#the girls are fighting etc etc

[graveyardrabbit]

[caelin-ismycity]

Its been absolute AGES but....Do you still love SoV Fernand....been thinking about CliveFernand in particular...It got me fucked up. 🥲🥲🥲

i can't remember loving fernand is that bad of me. i do remember enjoying clive/fernand tho :]

[jakeperalta]

the taylor swift ai porn issue is such a bleak reminder of how inescapable the horrors of misogyny are. like obviously there's the talk of sort of "celebrity problems" like treatment by the tabloids etc, but beyond that there's just the constant heinous shit that women seemingly cannot escape no matter what. it doesn't matter that she (as well as other female celebrities) is extremely rich and famous and successful and has basically as much privilege and power as it is possible for any person to have, ultimately that's still not enough to escape the revenge porn and sexual assault and stalking and harassment. like there is literally no level of power a woman can have that puts her out of reach of all the men who hate women and want to control and humiliate and subjugate us in any way they can.

[mishy-mashy]

Toga: Someone who wanted to be happy

Uraraka: Someone who wanted to make others happy

And also,

Toga: Someone who wanted the world to be easier to live in

Uraraka: Someone who wanted to make the world easier to live in for others

[hajihiko]

If Junko’s ghost varies on who sees her and how they perceived her, wouldnt the ghost that Kazuichi sees be extremely powerful? Considering his personality and how scared he normally is.

I don't think the appearance changes so much as the vibe and perhaps setting. It IS based on how differently people can see the same person, so it's more about the reaction one would subconsciously have to seeing it. Kaz would instantly recognize her as strong, scary, beautiful and cruel, because that is where his mind goes when he's reminded of her. If it's a "ghost", it's already in your head and not physical, so all you can see is what your mind lets you.

[queenlua]

hey lua what decks do phoenix aceattorney and miles aceattorney play in magic

PHOENIX WRIGHT

once upon a time, a friend bullied me into going to a Pro Tour Qualifier, which was probably the largest Magic tournament i’d ever been to at that time, right?

i was happy to be bullied, to be clear, but the problem was… i hadn’t played standard-format Magic competitively in about 2-3 years.  so my knowledge of the current metagame, what deck archetypes were popular, and what the current cards even were, was staggeringly limited.

“it will be fine,” said my friend.  “here, take this spare deck i built.  it’s super-straightforward and easy,” he lied.

he said this to me approx. 8 seconds before the first round began, so uhhhhh, i sure was playing a game of magical cards without ever having even looked at the damn deck before!

so, lo, literally in the course of playing the deck, i was learning how this shit was supposed to work.  “oh!” i’d exclaim with delight, halfway through my turn.  “THAT’S how those two cards are supposed to interact.  oh that’s super clever.  what a neat combo.”  and then i’d proceed to shiftily look at my opponent over my cards, riffle those cards a lil bit, and then say “pass” with as much of an enigmatic vibe as i could muster.

meanwhile, my opponent was Actually Prepared, and they were Trying To Win, and they were pissed.  they threatened to call Slow Play on me because i was taking so fucking long reading all the cards.  as in, he literally called a judge over, who stood there watching me the whole time, in order to determine if i was being Criminally Bad At Magic versus just A Regular Amount Of Bad At Magic, and i was sweating bullets the whole time because i didn’t know this deck or their deck or any of those cards and AHHHH why is the judge staring at me!!!

….which only served to make it EXTRA-humiliating for this poor fuck when i proceeded to eviscerate them 2-0.  hahahah get dunked onnnnnnnn nerd!!!

and then i also proceeded to eviscerate my next opponent???

sheer dumb luck.  i cannot overstate how ill-prepared i was for this tournament.  i absolutely did not deserve these wins.

meanwhile the friend who gave me the deck was having a much worse time with their deck, and they were like “what the fuck. you weren’t supposed to win. how are you winning with that shit, my deck’s so much better than yours”

anyway.  i think that’s the kind of scenario Phoenix would get into if he were an MtG player.  dude Gets Himself Into Situations And Then Uses Cleverness + Bullshit + Luck To Get Out Again.

(AA4-era Phoenix seems like he’s doing the same thing… but, in reality, he’s actually been meticulously crafting his deck in secret for the past six months.  he’s not even aiming to win the tournament, he’s just exploiting a known weakness in the opponent-matching system that lets him know with certainty who he’s going to get matched up against (spoiler: first round is Kristoph), and he’s hyper-optimizing his deck to beat Literally Only Those People.  meanwhile, Apollo, who built a tryhard hyper-optimized variant of Red Deck Wins, is lowkey annoyed that Phoenix's seemingly-random pile keeps vaulting him just one table above him in the standings, because Apollo knows his deck is better. he knows it!!!! just let him go 1v1 and prove it aaaaughhhh!!!)

((also, in case you want Actual Concrete Cards And Colors And Stuff: in general i think Phoenix prefers limited play (draft, sealed, "anything where you open booster packs on the spot & throw a deck together") to constructed play, because he doesn't like being tied down to any one game plan. when he does play constructed, i think he's less attached to a specific colors and more attached to specific mechanics. in particular: he's not a combo player exactly, but he likes mechanics that feel like bullshit. dude saw Madness for the first time & his eyes lit up & he was in LOVE, "you mean i'm discarding the card but then i can cast it for free??? hell YES." he absolutely ran a poison counter deck during New Phyrexia. ah fuck i just realized he was probably a huge stan for noted awful expansion Battle for Zendikar, i think i gotta cancel him now, sorry))

((and i think Phoenix also has a touch of Timmy in him! like, i went to a huge state tournament once with a bunch of really skilled players, and there was this one dude in our car who had a really solid deck, clearly adhered to a lot of the trends in the meta at the time... but his win condition was a Shivan Dragon. which wasn't a bad card at the time, it was a reasonable win condition, but it was... slightly suboptimal? not at all the obvious pick? sort of random? and multiple people asked him "why is that your win condition" & he shrugged and said "i like dragons." so the dragon stayed & that dude ended up getting second place in the whole tournament so FUCK optimal play, bring a dragon. i think Phoenix would sneak in a dragon now and again. just 'cause))

MILES EDGEWORTH

this one is trickier!!!

young!Miles is just going to play Whatever The Meta Deems To Be The Best Deck, right. the von Karma perfection thing and all. it's all very boring & micro-optimized to be the Best Deck Of Its Kind & he pours over the results of the big name tournaments week after week & does some math or whatever to hyper-optimize his own build of the Obviously Correct Deck. there is no soul in any of this, purely Executing On A Formula.

...but then he experiences Character Growth & has his big gay crisis & now he has to pick up the game again. he opens the latest tournament results... clicks around some win % stats for various cards in a desultory kinda way, and... his heart's just not in it, right?

enter 2-4 era Miles. 2-4 era Miles is playing some utterly unhinged Five Color Good Stuff thing. there's a lot of Planar Chaos cards in there, because that whole set was about Weird Shit & cards doing Stuff You're Familiar With (But In The Utterly Wrong Color!!!) & all that is resonating with Miles more than he'd care to admit. he cannot possibly talk about his unnecessary feelings but he can make a weird noise rock album about them. and by noise rock album i mean this fucking Magic deck.

and he's playing this deck with a 100% straight face, as though this is the exact same behavior that won him the Junior Super Series five years in a row & not a desperate cry for help from a madman. everyone else is like Miles... are you playing fucking singletons... in a fucking standard deck... you know your deck will be more consistent with four-ofs right... and then he gives a cool fish-eyed stare & taps out to cast some arcane bullshit legendary creature & gives a single rap of his knuckles against the table to indicate that he's passing the turn.

and it works, is the thing! all those years of training to be the Spikiest Spike Ever have paid off; this Five Color Good Stuff thing relies on some pretty clever insights to make the mana base work, and parts of what he's doing eventually get adopted by the larger metagame to become an Actual Serious Deck. but, like. it's still a monstrosity. any skilled players watching are still definitely wondering Are You Okay, Dude.

after 2-4, i think Miles settles back into playing something more normal. he still cares about winning, but he's going to do it with a touch of class. he wants a game that involves dialogue, some actual back-and-forth, because just trying to combo off is lame coward behavior.

aw yeah baby we're talking counterspells!!!

he's a blue player at heart & he's happiest when he's updating the autopsy report shutting down whatever his opponent's plan is. he'll splash other colors as the occasion calls for it, but he'd be happy running mono-blue the rest of his life. like, i ran a pretty fun Legacy deck back in the day which consisted of:

every kind of counterspell i could get my hands on,

propaganda because FUCK creatures,

thieving magpies for the card draw,

and a few silver wyverns to, y'know, actually win the game

...and i think Miles would appreciate that deck. just play counterspells until the opponent runs out of steam & then cruise your way to victory with a couple birds. simple. elegant. classic. doesn't involve any of this modern Planeswalker bullshit (Miles regards most developments that happened to MtG post-Time Spiral block or so as affronts to game design).

(i do think Miles has a secret fondness for sagas as a card type, however. they remind him of all that Character Growth, but in an abstract/subconscious/nonthreatening way. too bad most of them are a bit of poor match for the kinds of decks he likes to play)

FINALLY: i think Miles hates playing Commander with every fiber of his being & Phoenix loves it & this is a pretty serious point of contention in their relationship. poor dudes

[borgialucrezia]

"The fact that Juan is aware of [Cesare and Lucrezia's affair] and concerned by it is quite an interesting one. I don’t think he’s jealous of them being together. I think he’s jealous of not being a part of it as well. " — David Oakes

[greenerteacups]

oooh please someday tell us what you think of GOT

oh, no, it's my fatal weakness! it's [checks notes] literally just the bare modicum of temptation! okay you got me.

SO. in order to tell what's wrong with game of thrones you kind of have to have read the books, because the books are the reason the show goes off the rails. i actually blame the showrunners relatively little in proportion to GRRM for how bad the show was (which I'm not gonna rehash here because if you're interested in GOT in any capacity you've already seen that horse flogged to death). people debate when GOT "got bad" in terms of writing, but regardless of when you think it dropped off, everyone agrees the quality declined sharply in season 8, and to a certain extent, season 7. these are the seasons that are more or less entirely spun from whole cloth, because season 7 marks the beginning of what will, if we ever see it, be the Winds of Winter storyline. it's the first part that isn't based on a book by George R.R. Martin. it's said that he gave the showrunners plot outlines, but we don't know how detailed they were, or how much the writers diverged from the blueprint — and honestly, considering the cumulative changes made to the story by that point, some stark divergence would have been required. (there's a reason for this. i'll get there in a sec.)

so far, i'm not saying anything all that original. a lot of people recognized how bad the show got as soon as they ran out of Book to adapt. (I think it's kind of weird that they agreed to make a show about an unfinished series in the first place — did GRRM figure that this was his one shot at a really good HBO adaptation, and forego misgivings about his ability to write two full books in however many years it took to adapt? did he think they would wait for him? did he not care that the series would eventually spoil his magnum opus, which he's spent the last three decades of his life writing? perplexing.) but the more interesting question is why the show got bad once it ran out of Book, because in my mind, that's not a given. a lot of great shows depart from the books they were based on. fanfiction does exactly that, all the time! if you have good writers who understand the characters they're working with, departure means a different story, not a worse one. now, the natural reply would be to say that the writers of GOT just aren't good, or at least aren't good at the things that make for great television, and that's why they needed the books as a structure, but I don't think that's true or fair, either. books and television are very different things. the pacing of a book is totally different from the pacing of a television show, and even an episodic book like ASOIAF is going to need a lot of work before it's remotely watchable as a series. bad writers cannot make great series of television, regardless of how good their source material is. sure, they didn't invent the characters of tyrion lannister and daenerys targaryen, but they sure as hell understood story structure well enough to write a damn compelling season of TV about them!

so but then: what gives? i actually do think it's a problem with the books! the show starts out as very faithful to the early books (namely, A Game of Thrones and A Clash of Kings) to the point that most plotlines are copied beat-for-beat. the story is constructed a little differently, and it's definitely condensed, but the meat is still there. and not surprisingly, the early books in ASOIAF are very tightly written. for how long they are, you wouldn't expect it, but on every page of those books, the plot is racing. you can practically watch george trying to beat the fucking clock. and he does! useful context here is that he originally thought GOT was going to be a trilogy, and so the scope of most threads in the first book or two would have been much smaller. it also helps that the first three books are in some respects self-contained stories. the first book is a mystery, the second and third are espionage and war dramas — and they're kept tight in order to serve those respective plots.

the trouble begins with A Feast for Crows, and arguably A Storm of Swords, because GRRM starts multiplying plotlines and treating the series as a story, rather than each individual book. he also massively underestimated the number of pages it would take him to get through certain plot beats — an assumption whose foundation is unclear, because from a reader's standpoint, there is a fucke tonne of shit in Feast and Dance that's spurious. I'm not talking about Brienne's Riverlands storyline (which I adore thematically but speaking honestly should have been its own novella, not a part of Feast proper). I'm talking about whole chapters where Tyrion is sitting on his ass in the river, just talking to people. (will I eat crow about this if these pay off in hugely satisfying ways in Winds or Dream? oh, totally. my brothers, i will gorge myself on sweet sweet corvid. i will wear a dunce cap in the square, and gleefully, if these turn out to not have been wastes of time. the fact that i am writing this means i am willing to stake a non-negligible amount of pride on the prediction that that will not happen). I'm talking about scenes where the characters stare at each other and talk idly about things that have already happened while the author describes things we already have seen in excruciating detail. i'm talking about threads that, while forgivable in a different novel, are unforgivable in this one, because you are neglecting your main characters and their story. and don't tell me you think that a day-by-day account tyrion's river cruise is necessary to telling his story, because in the count of monte cristo, the main guy disappears for nine years and comes hurtling back into the story as a vengeful aristocrat! and while time jumps like that don't work for everything, they certainly do work if what you're talking about isn't a major story thread!

now put aside whether or not all these meandering, unconcluded threads are enjoyable to read (as, in fairness, they often are!). think about them as if you're a tv showrunner. these bad boys are your worst nightmare. because while you know the author put them in for a reason, you haven't read the conclusion to the arc, so you don't know what that reason is. and even if the author tells you in broad strokes how things are going to end for any particular character (and this is a big "if," because GRRM's whole style is that he lets plots "develop as he goes," so I'm not actually convinced that he does have endings written out for most major characters), that still doesn't help you get them from point A (meandering storyline) to point B (actual conclusion). oh, and by the way, you have under a year to write this full season of television, while GRRM has been thinking about how to end the books for at least 10. all of this means you have to basically call an audible on whether or not certain arcs are going to pay off, and, if they are, whether they make for good television, and hence are worth writing. and you have to do that for every. single. unfinished. story. in the books.

here's an example: in the books, Quentin Martell goes on a quest to marry Daenerys and gain a dragon. many chapters are spent detailing this quest. spoiler alert: he fails, and he gets charbroiled by dragons. GRRM includes this plot to set up the actions of House Martell in Winds, but the problem is that we don't know what House Martell does in Winds, because (see above) the book DNE. So, although we can reliably bet that the showrunners understand (1) Daenerys is coming to Westeros with her 3 fantasy nukes, and (2) at some point they're gonna have to deal with the invasion of frozombies from Canada, that DOESN'T mean they necessarily know exactly what's going to happen to Dorne, or House Martell. i mean, fuck! we don't even know if Martin knows what's going to happen to Dorne or House Martell, because he's said he's the kind of writer who doesn't set shit out beforehand! so for every "Cersei defaults on millions of dragons in loans from the notorious Bank of Nobody Fucks With Us, assumes this will have no repercussions for her reign or Westerosi politics in general" plotline — which might as well have a big glaring THIS WILL BE IMPORTANT stamp on top of the chapter heading — you have Arianne Martell trying to do a coup/parent trap switcheroo with Myrcella, or Euron the Goffick Antichrist, or Faegon Targaryen and JonCon preparing a Blackfyre restoration, or anything else that might pan out — but might not! And while that uncertainty about what's important to the "overall story" might be a realistic way of depicting human beings in a world ruled by chance and not Destiny, it makes for much better reading than viewing, because Game of Thrones as a fantasy television series was based on the first three books, which are much more traditional "there is a plot and main characters and you can generally tell who they are" kind of book. I see Feast and Dance as a kind of soft reboot for the series in this respect, because they recenter the story around a much larger cast and cast a much broader net in terms of which characters "deserve" narrative attention.

but if you're making a season of television, you can't do that, because you've already set up the basic premise and pacing of your story, and you can't suddenly pivot into a long-form tone poem about the horrors of war. so you have to cut something. but what are you gonna cut? bear in mind that you can't just Forget About Dorne, or the Iron Islands, or the Vale, or the North, or pretty much any region of the story, because it's all interconnected, but to fit in everything from the books would require pacing of the sort that no reasonable audience would ever tolerate. and bear in mind that the later books sprout a lot more of these baby-plots that could go somewhere, but also might end up being secondary or tertiary to the "main story," which, at the end of the day, is about dragons and ice zombies and the rot at the heart of the feudal power system glorified in classical fantasy. that's the story that you as the showrunner absolutely must give them an end to, and that's the story that should be your priority 1.

so you do a hack and slash job, and you mortar over whatever you cut out with storylines that you cook up yourself, but you can't go too far afield, because you still need all the characters more or less in place for the final showdown. so you pinch here and push credulity there, and you do your best to put the characters in more or less the same place they would have been if you kept the original, but on a shorter timeframe. and is it as good as the first seasons? of course not! because the material that you have is not suited to TV like the first seasons are. and not only that, but you are now working with source material that is actively fighting your attempt to constrain a linear and well-paced narrative on it. the text that you're working with changed structure when you weren't looking, and now you have to find some way to shanghai this new sprawling behemoth of a Thing into a television show. oh, and by the way, don't think that the (living) author of the source material will be any help with this, because even though he's got years of experience working in television writing, he doesn't actually know how all of these threads will tie together, which is possibly the reason that the next book has taken over 8 years (now 13 and counting) to write. oh and also, your showrunners are sick of this (in fairness, very difficult) job and they want to go write for star wars instead, so they've refused the extra time the studio offered them for pre-production and pushed through a bunch of first-draft scripts, creating a crunch culture of the type that spawns entirely avoidable mistakes, like, say, some poor set designer leaving a starbucks cup in frame.

anyway, that's what I think went wrong with game of thrones.

[nathaniacolver]

what it feels like thinking about all the tragedy in arcane, and then remembering the lesbians

[lunarharp]

being attached to that moment qifrey held a baby one time and my ideas for the future :)

[idanit]

she likes to discuss rationalist philosophers and carries incapacitating drugs on her person at all times

[rat-rosemary]

I want to write a fic about Dream moving into a frat mid college for some reason and he has the surgery scars he has and every single time a frat bro sees him without a shirt on their reaction is "Dude, cool scars!! ... is it a trans thing?" "Uh... no, they're like, surgery scars" "Cool cool... you're still going with he/him right? Just to check" "yeah"

[kiwifie]

art fight attack for shmeebdingyy!

including my own oc too because I thought frankenstein's monster and mad scientist ocs being besties would be SO cute

[blueskittlesart]

any thoughts on how once again zelda was robbed of her agency because her "father figure" didn't listen to her? even if rauru was kinder to her than her father. and that she had sonia who was patient and loving for a little while before she died (just like her mother). i know rauru apologizes for his hubris but still, i wish we saw zelda be upset about it. and even if zelda was such a big part of the quest she still literally sacrificed her humanity once again because of someone else's mistake- because rauru literally didn't listen to the girl from the future that warned you that shit was going to go down. o know nintendo just loves putting zelda inside crystals and stones but i wish we got something better. even if it was her decision to become a dragon... did she have any other choice? it really just feels like they robbed her of agency again just like botw and the games before

i've been trying to figure out how to answer this one. because there are two ways i could analyze this plot point, either from a writer's perspective or an in-story perspective, but neither of those lead to me fully agreeing with your interpretation? I think there's definitely something to be said about zelda consistently being pushed aside in these games, but. well. ok let's get into it ig

from a writer's perspective, I do honestly have quite a bit of sympathy for the zelda devs as they attempt to navigate the modern political landscape with these games. The cyclical lore, though canonized relatively recently, holds them to a standard of consistency in their games in terms of certain key elements. one of those key elements is that there has to be a princess, and that princess must somehow be the main macguffin of the game. The player must chase her, and the end goal of the game must be to reunite the player and the princess. In 1986 this was an incredibly easy sell. women didn't need to be characters. players were content with saving a 2-dimensional princess whose only purpose was to tell them "good job!" at the end. but as society advances, that princess becomes a much more difficult character to write while adhering to the established overarching canon. (as a side note: i don't necessarily believe that the writers SHOULD be held to the standards of that canon. I think deviating from it in certain areas would be a good change of pace. but i also recognize that deviations from the formula are widely hated by the loz playerbase and that they're trying to make money off these games, so we're working under the established rule that the formula must be at least loosely adhered to.) Modern fans want a princess who is a person, who has agency and makes decisions and struggles in the same way the hero does. but modern fans ALSO want a game that follows the established rules of the canon. so we need a princess who is a real character but who can ALSO serve as a macguffin within the narrative, something that is inherently somewhat objectifying.

the two games that i think do the best job writing a princess with agency are skyward sword and botw (based on your ask, our opinions differ there lol. hear me out) in both games, we have a framing event which seperates zelda and link, but in both games, that separation was ZELDA'S CHOICE. skyward sword zelda runs away from link out of fear of hurting him. botw zelda chooses to return to the castle alone to allow link the time he needs to heal. sksw kinda fumbled later on by having ghirahim kidnap her anyway, but. i said BEST not PERFECT. botw zelda I think is the better example because, with the context of the memories, she's arguably MORE of a character than link is. we see her struggles, her breakdowns, her imperfection, specifically we see her struggle with her lack of agency within the context of the game itself. when she steps in front of link in the final memory, and when she chooses to return to the castle, those are some of the first choices we see her make almost completely free of outside influence; a RECLAMATION of her agency (within the narrative) after years of having it stripped from her. from an objective viewer's standpoint, this writing decision still means she is absent from 90% of the game and that she has little control over her actions for the duration of the player's journey. however I think this is just about the best they could have done to create a princess with agency and a real character arc while still keeping the macguffin formula intact--you're not really SAVING zelda in botw. SHE is the one that is saving YOU; when you wake up on the plateau with no memories, too weak to fight bokoblins, let alone calamity ganon. the reason you are allowed to train and heal in early-game botw is because SHE is in the castle holding ganon back, protecting YOU. When you enter the final fight, you're not rescuing zelda, you're relieving her of her duty. taking over the work she's been doing for the past hundred years. in the final hour, you both work in tandem to defeat ganon. while this isn't a PERFECT example of a female character with agency and narrative weight, i think it's a pretty good one, especially in the context of save-the-princess games like loz.

as for totk, you put a lot of emphasis on rauru not believing zelda and taking action immediately, which, again, from an objective standpoint, i understand. but even when we're writing characters with social implications in mind, those character's actions still need to... make sense. Rauru was a king ruling over what he believed to be a perfectly peaceful kingdom. zelda literally fell out of the sky, landed in front of him, claimed to be his long-lost granddaughter, and then told him that some random ruler of a fringe faction in the desert was going to murder him and he had to get the jump on it by killing him first. the ruler which this girl is trying to convince rauru to wage an unprompted war on has the power to disguise himself as other people. no one in their right mind would immediately take the girl at her word. war is not something any leader should jump into without proper research and consideration, and to rauru's credit, he DIDN'T ever outright dismiss zelda. he believed her when she said she was from the future, he allowed her to work with him and he took her warnings as seriously as he could without any further proof. but he could not wage an unprompted war on ganondorf. that's just genuinely not practical, especially for a king who values peace among his people as much as rauru seems to. as soon as ganondorf DID attack, giving rauru confirmation that zelda's accounts of the future were real, he began making preparations to confront him. remember that zelda didn't KNOW that rauru and sonia were going to be casualties of the war--she didn't make the connection between rauru's arm in the future and rauru the king until AFTER sonia's death, when rauru made the decision to attack ganondorf directly. I think the imprisoning war and the casualties of it were less an issue of zelda being denied agency and more an issue of no one, including zelda, having full context for the events as they were unfolding. if zelda had KNOWN that sonia and rauru were going to die from the beginning and was still unable to prevent it that would be a different issue, but she didn't. none of them did.

I think another thing worth pointing out with rauru and his death irt zelda is that rauru is clearly written specifically as a foil to rhoam. this is evident in how he treats both zelda and link, with a constant kindness and understanding which is clearly opposite to rhoam's dismissiveness and disappointment. consider rhoam's death and the circumstances surrounding it. He died because, in zelda's eyes, she was unable to do her duty; the one thing he constantly berated her for. Rhoam's death solidified zelda's belief that she was a failure, a belief which she KNEW rhoam held as well. his death was doubly traumatic to her because she knew he died believing it was her fault. Now contrast that to the circumstances surrounding rauru's death. Rauru CHOSE to die despite zelda's warnings, because he wanted zelda and his kingdom to live. rauru's death was not agency-stripping for zelda; in fact, it functioned almost as an admission that he believed her capable of continuing to live in his place. With him gone, the fate of the kingdom fell to her and the sages. he KNEW that he would die and still went into that battle confidently, trusting zelda to make the right decisions once he was gone. where rhoam believed zelda incapable of doing ANYTHING without link, rauru trusted zelda COMPLETELY with the fate of his kingdom. several details in totk confirm that when rauru died there was no plan for zelda to draconify, that all happened after rauru was gone. it was HER plan, the plan which rauru trusted her to come up with once he was gone. and I think it's also worth noting that zelda's sacrifice with the draconification parallels rauru's!! Rauru gives up his life trusting the sages and his people to be able to continue his work in his place. Zelda gives up her physical form trusting link and the sages in the future to be able to figure out what to do and find her. these games in general have this recurring theme but totk specifically is all about love and trust and reliance on others. zelda relies on link, link relies on zelda, they both rely on the champions and the sages and rauru and sonia and they all rely each other. reliance on others isn't lack of agency, it's a constant choice they make, and that choice is the thing which allows them to triumph.

The draconification itself is something i view similarly to zelda's sacrifice in botw--a choice she makes which, symbolically & within the confines of the narrative, is a demonstration of her reclaimed agency and places her at the center of the narrative, but which ALSO removes her from much of the player's experience and robs her of any overt presence or decisionmaking within the gameplay. again, I think this is a solution to the macguffin-with-agency dilemma, and it's probably one of the better solutions they could have come up with. Would I have liked to see a game where zelda is more present within the actual gameplay? yes, but I also understand that at this point the writers aren't quite willing to deviate that much from their formula. the alternative within the confines of this story would be to let zelda DIE in the past, removing her from gameplay ENTIRELY, which is an infinitely worse option in my opinion. draconification allowed her to be present, centered the narrative around her, and allowed the writers to reiterate the game's theme of trust and teamwork when she assists the player in the final battle, which i think was a REALLY great choice, narratively speaking.

In any case, I don't think it's right to say that zelda was completely robbed of her agency in botw and totk. Agency doesn't always mean that she's unburdened and constantly present, it means she's given the freedom to make her own choices and that her choices are realistically written with HER in mind, not just the male characters around her, and I think botw/totk do a pretty good job of writing her and her choices realistically and with nuance.

[psychicpinenut]

welcome to this segment that's called "movies that are actually good and have always been good but toxic filmbros have attached their personalities to it and interpreted it in a harmful way so people are now making fun of the movies and downplaying their value". i'm your host, Please For The Love of God Form an Original Thought That Didn't Come From TikTok

[ummmuhhidk]

girl help im trying to fight the urge to consume problematic media