#the tower of sorrow

[trickster-kat]

Uploaded Elias Goldstein (Premium Route) + All Endings to Youtube.

[phoenixcatch7]

Just finished oracle of ages!!! Good game, good game. I have Thoughts.

I actually really enjoyed the story and characters! I figured going into the oracle games that it'd be a simple, cliché story, not much nuance or depth, and with Seasons that's basically what I got: din gets fridged in a crystal at the start of the game -> go get her -> you need a set of maguffins to do so -> fight big monster.

Admittedly it was the first game, which meant less story, but even if I hadn't linked (heh) the games for extra end game content Ages just did so much more.

Unlike din, naryu has someone else willing to help her. Ralph (the twinkiest twink to ever twink) was a young man who was her devoted friend (there was a weird crush triangle thing going on with him, Link and naryu, I always felt like I was missing subtext) and, spoilers for a 20yo game?? I guess?

He was the dethroned descendant of the ancient queen Ami. His family definitely still have big money though. He was pretty clearly supposed to be a comic relief character with a twist, but I ended up really liking him! He was over enthusiastic and over confident, but not unintelligent, a decent swordsman (I think) who was incredibly loyal to his friends and held some deep rooted responsibility for the people his family used to rule. Kind, determined, good with kids and people in general, he was terrified but willing to sacrifice his very existence to save the people.

The world building was also great! I don't think I've ever played a zelda game without gorons, but hylians were in short supply. To be expected outside of hyrule, I guess? Anyway, there were also lizard people on an island (tokay!) whose entire deal was.. A bit outdated? Rude, brazen and aggressive to outsiders, they lived in crude huts, worshipped things they didn't quite understand and were generally the old Hollywood stereotype of an isolated jungle tribe.

There was also, like, zora racism? There's a zora village underwater, and one of them was like 'us sea zora are nothing like those river zora 😒' which handily solved both my question of if the river/ocean zora divide was canon or fanon and the relationships between the two. Are they even the same species?? It just makes the rito even weirder but hey lmao. In all honesty I was pretty sick of the river zora at that point too, I swear there were two of them popping up in every screen that had even a sliver of water deeper than the knees and they CONSTANTLY shot fireballs istg they were such a pain. They were literally everywhere and so hard to kill.

On the plus side mermaid suit ^u^!! A dungeon item (the mermaids cave), the item had a desc like 'the skin of the mythical beast' which raised SO many more questions than it answered. The zora were delighted to see a young mermaid! The use of 'maid' implied either a) the zora all thought link was a girl and he didn't correct them (eyo genderqueer androgeny) b) the zora don't subscribe to gender the way humans do (eyo genderqueer androgeny) or c) all fish people look like mermaids regardless of their specific gender (eyo genderqueer androgeny). It literally could have been all three who knows. Maybe one day we'll actually meet a mermaid in zelda.

Also, there's a mini game in Seasons, which I played first, the subrosian dance. It's a pretty popular part of their culture, it's got music, it's got professional dancers. In Ages, you find the gorons doing the exact same dance! Rosa, a subrosian performer you meet in Seasons, is also there, saying her people's dance is better (tbf it is), but if you go to the past you'll find the gorons actually invented the dance first, as part of their love of games and entertainment, and you can talk to two subrosians who are talking about bringing the dance home! It's so interesting to see little details like this, where the travelling subrosians visited their fellow cave dweller lava eating people centuries ago, brought it back home where it exploded in popularity and centuries later became refined as a whole folk dance with spinning and everything, with the people forgetting where it came from, where the gorons keep their dance exactly the same (having to do a rhythm game without rhythm is hard).

Actually, there was so much political fantasy drama going on in the past?? Like, you've got the childless queen taking care of her people, a budding village and a few more settlements across the kingdom. Early in her reign she tried to build a tower to act as a beacon to her fiancé lost at sea, which is a romance story all on its own, but it was cut short (maybe because of funding?). Centuries in the future, it's just ruins. You've got people living on an ACTIVE VOLCANO starting a symmetry cult around a artifact called 'tuni nut' which, presumably, stabilises the volcano? And it's entirely cut off from the outside world. The goron elder is crushed under rocks and their economy is failing. The zora king got poisoned and he's about to die without an heir because a witch turned the fairy queen into an octorock, but the man in charge of the only cure refuses to hand it over until someone passes his tests.

Most of it is solved relatively easily by link and a copious amount of time travel, but the thing with the ruling queen only gets worse. When the evil witch invades the kingdom, she possesses the oracle of ages, naryu (who's a little implied to be the Actual Creation Goddess Naryu reincarnated) and travels back to the past to bring about an age of despair in the present. She does this by slipping into the royal court and befriending the queen as a serving girl, rising up the ranks to become her closest advisor and corrupting her (pretty sure mind control magic is used a li'l). She convinces her to restart the black tower project, pouring all of her and the towns resources into it - forcibly conscripting every able bodied worker and working them to the bone, all while monsters start to circle the tower. With all the fear and resentment, it quickly becomes a beacon of dark energy, a perfect focal point to perform black magics.

Link (and Ralph) end up in the past and get hauled in front of the queen, with possessed naryu at her side, who basically jeers at them and ensures the queen won't listen to their untrustworthy lies. The townsfolk are getting increasingly stressed as their village fills with rubble and their men are worked to the point of collapse. Armed guards start to appear to keep the workers under control. Eventually, Ralph uncovers a hole in the guard rotation, and he and link sneak into the palace through a secret entrance Ralph oh so casually knows about. Link and naryu fight, but with stupendous timing the queen walks in to see naryu collapsed on the floor, Link standing over her with a sword. She calls for the guards, but before anyone can react, the witch, banished form her first vessel, leaps into the queen herself instead. Ralph shoves past the arriving guards and into naryus arms, while link moves in from of them. The queen orders the guards to attack, but naryu, reawakened, pulls them back to the present in the nick of time. In the present, the black tower is magically growing, reaching higher and higher into the sky, terrifying the people of the city.

Then! Ralph, who at this point is suspiciously invested now his actual goal is completed and naryu is safe, vows to go back into time again, away from naryu, to live under the now evil queen and bring protection and comfort to the villagers as a direct act of resistance, because the witch is feeding on their sorrow to power an unknown ritual (link knows. Link, canonically, has told nobody). So this teen in fancy robes and cape goes back to the oppressed, poverty stricken town under the thumb if someone who wants him dead and lives there for weeks if not months dedicating himself to supporting the village and bringing people's hopes and spirits back up, presumably while living out of someone else's wooden hut. In the middle of a literal depression inducing miasma that's sapping everyone's joy and will to live.

That just. Takes insane strength of character. That's a feat of pure, distilled, compassion as anarchy.

Link's off bouncing between past and present doing dungeons and solving easier issues through either sword or magic item, but Ralph is out here doing the long hard slog for little reward.

Link finally returns to the black tower completed, affecting even the people of the present, and, preparations complete, rushes to the past. Ralph is nowhere be seen. Talking to the villagers reveals several have a crush on him, but an old man saw him running for the tower, sword drawn. There's a man pacing by the entrance, who saw the kid run in, tried to stop him. He said Ralph said that he no longer cared what happened to him. That the man realised that Ralph had quietly succumbed to the same curse of despair they all were under. Link fights his way up to the top of the tower, where Ralph confronts the evil queen, sword at her heart, but every step she takes into it, he steps back. The witch laughs. She asks him if he's really willing to write himself out of existence - being the queens descendant, and all. Ralph leaps back, into links chest. He's shaking and stuttering, but he lunges, and is knocked out in one blow. The queen now asks link the same question: is he willing to erase Ralph? If he strikes her, kills her, the queen will die, childless, and he will never live. She leaves, and link rushes to Ralph. He's awake but unresponsive, defeated. With a heavy heart, Link leaves him to chase the queen. It's naryu who finds him, brings him out of the tower.

When the witch is defeated, the curse is lifted, and Ralph is once more energetic and kind. He's a little quieter now, though, sticking close to naryu. For all he was a loud and headstrong kid, I gotta say I was very impressed.

He would have made a good king.

[cotton-mix]

Lazy sorrow pizza head animation

(Tw:blood,weapons,gore,and zesty murderouse pizza)

This is why sorrow peppino is mauled..

[neocrash1101]

I think I overdid it...💦

(Tw:blood,body horror,gore,)

@fallingfromtrees

Sorry, I feel like I'm going to shock you.

I changed the coloring a bit...

[fideidefenswhore]

 the tudors (2007-2010) / the concubine, by christopher rae / the six queens of henry viii (2016) / zombie (2018), cover by bad wolves / the white princess (2017) / hunting the falcon, by john guy & julia fox / viii, by hm castor / the white queen (2013) / henry viii, by lucy wooding / firebrand (2023)

[booksters-shitty-art-blog]

P-peppino?..

[A au i made called sorrows]

(Sorrow tower)

(Tw:gore,body horror,viens)

[umbrasdoodles]

Due to things I noticed from prior experiments I did these face studies in art class. Ft. Soma Cruz as my guinea pig because they announced a Castlevania DS collection and I've always wanted to play those games. Also a bonus Peppino Soma because Pizza Tower on Switch.

[dontaskchaosandco]

(follow-up to a previous poll)

[mcl-mia]

//the very idea of the night class being Built Different (tm) to the point where all of the day class shenanigans are just trivial matters is so funny to me

[tsunderecat413]

okay so y'all really liked that cover of doctor from homestuck i posted a while back. so here's a cover of aquarius from the castlevania series and the clock tower theme from aria of sorrow, plus a bunch of other stuff.

[tometraveling]

My favorite fantasy series.

[beevean]

Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow

Cursed Clock Tower

[taxus-fraud]

A lot of the stuff we hear from Toland, the Shattered is made hilarious in retrospect as the scope of the story continuously expands while he's not meaningfully involved it.

Like, back in Opulence, he was acting all haughty about "oh you think you're powerful because you killed some Hive gods? Please, you haven't seen how many stronger foes there are to come." And now we have. We saw exactly how high that pyramid goes, because we watched the guy on top of it kill the Traveler.

All obsessed with "oh the sword logic is the one truth of the universe, the hive are the only ones who truly understand this." Except then we met Savathun and she didn't really care about the sword logic. Then we made Eris into a Hive god and she also said it sucked. Xivu says she follows it but is also clearly torn up inside about it after her siblings started dying. That's a majority of hive gods who don't like it, and you based your entire understanding of the universe around it.

[aspiringnexu]

I feel like not enough people are talking about the tiny Ent cameo in the first episode. We might see Ents in the show. specifically baby Ents. Entings. A sight that Middle-Earth has long forgotten by the time of the Ring War. And the Entwives!

We know Nori and the Istar (cough Gandalf cough cough) are entering Eryn Galen so I hope we also see Oropher and a young Prince Thranduil but mayhaps we can take a little detour into Fangorn? I want to see happy tree people, I want to see how happy the Ents were. In the Two Towers they’re all so defeated, keeping to themselves because ‘nobody is on their side’, constantly searching for their other halves, for their beloved wives.

And given the hell that is going to be coming in the later seasons, it’s not a stretch to imagine we’ll see Sauron burning the Entwives’ garden.

[garden-ghoul]

Happy Gushiwensday Monday!! Today we have an artful and twisty poem by Xin Qiji called “Boshan Temple Composition.”

I don't follow the road up to chang'an. I'm always at the mountain temple, where they've gotten sick of my chattering. I seek to live cheerfully between perfume and porridge, oh yes--- in this life I walk between material and immaterial. I work at my own pace; why do I need to be an official? I've walked all over the world, but in the end I returned to my plow. the only true friends are pine and bamboo, oh yes! the only comrades I need are mountain birds and flowers.

notes and original text below the cut. this is a really good one.

鹧鸪天·博山寺作

不向长安路上行。却教山寺厌逢迎。味无味处求吾乐，材不材间过此生。 宁作我，岂其卿。人间走遍却归耕。一松一竹真朋友，山鸟山花好弟兄。

The thing you need to understand is that Xin Qiji is being so funny. It’s not just in my translation, although that is the reason I chose to translate it like this. He’s just written a very funny poem, albeit one that deeply puzzled us when we were writing our first drafts.

the road up to chang’an --- obviously he’s saying he has no interest in going to the capital and its imperial court. I want to highlight here that you could read 路上 together as “up the road,” but 上行 is also a binome indicating the passage of something upward in a hierarchy. It can apply to things like submitting paperwork to an authority, but also you use it specifically for journeying (by train!) in the direction of the capital. I think it’s so neat that this idiom exists, and stands in vague conceptual opposition to the English “downtown.”

between perfume and porridge --- the first of a collection of great structural parallels. It reads 味无味 “flavorful flavorless,” which I interpret as being about either excitement or epicureanism. In lieu of a decent parallel phrase that also makes the meaning clear, I’ve used alliteration.

material and immaterial --- he’s being funny again. One way to translate 材不材 is as I have it here, which sounds rather lofty. Maybe he heard it at Boshan Temple. Another way to translate it, incorporating the binome 不材, is “talented and talentless.” I desperately wanted to think of a pun that would convey both meanings, but the connection between physical substance and ability doesn’t exist in English. Tragic.

oh yes --- it ended up in the same place in both verses, but neither of them is in the original poem. I added them to convey a lighthearted tone, a verbal wink to the reader: “We both know I’m being silly. You love it.”

[codenameantarctica]

Love that scene <3

“You are the strangest man I have ever known”, Vorzheva told him. She married him anyway.