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eloquenceassassinated · 8 years ago

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Useless headcanons for my beloved Nerd Dad

First order of business: I love him. Now, on to the headcanons.

Certified Introvert™

Fav colors are rose gold and teal

Not aquamarine, not turquoise, teal

Will tell you the difference if you get it wrong

Has impeccable aim. Like, the guy needs glasses, but it's all muscle memory. He can chuck a wadded-up napkin across the room and get it in the trash can (waste basket?)—in the dark!—every single time.

Says waste basket

Basically as British as you can get in Ninjago

There is no Britain in Ninjago

Definitely became Engineer Friends with Jay and Nya

He and Nya are programming buddies.

Has made Jay laugh until he chokes five times and still threatens to do it again.

Has a quicker response time than Zane and I still can't get over that

See: who pulled Zane away from the window when the Leviathan showed up?

Moves really fast when he wants to

Just doesn't want to

Complains that he's old

Prefers tea but drinks his coffee black like a disgusting person

Zane puts creamer in his coffee one day anyway and Julien loves it

Hasn't taken the time to make himself a good coffee in a few decades

Still doesn't make a good coffee because he's lazy

Early-riser by habit, late-sleeper by nature

Dead to the world until 2:00 in the afternoon

So groggy he is literally half conscious for three hours no matter when he wakes up

Can't seem to think of Lloyd as the Golden Ninja, but can wrap his head around the idea that he was aged up by magic tea

Has also made Lloyd laugh until he chokes

It's surprisingly easy since Lloyd’s sense of humor is still that of a preteen

Was definitely the “hey, son, pull my finger” dad when Zane was little. It made Zane laugh EVERY. SINGLE. TIME because robots can't pass gas.

Left-handed

Can write backwards so that his hand doesn't smudge the words

Trained his right hand to do basically everything but write

He tried. It didn't work.

Has a phonograph. Still listens to it and will not receive a borgPod.

Insists that it has better sound than your new-fangled speakers

Says new-fangled

Doesn't even care

Bought a top-of-the-line Borg Industries laptop as soon as he could nonetheless

Refurbished, of course. Who buys anything retail?

And uses it while listening to vinyl records on the phonograph.

Loves musicals

Honks when he sneezes

Laughs at soap operas

Calls them soaps

Bakes

But doesn't like sweets

Losing his hearing and uses that to his advantage. Makes everyone repeat what they said if what they said was really stupid.

Can wiggle his ears if he takes off his glasses

Writes essays on robotics and engineering no problem but secretly writes adventure fiction and hides it from EVERYBODY.

The main character is a heroine, nurse turned archaeologist turned action hero.

Only Zane has read it. Part of it. Maybe a page or two.

Zane insists that he should publish and Julien is adamant that he shouldn't publish.

Goes by his last name because his given name is embarrassing and he doesn't want to do the paperwork to change it. Again, lazy.

TACTILE.

This is a HUGE headcanon of mine.

Shows love through touch.

Receives it through touch.

Used to kiss Zane on the head every night when he was little

Practically Perfect in Every Way™

Still manages to be a goober

#dr. julien #doc j #i'm only serious about maybe half of these #haha #ninjago #headcanon #nonsense

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thetrashbang · 8 years ago

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Officer Benny and Characterisation in Stealth

There's a very special NPC in Thief II: The Metal Age. In the dimly-lit games room of the Truart Estate, surrounded by the discarded playing cards and abandoned dartboards of the recent party held by the Sheriff and his debaucherous toff friends, a lone drunken City Watch officer disconnectedly rambles to the barmaid on duty. His name is Officer Benny, and I love him.

"I can't believe that s-some (hic) taffer went and spilled mead all over that rug!" he yells as you approach unseen, his model swaying unsteadily in a dramatic display of intoxication. The barmaid, clearly worn out by a harrowing work shift, sighs wearily.

"Benny... you spilled the mead on the rug," she explains patiently. "Anyway, someone is on the way to clean it up already."

"But you don't understaaand!" Benny wails, now clearly, inexplicably on the verge of tears. "These (hic) taffers have no respect for such... b-beautiful things!"

Around this point, it’s likely that you’ll start to tune out and skulk around in the gloom, looking for the telltale glint of loot to funnel into your pockets. Stacks of coins and rings litter the gaming tables, tempting you to sneak a hand under the hanging lamps. One of Karras’s Children—a hunchbacked steam-powered automaton with a head like a brass football —clanks around the room, mindlessly praising its creator to the heavens. It’s not much of a threat, but it’s certainly an annoying little contraption. One water arrow to the boiler grate usually does the trick.

"Benny, I think you've had too much to drink. Aren't you supposed to be on duty?"

“Hah. So what if I am, huh?” he says, sounding more than a little defensive. “Anyways, I work mm-better when I’m drunk. It makes me fearless! If I see a bad guy, I’ll just point my sword at him, and saaaaaay… HEY, BAD GUY!”

You freeze, momentarily worried you’ve been spotted trying to snaffle the discarded goblet from beside the fireplace. Benny continues with his charade, utterly oblivious.

“You’re not s’posed to be here! G-go home or I’ll stick you with my sword ‘til you go ‘Ouch, I’m dead!’ Ah-hah-hah-hurgh!” He makes an indescribable sniffing, gurgling, chuckling noise, and momentarily falls silent. “See? Ain’t no one gonna be messin’ with ol’ Benny.”

“Whatever, Benny. I think you should sleep it off. No more mead for you.”

In the grand scheme of things, it’s a fairly trivial exchange: it doesn’t tie into some larger arc, it doesn’t impart any useful information about objectives or security system vulnerabilities, and neither Officer Benny nor the barmaid will ever be seen again. Benny’s emotional ping-ponging is unconvincing at best, and while his delivery certainly isn’t lacking in vigour, the only character in the room with exceptional voice acting is Garrett, the Master Thief; the one surreptitiously pocketing everyone’s gambling winnings during this exchange. And yet, Benny’s rambling accomplishes something very special. It’s the perfect, emblematic example of a quality present throughout the Thief games; one that shapes how we approach them, and in turn, the experiences they provide.

Thief II gives you a sword. Not a discreet little knife, fit for a slippery cutthroat, but a proper blade; the kind for lopping off soldiers’ limbs on a muddy, arrow-strewn embankment. It’s a silent acknowledgement that you may have to kill men, not in a surprise scuffle where you jump them from behind the bins, but in a full-on fight with multiple assailants. It’s the kind of thing you defend yourself with when things are rapidly going downhill and there’s nowhere to run; a tool for when the halls are filled with the sounds of alarm bells and clattering jackboots. In the right hands it can be quite effective, and it’s entirely possible to hack n’ slash your way through a legion of aggravated soldiers, provided they’re courteous enough to approach you in a narrow corridor or something.

Something doesn’t add up here, does it? Stealth needs reasons for you to stealth, so to speak. There have to be incentives to keep you in hiding, and those incentives usually start with some sort of punishment for being caught. You’re supposed to be outmatched and outgunned, or at the very least, have some higher-level motive for not wanting to be seen. If Garrett can accomplish his goals by going where he pleases and stabbing everyone who looks at him the wrong way, what’s stopping him, really?

Well, it’s kind of a dick thing to do, of course, but gamers have never been above murdering NPCs for slightly inconveniencing them. It’s also a flat-out fail state on many missions if you attempt them on a higher difficulty setting, but by the time you get around to them you’ve almost certainly put the idea out of your head long ago in any case. Dishonored, Thief’s darling modern protégé, would invisibly bump up the Chaos meter—a hidden metric that determines whether Corvo’s been naughty or nice—but Thief itself has no such system, and other than occasionally dropping remarks along the lines of “remember, murdering people is for poser scrublords”, does little to impress upon you the moral wrongness of your actions. A corpse is functionally identical to an unconscious body—indeed, were it not for a single line of HUD text, they’d be impossible to differentiate at all—and sure, people might be a bit more screamy if you clobber them over the head with a blade rather than a blackjack, but what does that matter if you’ve already established you’re not interested in being quiet?

No, Thief II chooses instead to work with characterisation. Who, of the people you encounter throughout its missions, are your enemies? Not the tired watchmen trudging through the halls on a cold evening; not the harmless peasants, trying to prosper in an industrial revolution even as it crushes them between its wheels; not even the Mechanist underlings, suckered into a fad cult and set to work fulfilling Karras’s insane agenda. Your foes are far away, clinking glasses in rooms full of light and music, and most of them will never meet you face-to-face. What direct quarrel do you have with the guards who patrol the game’s moody locales, besides the fact that they’re between you and your goal?

Right. They’re not your enemies, so Thief doesn’t characterise them as enemies. Engendering sympathy to discourage murdering NPCs is hardly a novel concept, but Thief’s approach stands out, primarily because it’s less about pre-emptive guilting and more about subtle humanisation. While you creep around behind their backs, guards will hum, whistle, recite passages, moan about the cold, mumble to themselves, even wonder aloud when they’re getting dinner. You’ll find guards cracking jokes, trash-talking each other’s employers, discussing financial management, complaining about the weather, worrying about being replaced by the new-fangled mechanical eyes, and a thousand other ordinary things totally unrelated to the here-and-now of their work shift. They’re not goose-stepping around shouting “boy, I sure hope nobody stabs me in the back while I’m pacing back and forth, how would my wife and three children ever survive on the streets without a loving father like me?”; they’re just… well, bored, usually. Wouldn’t it be terrible to have to cut down a person like that, just because they made the mistake of investigating some footsteps a little too closely? Thief makes you want to stay unseen, not for your own sake, but for the sake of those who might see you.

And Officer Benny? He’s the epitome of this humanisation. Not only is he drunk, chatty, skiving off work and chewing the scenery with an unprecedented level of unhinged abandon, but through his babbling, he offers an insight into his attitude. There’s no black, tarry pit of hatred boiling away somewhere in him, fuelled by some personal vendetta, waiting to bubble over in fury at the sight of a wayward miscreant; he’s just doing what he’s supposed to. Benny sees himself as the cop in the proverbial cops and robbers: a figure of authority in a simplistic world, out to stop the scoundrels and ruffians in a game where everyone mutually agrees on the rules. His inebriated cry of “HEY, BAD GUY! You’re not s’posed to be here!” is born of this position, announcing what he sees as incontestable truths, spoken more out of convention than anything else. And what’s his ultimatum? Go home, or get stabbed. Go home. Even faced with someone absolutely, undeniably in the wrong, in his morally black-and-white world, his first thought is of telling them to scarper; to leave peacefully, without accountability or interrogation. He’s not smart, or nuanced, or even—if you catch his attention—particularly true to his word, but Officer Benny’s attitude is charming in its simplistic naivety, devoid of real malice or antagonistic ideals. For that, I could no more swing my sword at him than kick a puppy, and that’s why he holds Thief II’s formula together—along with countless other watchmen, guards and Mechanists.

Thanks, Benny. I hope your hangover wasn’t too rough.

#Thief #Thief II #Looking Glass #Stealth

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