the bear claw with a feeling of respect and gratitude. This bear claw is significant because it reminds us that we are very fortunate if we are welcomed by Indigenous people and it reminds us to look at their gifts through their cultural lens and not our own. My Dad’s Tooth

This is my dad’s tooth. I am not sure what type of tooth it is. It might be a wisdom tooth. It is rotten and disgusting. You can see dried up blood and black tooth decay. It is roughly 3/4 of an inch long. Luckily, it does not stink. This tooth is in my collection because I like gross things and I think every treasure chest should have at least one gross curiosity. This semester, I am studying anatomy, so body parts are important. This tooth is a reminder to maintain proper oral hygiene and to floss every night. People die from tooth abscesses and this is a stupid and avoidable way to die (if you come from a rich country). Hygiene practices are also especially important now in our current pandemic. My Cat

This is my cat, Shit Rock. He is black, white and gray and his back has a leopard pattern. His fur is thick, healthy, shiny and soft. He smells like nothing, which makes him so much better than a dog because dogs stink. I love him as though he were my child. At first, when he was a kitten and we rescued him from a barn at my aunt’s house, we used to call him Bubbi, and that is his name at the vet. But Shit Rock is his real name, and this is stolen from the Trailer Park Boys, whose character, Bubbles, is a cat lover. The Trailer Park Boys are icons of Canadian counterculture whom I like for their comedy, irreverence, and Canadian-ness. They also like Rush! Shit Rock is a naughty little kitty, but he has a sweet side as well. He can bite, scratch, and growl when he is hungry or wants to go outside. When he is outside, he likes to cross the road to play with his other kitty friend, which is dangerous. His sweet side comes out when he is full and sleepy. He cuddles, kneads, licks, and purrs on the fluffy blanket on my bed. My Great Grandma’s Silverware

This is my great grandmother’s silverware, which she received as a wedding gift in the 1930’s. She did not use the three sets that remain in the original packaging. The box in which the knife set is housed is blue with vintage lettering. The cardboard is frail and thin. The knife handles are plastic, but they look like yellowed ivory. The spoons are dark and tarnished. The significance of the silverware is to remind me of my father’s Mennonite family history. The Mennonites were expelled from Germany and Russia and other Slavic countries and they dispersed through North America and South America from the 1870’s through the World Wars (The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica, 2019). My father’s maternal relatives settled in Altona, Manitoba in the 1870’s, whereas his paternal relatives escaped from Siberia and came to Canada during World War I. The Mennonites were pacifists and although my father is irreligious, he has kept this trait. He once had a conversation with a Dutch serviceman, my mom’s step-cousin, whom he told, “If I were called to war, I would tell my government to shoot me before I would ever kill anybody.” The cousin seemed favourably impressed. As for the unused silverware, it speaks of frugality, of saving things for a more important time that never arrived. This stinginess also translated into a parenting style that involved a lot of disapproval, the tone of which got less toxic with each passing generation. (I am not making this up… Just read a Miriam Toews book.)

My Letters/Postcards from Antonia

In 2012, I met a German girl named Antonia on Twitter. We shared an interest in One Direction, a British boy band. We became very good friends and decided to start writing each other real, snail-mail letters. I have kept her letters in a box in my room. It is funny to reread them and remember my tween years. I have studied German since the ninth grade, and to this day, Antonia and I practice English/German with each other. I met her in person in 2018, when I studied abroad in Berlin, and she was just as lovely as I could have imagined. Antonia took an airplane from Bavaria to spend a day with me. We attended an anti-neo Nazi protest. It was a wonderful day. This photo shows a Christmas card she sent me in 2019, and a few postcards too. The Christmas card has a Christmas tree made of glitter on the front and on the inside, she put little dashes of glitter too. The postcards are from Prague, Berlin, and Salzburg. The postcards represent the acquisition of language and cross-cultural exchange. They also represent two parallel comings of age on separate continents: when we first met, we only had a boy band in common, but when we met in person, we had enough in common politically to join a protest together. My TI-84

My TI-84 is a black, rectangular instrument, about 6 by 2 inches, with a lot of intimidating buttons, all of which have three functional levels. It has an LED screen with intimidating, primitive text in its display. The cover has my name and hearts on it, which I did with White Out during one of my math classes. The back bears a sticker of Jack Black from Tenacious D. My TI-84 graphs functions, and finds their roots, maxima, minima, derivatives, and antiderivatives. It can calculate probabilities for normal, t, chi square, F, binomial, Poisson, and geometric probability distributions. It can perform a wide range of statistical tests. It multiplies matrices, calculates trigonometric values, and is handy with logarithms. I got a C in calculus but an A in statistics. I hate math, but I know it matters. For example, statistical studies have changed the United Nations’ policies on awarding aid. They found that giving money to women in impoverished nations ensured that children would be fed, whereas awarding the same money to men did not result in the feeding of children (United Nations, 2020). Another example of math being important socially is the mathematics of exponential growth, which describes the inequality generated by the capitalistic financial system and which also describes the spread of diseases, like Covid-19. Projection models for the spread of disease help public health officials decide policies.   The Province 2008 Newspaper

My last curiosity is a 2008 Province newspaper announcing Barack Obama’s presidential win. It is torn on the backside, permanently folded, yellow, and fading. It stinks a little bit. Obama looks young in this photo compared to now, even though the time since then has gone by very fast. Why should I care whom Americans elect? Well, everything they do affects us; economically, militaristically, culturally, etc. I get very sick of watching their TV and seeing their flags on everything. Pierre Elliott Trudeau said in a 1969 interview with President Nixon: “Living next to you is in some ways like sleeping with an elephant. No matter how friendly and even-tempered is the beast, if I can call it that, one is affected by every twitch and grunt" (MacMillan, 2018). This was true when Nixon was in power and it is most certainly true now. I was happy when Obama was elected. I believe that he did his best; however, America is just too far gone. Maybe in many generations to come, they will have free health care. More likely, the country will dissolve into two factions. Or maybe both of these things have already happened somewhat. Now we have Trump, The Proud Boys, and an out-of-control pandemic, and most of Canada’s cases have come from America (Tumilty, 2020).

Thematic Analysis

One theme that recurred in my collection was that of irreverence, even though this was not deliberate in my choice of objects. My kitty is named Shit Rock, which is so off-colour as to be unmentionable at the vet’s office. He is named after the Trailer Park Boys whose humour is founded upon stupidity, drug dealing, and failure. My calculator did not escape unscathed because it bears a sticker of Jack Black in his Tenacious D persona. Tenacious D sings vulgarities with operatic enthusiasm. The apple head is a standing family joke that pokes fun at a creepy looking thing with complete disregard for supernatural associations. Finally, the silverware reminds me of my paternal Mennonite roots and my reasons for wanting to shake them off. As the above thematic links diagram shows, many of the sub-themes that my objects brought to mind are interconnected. However, now I will try to lift another theme out of the objects’ functions. Five of the objects function as memory enhancement. The newspaper stores and helps us recall events of a particular period, in this case the 2008 American election. The TI-84 stores, remembers, and manipulates more mathematical data than any good math student can hold in her head. The watch not only acts as a mnemonic device to help me remember my travels, but it also keeps track of time. The Rush album generates music, which transports its listeners to the time when the music was new, and in this way, it also enhances memory. The letters/postcards serve as a reminder of a long friendship and constitute a written record of two girls’ transition from childhood to adulthood.

References:

Ankeny, J. (2020). Rush: Biography & History. AllMusic. https://www.allmusic.com/artist/rush-mn0000203008/biography.

Hemingway, E. (1957). A Farewell to Arms. New York: Scribner.

MacMillan, M. (2018, June 15). Sleeping with a very cranky elephant: The history of Canada-U.S. tensions | CBC Radio. CBCnews. https://www.cbc.ca/radio/sunday/the-sunday-edition-june-17-2018-1.4692469/sleeping-with-a-very-cranky-elephant-the-history-of-canada-u-s-tensions-1.4699017.

Peart, N. (1977). Closer to the Heart - Farewell to Kings. Thornhill, Canada: Anthom Records 

Santillan, J. (2020, March 27). 8 Disturbing Facts About Real Shrunken Heads. TheCollector. https://www.thecollector.com/shrunken-heads/.

The Ancient Symbol. (2020). Native American Bear Symbol. https://theancientsymbol.com/collections/native-american-bear-symbol.

The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica. (2019). Mennonite. Encyclopædia Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/topic/Mennonite.

Tumilty, R. (2020, April 30). Canada's early COVID-19 cases came from the U.S. not China. Healthing.ca. https://www.healthing.ca/diseases-and-conditions/coronavirus/canadas-early-covid-19-cases-came-from-the-u-s-not-china.

United Nations. (2020). Reduce inequality within and among countries – United Nations Sustainable Development. United Nations. https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/inequality/.

[jakiphyr]

Jak (re)plays FE2  [Part 01]

Awright!  It’s been a good four years since I’ve last touched Gaiden fully (late Dec 2013 - Feb 2014), so I’ll be doing a challenge this time around.

This LP is brought here today by HistoryoftheEmblem’s Gaiden event Kickstarter. So feel free to join the ride, or follow along!  Now, without further ado...

Introduction

I will be doing a Gaiden Novels Canon Playthrough challenge.  I will explain what this is, then lay out the rules that are styled similar to a draft now that I look at this back over.

My Motives (a.k.a. why am I doing this) 

This run is based on Fire Emblem: Gaiden’s two-parter novels that were released back in 1993.  Scans of illustrations can be found starting here, the rest are linked from there for those interested.

After @azebraslife ‘s discovery posts about the craziness that is Silque+Kliff subplot being half-siblings, Kamui dying to a necrodragon, possessed!Delthea killing Luthier and snapping out from that…

I meant to record my in-depth findings/summaries from what I read so far off my twitter live log in June but forgot to write them down as more than just quick blurbs.  This liveplay event will help me on being continuously motivated to read these books, from start to finish.  So I’ll be using my posts to record these summary translations, so expect those inserted throughout my LP entries.

Which is OK, the novels are easy enough to read as a beginner for the most part and makes for a fun experience.

It’s time to dig whatever hidden gems there are (and there’s plenty, I’m sure).

Rules, to keep myself organized and for followers to know what I’m doing:

(1)  Whoever dies in the novels dies, and stays dead.  No exceptions.  If you know exactly who dies from the scan posts I’ve made... a~yup, those will be dying at the same story/battle points whenever possible.

(2)  To branch off from 1, if revival springs are used, I will use them for that character to be revived from the dead.  AFAIK, the author didn’t use any, but I’m hoping for a pleasant surprise.

(3)  I’m allowing myself the old-fashion method of the Mila Turnwheel — save states.  Someone dies when they aren’t supposed to?  Reset.  There’re likely other scenarios I’ll keep a mind for when replicating novel events in my play.

(4)  Whatever the novel does — give certain classes to villagers, equip certain items to units, kill a boss with a certain strategy, choice recruitments, lionhead statboost uses — I must replicate those events and actions in my run, thus making it a challenge.  If something’s almost or actually impossible, well... I’ll figure a way around it by having the next closest thing to it.  If nothing’s specified, I’ll use my own discretion (and hope it doesn’t conflict later).

That’s the basis, for now.  I don’t want to restrict myself too tightly so I’ll be a little more flexible — unless, of course, the novels dictates otherwise

The Game

Okay!  Now with that out of the way, let’s begin.

I’ll be going Easy Mode for the ease of training female mages to level 20 to not be hellish again like on my first blind run.

And now... we get to Act 1.

But wait!  The novels have a couple of things to say before I can truly start.

It has a backstory and some pre-game exposition with our favourite Deliverance gang—their own Rise of the Deliverance DLC in novel form.  Let’s have a look.

—

[Novel]

Prologue:

Greek mythology-esque poetic literature that dragons are gods and how their actions affect weather/nature.  A roar brings the rain and lightning storms, humanity questioning why the heavens are always angry.  As the two dragons have always fought as if they were born to, and birthed Valencia to be a reflection of their souls (North vs South fighting mirrors the Duma vs Mila conflict).

It gives a history lesson of how Rigel and Zofia came to be, describing Duma and Mila like oil and water put in a single vase, eventually growing murky and bad as it mixes from being stabilized prior. And now Valencia faces the worst war in its history.

—

Chapter 1 - Liberation Army Part 1-1: 6 Fake Death Pills

[ This entire part is pre-game, contains graphic depictions of events. Warnings for characters contemplating suicide, gritty themes, blood, and graphic descriptions of murders. ]

Starts off with a visible blood splatter on the polished stone floors of Zofia Castle, the military fill the halls leading to the throne room.  An old man with pale skin, has long, hairy legs, and a long white beard, sits on the tall golden throne with a sword lodged in his bleeding chest.  King Lima IV stabbed by none other than Desaix.

Lima IV still draws breath, barely living as he’s groaning painfully and flailing an arm searching for support (but gets none).  His last words condemn Desaix for being ambitious, having stolen the sword of the royal family which he had taken out at the scene as his second sword.  (The royal sword is apparently forged with steel.)  Desaix mocks the king, and his army begins to chant as he takes the next course of action.

The royal sword was then swung to behead Lima IV, the bloodied head rolls to the stone floor, his half-opened eyes looking up at Desaix with resentment.  The usurper declares the rest of the living royal family to be thrown into dungeons or killed.  The defense rebellion broke out immediately after and utterly failed, their numbers whittled down brutally.  Desaix’s reformed royal army heed all responsibility on throwing rebels and other captives in the dungeon (which hasn’t been used for many years in the peaceful kingdom of Zofia).

The anti-Desaix faction’s numbers continue to decline until six (named) knights remained with very few others who were still fighting vigorously.  It is revealed that the six are Clive, Mathilda, Clair, Lukas, Python, and Forsyth.  Eventually, they were captured and got locked up in the cold dungeons.  Frustrated by their circumstances, Clive grieves that death is preferable for the sake of their knightly pride over being tortured by the usurpers.  An old(ish) soldier with graying hair starts talking to Clive (he is the generic looking man in the first illustration).

The six really want to die, as they’re depressed, but the generic soldier makes a deal with them: drink the 6 “death” medicine pills he had made (and calls them lucky he has that many), which will put them in heavy sleep for four hours.  He’ll disguise himself in the enemy’s uniform, cart their “dead” bodies to the graveyard catacombs full of Terrors (the Deliverance Hideout), and buy them time to rebuild forces to liberate Zofia.

He calls six names, the novel describes each one as the following: Clive, the young chief knight, Clair, the Pegasus Knight who was rewarded good luck by the gods for riding a temna, Lukas, a hot-blooded soldier whose spear strikes like a lightning bolt, Forsyth, his character is different from Lukas, whose calm judgment is true, Python, a genius archer whose bow technique is clear [and shoots] with anger, and Mathilda, the female knight who has a brave soul, as beautiful as the night sky, and is as good as Clive.

Clive rejects the offer, shouting it won’t fly with them as knights, still insistent on preferring death.  Mathilda and Clair nod in agreement with them.  A tearful Forsyth insists on all of them dying together as was their knightly vow if it came down to it, the gray-haired man calls them foolish.

The soldier persuades Clive and the others a little more, until finally, Clive makes the first move on reaching for the “death” pill, which then the other five immediately follow suit.  The man tells the knights about Mycen, a holy knight who was banished by Desaix ages past and currently living in Ram, a village located at the cape of the southernmost tip of Zofia.  He tells them to form the liberation army together with Mycen and free Zofia from the hands of Desaix.  The six proceed to swallow their pills and “died” on the spot.

The consumed medicine causes a foul odor to fill the prisons, signaling some had died to the unaware.  The guards drag their six bodies out of the dungeons, sending them to the caves on the far coast from the castle. 

Upon waking, they salvage the caves for weapons, arrows, armour, and garments.  They also attempt to cover up the cave’s entrance with rocks and leaves to keep Desaix’s men from finding the location again.  Lukas was chosen as the messenger because he can hide himself the best from being captured, he is given a map of Zofia that was found and the journey would take three nights.  Lukas and Forsyth hug it out before patting each other’s backs with fists, then Lukas departs.  Clair follows Lukas out of the cave and mentions she is going to find her pegasus.

Forsyth and Clive have strategy talks while waiting for Clair for return and talking about accommodating Mycen.  Python’s polishing his arrows.  Mathilda returns with urgent grim news that the royal army has found their hideout, rushing them to go deeper into the thin, narrow caves.  Meanwhile, Clair did not hear the loud distant yells from Desaix’s army descending upon the caves, chasing her fellow soldiers.

—

[Game]

Whew, apologies for the length so far.  It was to set up the atmosphere of how the chaos will unfold in the future.

If Gaiden’s character endings weren’t potentially depressing enough on their own, we get them from the very beginning...  

So I suppose from that cliffhanger, that was how Clair and Mathilda get captured, which is different from Shadows of Valentia’s depiction where Mathilda was taken hostage before Lukas left, and Clair got kidnapped after his departure for Ram.

These fills in the fe2′s story gaps are interesting to note (as well as the author’s portrayals of the RGB trio’s personalities).

Okay, back to the game...

Act 1 will begin in the next post.  (This one is already long enough, and the next part’s 6 pages long.  In comparison, part 1-1′s was ten pages long.)

To be continued...

—

→ Next installment: Yo, Alm! Listen to this guy! (3x)

[sutzrainbow]

An alternative to “Love Never Dies”

(Warning: I do rag on LND a fair amount in this, but I’m pretty gentle. Please don’t feel got at if you happen to like it. My issues with it are plot and character-based. The music’s fine. Except the sex song. Ew.)

Watching the 25th Anniversary of Phantom of the Opera completely reignited my love for the musical, especially since I could now look at it with an adult perspective and do all this fun character analysis.

I found the Phantom - Erik - engaging for similar reasons I found Josh Washington from Until Dawn engaging. A human being that does despicable things, but who is still understandable and sympathetic. If anything, Erik is worse than Josh, because he actually goes into full jealous-lover-control-mode, and he kills a couple of people. And yet I still really, really like him and would have loved to see him get a happy ending.

That said, I still think Phantom’s ending is perfect, because it has Erik making this huge jump in character and performing his first act of legitimate true love: letting Christine go. It’s brilliant, and beautiful, and bittersweet.

Which is why I take such enormous issue with Love Never Dies.

Now look, if you enjoy Love Never Dies, then that’s absolutely fine, more power to you. I absolutely understand why it must be cathartic and gratifying to see Erik and Christine as a legitimate couple. No one should ever try to take that away from you. I have pieces of media that I love, even though I know they’re riddled with flaws and other people might hate them.

The reason I hate Love Never Dies so much is because it removes everything about Erik that I find interesting or even sympathetic. He has tons of money, a support network, already had sex with Christine offscreen somewhere (which I feel totally invalidates the kiss she gave him at the end of Phantom), and a kid - and yet he still acts like he did in the last one, threatening and bullying. It’s like he learned nothing. He’s no longer a tragic character whose actions are understandable: he’s just an entitled douchebag. Also, making Madame Giry and Meg the villains and killing Christine; what the heck was all that about? What in the last story made it even plausible that this is where things would go?

I don’t feel Phantom honestly needed a sequel; the ending was perfect and wrapped up all the loose ends. We don’t know what happens to Erik, but we don’t need to.

That said, the sheer screwing around Love Never Dies does with the story and established characters made me so mad and got under my skin so much that I felt the only way I could purge it from my mind was think up my own sequel idea, one that I tried as hard as I could to keep in line with the story of the original. So that is what I humbly present to you today: my sequel idea to Phantom of the Opera, in place of Love Never Dies. As yet it has no title.

So where could the story go after Phantom? The only thing I could honestly think of was continuing the lesson Erik began learning, i.e how to love. How about he learns about a different kind of love? Say, platonic love, maybe?

Let me tell you a story...

It is five years after the events of Phantom. Christine no longer works at the Paris Opera house, and instead has disembarked to a smaller one elsewhere in the country, where she is much happier with a relatively successful career as an opera singer. Amongst the regulars is a young girl of Romani background whom Christine has taken under her wing. Let’s call her... hmm, what’s a traditional name from that period...? Maria. Let’s call her Maria.

Maria has a very pleasant voice which Christine sees a lot of potential in. Unfortunately the girl lacks technique and has poor breath control. Christine thinks she could become a great singer with the right training, but because Maria comes from a difficult background, no one is willing to spare the time or the money to train her, and because she abandoned her star role at the Paris Opera, and has a growing family, Christine cannot fund her training either. She attempts to teach her herself, but Maria’s progress is slow.

Christine is tempted to send Maria to Paris, hoping that the Phantom may still be living there and might teach her. Her husband Raoul, understandably, is not keen on this plan. (They’d probably have a long duet here weighing up the pros and cons.) Maria overhears their conversation and insists she is not afraid. Eventually they decide it’s possible Erik might have changed and it may be worth the risk. They send Maria to Paris with some funds, a letter for Madame Giry and Meg who are still working at the opera house, a letter for the Phantom if they find him, and a young man Christine employs to look after Maria. This chap is Auguste and he wants to be a doctor. He’ll be important later.

In Paris, Maria and Auguste are greeted by Madame Giry and Meg, who manage to find them some rooms to stay in. Madame Giry and the owners audition Maria and agree that while the girl’s technique is all over the place, if she improves, she may land a job as a chorus girl. Maria and Auguste intend to go searching for the Phantom, but Meg warns them against searching for such a dangerous man. When Auguste and Maria point out that getting lessons from the Phantom is the only reason they are here, Meg reluctantly admits that she believes the Phantom made a new lair somewhere in the Paris catacombs. The next day, the two enter the catacombs, but quickly lose each other in the darkness. Auguste gets out offscreen, but Maria hears eerie organ music playing and follows it, only to come across a dark chamber and the Phantom, though all she can see is a vague silhouette (they could have a lot of fun here with lighting and effects). The Phantom is now sporting a black half-mask instead of a white one, because why not.  At first he doesn’t believe that Christine has sent Maria, thinking that she would have tried to forget him. Maria insists:

“She has not. She speaks of you often.” “What does she say of me?” “She says that you were her teacher, and that you were the best.”

The Phantom is still reluctant, but he asks her to sing for him anyway. Maria ends up singing an exercise she used to do with Christine, which turns out to be one which the Phantom taught her. This finally convinces the Phantom to begin training her.

Cut to a month or so later, and under the Phantom’s tutelage, Maria’s voice has grown strong enough that she now has a job as a chorus girl. Hijinks ensue at the Opera house when one of the bitchier girls, Jeanette, sabotages Maria’s performance, but later slips on a wet patch on the stage, earning her a twisted ankle. Auguste cares for her, being a trainee doctor. Meg and Madame Giry wonder if this could be the Phantom’s doing and fear that he may have returned to the opera house, but when they check his original underground lair, they find nothing. Still, stories begin to spread about the opera ghost’s return.

Maria, suspicious, attempts to quiz the Phantom in their lessons, but he keeps the topic strictly on their task, snapping at her if she tries to change the subject. He reveals to her that he is still writing music, and has in fact written a short aria intended for her. Maria is shocked and doesn’t think she’s even close to being ready to perform a solo. The Phantom assures her - surprisingly gently - that he has put in many short phrases, to help with her breath control, and that he believes she will soon be skilled enough to perform it. Thrilled and full of gratitude, Maria kisses his cheek before she leaves, leaving the Phantom stunned.

Later Madame Giry and Meg overhear Maria singing her aria backstage. They suggest she submit it to the opera house’s current owners, and ask the identity of the composer. Maria makes an excuse and leaves, eventually voicing her concerns to Auguste. She has grown to care for the Phantom (basically he’s been playing Grumpy Dad to her), and she wants his music to be heard, but knows he is not welcome here. Christine never told her why, but she did mention the Phantom’s deformed face, so Maria assumes it’s because of that. 

To her surprise, the Phantom agrees to submitting his aria, and they put it in under his real name, “Erik”, to avert suspicion.

Rehearsals are under way and the opera house has an unexpected guest: Carlotta, with her new partner. Turns out lovably bitchy Jeanette is her niece. Carlotta expresses distaste that this young gypsy upstart with little experience is going to sing a solo - reminds her of another unfortunate series of events that occurred not too long ago. Cue over-the-top grieving for Piangi. When Maria asks her to elaborate, Carlotta tells the story of how the Phantom abducted Christine and killed both Buquet and Piangi, before disappearing. She insists that the Phantom’s influence alone was what started Christine’s career, that she was never truly talented, and after he disappeared she had nothing left, hence why she moved away.

Maria, of course, tries to protest this, but there are too many questions now, and too few answers. She knows that there’s something really iffy going on and that the Phantom and Christine have both kept lots of things from her. Once again she has a conversation with her teacher, which becomes pretty fiery. 

“You know everything you need to.” “You are a man with two faces! You tell me your real name, but you won’t let me see the truth! Christine told me what that mask is concealing; surely it cannot be worse than what I have imagined! I’m a gypsy - I’ve seen my fair share of freak shows!”

The Phantom is incensed, and almost kicks her out, but the sound of the Masquerade music box makes him hesitate. He calms.

“I will tell you - after your performance. As soon as I know your future as a singer will be secure, I will tell you anything you want to know.” “Do I have your word on that?” “You have my word.” He touches his hand to his mask. “You have earned it.”

Première night comes, and Auguste drops a hint to Maria that the Phantom may well attend, in disguise, to watch her sing. He reckons the old grouch has grown - gasp - fond of her. As the final act begins and Maria prepares to sing her aria, she notices a masked figure slip into Box 5 next to Auguste. She sings and gets a round of applause, then pleads with the crowd to meet the composer of the aria, hoping that the Phantom’s different mask (not the half-one this time, but a full-face one vaguely similar to the one he wore during Masquerade) will disguise him.

Unfortunately Carlotta remembers the Masquerade incident and recognises this man as the one who killed her husband, so interrupts and accuses him of Piangi’s murder. When the Phantom doesn’t deny it, Carlotta’s boyfriend, who is a trigger-happy chap at the best of times, fires two shots at him. The first misses, but the second catches his mask a glancing blow, shattering it. Erik flees back to the catacombs and chaos descends on the opera house.

Maria sets off for the catacombs to find Erik, but Auguste begs her not to go.

“I need him to tell me the truth!” “I’ll come with you!” “No - no, I daren’t. He’ll trust me better if I go alone. Get help. Hide outside the lair in case something goes wrong.” “Maria - how can you think of going there alone, knowing what he is?” “I’ve always known what he is - but if we don’t give him the benefit of the doubt, he’ll only act as we expect him to. He deserves one chance, Auguste.” “All right. For pity’s sake be careful, Maria.”

She reaches the lair just as Erik arrives, now back in his black half-mask. She is furious with him and gives him a huge mouthful: is it true that he committed those murders? Did he lie to Christine? Has he been lying to her? Should she truly have been afraid of him all along?

Erik denies nothing, and when she’s run her mouth for a while, he admits that it’s true, all of it. Why did she think Christine gave her all those warnings about him? He hoped that by teaching her as Christine requested, and looking out for her, he could atone for the dreadful things he did. But now he knows that the people will never accept him, not just for his deformed face but for the severity of his crimes. He removes his mask to demonstrate: he is a monster inside and out, and he knows it. He cannot run from it, however hard he tries. No wonder Christine walked away.

Then he collapses. Turns out the first bullet did hit him, in the side. 

“He shot you!” exclaims Maria. “I didn’t know...” “Of course not. I never said.”

Maria is horrified as she rushes to tend to him. Erik of course goes through that usual tirade that ‘it’s better this way’ and ‘better kill the monster before he harms anyone else’. At this, Maria snaps.

“I don’t think you’re a monster! You’ve never been a monster to me. You were good to me; you taught me. You were strict, you were stern, but you were patient. Christine warned me, she told me to be wary, but you never gave me a reason to fear you. Not even your face."

Erik is deeply touched at her words, and wonders if by caring for her he has earned a place in heaven, as before him stands an angel, in a form he recognises.

Of course it’s not an angel. It’s Christine. She came to hear Maria sing his music. Because despite the bad history between them, she still cares for Erik, too.

“Why did you return?” “Because I believe you still have so much to give to the world. Hearts soared with your music tonight. You made people happy.”

She’s so proud of him. She heard what Maria said. She feels he’s finally learned to love, and earned someone else’s love in return. It’s not the romantic love he always craved, but it’s love nevertheless.

Following her is Auguste, Meg, Madame Giry and Raoul - and of course Auguste is a trainee doctor. Maria begs him to save her teacher. Auguste says he’ll try - but the wound is very deep... (lights down! Cliffhanger! Aaah!)

An unspecified time later, the opera is preparing for another performance. Madame Giry meets with the opera house owners. It appears the dramatic première night only served to sell out tickets.

“Nasty business, though, very nasty business. You say the man died?” “Indeed Monsieur, there was nothing that could be done.” “Do we know if he truly was this so-called ‘opera ghost’?” “As he died before he could give a confession, I feel we may never know.” “Pity. He may have been a criminal, but the chap wrote good music.”

Meanwhile, Christine, Raoul and Auguste watch Maria sing her final aria. The music swells. The audience applauds - and in a dark, distant corner of the opera house, a man in a mask can be seen, watching.

...Okay, so it is fanficcy, but y’know what, it’s lot less fanficcy than what we got in Love Never Dies. I hope I managed to keep all the returning characters in-character, with their development from the first story intact. No drunken, gambling Raoul, but a sympathetic and cautious one. No villainous Giry or Meg who are loyal to the Phantom for some reason; they’re a neutral force as always. No kid whose parentage drives the plot. An active Christine who makes her own decisions and isn’t treated as an object for the guys to fight over. God, that pissed me off!

Honestly, there was no chance of Christine and Erik getting back together. Their romance is toxic, sorry guys. And their story is over when he lets her go. That said, I didn’t see why Christine couldn’t be part of his later character development. Erik does still angst about her, because she’s the only person who has ever shown him compassion, and she still walked away. Christine could be the catalyst to help him start changing, but for the main lesson, I had to start him afresh with someone else.

I like to think Maria is not a Mary-Sue - for a start she doesn’t hook up with Erik, and she isn’t a singing prodigy like Christine either; she’s got potential, but she needs a lot of work. She doesn’t go searching for Erik in an attempt to ‘fix’ him; she needs something from him. He’s her teacher who at first she cautiously respects, but later grows more attached to as he does legitimately nice things for her. At first Erik only does this to honour Christine’s request, but later it’s because he genuinely wants to. He learns to love, and he also learns that yes, his deformity is a huge social handicap, but if he’s kind and does good things, he can still earn love. That was the best reward I felt I could give him - but he had to earn it, and he couldn’t have everything. After all, this guy’s a murderer. So no, he doesn’t get accepted into society, he doesn’t get Christine - but he does earn applause for his music, he earns Maria’s love, his relationship with Christine becomes a whole lot healthier - and he becomes a better person.

So yeah, if you hate Love Never Dies as much as I do, I hope that was cathartic - at least as much as puncturing an abscess could be.  And to be fair, there is one good thing that came out of that wretched musical: the ultimate Phantom/Christine power duo that is Ramin Karimloo and Sierra Boggess. They met through LND and have since forged a friendship that is the purest, sweetest, cinnamon-coated bond I’ve ever seen. And when they’re playing Erik and Christine, their chemistry is so hot you could fry eggs with it. I absolutely understand why they were picked for the 25th Anniversary version. And they make LND almost tolerable. Almost.

[tamboradventure]

How to (Virtually) Travel the World

Posted: 5/11/20 | May 11th, 2020

With the world on hold for the foreseeable, it’s going to be a long time before we get back on the road. Even as we begin to look to the summer, it’s likely that many destinations will keep their doors shut to international travelers until the fall.

But that doesn’t mean we have to put our wanderlust on hold.

With the world at our virtual fingertips, there are plenty of ways to feed your inner traveler from the comfort of your bed.

Many destinations and museums now let you “visit them” virtually. And there are also plenty of amazing books you can read, interesting films and TV shows you can watch, and fun meetups and classes to join.

In short, you can still see the world from home. Here’s a list of ways you can travel virtually and keep your wanderlust spirit alive:  

Books

Reading is one of the best and most budget-friendly ways to “travel” when you’re stuck indoors. You can transport yourself to far-flung destinations and get inspired by the power of words — all from the comfort (and safety) of home.

Some great recent reads: The Yellow Envelope, Wanderlust, Ghengis Khan and the Making of the Modern World, and An Irreverent Curiosity.

Here are a plethora of articles with more books:

12 Books to Take You Around the World

13 Books That Will Give You Serious Wanderlust

13 Non-Travel Books That Changed My Life

Additionally, if you want some monthly suggestions, check out our monthly book club. Each month you’ll get 3-5 books sent right to your inbox!  

Movies

There are many amazing films to choose online right now. I mean between Hulu, HBO, Netflix, Amazon, and Disney+, you can get anything you want. (Netflix has been especially on fire this month.) Some of my favorites:

Wild – Based on the novel of the same name, this movie follows Cheryl Strayed as she hikes the Pacific Crest Trail as a way to restart her life, end her drug addiction, and cope with her mother’s death.

Midnight in Paris – I pretty much love every movie about Paris, but this is one of my all-time favorites. The movie follows Gil, a writer on vacation with his fiancée and her family. At night, he wanders the streets of Paris before stumbling into a time warp that sends him back to the 1920s.

The Beach – Staring a young Leonardo DiCaprio, this movie is about young backpackers who set out to find paradise while in Thailand.

Lost in Translation – This film takes you into the heart of chaotic Tokyo. Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson play two characters adrift in the the city together.

Into the Wild – Based on a true story, this movie follows Christopher McCandless as he sheds his material life in search of something more.

A Map for Saturday – This documentary is the best film about long-term travel.

For more suggestions, here is the complete list of my favorite travel movies and another post on LGBT Travel Movies and one on Africa-related films.

  TV Shows

Looking for some binge-worthy TV? Here are a few suggestions to keep your wanderlust satiated from the comfort of your own couch:

An Idiot Abroad – Comedian Ricky Gervais sends his clueless, culturally insensitive friend on hilarious (and often insightful) misadventures.

Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown – In one of the best travel shows ever made, the late Anthony Bourdain sheds light on new places and cultures as he eats his way around the world.

Long Way Round – Actor Ewan McGregor and his best friend travel across the entire world on motorcycles in this epic miniseries (and in Long Way Down they travel from Scotland to South Africa — again, on motorcycles).

Departures – Award-winning series chronicling two friends traveling the world together.

Dark Tourist – Journalist David Farrier visits some of the world’s weirdest, scariest, and most tragic places.

The Amazing Race – A reality TV show in which contestants race around the world for cash prizes (there are over 30 seasons, so it’s great for bingeing!).

Big City, Little Budget – My friend Oneika Raymond hosts this show, in which she shares budget tips and hidden gems so you can experience the best of big cities without breaking the bank.

Somebody Feed Phil – Phil Rosenthal, the creator of Everybody Loves Raymond, travels the world on a comedic culinary journey.

  Virtual Meetups

Since we can’t meet in person right now, we’ve been hosting our own through The Nomadic Network. Every week, we have meetups where we share stories, host guest speakers, and play games. We do about 2-3 a week.

Here are this week’s events:

Launching a Career in Travel: A Roadmap with Kelly Lewis from Damesly

“Ten Years A Nomad” Book Talk and Q&A with Me

Meet Heather: Year-Long RTW Trip Winner from Nomadic Matt Giveaway

For future events, click to see what’s coming!  

Virtual Tours (Museums, Galleries, Historical Sites, etc)

It seems every destination or museum is now offering some virtual tour. I’m all for it. While it’s not the same as being there in person, it’s still an enjoyable way to pass the time, get inspired, and learn about the world. Here are some of my favorites:

Anne Frank Museum (Amsterdam)

Rijksmuseum (Amsterdam)

Van Gogh Museum (Amsterdam)

Picasso Museum (Barcelona)

Guggenheim (Bilbao)

Faroe Islands Virtual Tour (Denmark)

Salvatore Dali Museum (Figueres)

Uffizi Gallery (Florence)

The Giants Causeway (Ireland)

British Museum (London)

Buckingham Palace (London)

National Gallery (London)

Natural History Museum (London)

Tate Britain (London)

Metropolitan Museum (New York)

Coliseum (Rome)

Catacombs (Paris)

Louvre (Paris)

Musée d’Orsay (Paris)

Machu Picchu (Peru)

Ruins of Pompeii (Pompeii)

Hermitage Museum (St. Petersburg)

Sweden Virtual Tour (Sweden)

National Gallery of Art (Washington, DC)

US Holocaust Memorial Museum (Washington, DC)

Free Tours by Foot is also offer a handful of tours from around the globe. They have walking tours, historical videos, and much more. Check out their YouTube page for a comprehensive list!  

Online Classes

With so many people home, online courses are seeing a huge surge in activity. In fact, I myself have finally been able to get around to taking some of the courses I’ve bought ages ago. If you’re looking to jump into a new online course, here are a few worth checking out:

MasterClass – This program is one of my favorites. I watch a ton of masterclasses. They are mini-courses with some of the most famous and successful people in the world, such as Margaret Atwood, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Martin Scorsese, Gordon Ramsay, Malcolm Gladwell, Alice Waters, Serena Williams, and many others.

Superstar Blogging – If you’re looking to start a blog or break into the freelance writing industry, we offer two courses that can help. You’ll get free tech support, weekly calls, and feedback and copyedits on your writing.

Udemy – Udemy is an online marketplace with over 100,000 online video courses. You can find courses on pretty much anything here!

Skillshare – A project-based marketplace for online courses. Like Udemy, there is lots of variety here.

Massimo Bottura’s Kitchen Quarantine – World-class Italian chef Massimo Bottura cooks up a storm in his home kitchen.

Pasta-Making Class (with Italian Chefs) from Take Walks – My favorite tour company, Take Walks, shows you how to make delicious pasta at home.

Seamus Mullen’s Quarantine Kitchen – Check out Seamus’s daily show for tips on clean and healthy eating.

José Andrés’ #RecipesforthePeople – Chef José Andrés is helping the world relearn simple, delicious recipes on his Twitter feed.

***

Learn something new. Or meet some new friends in a virtual meetup. Or just chill out and eat snacks and watch some movies.

We’ll be back on the road again.

But, until we can, at least we can travel the world through our computer.

P.S. – We’ve launched a new Patreon where you can get untold stories, photos, weekly Q&As, and free books. It’s our new member platform. So, if you want more of the content we have here, click here to check it out and get access. Your support helps keep this website going while giving you perks and content exclusive to Patrons!

Book Your Trip: Logistical Tips and Tricks

Book Your Flight Find a cheap flight by using Skyscanner or Momondo. They are my two favorite search engines, because they search websites and airlines around the globe so you always know no stone is being left unturned.

Book Your Accommodation You can book your hostel with Hostelworld as they have the largest inventory. If you want to stay somewhere other than a hostel, use Booking.com, as they consistently return the cheapest rates for guesthouses and hotels.

Don’t Forget Travel Insurance Travel insurance will protect you against illness, injury, theft, and cancellations. It’s comprehensive protection in case anything goes wrong. I never go on a trip without it, as I’ve had to use it many times in the past. I’ve been using World Nomads for ten years. My favorite companies that offer the best service and value are:

World Nomads (for everyone below 70)

Insure My Trip (for those 70 and over)

Looking for the best companies to save money with? Check out my resource page for the best companies to use when you travel! I list all those I use — and they’ll save you time and money too.

The post How to (Virtually) Travel the World appeared first on Nomadic Matt's Travel Site.

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[hermanwatts]

Sensor Sweep: D&D Cartoon, Tim Kirk, Lin Carter, Literary Swordsmen and Sorcerers

Animated Cartoons (CBR.com): When CBS ordered a series based on the latest trend, fantasy role-playing games, perhaps they didn’t know what awaited them. Debuting on Sept 17, 1983, Dungeons & Dragons (inspired by the game created by

Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson, and published by TSR) came to air already surrounded by controversy. The game’s use of occult imagery wasn’t the only factor disturbing parents groups. Some even declared it a literal danger to young people.

      Art (Black Gate): Tim Kirk, another artist who has had a major professional career, was nominated for Best Fan Writer 8 times in the between 1969 and 1977, winning the Hugo in 1970, 1972, 1973, 1974, and 1976. It would be fair to say that for me, coming into contact with fandom in this period, my image of “fan art” was formed by Tim Kirk’s work, along with two more artists who won for their 1970s work, William Rotsler and Alexis A. Gilliland. (Not to slight the excellent Phil Foglio, but for whatever reason his art didn’t enter my consciousness until later. And Alicia Austin, four-time nominee and 1971 winner, was and is a favorite artist of mine, but for her professional work.)

        Fiction Release (DMR Books): DMR Books is proud to present our next release: the picaresque fantasy novel The Road to Infinity by Gael DeRoane. It will be available in digital and trade paperback editions very soon (within the next few days), and the classic size edition (6.5” x 4.25”) should be released before the end of June. Read on for more:

Poised on the brink of manhood, young Aran Dyfar makes a rash and momentous decision that will either elevate him to glory or seal his doom.

  History (Barbarian Book Club): “No silver, no Swiss,” commented Gian Trivulzio, a Milanese Condottiero during the Italian Wars. He was talking about the Swiss Mercenaries that served in the armies of the Italian City States. They were expensive and often sieges and sacks depended on the city’s ability to pay foreign soldiers.

A more recent quote “Amateurs talk about tactics, but professionals study logistics,” quoted to Gen. Robert H. Barrow, Commandant of the USMC.

  Fiction (Uproxx.com): Martin is no casual fan of Lovecraft. He regularly cites the writer as one of his earliest reading obsessions. He’s visited

Lovecraft’s grave in Rhode Island, and even wrote some elaborate fan fiction back in 2011 pitting Jaime Lannister against Cthulu in a deathmatch. When George sat down to speak with Stephen King, their conversation kept leading back to Lovecraft’s influence on both of their writing.

  Fiction (DMR Books): When I was eleven years old, I preferred Lin Carter’s Jandar of Callisto series to Edgar Rice Burroughs’ books about Mars. Sacrilege I know, and that’s not the case today, but as a kid, I liked that the Callisto books were written in modern language, and the events described not only took place within my lifetime, they were still occurring now, in the 1970s when I was reading them. I could almost believe they were true.

  Gaming (Player One): What happens when you have a cyberpunk futuristic world and put in the themes of H.P. Lovecraft? You get the latest offering from Stormling Studios, Transient. Aside from this announcement, Stormling Studios also released a reveal trailer. So what is the game all about? It begins in a distant and post-apocalyptic future. Whatever remains of mankind are now living in the Domed City Providence, an enclosed citadel that was created in order for humans to survive the harsh environment. Amidst all of this, the story focuses on Randolph Carter, a member of ODIN, a hacker-for-hire group.

  Robert E. Howard (John C. Wright): The Devil in Iron was published in the August 1934 issue of Weird Tales, several months after the previous story, Queen of the Black Coast. It is the eleventh published story in the Conan canon. We have reached the halfway mark of the published Conan stories completed by Robert E. Howard.

Howard here recycles elements of his own previous stories – there is a magic blade as in Phoenix on the Sword, the sole bane of an otherwise invulnerable eldritch monster, who is a resurrected necromancer as in The Black Colossus. 

          Comic Books (Paint Monk): Our tale begins as Conan, Bêlit, and Zula battle Stygian warriors in the catacombs of Luxor. As the fight progresses, the trio finds a secret passage that allows them to descend further into the depths beneath the city.

Zula shows some empathy toward the Stygian soldier’s fate – Conan and company are killing them simply for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Bêlit declares she will kill any Stygian, because they were the people who helped her Uncle overthrow and kill her Father.

  History (Real Crusade History): Henry was born May 3, 1217, the third child but the first son of King Hugh I of Cyprus and his queen Alice de Champagne. (Alice was the daughter of Isabella I of Jerusalem and her third husband Henri de Champagne.) When Henry was just eight months old, his father died suddenly, while absent from the kingdom on the Fifth Crusade. According to the constitution of the kingdom, a minor king’s regent was his nearest relative resident in the Latin East, in this case, Henry’s mother Alice de Champagne. However, Alice showed remarkably little interest in wielding political power.

  Fiction (Eldritch Paths): I  was reading The King Beyond the Gate, the second book in David Gemmell’s Drenai Saga. I��really enjoyed the larger-than-life heroes in Gemmell’s first book, Legend. Druss the Legend was an awesome character, taking on scores of baddies and coming up on top. Even the leader of the enemy invasion force respected the strength and sheer force of will that was Druss. I was expecting, no, wanting more of the same from the second book. Most of this second book seemed to deliver.

  RPG (Pulp Rev): Designing for games is vastly different from designing for stories.

Readers engage a prose story through the plot, characters, and prose. The writer guides them on a journey in the mind, directing the story from start to finish.

Gamers engage a game through its mechanics. By playing as their avatar, they create their own experience.

Readers and gamers have different ways of approaching their chosen media. The requirements of these media lead to different design choices.

  Writing (Mad Genius Club): Write the soldier as he (or she) is, not as you wish to caricature them, not as your narrative demands.  Haven’t served in the military? Start looking through your list of friends for somebody who has. Sit down and ask them questions (bring drinks), listen and be respectful.  See, contrary to popular belief, we will talk. If you show yourself to be trustworthy, we’ll tell you the unvarnished truth about life in the service. What hurt, what sucked, what made us laugh, made us cry, made us mad, made us happy, what made it home for us.

  RPG (Brain Leakage): About three or four sessions into my current campaign, I noticed that my players didn’t really like the abstract nature of D&D combat. No matter how much narration and dramatizing I did, combat just felt too passive to them. Specifically, they wanted to do something besides stand there and take it while the enemy rolled against their AC. Now, one thing I’ll say in favor of D&D combat RAW. It’s streamlined. And if the players are happy enough to fill in the blanks by imagining feints, dodges, and other maneuvers happening in between declared actions and combat rolls, then it’s fine.

  T.V. (Pulpfest): Rod Serling’s THE TWILIGHT ZONE ran on CBS from 1959 to 1964. It remains in syndication to this very day. A new version of the series — narrated by filmmaker Jordan Peele — premiered on CBS All Access on April 1, 2019. Sixty years after its original debut, Rod Serling’s remarkable creation is still very much embedded in the public consciousness.

The creator of THE TWILIGHT ZONE was born on December 25, 1924 in Syracuse, New York. His brother, the late novelist and aviation writer Robert Serling, said: “We were fairly close as kids and we played together a hell of a lot, despite the seven-year difference. The two of us used to read AMAZING STORIES, ASTOUNDING STORIES, WEIRD TALES — all of the pulps. If we saw a movie together, we’d come home and act it out, just for the two of us.”

  Lit Crit (George Kelley): Just by chance, I stumbled across this 1976 Arkham House edition of L. Sprague de Camp’s wonderful Literary Swordsman and Socerers at my local public library. I immediately took it out and read it. De Camp’s informational essays on these fantasy writers made me want to drop everything and reread some of the great books by these authors. I’m a big fan of Lord Dunsany, but I haven’t read more than a fraction of his oeuvre. I’ve read most of Lovecraft, but I can always pick up one of his collections and find delight in its pages.

        Sensor Sweep: D&D Cartoon, Tim Kirk, Lin Carter, Literary Swordsmen and Sorcerers published first on https://sixchexus.weebly.com/

[ciathyzareposts]

Legends of the Lost Realm: Summary and Rating

          Legends of the Lost Realm

United States

Avalon Hill (developer and publisher)

Released in 1989 for Macintosh

Date Started: 26 October 2018

Date Ended: 24 December 2018

Total Hours: 32

Difficulty: Hard (4/5) 

Final Rating: (to come later)

Ranking at Time of Posting: (to come later)

Legends of the Lost Realm is a Macintosh-only game from 1989, based heavily on themes from Wizardry (1981), The Bard’s Tale (1985), and perhaps Might and Magic (1987), with some survival elements inspired by the Alternate Reality series (1985-1987). Six characters, initially drawn from fighter, thief, shaman, and magician classes, explore the large castle of Tagor-Dal, with the ultimate goal of finding one of the Staves of Power, necessary to overcome the conquering nation of Malokor. A first-person exploration window (in which you cannot see enemy parties) is navigated with a mostly point-and-click interface. Combat is turned-based, with a complex magic and skill system that makes good use of the various character classes. Combat difficulty, experience point rewards, and the economy are all terribly imbalanced, making for an extremely difficult early game. Five sequels-cum-expansion packs were intended, but only one was ever produced.

***

When I wrapped up my last entry on Legends of the Lost Realm, I was actually quite motivated to keep going. I seemed to have gotten over a hump and I was looking forward to finding out how the puzzle map would be used in gameplay.             

Entering The Catacombs. I didn’t last long here.

         A few things happened after that to sap my interest in continuing. First, the difficulty curve returned in a big way. Once I finished the four towers, the only two major places left to explore were the Catacombs, accessible from the magic shop, and the Great Tower at the center of the map. In both cases, enemy parties encountered on the first level so far outclassed my own party that I would have had to grind for hours to defeat them.

I started to grind anyway, but it was getting a lot longer. Some of the enemy parties in the Great Tower serve up significant experience rewards, but the combats are long. For instance, there’s a fixed combat with 80 bats in one hallway, and it reliably delivers about 1,000 experience points. The bats hardly ever hit, so it’s easy enough to restore what little damage they cause. But I can only reliably kill 2 or 3 per combat round, so it takes over 30 rounds–and almost as many minutes–to defeat this one party.           

The beginning of a long, boring session.

        The same is true of more deadly parties, like the dozens of fighters and archers that attacked in another hallway of the Great Tower. Even if I leveled up two or three times, I’d have no luck against this group. The only hope of defeating such large, powerful parties is to acquire mass-damage spells. Mages never get those until they change classes to wizards, and even then they don’t get them until character Level 4. That’s a lot of grinding.            

One of the Great Tower groups I had no chance against.

          But even then, I was prepared to give it a shot. Unfortunately, I ran into my third problem: the emulator keeps crashing. Sometimes it crashes while I’m just walking down the hallway, which is bad enough, but sometimes it crashes after I’ve saved and quit the game, after I’ve selected “Shut Down.” That’s worse. And in those cases, when I restart, even though I saved and quit the game, because the Mac didn’t “shut down” properly, everything reverts to the way it was before the previous session. Is this really how a Mac worked? You’d save stuff but it wouldn’t really save unless you held its precious little hand and read it a story when it was time to go to bed? What kind of sadistic machine was this?

I don’t know whether to blame the emulator for in-game crashes or not. They usually happen right after I notice that the game’s fixed encounters have stopped appearing, so that sounds more like a game problem. Either way, getting anywhere in this game is hard enough without having to flip a coin at the end of a multi-hour session and hope your progress is saved. The last crash came just after I’d done enough grinding to level up and change my thief to a ninja. Losing that progress deflated me enough that I decided to throw in the towel. I slept on it for a couple of days just to be sure.            

Ninjas in the Great Tower often attack “from behind,” screwing up the character order and imperiling spellcasters.

           I couldn’t find any walkthroughs for the game, but someone did take the time to make a wiki. It shows that the Catacombs would have been two levels, the first another maze of holes for which I would have needed to find a bunch more 50-foot rope. The Catacombs would have led to three other areas of one level each: the Goblin Galleries, the Troll Tunnels, and The Lair. Each would have delivered items or clues necessary for various Great Tower levels.

The Great Tower is 11 levels. The first level–the only one I explored–is broken into four sections, each accessible from a different entrance on the town level. Each “approach” requires the party to defeat a guardian (samurai, mountain giant, enchanter, and high wizard), and each requires a different object from the four corner towers to be in the party’s possession.          

Whoops. I never found the ring, so I need to enter a different way.

         The other levels promise a maze of staircases, teleporters, and various navigation obstacles. The map puzzle would have come into play on Level 7, which is largely open and requires the party to walk a particular path. I had the pieces assembled slightly wrong, but I think that would have become clear when I actually got to the level, partly because I would have known the starting point, and partly because there is a small walled area that would have rendered some configurations impossible.

The game apparently culminates with a fight against a dragon on Level 11, after which the party finds the Staff of Life. The endgame screen–and boy, would this have been disappointing–suggests sequel material that never arrived.            

The entire game is basically just a test to prove your worthiness.

          Altogether, I imagine it would have taken me another 40-50 hours to finish the game, and I would have still been blogging about it in February. That just wasn’t in the cards this holiday season.

If there’s one thing I’m disappointed not to have experienced, it’s the specialty classes. Only towards the end of my last session did I finally start getting upgrade options; specifically, my shaman could change to a healer and my thief could change to a monk or ninja. My fighters would have received the options to change to barbarian, blademaster, or samurai at Level 9, and my magician could have become a witch, wizard, or enchanter (and possibly a sorcerer; this class is mentioned on the spell cards but not in the manual or on the “change class” screen).

Around this time, I would have started to regret keeping “Pete,” who at some point I rechristened “Gideon.” The game allows you to dual-class or move to a specialty class but not both. As a fighter/mage, Pete would have started to lose some of his utility, and I’d definitely be wishing for a new pure spellcaster. I probably would have changed my thief to a monk or ninja, moved him to the front rank, dumped Pete, and created a new magician, hoping to grind him quickly to higher levels.           

My thief can switch to a more useful class.

          The specialty classes are done better here than in most games that offer them. First, the characters retain the skills of their previous classes when they switch, so you don’t necessarily want to jump to a specialty class right away. Perhaps you want to ensure that the shaman gets the full suite of shaman spells before he becomes a healer. Second, the specialists really specialize. The healer is good only at healing, for instance. Every single spell on his list either heals or cures a condition. The blademaster is all about the blade: he can reforge it, identify it, even sharpen other party members’ blades, but don’t put anything else in his hand.

Choosing among the mage specialists would have tied me in knots, which is why I would have wanted a second one. The raw magician is mostly about exploration-based magic. His compass, light, detection, and auto map spells get more powerful but that’s about it. He has mass-effect spells that are supposed to weaken enemy parties (e.g., “Impede,” “Sap Strength,” “Slow”), but I never really saw much effect from them. For any mass-damage spells, you need a witch or wizard. The wizard particularly specializes in elemental magic (“Fire Protection,” “Storm Winds,” “Summon a Fire Elemental”), but the witch is what you want against undead. The enchanter specializes in summoning as well as spells that enchant items. The sorcerer (if it exists) doesn’t come with any spells: he writes his own, based on the effects, strengths, and targets of the other classes’ spells. But you can’t turn him into an omnipotent juggernaut because each spell he creates subtracts from his maximum spell points. That’s clever.

I suspect that in the end, I would have concluded that all of this specialization is mostly wasted in a game where the enemies aren’t very memorable and the combat system isn’t very good. I also suspect that the system was scaled for the many planned expansions (see below), and that in a normal first-game campaign, characters would have a tough time hitting the cap of even a single class. Still, Legends deserves high marks in the “character creation and development” category.

While we’re talking about marks, here’s my best-guess GIMLET:

2 points for the game world. The boilerplate evil-wizard framing story hardly gets referenced in-game. You don’t even get to defeat the evil wizard; you just get one step closer.

              Alas, you only get to get 1/7 of the way to assembling the equipment you need to “cleanse the land of the evil of Malokor.” Not quite as epic.

           5 points for character creation and development. There isn’t much to the creation process, and as we’ve seen, rewards are uneven. But the dual- and specialty class systems coupled with with class skills offer a rare level of customization and class-specific role-playing.

0 points for no NPC interactions. Anything that technically might count as an “NPC” is really more of an “encounter,” and even if I were to give 1 point for these quasi-NPCs, I would immediately subtract it for the tax man.

3 points for encounters and foes. The monsters are nothing special, but they do have the standard set of special actions and defenses. Other “encounters” are mostly puzzles, and mostly of the navigation sort, which are my least favorite. People who like those puzzles and use terms like “level design” will perhaps add a couple of points here.

4 points for magic and combat. The Wizardry base basically works, but the game is a bit too stingy with its spells to offer the tactical depth of Wizardry. 

           I still never figured out what this was about.

          4 points for equipment. Speaking of stingy. On the positive side, the game offers a lot of equipment slots. On the negative, in 32 hours I basically finished with the equipment I bought in the first three hours. You find a baffling variety of items that seem to have no use, and the characters’ backpacks are far too small. I’m giving it an extra point, though, because screenshots from the wiki suggest there was better stuff to come.

3 points for the economy. The system is more complex at the beginning, when you’re trying to outfit the party and pay for character deaths and retrievals. By the 20th hour, however, most of my money was getting stolen by thieves and otherwise simply going to resurrections and healing. It would have been nice if there had been some high-value items in the shops.

2 points for a main quest but no side quests, alternate endings, or role-playing decisions.

2 points for graphics, sound, and interface. The black and white textures are fine, but they’re just textures. By 1989, I should be seeing useful things in the environment. There are a sparse and unremarkable number of sound effects. I never got used to the interface. Like most Mac games, it involved too much clicking. There are some keyboard backups, but they mostly involving having to hold down multiple keys, which reduces the convenience of the keyboard. There are far too many poorly-documented or undocumented commands.

2 points for gameplay. It gets some credit for mild nonlinearity and replayability (with different classes), but overall it’s too unbalanced, too difficult, and too long. The food, drink, and sleep system is particularly obnoxious.

           That give us a final score of 27. I note that the best elements are mechanical (except for the interface); the worst are thematic. The creators, who bragged in the manual that the game represents “the most complete and accurate fantasy role-playing game ever written,” made a better engine than they did a game.

Dennis Owens reviewed Legends in the June 1990 Computer Gaming World. Like me, he criticized the sparse graphics, early-game difficulty, and some poorly-documented controls. Unlike me, he was in love with little touches like the ability to create arrows from sticks and feathers (you have to have a samurai to do this, and anyway it’s really not that hard or expensive to just buy arrows). Given a lack of any information in the manual about the quest, the encounters, the puzzles, and so forth, I would suspect that Owens didn’t get very far, though I thought it was CGW’s policy to require reviewers to finish the game.

The CGW review is the only one I’ve been able to find so far, suggesting the game didn’t make much of a splash. The “sequel” from the same year, subtitled The Wilderlands, is really just an expansion pack that lets the party exit the Catacombs into a wilderness area, where they can try to find a second piece of the staff. The manual suggests that future installments would have been called The Necropolis, The Ocean of Dreams, Malakor, and Black Sorcerers, and like The Wilderlands, they would have allowed adventuring directly from the castle hub. One wonders if the developers were inspired by Alternate Reality (given the dedication to food, fatique, and environmental factors, probably). But not only did Avalon Hill drop the series after 1989, they never published another RPG again.             

The “Wilderlands” used the same box and just added a sticker.

           Lead design on Legends is credited to David Cooke and Charles Collins, neither of whom have any prior or subsequent video game credits that I can find. It’s possible that they developed the game independently and then shopped it to Avalon Hill, as both the RPG-only and Mac-only genres are rare for the publisher and Cooke and Collins aren’t credited on any other Avalon Hill games (some of the other staff are). Unless we hear from someone involved, we’ll never know. The developers’ names are both quite common, and I couldn’t find any obvious candidates to contact.

Pulling away from Legends of the Lost Realm is a little disappointing, but probably necessary for sanity’s sake. Unfortunately, this doesn’t bring us much closer to the end of 1989 because it elevates to the list another long, difficult Mac game: Theldrow.

***

A year or two ago, when I started calling my final entries “Summary and Rating” instead of just “final rating,” I did so because I intended to put a single-paragraph game summary after the header information. My idea was that people who didn’t want to read an entire series of entries on a game could get a quick snapshot from the final entry. Unfortunately, I forgot about the “summary” part almost immediately, until now. You can see my first attempt in this entry, and eventually I’m going to try to go back and add summaries to other multi-post games. Single-entry games will remain as they are.

source http://reposts.ciathyza.com/legends-of-the-lost-realm-summary-and-rating/

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Top 10 reasons why I ended up at an old convent in Mexico to preview "The Nun"

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Top 10 reasons why I ended up at an old convent in Mexico to preview "The Nun"

It was an honest enough question from my young friend, who’d seen some early postings on Facebook regarding my trip to Mexico City at the tail end of August.

“Why did you go?”

I’d made it known (and most who know me would have suspected it anyway) that of the main reasons I’d decided to accept the invitation by CatholicMom.com, Grace Hill Media, and Warner Bros. Pictures to be among a group of journalists previewing the horror movie, “The Nun” — fourth up in The Conjuring series — a love for horror films was not among them.

So why did I, a Catholic who tries to live her faith in the light, end up at an old, supposedly-haunted convent in Mexico viewing the kind of movie that, in the minds of some, serves only to highlight evil? To appease those wondering, I’ve pulled together the Top 10 reasons, from my perspective.

1. THE LAND OF OUR LADY OF GUADALUPE? YES PLEASE! Ever since a fellow Catholic mother in my home of Fargo, N.D., showed a group of friends a slideshow of her pilgrimage to Mexico City to visit Our Lady of Guadalupe Basilica and view the tilma — the image impressed upon a garment worn by Juan Diego in the early 1500s after Mary appeared to him — I’ve had this place on my bucket list.

The Tilma — the image of Our Lady of Guadalupe, an impression left in the cloak of Juan Diego during the apparition of Our Blessed Mother in Mexico City in the 1500s; an event that led to the conversion of millions to the Catholic/Christian faith, currently kept behind the altar in the newer basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe. Copyright 2018 Roxane Salonen. All rights reserved.

Though it wasn’t the primary order of business, and I wasn’t sure time would even allow for a visit to the shrine (the most frequently visited apparition site in the world), it did come to be, thanks be to God, and I can’t wait to share more soon.

A statue depicting Juan Diego displaying the tilma, near the base of the site where the apparitions occurred in Mexico City in the early 1500s. Copyright 2018 Roxane Salonen. All rights reserved.

2. FACING MY FEARS: Earlier this summer, I had the most terrifying airplane experience of my life, and was left wondering whether I’d ever get up the nerve again to travel by plane. This new anxiety bothered me. I wondered about the opportunities I might miss, gripped by fear. Saying “yes” to this junket would be a chance to face my fears in so many ways — my new and growing fear of flying, not to mention watching a horror film, which is not my cup of tea, and in a foreign land no less! It was a chance to go bold and not let my fears keep me from living. I’m grateful to say everything went off without a hitch! Yes, even being “dropped” into another country for a few days, one in which I knew only small bits of the language, reminded me I am not alone, that God always goes with me. I faced and conquered my fears and grew in trust. On the way there, I sensed Our Lady of Guadalupe opening her arms and ushering me to her side. It was a lovely visual that kept me peaceful and hopeful.

3. I LOVE NUNS! Those closest to me know I’ve had a long and beautiful relationship with a group of Carmelite nuns here in North Dakota. They have offered me harbor on many occasions, and given me such an appreciation for the cloistered life and its fruits. I’ll admit, the very fact that this movie was centered around a cloistered monastery intrigued me, not to mention that it would be focused on the nuns themselves. I was curious how the nuns in this movie would be portrayed — not just the evil nun whose character forms the base for the story, but the good nuns also. Especially the good nuns!

A brief brush with Taissa Farminga, lead actress and novice in “The Nun” film. Copyright 2018 Roxane Salonen. All rights reserved.

Having the chance to talk with the main actress, Taissa Farmiga, who did an excellent job in her role as a grace-filled, frightened-but-courageous young novice — along with another main character and the director — was indeed thrilling.

Meeting the actors and director, Aug. 23, 2018, at the convent the day after the viewing of “The Nun.” Copyright 2018 Roxane Salonen. All rights reserved.

4. THE SCANDALS ARE SCARIER: This opportunity came just as the Church scandals were beginning to break wide open. And while I don’t believe glorifying evil a worthy pursuit, these other evils in our Catholic family right now seemed so much scarier, and more horrifying, than any horror film could be. I knew “The Nun” is a fully fictional account, whereas these other situations are real: the true horror at the moment. I also figured that analyzing the film with fellow journalists and seeing behind-the-scenes glimpses could help break down the fear factor, as information and details often do — and that proved true.

5. A CHANCE TO IMPRESS MY FAMILY: While I’m not a lover of horror films, several family members — including my husband and older kids — are. I’ll admit that may have come into play in my agreeing to go. Knowing my leaving could be an inconvenience, I left the final decision up to my husband, who urged me onward. “Are you kidding? You have to!”

We’re called to be in the world, but not of it. In the end, knowing some of these dear ones would likely see this film with or without my review, I decided I’d rather they hear about it from me first than leave them to tackle this culture wholly on their own. (My youngest two, 13 and 15, will not be viewing it anytime soon).

6. TURNING 50: I was a week from my 50th birthday the day I flew to Mexico City. Surely, a self-challenge figured into my decision. When you realize your life is likely more than half over, you tend to want to jump at unique opportunities while you can, and this was certainly one.

7. I LOVE CONVENTS! Knowing we’d be viewing the film at Ex Convento del Desierto de Los Leones, a former Carmelite convent in rural Mexico, provided an additional layer of intrigue. The trip to the site our two evenings there, involving traveling in a shuttle up hills on treacherous roads in the rain, proved to be every bit as scary as the film itself.

Copyright 2018 Roxane Salonen. All rights reserved.

The convent grounds, however, were absolutely stunning, and our trip through the catacombs, memorable. I wouldn’t have wanted to miss this rare chance to glimpse this gem. Though it’s hard to find information about the convent in English, I enjoyed this blogger’s rendition of her visit.

Copyright 2018 Roxane Salonen. All rights reserved.

    8. FELLOWSHIP: I absolutely loved the chance to view this film with fellow media folks. As part of the faith-based bunch, I felt very “safe” knowing I would not be alone, and there would be plenty of discussion and analysis afterward with others who see things from a faith perspective. I am especially grateful that God saw fit to pair me with the only religious sister on the adventure, Sister Rose Pacatte, a more seasoned film critic, who brought along holy water that she sprinkled in the viewing room the evening we watched “The Nun” together.

Sr. Rose sprinkles holy water on the journalists before the viewing of “The Nun” in Mexico. Copyright 2018 Roxane Salonen. All rights reserved.

9. FOOD: I will never turn down an offer to experience new foods, and Mexico City definitely served up some scrumptious treats.

A glimpse of the meal we were served after watching “The Nun.” We certainly worked up an appetite after shrieking our way through the film. Copyright 2018 Roxane Salonen. All rights reserved.

10. AN INVITATION: At the first mention of an the invitation to a film junket, I checked the dates, even before knowing which film would be highlighted. Surprisingly, my schedule was clear those days only. When the film’s name was revealed, I felt initial conflict, knowing embarking on this adventure might confuse some because of my faith. But also because of that faith, and the light that burns in my heart, I  sensed there would be blessings to experience by saying yes, that I’d be denied by saying no. I’ve learned to be discerning, but also to err on the side of adventure and an openness to new experiences. The experience did not disappoint!

Our first peek at the convent in Mexico where we viewed the film “The Nun.” Enter if you dare! Copyright 2018 Roxane Salonen. All rights reserved.

Why a faithful Catholic previewed #TheNun film in a Mexico convent -@peacegardenmama Click To Tweet

So, there you have it — why I went. As far as my take on the “The Nun” film, which opened in theaters this week, for now, let me say it takes place in a Catholic setting, which might be of interest to some of my fellow Catholic friends. If you are inclined toward the horror genre — some are as a way to gain a sense of control over the evil in our world — go see for yourself. It is terrifying and revolting in moments, so be prepared to close your eyes if you’re sensitive to strong visuals. In fact, if you normally wouldn’t seek out such a film, I don’t suggest you do. But know that if you go, you’ll find a satisfying, quite triumphant ending — a real good-over-evil moment. Either way, I hope you will enjoy hearing about my experiences from a Catholic perspective. Stay tuned for more in the coming weeks.

A nook in the corner of Ex Convento del Desierto de Los Leones, set up for the promotion of “The Nun” film. Copyright 2018 Roxane Salonen. All rights reserved.

Q4U: What are your thoughts on horror films and why some are drawn to them? Where do you draw the line in the movies you choose to view? Do you plan on seeing “The Nun?”

Copyright 2018 Roxane Salonen

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