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fate-motif · 2 years

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How do I get into Star Trek? I hear so many things about it that sound interesting, but there is just an intimidating amount of content. Do I have to start at the beginning?

i feel kind of bad about leaving this ask hanging, anon, but believe me that i’ve been considering it. i’ve been thinking deeply about a good answer to give you because i love star trek. if you follow me, you know i love star trek and if you don’t i have no idea why you asked me of all people but i need you to know that when someone asks me, hey, how can i get into star trek? i take that question very seriously. and i’m sorry if you wanted a simple order for which to watch properties but star trek’s kind of a hard franchise to get into compared to most. and you’ll find roadblocks that you probably won’t run into for other franchise. so i’m going to describe to you first, a brief overlay of the star trek franchise’s installments, in order of release, and then two (and a half) possible methods to watch them in. i hope this helps and that the length of this post doesn’t intimidate you.

a preface

i will add three initial clauses come with this guide to help you to orient yourself when unsure about what to do in the face of uncertainty.

1. it’s okay if you don’t want to watch something, whether that be an episode or even an entire show. i know there are people who have very strong completionist instincts but i’m going to have to stress here that star trek is a franchise spanning over fifty years. all kinds of production teams have come and gone and released episodes that really run the gamut of quality like you wouldn’t believe. you won’t just find bad episodes, sometimes you will find unbelievably racist or sexist episodes. you will find aesthetic or narrative decisions you heavily disagree with for other reasons, and sometimes if you don’t mesh with something you’re watching, it’s okay to leave it behind. normally you won’t need to be heavily well-versed in the franchise to keep going to the next installment (provided you’ve already somewhat immersed yourself in how the technology and protocol of starfleet) but for a long period of the franchise, the shows were heavily episodic. you’ll recognize the more serialized episodes and shows when you see them but if a specific episode feels outdated and too weird and clearly this one very specific spat about whether riker wants to take up ballet won’t matter later on, you can move on, and in fact you might feel better if you do it instead of punishing yourself by slogging through filler that really isn’t working for you. however, and i have said this before, for a long period of the franchise, the shows were heavily episodic. one of the joys of star trek comes a lot in how a character gets deepened through every silly episode. so while you should feel free to skip an episode if you’re not vibing with it, one way you can try and parse out whether a flimsy and bizarre episode might be worth sticking with is by identifying the characters you like the most and trying to see if this episode develops them in particular. you might be in for a treat!

2. don’t be ashamed to compliment your watch with wikis. that’s how i stopped being a little less intimidated of the breadth of the star trek franchise. i knew what episodes were coming and i could liberally skip those that focused on characters i didn’t really care about or even cut out shows i knew wouldn’t offer a lot to me. granted, my experience has been a little unorthodox but if you don’t understand something, don’t be afraid to google it! wikipedia has a very strong set of plot summaries for the shows of star trek up to 2004, the end of the berman era, but for a more fan-focused perspective you might want to rely on memory alpha, a fandom dot com fan wiki focused on the worldbuilding of the star trek universe where you can figure yourself out if you have any questions about what this specific species they just mentioned might mean or if it’s just a passing namedrop to make stuff sound more alien. (memory beta also exists but it’s dedicated to archiving stuff related to secondary canons ie not the shows or movies like videogames, tie-in novels, the now defunct sequel novelverse that was supposed to continue after voyager, etc.)

3. no star trek has been good from the start. it is a common truism among star trek fans (although i have to dispute it in some cases) that the first season of every star trek show is garbage. while it may seen ridiculous to us, who are familiar with streaming services canning shows at the drop of a hat, a lot of these star trek shows got away with entire early seasons of being meh or even terrible without getting cancelled. you might even want to have the plot summaries of the episode from the first two? seasons of a show handy just in case there’s a particularly bad stinker incoming that you might want to avoid at all cost. if you want to, i’ll answer an ask for particularly offensive episodes across the franchise that you might want to avoid, but this ask is going to be long enough with just basic info as to how to get into the franchise, so i’m not going to jump the gun just yet.

PART I: THE STAR TREK UNIVERSE

so let’s start with the order of the films and shows of the star trek universe as they were released. the release order is important because every show is heavily touched by the historical context in which the properties were made in, in both good and bad ways, and the context informs decisions that were taken in them very obviously. (i will also add a small three-letter abbreviation of the title of each show because it’s a common way for fans to get across what specific incarnation they’re talking about without typing the whole thing out.)

star trek (1966-1969) [tos]. this was the original star trek show, now more commonly referred to as “the original series”, hence tos. created by gene rodenberry, it pictures a future in which earth has joined an alliance of planets named the united federation of planets that seems to expand their scientific horizons through their discovery service. it made great strides in its time for advocating for a more sexually liberated society and a more inclusive society for black people and women, even portraying one of the first interracial kisses broadcast in america. however, do note that it’s still a show of its time and it will be apparent in both casual asides from the dialogue and the plot of some of its episodes. but you still might enjoy it due to its extremely 60s campy tone and hey, it didn’t start one of the longest-lived slash pairings in history for nothing (and in fact, invented the term “slash”). just be aware of the underpinnings that a show released in the 1960s might have.

star trek: the animated show (1973-1974) [tas]. after the original star trek show was cancelled, there was an effort to continue the adventures of the main cast introduced in tos in the animated form. tas doesn’t do much that tos doesn’t already do, except that it’s animated during the dark age of animation, and so…you get a really, really goofy sequel series to a show that was already super goofy with mediocre animation and just as mediocre writing. however, a lot of people will swear by it and it has its own silly charms that you can hold on to. most people won’t judge you for skipping it because it’s more than anything, an addendum to tos.

then after around a decade after the cancellation of tas, a series of films were released after much effort to get something off the ground to revive star trek. these are also centered on the characters we met in the original series: star trek: the motion picture (1979), star trek ii: the wrath of khan (1982), star trek iii: the search for spock (1984), star trek iv: the voyager home (1986), star trek v: the final frontier (1989), and star trek vi: the undiscovered country (1991). these take place about a decade or so after the original series and we meet the original crew in higher, more cinematic stakes than in tos. just as well, these movies are not produced in the 60s on a TV budget so you could argue that the original cast really get a chance to shine in these and if you liked the cast but not the production of tos, you might really treasure them. ii to iv are continuing the same plot so you probably can’t skip anything in between if you’re touching that string of movies, but otherwise they are mostly self-contained movies. (god knows no one would fault you for skipping the final frontier).

thankfully, the success of these movies was enough to get a new era of star trek on TV off the ground. the following shows (and accompanying movies) are what we now call the “berman era” of trek, named after the main shared showrunner of the shows that more or less had the baton passed to him after gene rodenberry developed alzheimer’s and then eventually died. (do note even through progress was made between the 60s and the 80s in terms of writing women and people of color, there were still some gaping flaws that a mostly white and male writing and production team couldn’t fully cover from, and as a result if you were hoping for shows far ahead of their time in terms of representation, you might be a little disappointed with the result.)

star trek: the next generation (1987-1994) [tng]. this series takes place almost a century after the adventures of tos, and introduces an entirely new cast on a new flagship continuing the discovery work of the federation. thanks to the time skip between this show and its previous installments you don’t need to have seen much from the tos era to understand what’s going on, but if you’re here from those shows then you’ll have full knowledge of how the federation operates already, with some new technology thrown in that didn’t exist in the tos era. it also establishes a lot of long-running elements of the universe that will be crucial to the understanding of the shows after it, so if you’re not enjoying this one you might want to at least pass over some important episodes or at least read their wikipedia pages or memory alpha plot summaries.

star trek: deep space nine (1993-1999) [ds9]. this series takes place around a year before the end of tng, so you can see that if you want to start this one you might want to at least know what happened on tng. this one takes place on a space station as opposed to a ship, and is much more concerned with morally gray topics about politics and interspecies relations than its predecessors. that’s not to say it doesn’t indulge in occasional lighthearted and out-there scifi episodes but it takes it on itself to ask questions about the seemingly utopian federation and its interactions with other alien societies that don’t share its views. it’s probably both the most interesting and the most watchable for a modern audience because of its observations, but it certainly doesn’t work as well for the audiences that are looking towards star trek for more zany scifi comfort food.

star trek: voyager (1995-2002) [voy]. this one starts midway through ds9, and is probably as condensed as you get in the lore as you get in berman era trek. you kind of need to know a lot about what happens in both tng and ds9 to understand the setup for voy, which is hilarious considering its setup is that the eponymous ship gets yeeted by an extremely powerful alien entity halfway across the galaxy into depths of the mostly uncharted by the federation delta quadrant, so you won’t get that many returning plot elements across its run. it can be heavily divisive based on the quality of its episodes and its intent but it definitely sets itself up in counterpoint to the most cerebral and grave ds9 by returning to the days of purely exploration for the main cast (even if there’s a greater element of danger than in the tos days due to being so far from home). this is the last show in the tng-ds9-voy series, and the century these three shows take place in is commonly referred to as the “tng era”.

throughout the release of ds9 and voy, star trek also released a series of movies that continued the adventures of the cast of tng. these are star trek: generations (1994), star trek: first contact (1996), star trek: insurrection (1998) and star trek: nemesis (2002). these are all standalone movies and if you’ve become a fan of the crew of tng, have at it! i will warn you ahead of time that by the point of first contact there had started to be franchise fatigue. the quality of all these movies except first contact is constantly argued and for good reason, and some jokingly say that star trek: nemesis singlehandedly killed the star trek franchise. but there’s still one more show left from the berman era of trek.

star trek: enterprise (2001-2004) [ent]. this is a prequel series set before the tos days before the birth of the united federation of planets. it’s a complicated show to appreciate due to the serious franchise fatigue that was setting in by the beginning of the 21st century, its aspirations to return to its more utopian days in the franchise and then its efforts to backtrack on that completely when shows like 24 began to make a killing in the market which led to its production team to tackle, incorrectly i might add, the sensitive topics going around by the days of the war on terror. but if you’re already immersed in the universe and if you fall in love with the cast, you might appreciate the worldbuilding it offers in spite of it having all the worst excesses of the berman era section of the franchise. suffice to say that the finale of this series was the most reviled of the franchise and probably to this day.

the franchise then didn’t see any more installments until the reboot movies that brought back star trek to the mainstream. star trek (2009), star trek into darkness (2013) and star trek beyond (2016) center around an alternate universe and an alternate version of the cast of tos. these are way more in line with the modern traditional hollywood blockbuster than any of the previous installments and were famously produced by j.j. abrams, who vocally admitted that he took on the responsibility because this might be the closest he might ever get to making a star wars movie. … anyway, while these movies might rub the wrong way to fans of the old movies (if you came to these movies having seen the franchise that came before you probably won’t enjoy them as much), they’re not technically bad movies though, and star trek beyond is by far the best of them. we’ll come back to them when i talk later about possible ways to get into the franchise.

once again, the success of these new movies revived attention in the star trek universe, and we have now entered the latest chapter of the star trek franchise that is still ongoing to this day. commonly referred to as new trek, the franchise has taken on a somewhat grittier, more action-based tone than what came before and the steps it took to solidify itself have been very hotly contested. that being said, as someone who’s been through the wringer of [gestures upwards vaguely] all of that, i’m going to use my trekkie street cred and still endorse new trek. there have been both reasonable and completely unreasonable criticism to the entries of new trek, but star trek has always been flawed in some way or other but even in new trek i can see the shine that all of us star trek fans see when squinting our eyes through a questionable 60s or 90s episode of a better world. i will say, though, with one exception, i think new trek is probably the worst way to get into star trek just because of how heavy it is with the previously set up worldbuilding. i’ll go into further detail when i describe the possible roads you could get into the franchise but all of these shows are piggybacking off of at least one other show or era and aren’t really made for people who are completely unfamiliar with the universe. but if you’ve made it this far, here’s the rundown for new trek.

star trek discovery (2017-ongoing) [dsc or dis, but more often than not ends up just being abbreviated to disco]. this was the starter of this new era of star trek. it starts a few years before tos and its main characters are heavily ingrained in the stories of the cast of tos, even if they are not original tos cast members themselves. the first two seasons are extremely rocky but ultimately the show makes great efforts to get the shine out of its potential in its latest two seasons. if you feel that it starts off way too tryhard and edgy in an attempt to capture a more mature audience in a franchise that’s never needed to do that, you are not alone, but they eventually recognize this tendency and begin to course correct for mature stories that aren’t trying to shock to get all its worth out of its mature rating.

star trek picard (2019-ongoing) [pic]. this show is set a few decades after the end of voy and is also target of a lot of discourse because it’s also trying to be dark and mature whether or not it’s appropriate for the franchise or for the development of these characters. decisions are made with the characters of this era that a lot of people don’t approve of (myself included). however, if you’re really invested in getting closure out of the cast of tng and you’ve been warned ahead as to the more controversial developments that they take, you might find this show worth a shot. not to show my own colors but i personally steered clear of this one

star trek lower decks (2020-ongoing) [lds or lwd]. this is the first purely comedic star trek show and the first animated entry since tas. it centers on a cast of lowly ranked characters on a ship from a low rung class of ships dedicated to the unstylish duty of second contact. this is the first entry of new trek that warmed up pretty quickly to the fans, and i have to say that this one is probably the most inhospitable to newcomers because it’s all built on the understanding that you know the star trek universe top to bottom. the animation style is contentious, due to it resembling a lot of low-quality adult animated shows, but if you get past it you will be very well entertained, because this show is comfort food for the trekkie, and it has a lot of heart as well, even if the battles aren’t exactly monumental.

star trek prodigy (2021-ongoing) [pro]. this is the first star trek show made to include children new to star trek in the audience, though it’s still highly enjoyable as an adult trekkie as well. the protagonists are refugees from the delta quadrant seeking to find solace in the federation, so you get an outsider’s perspective to the federation while they’re doing so. i’ll talk about this show later on in my potential entries to the franchise but off the bat i’m going to show my colors and say that this is the show with the best original content of the franchise since the start of new trek and a lot of people aren’t giving it its due because of its intended age range, so that’s a massive shame and i hope you don’t pass it over, anon.

star trek: strange new worlds (2022-ongoing) [snw]. thanks to the success of disco, an entire show was greenlit for the continuation of the story of one specific character, captain christopher pike. he’s actually a character introduced in tos, and so this show follows the events under his command previous to tos. it has multiple members from the tos cast like spock, uhura, nurse chapel and m’benga, but it also has new characters and new ideas to complement its tos roots. it has some questionable decisions in its writing that make me averse to it but from what i can tell it’s pretty popular due to the fact that it’s not afraid to get a little weird with it, like a lot of previous star trek shows, and i hope that they continue that tradition for as long as they’re on the air.

PART II: HOW TO GET INTO THE STAR TREK UNIVERSE

now, with all that information on the table, surely that’s the most logical way to get into the franchise? following the order of the release of the shows and movies that make part of the franchise? well, yes, and i’ll elaborate a little later on about that path, but that’s not the only way you can get through it. i have loved ones who couldn’t get into star trek through tos because the 60s production style bounced right off them. i have friends who couldn’t get into properties that don’t have the tos cast because in tng is when the lore starts to compress and become heavier and more important and they just wanted something more casual. so taking into account different sensibilities for eras of TV, the quality of the works involved, and the importance of the lore from its components, i devised two and a half ways to get into star trek that i recommend, and one experiment if you’re brave enough to undertake it. let’s get to it.

the basic tos era block: starting with the original series, then the tos movies, and then following the franchise by order of production. this would be a pretty logical way to go around it, as previously said. the world gets elaborated in the way it was written. i can’t imagine what a shock it would be to try and handle the franchise chronologically in-universe because a show produced in 2017 is a prequel to a show produced in the 1960s and the clashing aesthetics and writing would be very intense. this way, instead, you see the production value increase and the sensibilities change more towards what we have in the present day without being pulled between eras of TV. it also helps that even if you kind of don’t love the original series itself, if you like the cast of characters but not the fact that their stories have to be told in the 1960s, the sequel movies do the characters a lot of justice (up to a point, i mean final frontier exists) so you won’t be frustrated the same way other fans have to be that the limitations of the time the show was produced in completely defined the stories told with the characters. you can even just stay in your tos bubble if you like, you’re still a star trek fan if you just feel attached to the one crew, and it’s fine. but if you started here you are in an optimal position to continue with the rest of the franchise, preferably in the order of production of the shows.

reboot movies as a gateway to the tos era: starting with the reboot movies (star trek, star trek into darkness, and star trek beyond), then watching the original series, the tos movies, then following the franchise by order of production. at the risk of alienating my star trek mutuals, i’m going to say that i think not everyone will just acclimate to the production values of the 1960s so easily. i certainly couldn’t, and if i had been introduced to star trek through tos i don’t think i would have continued through the franchise. i came to the franchise through the reboot movies because it was 2013 and i thought anton yelchin was super cute. be warned if you take this path as a way to familiarize yourself with the tos cast before jumping ship to tos: these movies really are more in line with the sensibilities of a marvel movie than your regular star trek show. i only suggest this shortcut so that you fall in love with the characters and wonder what kinds of other stories they can be in aside from j.j. abrams’ questionable mystery box approach. if you do fall in love with the characters, you could make it to tos and brave through tos or even just part of tos (there’s nothing wrong with skipping episodes if you’re not feeling them!) as it is, the tos cast really get their time to shine in the sequel movies. you will benefit from having seen at least some of the tos episodes before jumping to the movies though. and as i said before, if this is where you want to end your star trek journey, no judgment! i have friends who stopped here and i’m happy for them. but again, if you’ve made it this far maybe you’re wondering where the universe can go from here, even without the tos cast. if you really can’t attach yourself to any of the new characters, however, you might be ready to tackle something like disco or snw which heavily feature or even are led by members of the tos crew, especially since you came here having started through the abrams movies and a little action and questionable modern day blockbuster quality clearly didn’t throw you off.

the basic tng era block: starting with the new generation, then continuing with deep space nine, voyager, and the tng movies, before watching new trek. another perfectly logical starting point is tng because it was meant as a starting point for newcomers of the franchise and doesn’t continue the stories of anyone featured in the franchise before. furthermore, if you want to do the same thing previously mentioned where you just want to focus on the adventures of the tng cast, that might be for you! just note that the tng cast movies have a more mixed reception, to say nothing of picard. if you want a continuation to the stories of the cast of ds9, voy, or even ent you’re fresh outta luck; none of the other shows really focus on the developments in the lives of the cast of these shows. but i will say that the world is far better fleshed out in this part of the franchise than in the rest of it, and new trek is a continuation of what was established here mostly, even if the show is set in the days of tos or thereabout.

however, i need to interrupt this suggestion with one very dire warning: tng s1 is some of the worst star trek ever to be made, and probably some of the worst TV overall. holy shit i cannot stress this enough. it is so bad that even i haven’t seen it, and you will have to ask someone who’s actually seen it ahead of time to tell you what episodes might be worth watching because the hell that is tng s1, hell even some of s2, is no joke and i can’t imagine seeing this as your first star trek ever. abuse the plot summaries heavily in early tng. you will need it to not give up hope on the franchise.

finally i’m going to suggest an experiment to you, but i don’t know whether it will work or not. start with star trek prodigy, then watch tng, ds9 and voy. this is kind of an insane route to take because none of these shows are prequel shows to prodigy (except arguably voyager) but i swear to god that prodigy is modern star trek at its very best and maybe, if prodigy gets to you, you’ll give a shot to the other shows set around its time that established the lore the same way that the reboot movies are a good gateway to the tos era of the franchise (except prodigy is actually good as opposed to the reboot movies).

once you complete either one of these blocks—either basic tos era trek or basic tng era trek—i feel like you’re ready to watch whatever show in whatever order as long as you understand the rough timeline of ent era ➝ tos era ➝ tng era. i honestly made it sound way more complicated than what it’s actually like but i hope this was in any way helpful to you. happy holidays and live long and prosper 🖖

#star trek #fandom #i'll tag all the abbreviations later. good god this took all day

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avelera · 4 years

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“Break the Cutie” aka Whedon’s just writing his fetish over and over and people are just beginning to figure that out

(Title from TV tropes “Break the Cutie” trope of the same name)

I’ve been thinking a lot about the latest “reveals” about Joss Whedon, namely, that his take on certain superhero franchises is just objectively bad (as someone who loathes “Age of Ultron”, this comes as no surprise to me) and the even less shocking (to those paying attention for the last 20 years) “revelation” that he’s abusive to his cast (all except for his self-selected male stand-in who plays his Mary Sue) which is even less surprising from a man who referred to his actors not-so-jokingly as “meat puppets”.

But I do find this implosion of his reputation, for the lack of a better term, rather objectively interesting as someone who liked Buffy Season 1-2 back in the day and is from the era where worshipping Joss Whedon was like worshipping Johnny Depp’s Jack Sparrow-- simply put, it was inescapable in most nerd communities. And the worship was largely by female fans because, shocker, Buffy was largely aimed at young nerd women.

Were all those women simply blind? Did they not see the subtly misogynistic mind behind the creation of such breakout “feminist” nerd icons as Buffy? Were they taken in?

I don’t actually think that’s the case. Rather, beyond the fact that complex feminist theory wasn’t necessarily being taught in the late 90s to young nerd women, I think there is a nuance between idolizing and fetishizing “Strong Female Characters” that can be difficult to distinguish and that the differences are not necessarily visible during most parts of a standard story structure.

Buffy was a strong female character, no sarcastic capitalization needed, because the fetishizing parts are largely limited to individual story beats, such as the “Long Night of the Soul”, for example.

Simply put, Joss Whedon’s fetish was the moment that Strong Female Characters are broken, so 90% of the story buildup of the character remains indistinguishable from someone building up a strong female character because they want her to be strong vs. wanting to see the moment she breaks.

And here’s the thing, as a writer, I get it. I get that we all have our story fetishes. We all have things we write about, over and over, the niggling loose tooth of a concept we can’t stop prodding at.

And yeah, as an angst writer in particular, I get it when the thing that gets your motor running for the objectively difficult slog of writing a story is seeing your beloved character bruised, suffering, and at the end of their emotional rope because of all the trials you’ve thrown at them. My personal story “fetish” is seeing characters transformed into the thing they most fear themselves becoming, either physically or mentally, and their struggles with that confrontation and what they and their loved ones go through during this horrific event. This story fetish colors pretty much all of my long-form stories.

Heck, I loved Season 2 of Buffy because Joss Whedon’s “see the strong character bruised and in anguish” fetish resonated with me. Not for the weird sexual aspects--for those uninitiated, Buffy sleeps with her Good Vampire boyfriend Angel, who promptly loses his soul and becomes essentially a demonic version of himself she has to fight and eventually kill, for maximum emotional anguish, at the climax of the season--I ate that up as an angsty teen! Not because of the actual sex, I admit I could have given that part a miss and I consider that part of Whedon’s weird sexual hangups coming into play around Purity and Sin and Anguish or whatever, but the idea of your moment of greatest intimacy/joy becoming your moment of confrontation with your worst nightmare is the stuff that really melodramatic angst is made of. So I get it and I enjoyed it as a viewer, at one point.

But where Whedon lost me there is that Buffy and Angel never get to be together. They’re perpetually apart from that point on, and eventually see other people, end up with other people, etc. I mean, what’s the point of the Ultimate Suffering around needing to kill your own soulmate if the story is then just going to ignore them being your soulmate? The suffering was just never ending. Buffy was a bit like Dean Winchester after a while, just never allowed to catch a break. Because Joss didn’t want a Strong Female Character overcoming obstacles and eventually triumphing for good, he was in it to see a Strong Female Character who he gets to watch at her lowest moment, surrounded by other Strong Female Characters repeatedly going through their lowest moments of pain and anguish, over and over, until we reach some sort of network-required conclusion.

Like the cruelty of Benioff and Weiss of Game of Thrones fame, it’s not difficult to understand once you see it. Sometimes, the angst and cruelty is the reward. The real sin of Joss Whedon is that he didn’t stop there but let his fetish spill over into his working and personal life by fetishizing the women who played the strong female characters he wrote and by being cruel and abusive to men and women on set who weren’t fitting his weird fetishistic obsession when it spilled into the way he ran his real life. Because word to the wise, all you creators out there, your fetishes will keep you going in your art, and keep you warm on a cold night, but letting them take over you creative process rather than simply provide power for it is a fast track to becoming a failed creator for a multitude of reasons. Hopefully, just that you can’t objectively view your own work anymore and accept critique, but more harmfully as we see here, when you play out our story fetish skit on real people, which only grows worse when you’re so insulated by fame and fortune that no one can tell you no.

(There’s another aspect of Joss’s storytelling that I’m going to break into another post, if you got this far. That is, that Joss doesn’t accept the premise of most of his stories. That is, he rarely takes a world he didn’t build himself seriously and that lack of accepting the premise of the world, is why he can be great at banter, but often fails at the new era of superhero movies.

Part 2 - link once it’s up.)

#joss whedon #buffy meta #my meta #writing meta

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thetypedwriter · 3 years

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All the Young Dudes Fanfiction Review

All the Young Dudes Fanfiction Review by MsKingBean89

So.

This is a first.

If you’ve been following this blog for some time, then you know I generally read young adult books and write far too lengthy reviews on them with the occasional outlier of adult fiction, mystery, sci-fi, etc.

At any given time, I usually have both a physical book that I’ve bought from somewhere that I’m working on (right now it’s Firekeeper's Daughter by Angeline Boulley) as well as a fanfiction that I reserve until before I go to bed (my treat for a day well lived).

Fanfiction is something that I’ve mentioned copious amounts of times on this blog in varying degrees, but this is the first time I’ll be writing an actual review for one of them on this platform.

The reason for this is myriad.

One, this fanfiction called All the Young Dudes is a far-cry from your normal standardized fanfiction of 5-50,000 words-something I can easily consume in a few minutes to a few hours.

Nope, this behemoth ends on a staggering 526,969 words and 188 chapters, not including bonus chapters and extra in-universe canonical content the author has also written and published. Roughly speaking, if this was actually published onto paper it would be well over 2,000 pages.

2,000 pages.

Yeah. And I enjoyed every single moment of it.

Two, while I read a lot of fanfiction I generally don’t put any of it on this blog because while I’ve dedicated it to published novels, I also usually have very simple feelings about fanfiction. My thoughts run the gambit of: It was good, it was fluffy, it was a train-wreck, so on and so forth.

Normally my reviews are so long and wordy because I have too many thoughts about the published books that I read and I need an outlet to let them loose.

Whether because of its longevity or because of its content, All the Young Dudes is a story I find myself having a profusion of thoughts for. Hence, the birth of this review.

If fanfiction isn’t your thing, feel free to skip this particular review of mine (although fanfiction is a gift to this world and you should really rethink your stance on it if you don’t like it, just saying).

Third, All the Young Dudes is well written and rivals any actual published content.

Fourth, because of how extensive this fanfiction is, it took me over a month to read it-time I generally would have been reading something else. Instead of leaving you all hanging for a few more weeks until I finish Firekeeper's Daughter (don’t hold your breath-the book is sort of a slog for me personally right now), I decided to just take the jump and write my first-ever typedwriter review for a fanfiction.

Fanfiction has been a part of my life for the better part of almost two decades now. It was truly something I found by accident and in retrospect, it’s insane to me that it’s still something that brings me continuous joy and happiness.

I discovered fanfiction when I was 11-years-old and deeply obsessed with the Harry Potter fandom.

Now, as an overall disclaimer I completely disagree with J.K. Rowling’s stances of gender and biology and differ wholeheartedly with her views of trans and non-binary individuals. With that said, I still love Harry Potter as a story and while I no longer buy anything that profits J.K. Rowling directly, I still love the fandom and the people in it, including fanworks like All the Young Dudes.

When I was 11, the seventh Harry Potter book had yet to come out and like many other people in this time period of agony while waiting for 2007 to roll around so that I could find out what happened, I discovered fanfiction as a way to fill in that ache I was so keenly feeling.

I found myself suddenly immersed in this world of online fiction-both good and bad-but completely entrancing all the same.

I never left.

That is to say, I did eventually move onto other fandoms with their own fanfiction cultures, but Harry Potter was still my first in terms of fanfiction and introducing me to the concept as a whole.

Specifically and maybe oddly, I never found myself curious for actual fanfiction about Harry or Hermione or Ron. In my mind, I already knew what had happened to them and reading about them in fanfiction was redundant.

In addition, the first fanfiction I just happened to come across was a Lily/James marauder era fanfiction on mugglenet.com

This idea immediately intrigued me as fans as a whole knew next to nothing about the infamous Moony, Wormtail, Padfoot and Prongs and while I knew everything I needed to about Harry Potter it was intoxicating to think that I could learn about a time before the series had existed and about characters who were important, but off screen.

I was hooked and devoured as much as I could for most of middle school about the marauders and Lily and James’ romance in particular (I even wrote and published some of my own that will go unmentioned as they are truly really terrible).

That being said, I haven’t read a Harry Potter fanfiction in years. I grew up and out of the fandom eventually thanks to Twilight and from there I’ve bounced from fandom to fandom as I’ve aged and consumed different things and fallen in love with different characters and different worlds.

That isn’t to say I’ve forgotten though.

I still remember my favorite marauder stories, my favorite Sirius Black/OFC (original female character), and my favorite baby Harry drabbles. They made such a huge impression on me and even though it’s been sixteen years, I still recall those stories with fond nostalgia and jubilation.

Which is why it’s almost ironic that I would return to this particular time period of the marauders with All the Young Dudes.

In a fashion that’s almost scarily full circle, I happened to be on Youtube one day and saw a recommendation video about this girl reviewing a fanfiction called All the Young Dudes. Now, youtube book reviews aren’t uncommon, but a thirty minute video for a fanfiction? Not your typical sighting.

So out of pure curiosity, I searched All the Young Dudes fanfiction on Google and low and behold the overwhelming and top results were all for a marauder-era fanfiction by MsKingBean89. Piqued, I clicked on the link in ao3 and thought why not?

While I’ve mainly been reading in other fandoms recently (BTS, some anime and manga, All for the Game) I had been in a little bit of a slump for finding a really good, really alluring story for some time and really didn’t think I had anything to lose by reading All the Young Dudes, especially as the more research I did, the more I found how popular it was-a plethora of videos on youtube, tiktok compilations, and dozens of fanart posts.

Plus, it had been so long since I had read anything from my progenitor fandom and the thought of going back was strangely comforting.

Hence the journey of reading All the Young Dudes began and oh what a journey it was.

Now, that this review is already five pages in, I should probably tell you what on earth All the Young Dudes is actually about.

The whole story is a marauder-era fanfiction told from Remus Lupin’s POV from the summer of 1971 when Remus is 11-years-old to the summer of 1995 when he is 35-five-years-old. It is an in-depth portrayal of Remus’ time at Hogwarts from year one to year seven and then going all the way up to the start of the second wizarding world, ending around the time Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix begins.

While already the scope makes this a massive undertaking, the author also includes all canonical content from the original series involving Remus, the Marauders, and the time period and incorporates it into her fanfiction-making it canon compliant from start to finish.

While a very large portion of this story is not romantic, there is eventual WolfStar (Remus Lupin/Sirius Black) and if you have read the original Harry Potter series...well. You know things don't end up super dandy for these two characters in particular so you know how the story will end before it begins.

This fanfiction left me speechless for so many reasons.

The scope and length is frankly unbelievable. This fanfiction was published on March 2, 2017 and it was completed on November 12, 2018.

….how?

How did she manage that? I frankly have no idea, but I am in complete and utter awe at her ability to write content with such a magnitude and actually complete it. She gets an award just for that honestly.

Not only that, but the fanfiction is actually superbly well-written. I won’t lie and say it’s the most poignant and beautiful piece of literature I’ve ever consumed, but it was consistent in its pacing, characterization, themes, motifs, and structure, which, for 2,000 pages, is an incredible achievement when you think about it.

Speaking of characterization, everyone was So. Well. Done.

Remus was such an interesting POV to read from and while he was compliant in every sense of the word-werewolf, prefect, bookish-MsKingBean89 added so much more to his character and fleshed him out so incredibly that it’s truly tragic that he’s not a real person.

And to that extent, she does this with all of the characters. You see James’ optimism and leadership, Sirius’ arrogance and loyalty, Peter’s jealousy and chess skills.

Every character was so well-rounded and real. She did an incredible job of taking the bits and pieces from the canon series and using that to build up her own flesh and blood people with motivations, likes, dislikes, dreams, and desires.

That being said, she also had 2,000 pages to do it sooooooo it would be bad if the characters weren’t fleshed out by the end honestly.

In addition, I really appreciated that she didn’t just focus on Remus, Sirius, James and Peter. Lily Evans played a critical role in Remus’ school life and after and so did the other Gryffindor girls like Marlene and Mary.

Too often, the focus is on the boys and their close friendship and while that was a huge focus, we also get to see Remus develop friendships with the girls in his own right and other friends as well that were often OC’s of the author’s.

Now. OC’s are generally something I dislike. I’m reading fanfiction to read about particular characters that I’ve sought after, not to read about some imaginary cast. However, just like any of the canon characters, all of the OC characters were well-developed and played crucial roles in Remus’ development-while either at Hogwarts or after-and I found myself not minding them in the least. In a few cases (Grant) I actually really loved them.

The biggest draw for this fanfiction for me was Remus’ time at Hogwarts. It was so well-written and incredibly descriptive and I found myself thrust back into the world of magic so suddenly and seamlessly that it was like I never left.

MsKingBean89 includes so many intricate details and builds up the world so beautifully that I’d recommend any Harry Potter fan to consume it, just to get some good Hogwarts material out of it.

Another thing I greatly appreciate about this fanfiction was the slow burn. I’ve read slow burn before (All for the Game trilogy anybody?), but this truly took the cake. Sirius and Remus don’t properly get together until the end of year six going into year seven. That’s over 100 chapters in.

100 chapters out of 188.

Meaning that over half of this beast doesn’t have the main pairing even together. For some people, this could be a drawback. You might think to yourself: It takes how long for them to confess their feelings and stop being prats?

A very, very long time.

However...it didn’t bug me. I like slow burn to begin with, but being along for the ride as Remus goes from being a child to an adolescent with unrequited feelings to being in a relationship with someone he loves is so rewarding and fulfilling that the 100 previous chapters are completely and utterly worth it.

MsKingBean89 develops them so well and so carefully that the payoff is so sweet and satisfactory that it's enough to bring the tears right then and there.

The last huge feat of this fanfiction for me was the author’s dedication to canon not just confined to Hogwarts and the Harry Potter books, but also to the time period. Either she lived through the 70’s and 80’s herself or she had done her due diligence when it comes to research because anything from London anti-gay laws to British slang was commonplace in her fic.

I found it completely amazing how she was able to tie in real-time historical and cultural moments like famous singers and movies playing at the time alongside convoluted muggle politics warring with the wizarding ones.

I was so blown away by the accuracy and genuine love behind this fic that it often brought me out of my own mind to simply ponder once again how much work this was and how well she was delivering it.

Even unpleasant things, like homophobia and bigotry, are dealt with in a very carefully constructed way that is aligned with the time period in which the story takes place.

Unfortunately, everything beautiful is not without flaws and All the Young Dudes is not the exception, although it’s flaws are nary compared to its achievements.

The few complaints I have with this fic are honestly quite negligible.

First, there are a few grammatical and punctuation errors. Very few, but I did notice some.

Next, and again, this complaint is really just me whining, but...the end of the fic was really fucking sad. The end of this whole story took me so much time to complete simply because I didn’t want to read it.

I know what happened during the first wizarding war and I also know what ended it (James and Lily Potter dying, Harry being shipped off to the Dursley’s, Sirius imprisoned for a murder he didn’t commit, Peter presumed dead) and in one fell swoop Remus lost everything and everyone he ever loved.

After spending over 1,500 pages of Remus growing to love these people it is absolutely devastating and heart-breaking to see him lose it all.

The last handful of chapters are just really, really sad and it makes me wonder why MsKingBean89 decided to write it in the first place. Frankly, I don't know why she didn't write about Remus’ time at Hogwarts and stop after graduation because we all know what happens after that and none of it is good.

Looking back, I wish I could time travel and tell myself to stop at chapter 150. I truly didn’t need to read about the tragedies that happened after that and the hell that all of the characters go through.

And while it does end on a….sort of kind of maybe positive (?) note with Sirius and Remus reuniting briefly once the events of Harry Potter and Prisoner of Azkaban take place, it was really tainted and bittersweet for me knowing that in a year Sirius would die and Remus would marry his fucking cousin and have a child.

Urgh.

I just can’t.

That being said, I understand it’s not the author’s fault and I’m not saying it is. She wrote a canon compliant fic to the end and it was my choice to continue reading. That being said, she said she ended it before the events of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix because Sirius and Remus are happy and back together and she didn’t want to write what was coming next if she continued.

I truly, truly get that.

But in the same vein, why even write the events of the first wizarding world to begin with then? I’m confused with that response as it doesn’t make much sense to me. I felt like ending it right then and there was not a happy ending. They’re together, yes, but at this point they are both shells of who they used to be. Both have severe trauma and PTSD and frankly I don’t even know if I agree with them being together just because they’ve put each other through so much.

It’s just an interesting choice at the end of the day in terms of the author.

Once again, however, I truly understand that she can do whatever she wants and that she doesn’t owe anyone anything, especially as she’s writing this for free and just because. So please keep in mind that although I’m complaining, I truly understand how fortunate we are to even have this fic in the first place.

Okay.

Secondly, my only other huge complaint is that MsKingBean89 made Remus gay. Not bi, not pan. Gay.

You could argue that Remus just calls himself gay in the fanficiton as he didn’t know about other kinds of sexuality. You could argue that Remus’ sexuality changes and develops as he ages and experiences trials and tribulations. You could argue that it was a sign of times like so much else in this fic.

I frankly just found it to be a frustrating choice as the fic is canon compliant and even though it ends before the events of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows we know that Remus eventually marries Tonks and has a baby son named Teddy Lupin.

How does that make sense?

I tried very, very hard to come up with some sort of feasible explanation for how a gay man would have ended up with the love of his life’s female cousin and truly could not think of one that was not fucked up to some degree.

Again. I know I’m being nit-picky, but it irked me that she made this choice regarding Remus’ sexuality and essentially ended her fic with Remus stuck in a corner regarding how the series actually ends.

At the end of the day, all of the negatives are truly, truly not important. I’m just whinging to whine and to express my thoughts, but I do once again understand that MsKingBean89 isn’t profiting from this fic and that she can do what she wants as is her prerogative.

I hope I was able to express that while I understand that, I can still be frustrated with some of the choices she made.

To wrap this all up, All the Young Dudes is a masterpiece and is a must-read for anyone who loves Harry Potter, the Marauders, or Wolfstar. I was blown away by the sheer magnitude, the love and care she put into her craft, the slow and deliberate development of all the characters, the beautifully constructed love between Sirius and Remus, and the intricate world-both muggle and magic-that surrounded the story like a cocoon.

I am so happy I found this fic and I truthfully am floundering at what to do with myself next. If you have any more current Marauder era fics that I’ve missed out in the past eleven years, please don’t hesitate to let me know.

Recommendation: Go read All the Young Dudes. For weeks, you will cry, you will laugh, you will despair, and you will smile. This fanfiction will make you wish this was canon and in my mind, it now is.

Score: 8/10

Links:

1. All the Young Dudes on ao3

2. The Youtube Video about All the Young Dudes that made me aware of its existence

#all the young dudes #wolfstar #Harry Potter #fanfiction #harry potter fanfic rec #marauders #book review #Book Recommendations #fanfiction recs #fanfiction review #wolfstar fanfiction #wolfstar fanart

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scribeofred · 3 years

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Thanks to @onereyofstarlight for the tag!

1. What fandoms have you written for?

This is embarrassing but I actually had to look at both FFnet and AO3 because I couldn’t remember all of them. TRON: Legacy, Assassin’s Creed, Star Wars, Lord of the Rings and the Hobbit, Sherlock, Final Fantasy VII and XV and Kingsglaive, Voltron: Legendary Defender, Merlin, Skyrim, and, of course, Thunderbirds. I have a couple other fandoms that crop up in various wips, including a Tom Swift/Thunderbirds crossover that I really should finish.

2. How many works do you have on AO3 &/or FFNet?

FFnet has 45, and AO3 has 41. There’s also a couple stories lurking on tumblr, notably a final chapter for Reflection.

3. What are your top 3 fics by kudos on A03 &/or Favs on FFNet?

AO3 dominates in this area, if I can use a word like “dominates” for stories that have less than 125 kudos each haha. Oh well, the numbers don’t matter!

1. 118 kudos on tell the shades apart (my world is black and white)

2. 94 kudos on Reflection

3. 91 kudos on The 43rd Hour

4. Which 3 fics have the least kudos & Favs?

Again on AO3:

1 kudos on I Am You (And You Are Me)

5 kudos on The Dragonborn Chronicles

6 kudos on cynosure

5. Which Fic has the most comments and which has the least?

Reflection has the most at 29 threads, and I Am You (And You Are Me) has the least at zero.

6. Which complete fic do you wish had gotten more attention?

Lodestar, definitely. Sure, it’s for something of a rarepair, but they aren’t that rare, and I just really really like the way the story came together. On the other hand, of course my unfinished Merlin fic has gotten probably the most attention, because that’s just the way it goes, eh?

7. Have you written any crossovers?

None that I’ve published! I have various crossovers lurking in mostly unfinished states, including the aforementioned Tom Swift/Thunderbirds crossover, and an Assassin’s Creed/Thundeerbirds crossover that is very good and I should also finish. There’s an Expanse/Thunderbirds fic lurking in my brain that I may or may not ever commit to paper, who knows. I’ve also very vaguely toyed with a Batman/Thunderbirds crossover, in the sense that “nebulous” is too strong a word for the kind of toying I’ve been doing.

8. What is the craziest fic you’ve written?

I don’t really write crazy or crack or humor in general, so probably the closest thing to “crazy” is On the Lam, which was the result of wanting to throw Scott and Penelope toward an Egyptian stud farm. It ended up being the host for a bad joke about that, courtesy of one @thebaconsandwichofregret, who consistently gives some of the best dialogue advice I’ve ever encountered.

Actually, the true answer is probably a chapter in Glimpses into a Supernova, maybe the one about blood? It seems bonkers when I think back on it now, but I admittedly haven’t read it in many years. Possibly I am misremembering. Glimpses has some weird ones, though.

9. What’s the fic you’ve written with the saddest ending?

It’s a tossup between The Painting and a place where the water touches the sky. The former deals with a prior off-screen death; the latter is (maybe??) an on-screen death. People seemed upset by it, at any rate. I said it was ambiguous!

10. What’s the fic you’ve written with the happiest ending?

“Happy” is probably a matter of perspective? Depends on the overall reading experience and the ending within that context. Either septet or Three Towels and a Tracy, they’re both pretty fluffy overall.

11. What is your smuttiest fic?

protoinstincts, which I completely forgot I wrote and then rediscovered like a year later and realized “hey, this is actually pretty good” and you know what, despite it not being overly spicy, it is pretty good.

12. Have you ever received hate on a fic?

Not hate, per se, but someone left a review on Less Than Nothing saying they “didn’t like” that I “wrote the story as a series of drabbles.” Cool, I didn’t write the story for you, random guest reader, and the back button exists, friend 😂 It didn’t bother me on a personal level because I wrote the fic for an audience of one (incidentally, not myself and rather the recipient of a secret santa event), but I was mad because the reviewer had no way of knowing where I was at as a writer, and I know from longtime observation how that kind of comment can crush less experienced or confident writers.

Don’t leave flames, kids, you don’t understand the power your words have. Don’t like, don’t read.

13. What is the nicest comment you’ve received?

The nicest? Goodness. Hmm. I’d have to go hunting to find the nicest, but in recent memory, @ayzrules sent me a couple passages from Spanish texts she’s been studying that reminded her of my writing, and I was honestly so touched by the fact that she even thought to make such comparisons, much less mention them to me. Taking the time to familiarize yourself with someone’s style until you can make comparisons between it and someone else’s work is so much more meaningful to me personally than a basic “Nice story!” or “Loved this!” type of comment ever could be. <3 Ayz <3

14. Have you ever had a fic stolen?

Not that I’m aware of, but I’ve never gone looking on any sort of copycat site or whatever either.

15. How many fics do you have marked as incomplete?

Two. First is The Dragonborn Chronicles, which is a retelling of Skyrim from Lydia’s perspective via her journal, to complement the in-game journal. It’s a slog of a style to write, though, even for someone who loves writing first person and doesn’t really want to write a lot of dialogue, and the outline is huge, and the story will be many times more huge, and just. Some day. Some day.

Second is tell the shades apart (my world is black and white), which has always been unfinished because the outline itself is over seven thousand words and the fully written story would undoubtedly land between 100,000 and 200,000 words, and there’s no way I’m writing that. I’ve always meant to upload the outline, but I got kind of self-conscious about the way I formatted it, and ugh I just haven’t bothered. One day, one day, right?

Moral of the story is I’m intensely a short story writer, and I’ve really found myself settling into that role over the last couple years. Better a clipped, punchy short story than a bloated slog of an epic.

16. Which of the WIPS will most likely be finished first?

Literally no one knows that. I wrote 95% of the observable entropy of a closed system over five years ago, and then I proceeded to pull it out roughly once a year and write and rewrite various endings until last month, which was when I finally figured out how I wanted to end the story. septet, too, languished for about five years before I finally remembered it existed and managed to wrangle an ending. Endings are hard, man. So are those third plot points. Terrible creatures, those, bog me down every time.

17. Which WIP are you looking forward to finishing?

Uh... mm. See. If I were looking forward to finishing any of them, I’d be actively working on them. At this moment, writing fic isn’t exactly high on my list of priorities, but I am also coming off a four-day idle game bender, so I still feel like I haven’t quite reengaged with myself as a living person. Give me another few days and I might have an answer.

(I am always most looking forward to finishing this ridiculous Ignis-drives-the-Audi-R8 fic that’s been languishing in my wips for literal years. As mentioned above, third plot points. Killer, man.)

(oh and also the working-titled the art of murder. Scott and Penny attend a private art auction. Things don’t go to plan. It, too, is stuck at the third plot point. I know, I know I have a problem, shush.)

18. Is there a WIP that you’re considering abandoning?

Any wip has the potential to be revived—this year and the old wips I’ve unearthed, dusted off, finished, and posted have been proof of that. I don’t intentionally permanently abandon anything for that reason, some stories just probably will remain dusty old wips forever because I didn’t actually need or want to write the full story for one reason or another.

19. Which complete fic would you consider rewriting?

Now that’s an interesting question. Hmm! Honestly? None of them. Once I finish a story, I’m not inclined toward rereading it again any time soon, to the point of years in some cases, and I feel like I’ve moved on from the stories I wrote one, two, five, eight years ago in the actual writing sense. They’re finished stories, and on top of that are relics of their time, which doesn’t mean the stories don’t have any ongoing significance on a reading level—I just don’t have any interest in rewriting those particular stories. I’ve gotten them out of my head, to the point of not remembering at least a third of them on demand anymore, and I don’t have any desire to “retell” those exact stories. I do tend to tighten the wording and fix perceived errors/weaknesses whenever I do end up rereading an old story, and I usually silently update the AO3 version if I make any significant changes because AO3 makes it a breeze to update a posted fic. I might do FFnet too if I’m feeling up to it or have the time.

20. Which complete fic is your favourite?

Once upon a time I would’ve said Holding On, but I honestly find it kind of unbearably melodramatic now. the observable entropy of a closed system is equally melodramatic, as it was written in the same era, but at least it has the excuse of being told in second person and via a style that is a half step away from being poetry. Possibly I will reread it in a few years and find it equally obnoxious and overly dramatic, but it received some shockingly positive comments, which I wasn’t expecting at ALL, and I’ve been honestly blown away by the amount of praise it’s received. <3 to everyone who’s said anything about it!

21. What’s your total published word count?

141,000 on AO3, 160,000 on FFnet, but technically the light of my life SS wrote fifty thousand words of each. It’s too late for math.

I tag @velkynkarma, @lurkinglurkerwholurks, @writtenbyrain, @thebaconsandwichofregret, and anyone else who wants to play!

#tag games

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obtusemedia · 3 years

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Ranking Lady Gaga's albums, from worst to best

Being a Lady Gaga fan can be an exercise in frustration.

Gaga is far more ambitious than most popstars — I doubt we’ll ever see Ariana Grande or Ed Sheeran make an album as left-field as Born This Way or ARTPOP. But she's also far less consistent, with numerous misbegotten projects.

Gaga's undeniably successful, with five #1 hits, an Oscar and multiple iconic music videos to her name. But her messy album rollouts and tradition of underperforming lead singles make her feel like an underdog compared to the more polished, precise careers of her contemporaries like Taylor Swift, Beyoncé or Bruno Mars.

Gaga is kind of a mess. But she's our mess. This album ranking will cover some records I can't stand — albums that make me constantly hit the fast-forward button, or albums I ignore altogether. But there isn't a single record on here that wasn't a bold move. Even the "back to basics" albums made strong aesthetic choices.

So let's dive into the career of the most fascinating Millennial popstar.

#8: Cheek To Cheek (2014)

This really shouldn't count. It's a Lady Gaga album in name only. But, technically it's a Gaga album, so here we are.

I've got nothing against Gaga having fun playing Rat Pack-era dress-up with Tony Bennett. She's a theatre kid at heart, and I'm sure every theatre kid would kill to make a Great American Songbook covers record like this. It sounds like she and Tony enjoyed themselves, so I'm happy for them!

...but I'm sorry. I can't be objective about Cheek To Cheek, it's the opposite of my taste. There's only so many bland lounge ballads I can take.

BEST SONGS: I have to pick one? "Anything Goes" is cute, I guess.

WORST SONG: "Sophisticated Lady"

#7: A Star Is Born (2018)

Let me first make this clear — A Star Is Born, the movie starring Bradley Cooper and Lady Gaga? It's a masterpiece. It's electrifying and tragic and I'm still upset it didn't sweep the Oscars that year. There's even a cute dog! You won't hear me say a bad word about it.

But A Star Is Born, the accompanying soundtrack? It's extremely hit-and-miss.

Yes, it includes arguably Gaga's best-ever song and one of the greatest movie hits ever written, "Shallow." And there's plenty of other great tunes in the tracklist too — "Always Remember Us This Way," "I'll Never Love Again," the "La Vie En Rose" cover.

Even the country-rock songs from Bradley Cooper (who, reminder, is not a professional singer) are mostly good! "Black Eyes" RIPS, and "Maybe It's Time" feels like a long-lost classic.

But sadly, there are so many mediocre filler tracks on this thing. The second half of A Star Is Born's hour-plus runtime (Gaga's longest!) is padded with generic songs like "Look What I've Found," "Heal Me" and "I Don't Know What Love Is." The only good one out of the bunch is the silly, intentionally-bad "Why Did You Do That?"

In the movie, these filler tracks serve a point – they're meant to show Gaga's character selling out. They work in the movie when you hear them for a few seconds and see Cooper make a drunkly disappointed scowl. But I don't want to listen to them, and sadly, they make up half the album.

In other words — A Star Is Born would've made an incredible six or seven-song EP. But as an 63-minute-long record? It's a slog.

BEST SONGS: "Shallow", "Always Remember Us This Way," "Maybe It's Time"

WORST SONG: "Heal Me"

#6: Joanne (2016)

After Born This Way and ARTPOP, I get why Gaga needed to make a more lowkey, back-to-basics album. I also understand that many of these songs have extremely personal lyrics for her.

But is a down-to-earth album what I really want from our most outré popstar? Not really.

Luckily, Joanne is better than that description suggests. Yes, there are some bland acoustic ballads and awkward hippie-era throwbacks (two styles that are really not in Gaga's wheelhouse), but there's also some Springsteen-style heartland rockers! And those go hard in the paint.

Joanne works best when Gaga works the record's dusty aesthetics into her brand of weirdo pop, like on the sizzling "John Wayne," the winking "A-YO" or the delightfully extra Florence Welch duet "Hey Girl."

The record also has "Perfect Illusion" — a glorious red herring of a lead single that sounds nothing like anything else on Joanne. It's a roided-up mixture of woozy Tame Impala production and hair metal histrionics, and it rules. It might be Gaga's best-ever lead single! (at the very least, it's her most underrated.)

And there is one slow tune that's unambiguously great: "Million Reasons," another solid Gaga lighters-in-the-air power ballad pastiche.

Despite what some Little Monsters may tell you, Joanne isn't a disaster. There's some great stuff in there, and even the worst songs are just forgettable. But it's still far from her best.

BEST SONGS: "Perfect Illusion," "Diamond Heart," "Million Reasons"

WORST SONG: "Come To Mama"

#5: Chromatica (2020)

When Chromatica was released near the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, it had been seven years since Gaga had released music in her classic gonzo-synthpop vein. I can easily picture the record serving as an "ugh fine, I'll give you what you want" response to the many Little Monsters annoyed with Gaga's half-decade of folksy ballads and Julie Andrews cosplay.

I'll say this about Chromatica — outside of The Fame Monster, it's her most consistent record. There's not a single track that's a glaring mistake. And the three singles — "Stupid Love," "911" and the triumphant Ariana Grande duet "Rain On Me" — easily stand among her best tracks.

But although "all bangers, no ballads" album sounds rad in theory, it doesn't really succeed in practice. Chromatica is solid, but it's also a very same-y record. It feels like Gaga had one really great idea for the album ('90s club music with super-depressing lyrics) and repeated it over and over and over again to diminishing results.

There are some songs that are able to separate themselves: the three singles, of course, as well as the goofy "Babylon" and "Sine From Above," the Elton John duet that's the closest Chromatica gets to a ballad. But by the end of the album, you feel more worn out than electrified.

Also — and this is probably unfair, but still — Chromatica came out just a couple months after another retro-dance blockbuster pop album: Dua Lipa's magnum opus, Future Nostalgia. That's not a flattering comparison.

BEST SONGS: "Rain On Me," "Stupid Love," "911"

WORST SONG: "1000 Doves"

#4: The Fame (2008)

Out of all of Gaga's records, The Fame is most like a time capsule. It REEKS of late '00s/early '10s pop — which isn't an entirely fair criticism, seeing as Gaga popularized that era's sleazy, synthy aesthetic. It's also not a bad thing! I don't mind a little nostalgia!

As you already know, The Fame's singles are masterworks. "Just Dance," "Poker Face," "Paparazzi" — these tracks have titanic legacies for good reason. And although it's probably the least-beloved of this album's hits, despite being a total banger, "LoveGame" should still be commended for having arguably the most Gaga lyric ever (you know, the "disco stick" line).

And even though those tracks are front-loaded on The Fame, there are some gems deeper in the tracklist. "Summerboy" is basically Gwen Stefani covering The Strokes (so obviously, it's great). "Eh, Eh" is adorable. "Starstruck" is the most 2008 song ever recorded, with aggressive Auto-Tune and Flo Rida showing up to make Starbucks jokes.

Sadly, The Fame still feels like Gaga before she became fully-formed at certain points. The back half has a number of songs that feel like generic club tracks forced by the label, and "Paper Gangsta" is one of the clunkiest songs in Gaga's catalogue.

But at the very least, the bad songs on The Fame at least serve as little nostalgia bombs for that era of pop. And the best songs are untouchable classics.

BEST SONGS: "Paparazzi," "Just Dance," "Summerboy"

WORST SONG: "Paper Gangsta"

#3: ARTPOP (2013)

For much of Gaga's career, she's been ahead of the curve. She tries something, and a year or a few years later, other popstars try something similar to diminishing results.

That doesn't just apply to the successful stuff, like Gaga's extravagant music videos inspiring many copycats from 2010-2013. It also applies to the mid-late '10s trend of legacy popstars making a controversial record with risky aesthetic or lyrical choices that backfired: reputation. Witness. Man of The Woods.

Gaga did this first, with ARTPOP — arguably the most abrasive, and bizzare major label album released by a major modern popstar. And she did it better, because unlike Swift, Perry and Timberlake, Gaga's weirdness was for real. And it was in service of some prime, hyper-aggressive bangers.

ARTPOP isn't Gaga's best work — some of her experiments on it are major misfires, from the obnoxious "Mary Jane Holland" to the bland Born This Way leftover (and Romani slur-utilizing) "Gypsy."

But when ARTPOP is on, it's ON. The opening stretch in particular, from "Aura" to "Venus" to "G.U.Y." to "Sexxx Dreams," is chaotic synthpop at its finest. Those songs took Gaga's classic sound to an apocalyptic, demented extreme, and they're fantastic.

"MANiCURE" is a great glam-rock banger, "Dope" is another classic Gaga piano ballad, the title track is some sikly-smooth dreampop; even the misguided, clunky trap anthem "Jewels N' Drugs" is bad in a hilarious, charming way!

Trust me: ARTPOP will go down in history not as a flop, but as a gutsy, underrated record from a legend. Less Witness, more In Utero.

BEST SONGS: "G.U.Y.," "Venus," "Sexxx Dreams"

WORST SONG: "Gypsy"

#2: The Fame Monster (2009)

Objectively speaking, this is probably the best Gaga album.

It's her one record with no fluff, no filler — only 34 minutes and 8 tracks, all of them stellar.

It's the record that took Gaga from "wow, this new woman is a fresh new face in pop!" to "this woman IS pop."

It's the record with her signature track, "Bad Romance," which was accompanied by arguably the greatest music video of the 21st Century. (It also has my absolute favorite Gaga track, the relentlessly catchy "Telephone.")

I don't think I need to explain what makes mega-smashes "Bad Romance" and "Telephone" and "Alejandro" great, nor the accompanying legendary deep cuts "Speechless" and "Dance In The Dark." They speak for themselves.

However — the sleek, calculated perfection of The Fame Monster, while incredible, isn't something I return to often. It's just not the side of Gaga that's my favorite. That honor would have to go to...

BEST SONGS: "Telephone," "Dance In The Dark," "Bad Romance"

WORST SONG: "So Happy I Could Die" (but it's still pretty solid)

#1: Born This Way (2011)

One of my favorite podcasts is Blank Check. The concept of the show is to analyze each movie by a famous director — in particular, those who had big success early on and then got a blank check to make whatever crazy passion project they wanted. Here's a great example: because Batman was a massive hit, Tim Burton got to make whatever Hot Topic-core movies he wanted to for decades, from Edward Scissorhands to a creepy Willy Wonka remake.

That long-winded tangent is just to say: Born This Way was Lady Gaga's blank check. By early 2011, she had conquered the pop universe, notching hit after hit after hit. Every other pop star was copying her quirky music videos. So the label let Gaga do whatever she wanted — and she didn't waste that opportunity.

Born This Way is wildly overproduced. It's both extremely trend-chasing (those synths were cutting edge at the time but charmingly dated now), but also deeply uncaring about what the teens want (I don't think Springsteen and Queen homages were big at the time). And I love every messy, overblown second of it.

From the hair-metal/synthpop hybrid opener "Marry The Night" to the majestic '80s power ballad "The Edge of Glory," Born This Way starts at an 11. And Gaga never takes her foot off the pedal for the album's entire hour-plus run time. Clanging electric guitars, thunderous synths and Clarence Clemons (!!!) sax solos collide into each other as Gaga champions every misfit and loser in the world. It's gloriously corny in the best way possible.

Born This Way is also the perfect middle ground of pop-savvy Gaga and gonzo Gaga. It doesn't go quite as hard as ARTPOP, but the hooks are stronger. And the oddball moments are tons of fun, from the sci-fi biker anthem "Highway Unicorn" to the goofy presidential-sex banger "Government Hooker" ("Put your hands on me/John F. Kennedy" might be the greatest line in pop history).

Born This Way will always be my favorite Gaga album. It's armed with nuclear-grade hooks, slamming beats, and soaring anthems. Although it's not as untouchably pristine as the Mt. Rushmore of '10s pop classics (for the record, that's 1989, EMOTION, Lemonade and, of course, Melodrama), Gaga isn't best served by meticulousness. She's proudly tacky and histrionic, and so that's what makes Born This Way an utter joy.

BEST SONGS: "The Edge of Glory," "You and I," "Marry The Night"

WORST SONG: "Bloody Mary"

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radramblog · 3 years

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Album Discussion: The Suburbs

Last week I felt like I didn’t have much time to pump an album review out. Was going to be in the lab all day, had work in the night, wanted to cover something quick. Then I finished really early, and had plenty of time in the afternoon to finish things off. This week I am in the same situation as far as scheduling, but someone’s bloody using equipment I need, so I’ve got a bit of extra time now. Time to talk about a >1hr 16 track record!

Also last week, I covered an album that I felt was more interesting from a meta level than it is musically. This week I’m talking about an album that I know nothing of the meta for.

The Suburbs I was reminded of recently. Mostly because I ran into the person who bought me the CD for the first time in like a year. I understand Arcade Fire have A Reputation as far as bands go, but the thing is: I have no idea what it is. I haven’t followed them at all, I don’t know whether they’re considered good or not, I haven’t even seen any of the music videos. I have never deliberately listened to an Arcade Fire song outside of this album.

But I do like this album. So.

Okay the one thing I do know is what the album is about. It’s about growing up in the suburbs of…I think Texas somewhere. I could look this up, but I refuse. The result of this is that the whole thing is intensely nostalgic, full of reminiscence and wistfulness, childhood innocence and what growing up is like. It’s one of those, you know? That does, however, make it fairly easy to like, because I think a lot of people are nostalgic for their childhoods.

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(yeah so the only music videos for this one are at the very start and very end. this is going to be a bit of a wall of words.)

This is characterised by the opening track, which is also the album’s title track: The Suburbs. It’s opening with a very folksy acoustic guitar and piano, and longing for that childhood is its modus operandi. It is, however, tinged by the anxieties of that era- growing up in the shadow of the cold war is going to leave an impact on anyone, and that cultural climate is also going to be running through the album. I think the most poignant section of the song lyrically is the start of the third verse- wishing to become a parent, so they can live vicariously through their child, show them their childhood world before the reality and the memory are completely lost. Okay that’s kinda heavy moving on- the track is pretty much built around that piano/acoustic bit, sounding relatively upbeat but coloured by these lonesome strings running through the background. It’s very effective of conveying the feeling- which is something that comes up quite a bit over the course of the album. The Suburbs is one of my favourite tracks on this album, and having it come right at the front makes it a very solid stage-setter.

Track two is Ready to Start, a faster, rockier track with this grimy bassline running through the verses contrasting the relatively bright instrumentation of the chorus. Considering the themes of the song, about working for the man, dude, and trying to escape that sort of life, it’s fairly fitting, though it’s a very different sort of nostalgia than the previous track. The instrumentation gives the whole thing this sense urgency, which is enhanced by some of the lyrics- I mean the track is called Ready to Start, isn’t it. I feel like this song would be great to try and hype yourself up for something you don’t really want to do, and I’m not sure how many songs we have specifically for that feeling.

Our next song is called Modern Man, and it feels like tumbling through a confusing life. God, I’m really getting pensive today. I feel like this is a lot because this album resonates a lot more emotionally for me than musically. I’m someone with a very weird sense of nostalgia, seeing as my childhood is pretty effectively defined into three segments, and I tend to fixate on one of them because it’s The Weird One. I’m nostalgic for high school which is when I was nostalgic for living abroad which is when I was nostalgic for when I still lived in Perth, which I do now, but I don’t know anyone from back then, so there’s a whole sense of longing, and it’s something I’ve always had, and that’s funky. And I’m still young, this isn’t going to change, it’s going to get worse, and eghhhh I’m supposed to be talking about music. I don’t really have much to say about Modern Man, I guess. It’s aight, the previous two were better, but here I am 800 words into an album discussion, and I’ve gone through all of 3 songs on a 16 track album, so maybe expect this to be a slog.

Rococo at least makes an impact real quick, with fuckin psychotic strings right at the start that’s kind of a shock to the system, especially compared to the relatively mild instrumentation the rest of the song provides. I think that’s a fairly appropriate tone for a song about looking at #thecoolkids, bemusement tinged with utter stark bewilderment. I think I’m too young to really get this, I guess. The song’s title regards an art movement that sounds extremely pretentious and fake deep, frankly, but considering the point of the song is that you don’t bloody know what Rococo means, that’s probably also fitting. I kinda wish the strings were more present throughout the song than they were, they add this existential dread to the track that I do think the later sections are missing somewhat.

Speaking of strings, Empty Room is up next, and it’s one of my favourite tracks as well. It opens with the strings but they’re fast and energetic and they’re going to blow right past you. I thought this track was in like the second half of the album, but nope, here it is. This is also where the album’s second vocalist takes the lead for a bit (she only does for like 3 scattered tracks) and she’s genuinely great here. The songs chugs like an old train, in a way that reminds me a lot of other songs; in particular, the bit between the chorus and second verse (and chorus/outro) reminds me a lot of Teach me About Dying by Holy Holy- I can’t unhear “teach me about dying, teach me about dying-dying” over that instrumental. Despite its desolate lyricism, this song’s energy is genuinely excellent, and it carries really well through the whole thing. I can’t think of a lot of songs that start on this sort of tempo and have it run the whole way through- not to keep referencing other songs, but it’s very Go with the Flow by Queens of the Stone Age. And that’s like in the top 3 QotSA songs for me, so.

It’s only just struck me how much track 6, City With no Children, reminds me of There There by Radiohead. Its mostly the percussion, I think. That’s fucking high praise, but it’s also about as far as the comparison goes. The song is pretty okay outside of that, this theme of a town left lifeless by the commercialism and capitalism of the ultra-rich and what that does to people. Maybe that’s just my reading of it, I do have a bias for this sort of thing, but I challenge you to find another one. Looking on Genius is cheating. I do like the riff the track is built around, but it gets old eventually, since it doesn’t develop at all as the track progresses- lost potential, I suppose.

The next song is the first part of the album’s first of two two-parters, Half Light I, because apparently this one is trying to be a long-running drama show now. With that said, this ballad is kinda gorgeous, and yet also kinda extremely boring? Which is a frustrating place to be, frankly. I get the feeling this is an opinion that would get me crucified, but aside from those strings what fuck, the song just isn’t doing anything for me. Maybe it’s because it’s kinda almost the halfway point and I’m just getting tired, maybe it’s just a generational and cultural divide between America/Australia and 90s-00s/00s-10s and I don’t Get It. But I’m afraid to say this one doesn’t land.

Half Light II (No Celebration), for the record, is one I enjoy much more. The instrumentation is a lot more fun, the tone is a lot more pained (and y’all know I love me some angst), as the rose-tinted lenses of the previous half are replaced by the jade of someone growing up through the GFC (and just, in general). Despite being a two-part song, the halves are very different, a deliberate dichotomy representing two facets of that same look backwards. I feel like this isn’t like other two-part songs I’ve heard before, in that you can kinda appreciate the halves separately- or, in my case, one and not the other.

Track 9, and welcome more officially to the Second Half, with Suburban War. It’s very much about reminiscing about old friends, and I think I’m going to wax personal for a bit, because I have very little to say about the song musically. I mentioned earlier that I basically don’t know anyone from back when I was a kid, and that’s kind of a product of what my childhood looked like. It’s hard to have a “childhood friend” that you still keep up with when you spend 5 extremely crucial, defining years somewhere away from where all of them are. When you leave at 7 years old and don’t come back until you’re almost a teenager. People change so quickly at that age, and I’m no exception, and so I just didn’t have the ability to relate to those same people that long afterwards, even if I could find them. I don’t resent the experience of growing up in such a fractured manner, but it means I have a fundamentally different experience to that discussed in this album. At the same time, as I listen to the closing moments of this song, with the line repeated, “All my old friends, they don’t know me now”, I can’t help but notice the similarity. The writer’s friends don’t know them because they’ve grown up, changed fundamentally as people, whereas I don’t know my old friends in a much more literal sense.

Our next song is a bit more fun. Month of May is unequivocally a rock song, as opposed to the..indie? folk? of most of its surrounds. Much like Empty Room, it’s driven by its tempo and instrumentation, but it’s a bit less dour than that one, almost a bit oldie in its rock and roll swagger. The song isn’t so utterly different that it wouldn’t fit on the album, the traces of The Suburbs still roll through the whole thing, the same guitar and percussion tones driven up a couple notches on the ol’ Mohs scale. Quite solid, ultimately, in my opinion.

Track 11 is Wasted Hours. I think it’s a kind of appropriate title, not because it’s a waste of time, but because it just kinda feels like a nothing song as part of the album. Like, it is unquestionably Part Of The Album, sonically and thematically, but I deadass would not notice if it was missing from the record. Sorry if this one is your favourite, but this one isn’t for me.

Deep Blue, on the other hand, is the song that got me into the album. There’s really something about this track, this sense of discomfort with the passage of time, that really wormed its way into me. It’s a shockingly cold song for this acoustic instrumentation that’s usually associated with quite the opposite. The piano feels desperate, the guitars grim, and there’s actual synths hiding in here- the song relates to technology, after all. It’s concern for the future of humanity, of the youth, and for, well, the Suburbs, through the lens of watching that match between chess Grandmaster Kasparov and the A.I. Deep Blue in 1996. Go watch the Down the Rabbit Hole on that if you haven’t already (and have a few hours), by the way, it’s utterly excellent.

I can’t really describe how Deep Blue makes me feel. There’s just something about it. I feel like if I hear this song again in 10 years, it would genuinely bring me to tears- it feels like loss in a way, and not the meme.

We Used to Wait has a fun instrumentation, glittery piano and that funky guitar noodling in the background, but unfortunately the chorus kinda lets it down for me. I just do not care for it, it’s really built on a vocal line that really doesn’t track for me personally. Like, I’m just young enough that a lot of the theme of the track is utterly unrelatable to me- I hail from an era that is post- the change the track is referring to. I’m focussing a lot this time around about how the songs make me feel personally, but I think that’s kind of the appropriate tack for this album in particular- like the idea of nostalgic reminiscence is so inexorably tied to your own personal experiences that there’s no way around those experiences clouding your perception of this album, and with that, how well you end up liking it. I bet this whole thing hits way harder for someone born in the same couple years as this band.

We’re up to the second two-parter, Sprawl I (Flatland), kind of the finale for the whole thing. I mean, in I’s case, it’s certainly that emotionally. The song is so utterly down, it’s lost in the urban sprawl the title and lyrics describe, and with that comes a very quiet track. Moody strings and guitar, that eventually build during the fourth verse (there is no chorus and they’re short). It does eventually resolve on a more positive note, at least, one that’s hopefully relatable to many of us- eventually, we find our emotional home is, and it’s often not where we grew up.

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Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains) is quite the different perspective. It’s got that other lead vocalist (I could look up her name but I won’t), it’s got a pulsing beat, and it has much more energy to work with. There are synths on this track that are absent from almost the entire rest of the album, but their introduction here, right at the end, is extremely cool. They’re cool, they’re clear, and they’re thematically relevant! I just really like the vibe of this track, and the way it trails off is similarly very good. Would recommend.

But of course there is one final track. Kind of. The Suburbs (continued) is basically a dark reprise of the album’s opener, shaded with more regret than that track is, more strings-y and whispered. It’s very short, but it acts as an appropriate closer for the whole thing.

And of course, that’s The Suburbs. In retrospect, I have a bit more mixed thoughts about this than I thought. There’s some really high highs, and some things that are just kind of bleh, but any album of this length is bound to have some misses. While I was browsing Genius to make sure I had the lyrics right for some tracks, I saw this record described as a Masterpiece, but I’m not sure that shoe fits- at least, not for me. The personal nature of this album, and anyone’s theoretical relationship with it, are such that I don’t think it can be given such a broad, universal title. I like the album as a whole quite a bit, but I personally wouldn’t call it a masterpiece.

It also doesn’t inspire me to go after more Arcade Fire. I’m actually perfectly content having them in my mind as this solitary piece, complete in its own way. Oh, they have like four other albums, but to me, Arcade Fire is The Suburbs. I don’t know why I’ve decided this, but it just works for me. So I’m sorry to any massive AF fans, but I did just dedicated 2.7k words to this album, so I’m sure you’re all satisfied.

God, next time I am going to have to cover something shorter, for my own sanity if nothing else.

#ramble #music #arcade fire #the suburbs #indie

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warsofasoiaf · 4 years

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What is your opinion of KOTOR 2? Favorite things about it, least favorite things about it, characters, etc.

Alright, it’s time for another video game review, so an early reminder, spoilers abound for both KOTOR1 and KOTOR2. There’s a cut of course. Overall, I thought it was a phenomenally well-written game and one of the greatest pieces of media to exist in the Stars Wars universe (although I haven’t read any of the Expanded Universe books so keep that in mind), and as is the usual case for Obsidian particularly in this era, developer constraints created a beautiful mess.

Before we can talk about KOTOR we need to talk a little bit about Star Wars and what it meant as a film. The original Star Wars isn’t a very creative story, it’s largely a conventional Hero’s Journey. It’s a pastiche of early adventure stories in a science fiction setting, but with the added benefit of video and sound effects to really make it come to life in a way that was only possible in the imagination of readers. This gave the series a wide deal of appeal. Folks who grew up on the 1950′s Flash Gordon serials or WW2 dogfight films could see a film with those things they loved from their childhood with a high budget to bring those things to life. Science fiction fans could visually see elements of their favorite books brought to life on the silver screen. Fans of movies can appreciate the cutting-edge (for the time, although I love me some practical effects in film) effects and the unfamiliar elements of science fiction with the familiar trappings of an adventure tale.

KOTOR was something similar for the video game industry, particularly for the fans of Baldur’s Gate. The ability to create a Jedi character and go on a journey like the Bhaalspawn did in Baldur’s Gate was something that appealed to a significant number of RPG fans, and the critical success of the Baldur’s Gate series brought a lot of money and prestige to Bioware. Fans of RPGs and Star Wars got to see their medium and interact with it in a whole new light. Much like A New Hope, KOTOR1 was largely a traditional story where Darth Malak is an evil guy without much in the way of redemptive qualities. The two major wrinkles were that you could play as a Sith and have some moments of true player cruelty like ordering Zaalbar to kill Mission, but this makes sense for an RPG, having no player choice in a game really makes you lose the lightside/darkside dynamic. Of course, the bigger and more interesting drift from a traditional Star Wars story was the Revan twist. This took advantage of both the slower pace of games to spend time with your PC and form a connection, and the nature of Western RPG’s where the player envisions themselves partially as their avatar onscreen to make the reveal hit home. Ultimately though, the Star Wars morality was upheld. The Jedi were the unequivocal good guys, the Sith were the unequivocal bad guys.

KOTOR2 decided to put the Force under the microscope. It had started in 2003, so Episode II had already come out, and this idea of the prophecy of Anakin bringing balance to the Force, and what we knew of the Jedi in the original Star Wars trilogy who were reduced to hermits hiding on the fringes of society, really gave the impetus to examine this idea of the balance of the Force as not necessarily benevolent. It’s not evil, per say, it’s just indifferent to the people that die to make it happen. So the game became a self-critical examination of the core structures of the Star Wars universe. The Sith are usually thought of as the bad guys, and a lot of that holds true, domination, subjugation, power, betrayal, all that nasty stuff aren’t really conducive to most conceptions of goodness, but are the Jedi good? Does their passivity lead to injustice and terror being wrought on others because the Jedi failed to act. That was the question behind the Jedi involvement in the Mandalorian Wars, was the Exile correct in going off to fight them or were the Jedi Council who forbade them correct? As befits the folks who wrote Planescape: Torment, the game has two journeys, one through the game world and the plot that unfolds and another more deeply introspective.

I’ll put the things I don’t like about KOTOR2 first because the list is small but it is worth noting. The game is very clearly a rushed product and it shows. The cut content shows a great deal of lost potential, and the bugs could make the game at times completely unplayable. The game suffered from the accelerated development, having barely half the development time, and you can see where the seams show. The UI is clunky and gets cluttered when you have to manage items. Level design is similarly a nuisance, as they are big sprawling expanses without a lot of content in them. Part of that is a necessity to the mechanics, smaller levels would have other encounter designs being agro’d into it, but the levels are still expansive, empty, and a slog to get through. The Peragus mining facility is too large by half, and there’s a lot of backtracking in these levels. Since side quests encourage finding a doodad or killing a few key figures scattered around a map, that means a lot of trekking through these big levels to find one particular item or enemy locked in a corner somewhere. That can be very tedious, particularly on repeat playthroughs. At times, it feels like legging your way through a swamp to get to the next piece of delicious content.

Which is a good segue into talking what I like about the game, because its writing and characters are superb. The character companions are twists of classic Star Wars archetypes. Atton is the scoundrel Han Solo non-Force user type, but ends up having a disturbingly dark backstory where he was a Sith interrogator and feared his own Force-sensitive nature. Bao-Dur is a man haunted by the weapon of mass destruction he created, a tech-head who ends up hating his most momentous creation but feels the need to use it yet again. Canderous has become the new Mandalore and is desperately trying to revitalize his dying culture because he’s been so broken by Revan’s departure. The Wookie life-debt is so toxic that it breaks Hanharr and Mira in their own ways. Visas is a Sith whose will is shattered. Each of these characters are fundamentally broken (save for the droids, unless you count the physical need to reassemble HK-47 as broken), and the Exile draws them to him or her. Through discovering more about them and resolving it, the Exile awakens the characters’ connection to the Force, oddly ironic since the Exile is cut off from the Force and is only rediscovering it. Like most Bioware RPG’s, you the player through your character guide the growth of these characters and form a relationship with them, or use them for your own ends.

Kreia, of course, deserves her own paragraph. Kreia is the Star Wars Ravel Puzzlewell, an embittered woman who wants to destroy the cosmic chains of the universe and loves the player character in a deeply obsessive way, one that’s played completely straight in how it makes the player uncomfortable. She is deeply resentful of the Force and wants to destroy it, and through the Exile, who managed to cut themselves off so utterly completely in a unique way, she sees the path. Of course, the reason why the Exile cut themselves off was the mass death at Malachor V was so overwhelming that he or she would have otherwise died. Of course, her obsession and overriding mission cares little for the Exile’s own pain, and so the manipulations begin, using you to lure out and destroy the Jedi and the Sith, and in the end, you disappoint her, either because you don’t learn her lessons or she discovers that the only reason you were the way you were was because you were afraid. She still is obsessed over you, though, and so when you finally confront her, she obliges that affection to explain everything, unusually honest for a woman whose Sith name is evocative of the word betrayal. And fortunately, she allows something that most monologue villains don’t allow, a means by which to tell her she’s full of shit. Certainly, it’s a little weaker coming from her as an option to you rather than the player character saying it themselves, but I think it’s stronger, since so much of the ending had to be cut anyway it reinforces the ambiguity of it, that the ending is what you believe. Personal belief has always been important for the Exile and Kreia/Traya, and letting that transfer to the player is, while perhaps not the most ideal, completely valid given how rushed the development was.

The other Sith Lords are fascinating concepts of evil and personal belief as well as well, and really show the Dark Side of the force in a parasitic, corrupt sense and the horrible ends of taking belief to its extreme. Darth Sion is the Lord of Pain. He cannot die but he feels pain constantly, making eternal life not a blessing but a torture, though in it he found a twisted source of enlightenment. His pain fuels his anger and hatred (key ingredients of the Dark Side) and so he persists solely through the Dark Side. Darth Nihilus, on the other hand, had his body obliterated by the Mass Shadow Generator, and so persisted as a wound in the Force, consuming Force energy to feed his relentless hunger. He is not a human anymore but a force of endless consumption that cannot be satiated, this hunger pain pushes him past his own mortal existence but which can only consume, not live. This perfectly illustrates the Dark Side concept of pursuit of power even past the point of sustainability, for Nihilus will continue consuming until all existence has been eaten.

The game is dark and moody, as you explore a shattered galaxy. In the original game, the search led to the Star Forge and the revelation that you the player was Revan. The sequel shows that there was no grand conspiracy; the act of Malachor built Nihilus and Sion and the player themselves was something that you did. It was not a conspiracy of Jedi but rather the after-effects of a particular action, much the way Lonesome Road had the Courier’s delivery of the package to Hopeville to be something that destroyed Ulysses even though you never met him. The Mass Shadow Generator was meant to save the galaxy from the Mandalorians but birthed a new, more powerful tragedy. Bao-Dur even wonders if the subjugation of the people under the Mandalorians was better than the power of the Mass Shadow Generator, a powerful moment ordered by just a mere single Jedi, built by a mere tech specialist. In true Planescape fashion, a personal apocalypse is a galactic apocalypse and vice-versa. Torment lingers over this game, in the broken characters, in a parallel journey both outward and inward. In many ways KOTOR2 was Planescape: Torment in the Star Wars universe, albeit with its own personal flair.

Alright, that’s a good review. I can do character analyses of some of the major characters if you want.

Thanks for the question, Messanger.

#star wars #knights of the old republic 2 #video game reviews

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theclaravoyant · 4 years

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AN ~ At long last; a *very* belated Roaring Twenties Rarepair Exchange gift for the amazing @bobbimorseisbisexual (lazyfish), who prompted “Scis & Spies + Regency AU".

This fic was inspired by the show Gentleman Jack, which is technically set in the Georgian era but it's pretty close! It’s also the longest thing I’ve written in like a year, and my first ever S&S fic! Though it may not be apparent from the appalling lateness, I had a great time writing this; I hope you enjoy it too <3

Rated T. Mostly fluffy. Relationships: Scis & Spies (Bobbi x Simmons x Fitz x Hunter, polyamory)

Read on AO3 (3800wd)

The Jacks and the Gentlemen

Barbara Elizabeth Morse was a woman of a peculiar kind. She always had been.

Ever since she had developed the capacity to loathe things, for example, Barbara had loathed her name; in particular, the foremost. But the fact that she insisted on being addressed as “Bobbi” instead was merely the first in a long line of deviations she took from the expected norm of her assigned sex so that by young adulthood, she had permanently marked herself as quite the oddity.

Growing up, Bobbi had no interest in the banal niceties expected of a woman of her station, and less than none in frills and petticoats or tending house. Even learning the arts and languages and traipsing around her family’s estate on horseback became dull and boring after a time. What was the point after all, Bobbi reasoned, of broadening one’s horizons if one was only permitted to gaze at them from the safety and mundanity of one’s lace-curtained bedroom window? What was the point of developing a sharp mind if it was allowed only to consume and perform as it had been told? It was a gilded cage to be sure, but a cage nonetheless, and so Bobbi dedicated much of her life to spreading her wings and flying free of it.

To this end – and despite much protest from her hand-wringing family - Bobbi left the comforting cloister of her estate and travelled the world; whereupon she discovered and indulged in many a fascination that had been denied her for so much of her young life. She experimented with tailored coats and hats, trousers, cravats… She studied science and medicine, biology, strategy… She delighted in romantic challenge and chase and left many a heart broken in her wake. She was even married for a time, to a disgruntled British naval officer, but it didn’t stick. Few things did as, quite the opposite of bored, Bobbi became rather restless; all but consumed by the need to discover what the world held in store for her.

When came the news that she had to return home, it was devastating. Without the benefit of hindsight, it hardly seemed to Bobbi that there could be a new and equally enticing journey about to begin. Yet, she had never been one to be cowed by things not going her way, and so she held her head high – a little too high, perhaps, when she insisted upon driving the carriage home herself; fearing, not that she would admit it, that her recently-returned nightmares of the carriage walls closing in around her would finally come true.

Bobbi endured the talk of her home town with as much dignity as she could muster – and as both a woman of high class and exceeding stoicism, that amount was not insignificant. Still, she could not entirely pretend, to herself at least, that it did not bother her; the way they all seemed to talk about her as though she was the small one, the poorly achieving one, having done nothing with her life but travel and dabble in knowledge after knowledge. Even the ones she thought might understand seemed to be hopeful that her return was a sign she was ready to settle down, and the more times this was insinuated, the more Bobbi wanted to cut off her own hair, denounce all civilisation, and steal away into the night. She had the skills and the courage to do it now. The only thing stopping her was the need to rebuild her estate before her family’s finances collapsed entirely and left a few dozen good people out of work and home.

… Although, if she were being completely honest, it did not hurt matters that she had also been invited for tea with the newest and most curious of her neighbours, one Miss Jemma Anne Simmons.

Miss Simmons was a pretty young woman, but her arrival was making a splash in the papers as much for her scientific mind as for her elusive inventor fiancé, and her appearance of apparently Shakespearean beauty. So, as much as Bobbi had been weighed down by tired social occasion after tired social occasion with the socialites that flittered through town on the ever-changing wealth of this new age of industrialisation, she had a feeling in her gut that this one was going to be different.

That feeling certainly was not nerves, Bobbi insisted to herself as she stepped over the threshold of the Fitz-Simmons house – and then again, as she was announced and ushered into the parlour, to find Jemma in all the resplendent glory the papers had promised. The woman seemed delicate, refined, and delightfully feminine in all the ways Bobbi knew she herself was not and Bobbi – who had always been a rather brash sort – felt herself oddly humbled by Jemma’s smile.

“Good afternoon,” Jemma greeted, “it’s Barbara, isn’t it?”

Bobbi couldn’t help but cringe. “Please,” she requested, “call me Bobbi.”

“Oh yes, of course. My apologies.” Jemma curtsied a little – and was that a blush? “It’s lovely to have you, Bobbi. Would you care for some tea? Of if you would prefer, I can send for coffee…”

She reached for the bell, but Bobbi raised a hand to stop her.

“Tea would be wonderful,” she agreed. “Young Hyson, if you have it - black, with no sugar. Thank you.”

“Of course.” Jemma nodded, and began to pour. And yes, that was definitely a blush. Bobbi was even feeling a whisper of her own as Jemma added – as if she was trying to hide how desperately she wished Bobbi to acquiesce –

“I wonder if we might take tea outside this afternoon. I’ve been positively beleaguered with meetings today and I must see to my plants.”

A woman after her own heart. Bobbi smiled.

“Of course. We should stretch our legs after all.”

“Then it is decided.”

Bobbi’s heart dared to flutter in her chest as Jemma’s cautious hostess’ smile erupted into a beaming grin. The woman took hold of her skirts – revealing boots much like Bobbi’s own, rather than slippers that might have matched her otherwise refined ensemble – and took off out of the parlour door with great gusto. Finding herself drawn to follow, this time undeniably by more than her botanist’s interest alone, Bobbi strode after Jemma as best she could while reeling at her own spoonishness.

As they traipsed across the lawn, Bobbi marvelled in the delight Jemma seemed take at being out of doors, and drank in the prelude to the greenhouse – half snatched away by the wind though it was – with which the other woman was regaling her. Bobbi found herself entranced by Jemma’s spirited expression; the way she revelled in the trials and tribulations of seeking and transporting her large collection of exotics, unfazed even as the wind began to pull locks of her perfect hair from its arrangement and blow them unceremoniously into her face. And then –

“Oh, excuse me, Bobbi,” Jemma pleaded, and her expression narrowed into a scolding sort of glare. Bobbi followed the line of it and saw a ladder propped against the side of what appeared to be a disused chicken coop, and a figure hunched atop the rickety roof in an overcoat and goggles, fixing some contraption or other to the highest point of the pitch.

“Ho, Fitz!” Jemma hollered, as the figure lost hold of a tool and it fell to the dirt. He cursed.

“That’s Fitz?” Bobbi blurted. “Your Fitz?”

“You sound surprised,” Jemma noted.

“I meant no offence, it’s just – I’ve met quite a few of these entrepreneurial types and generally they’re rather… obnoxious.”

Jemma scoffed. “Oh, believe me: he’s plenty obnoxious.”

Resolute, she handed her cup of tea to Bobbi, hitched her skirt up a little higher with both hands and made a bee-line for the chicken coop, until she was close enough that her boots were in the muck.

“Fitz!” she called again.

“Yes, love?”

Fitz’s head jerked up at the call, and he saw her and Bobbi and apparently not the loose tile on which he had stepped. Before he could do any more than yelp in surprise, he had slipped and fallen flat on his back, coughing and spluttering and winded. His curls looked madder than ever as he lay there in resignation, and spat a soiled feather from his pouting mouth.

“Ugh, Fitz!” Jemma lamented. She locked an arm with her fiancé and hauled him out of the sludge. “I told you to wait until Mack could come down and help with all this.”

“Mack and I are building the mechanical milling machine,” Fitz corrected. “This is a sonic fox repellent. It’s just a prototype but – Oh, sorry. I’m Fitz, by the way. Leopold Fitz, technically, but please don’t call me that.”

“Barbara Morse, technically,” Bobbi greeted. “But please don’t call me that either. I prefer Bobbi. Sonic fox repellent, you say? Let me know if it works – I might have to purchase a couple for myself.”

“Well, uh, thank you, but um –“

“But Mack will be here any minute, dear,” Jemma interrupted, waving Fitz toward the house. “Go and clean up now. Go! Honestly.”

“Yes, dear.” Fitz rolled his eyes, but smiled at his fussing fiancé as he retreated toward the house. Jemma slogged the rest of the way to the chicken coop and retrieved the screwdriver he had dropped, setting it on a step of the nearby ladder in case he went looking for it later. Bobbi looked on with nought to do but hold the two teacups steady, and she was a little surprised to find that despite what perhaps should have been a heart-wrenching reality check - to discover that the most recent object of her affection was indeed happy with someone else - Bobbi felt nothing but delight. No jealousy, no despair. And, if anything, a redoubled sense of yearning.

“Sorry about him,” Jemma apologised as she returned to Bobbi’s side to fetch her tea. “He’s a lovely man, really, and very intelligent, but he’s not accustomed to being complimented by beautiful women.”

“Well, with you around you think he’d be used to it by now.”

Jemma laughed, and raised an eyebrow as she took a sip. “Careful, Ms. Morse, you’ll give a lady ideas.”

The delivery of it was coquettish, light-hearted, but still Bobbi couldn’t help feeling that she’d crossed a line. She thought of poor sweet Fitz, and her heart sunk.

“I- I’m sorry, Miss Simmons. I meant nothing of it. Just that… Mr Fitz is a very lucky man.”

Seeing that she had sent Bobbi skittering, Jemma hurried to backtrack so emphatically that she almost spilled her tea.

“Oh, please! No need to apologise, it is all in good spirit – It was I who misspoke without the proper context. You see, Bobbi – may I still call you Bobbi? – your reputation precedes you in this regard but perhaps mine does not. Oh, dear.” Flustered, Jemma paused to gather herself and suddenly wished very dearly for a side table on which to deposit the lukewarm, useless beverage in her hands. “You see, I have been known to uh, entertain the attentions of the fairer sex myself. Not only am I not in the slightest offended by your perfectly innocent compliment, but I- I’m afraid I must confess I’d rather hoped you were being flirtatious.”

Bobbi gaped. “But… Fitz? I couldn’t. You’re engaged. It’s- it would be-”

“Fitz and I have an understanding,” Jemma clarified. At least, she phrased it like it was a clarification, but Bobbi only stumbled deeper into her confusion. She’d only seen the pair interact for a few odd minutes and already the connection was clear.

“He doesn’t- He’s not in love with you?” That man? Are you sure? Perhaps she would have to rethink her own calibration for stoicism if he had managed to keep that a secret.

Jemma shook her head.

“I’m not explaining this right. It never comes out simply, does it?” She clicked her tongue, tutting to herself as if musing on a new location for a particular pot, and not resolving the several short circuits sparking off inside Bobbi’s mind right now. It seemed like hours before she finally began again to explain:

“Fitz and I have been friends for the longest time,” she said. “As we grew and discovered that each of us had rather taken to those of our own sex we thought, if we were to live and love as our true selves well then, why not make it a marriage of convenience? Of course, he went and fell in love with me, didn’t he – and I him, do not misunderstand me: by some very blessed coincidence, we are very much in love. But our arrangement still stands. Fitz would not take offence in the slightest if you and I were to… explore any possibilities that may… arise.”

“…Right.”

“I can see that you need some more time to process,” Jemma observed. “Well, if I haven’t scared you off entirely – let’s say no more of it, for now. Come. Let me show you the greenhouse.”

They said no more of it for the rest of the afternoon, and for several days after that. They wrote little notes back and forth, about tea and chickens and foxes and plants, and very much not about the other topic of the day. Jemma waited for Bobbi to broach it and Bobbi – despite thinking about the arrangement with increasing regularity as time went on – dared not. The exact reason for it eluded her; did she fear that perhaps she had misread something, and that Jemma had not in fact, meant what she had said after all? Did she fear being the other woman – as she had been asked and offered many a time by men and women alike who did not have such an arrangement with their partners? Or did she fear the opposite instead; that she had finally found someone as unusual and brilliant and queer in every way as she herself was? Perhaps even two someones?

No doubt, there was some combination of all three tangled up in this knot in her chest, but it was the latter that kept Bobbi going to her desk in the middle of the night, pulling out a pen and paper, and not… quite… putting… the words down.

Or putting them down, and crossing them out.

Or putting them down, and throwing them in the fire.

As she watched the pages curl and blacken, Bobbi could taste the bitter memory of the last time she’d found herself in such a position. She had few regrets in her life, but one of them was that day; the day she’d let (or rather, driven) her former husband’s last words to her fall into the fire. There had been a lot more anger involved that time around, she recalled, and no shortage of jabbing at sparks with the fire iron, to make sure she’d got every last bit. This time, it felt like a step in the wrong direction. Like she was waiting to release the breath she was holding, or for the knot in her chest to untie and it never would.

I fear I must, were the last words she could discern now, from the letter she had burnt. She reached for the poker with a tremor in her fingers, and gritted her teeth. One good jab, and it would all be over. Then again, there was a blank spot just there. She could save it, if she were careful – and quick, as the words were already shrinking before her eyes.

I fear I

I fear

Fear

And then they were gone. And her breath was still caught in her chest but she lifted her head. She may have burned her bridges with the Midshipman after all, but she could still remember that infuriatingly rakish daredevil smile of his.

“Come on, love,” he used to like challenging her. “A little fear is nothing to be afraid of.”

It was something that had always bound them; the rush of taking risks, the revelling in new horizons. It was every reason she had to have left her home in the first place; perhaps that was what had made their relationship last so long, despite the warning signs. And as Bobbi reflected upon this image of herself, kneeling at her hearth, clutching a fire poker with a shaking hand at some unearthly hour in the morning - and not for the first time at that - she had to laugh. This was exactly the reason Hunter had broken up with her and after all this time she had to admit, the limey was right: as much as she purported to be bold and confident, to love a challenge, she was a coward when it came to affairs of the heart.

But Bobbi was no fool. She knew regret, and she knew the value of a wasted opportunity. She had regretted leaving Hunter enough times in her life thus far; she dared not waste such an opportunity again.

So she stood, and reached for her coat. Never mind the nightgown, never mind ringing for Davis; Bobbi figured, she could tack a horse herself just as quickly and if she didn’t take action now the fear might just get the better of her. Perhaps the boots, though, rather than these flimsy slippers – yes, she should take the boots.

She pulled them on in a fluster, hopping in through the stable door, and tacked up in the dark as fast as her fingers remembered how. Of course, she could walk to the Fitzsimmons’ – they were only next door after all, just a little ways down the road - but it was far too late at night for that, and God forbid it would give her too much time to think.

Fortunately, Belle was fleet of foot and it was not long at all before she was clattering up the FitzSimmons’ driveway, her heart in her throat. There was a carriage she did not recognise in a nearby pen. Did they have a guest? Should she turn back? Belle whinnied low as if warning her, and Bobbi swallowed her fear once again. If she did turn back, no doubt she would find herself achingly alone by the fireplace for many more nights in her life, and as much as she treasured her independence, she didn’t want it to be like that. Not when it didn’t have to be.

Bobbi slid from the saddle, and as she tied Belle to a nearby post she spared a thought of gratitude that she had decided to wear boots for a little relief against the chilled and dewy cobblestones. With a deep breath, she approached the threshold, and knocked, and rang the bell.

Seconds passed, and though she counted them along their way they still somehow felt like minutes. Like hours. Bobbi watched every breath steam in front of her and after the third she closed her eyes and reluctantly wondered what it would be like to just give in to the dread, and forget the whole thing.

Just as she was on the knife’s edge of giving up, however, the door opened a crack.

It was Fitz, with his soft curls and his shirt loose and dishevelled, and upon recognising the figure who stood at his door, a rather bewildered expression.

“Jemma, dear,” he called, “I think- I think it’s for you.”

And so Jemma came to the door as well, and looked Bobbi up and down. A frown crossed her features, concerned and curious, as she ushered Bobbi inside.

“Are you alright?” she wondered. “I… hadn’t heard from you.”

“I know.” Bobbi bounced on the spot. With adrenaline keeping her blood pumping, she hadn’t realised it was quite so cold. “I know. It’s my fault. I meant to tell you so- so many things. I was flattered- I am flattered. Exceedingly so. I just…”

“It’s perfectly understandable,” Jemma assured her. “I should never have sprung something so… unconventional on you like that!”

“But being unconventional is why I like you.” It blurted out with no restraint, and Bobbi felt her heart warm when Jemma smiled. “And it’s not the- the arrangement itself that worries me. I suppose I thought you were mocking me; that you might not have been taking me seriously.”

“Bobbi.” Jemma looked her square in the eyes, and very deliberately reached out a hand to take hers. “We were very serious – and still are, if you’ll have us.”

Fitz nodded his agreement earnestly, and at last, Bobbi felt the knot in her chest begin to untie.

“Well then,“ she confessed, “I suppose my answer is yes.”

Jemma beamed, and clapped in delight.

“Wonderful!” she cried. “Won’t you come in for a drink to celebrate?”

“Certainly,” Bobbi agreed. The fear was fading much faster than she had anticipated, and she smiled at her companions with genuine warmth in her heart. “I would love a brandy, if you have it.”

“I’ll pour you a glass,” Fitz said, and scoffed. “If Hunter hasn’t taken the last drop.”

“If- who?”

Bobbi stammered, and let Jemma and Fitz usher her into the lounge without protest, with hardly a thought as she checked back over what she had heard. Surely it couldn’t be…

“Where’ve you been, lovelies?”

That voice, she knew it. The spinning, slightly drunken dance he was doing as he poured himself a glass. Even that scruffy beard, and the medallion of St Anthony that gleamed on a leather thong around his neck as he turned away from the fireplace and back toward the door - Bobbi couldn’t see it from this far away but she knew, she knew that’s what it was.

Apparently, he knew her just as quickly too, as he froze mid-dance and mid-pour and stared. Not too long ago, he would have made a snide comment to try and to get a rise out of her – speak of the devil? she could imagine he would say - and a rise she would gladly have given him. But this time he simply… stared.

“Uh…” Fitz wondered from the sidelines. “Do you two know each other?”

Jemma elbowed him, and hissed for him to hush, but it barely registered to Bobbi. She was too busy watching Hunter, waiting for him to burst the bubble of nostalgia and rose-coloured glasses she had no doubt shaded him with. Any second now.

Instead, he smiled, and held the last glass of the brandy out to her.

“It’s good to see you, Bob,” he said.

“It’s good to see you too.”

#aosfic #scis & spies #agents of shield #aosficnet #roaring 20s rarepair exchange #marvel #polyamory #clara's fic tag

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markoftheasphodel · 5 years

Text

Unfulfilled Dream: An Introduction to Finn and House Leonster

This is intended to assist fans of Three Houses, and specifically Blue Lions fans, in understanding what the hell FE old-timers are talking about when the names “Quan,” “Finn,” and “Leif” come up with regard to Dimitri and his retainers (and Dimitri/Dedue in particular). You may have encountered these characters in FE Heroes, but there’s a lot more stuff out there and it’s not all in one place, or even readily available in translation. So here goes.

So, as a starting point, Azure Moon route of Three Houses is heavily influenced by Thracia 776 (aka FE5) and the more familiar you are with FE5, the more evident the parallels/echoes are. But going backward from Azure Moon to its inspiration, or to Genealogy of the Holy War (FE4) which served as an inspiration for Three Houses itself, can be really confusing.

We have the two games, FE4 and FE5, both of them for the SNES, neither of them ever given a worldwide release. Both have modern, very good patches so if you want to play them, it’s a much better user experience than it used to be. We have two artbooks, Treasure for FE4 and Illustrated Works for FE5, both of them only partially translated via websites and translation blogs. We have developer notes and interviews. We have the appearances of these characters as Einherjar in Awakening. We have their modern appearances in Fire Emblem Heroes. We have the modern run of Cipher cards as well as much older TCG cards. And finally, we have various manga and light novels, many of which have been fan-translated of late but also rather... dubious as “game canon.”

So, to grasp Quan, or Finn, or Leif, it’s a bit like being told “read 100 support conversations plus some DLC that never got translated,” right?

Here are the basics that might be of interest to Three Houses fans!

Quan is the prince of Leonster, a small but wealthy kingdom on the Thracian Peninsula, which juts eastward from the continent of Jugdral. He carries the Major Holy Blood (so, kind of like a Major Crest) of Njörun, one of the Twelve Crusaders who liberated Jugdral from an evil cult several generations before. His holy weapon is Gae Bolg, aka The Lance of Love and Sorrow, reputed to be cursed. Quan generally at war with his neighbor to the south, King Travant of Thracia (a poor nation), who also has Major Holy Blood and is a descendant of Dáinn, Njörun’s brother. Each of them wants to unite the Thracian peninsula and rule over the whole thing; despite an Irish naming scheme, Leonster was inspired by Italy and is supposed to be an elegant, fashionable place with a thriving middle class. Quan attended a fancy military academy in the center of the continent (the direct inspiration for Garreg Mach!) and has two close friends from other nations, Eldigan and Sigurd, also heirs to holy bloodlines. The three of them swear an oath to always have each others’ backs and Quan marries Sigurd’s sister Ethlyn, who has minor holy blood (like a minor crest but with no holy weapon access). They have two children, Altena and Leif.

Finn starts off as Quan’s page. I say “starts off” because FE4 and FE5 follow him over the course of twenty years. He’s the child of a noble house in Leonster, and when he was orphaned he was sent to the castle to be raised/educated. He’s not skilled at making friends but he does become Quan’s page and grows to think of Ethlyn as a big sister of sorts. When Quan and Ethlyn go to war across the continent to assist Sigurd, Finn wants to come along and they take him, even though he’s maybe fifteen and barely old enough to fight. Quan mentors Finn (which is something we see in FE4 itself), building his confidence up, telling Finn he’s the most promising knight of his generation, bequeathing Finn a special lance of his own, and ultimately entrusting Finn with guardianship of Quan’s son and heir, Leif. Finn in turn becomes utterly devoted to Quan and to Quan’s ambition of ruling all of Thracia.

A word about devotion. This is not “devotion” in the sense we’ve seen from Frederick or Jakob in recent FE games, where it’s performative and kind of amusing, with complicated tea rituals and recruiting slogans and whatnot. This is straight-up utter acceptance of someone else’s dreams and ambition as one’s own purpose in life. Hold that thought.

Anyway, Quan and Ethlyn are ambushed and killed by Travant shortly after Leif is born; every knight in their party is massacred in the Yied Desert. The rest of the continent is falling under the sway of the Grannvale Empire (Eldigan’s already dead, Sigurd dies shortly after Quan&Ethlyn), and Leonster is able to hold out for a couple of years before it falls to a one/two attack by Travant’s Thracian army and the Grannvale Empire. Finn, who’s been caring for Leif as his guard, escapes from the burning castle with Leif in his arms (Leif’s grandmother Queen Alfiona dies in the blaze; his grandfather King Kalf died shortly before on the battlefield, betrayed by allies).

The Yied Massacre and the Fall of Leonster are the Jugdrali psychological horror-show that parallel the Tragedy of Duscur’s impact on House Blaiddyd. Finn is devastated by the fact that his duty to Leif kept him from Quan&Ethlyn’s side during the massacre because dying with them would’ve been preferable to surviving them. He hasn’t recovered from that when Leonster falls in an inferno that traumatizes him for, as far as we can tell, the rest of his life. As Leif tells it, Finn then shut down emotionally to the point where he neither cries nor laughs. Of course, Leif himself is scarred by the memory of the burning castle, and that and the loss of his parents fuels his own rage and desire for revenge. Leif is also bothered by the fact that he only has minor holy blood from his parents, which is much less impressive than having two minor Crests because he can’t use any holy weapons. On the other hand, two types of minor holy blood don’t kill you.

(I think at this point many of y’all can see how these events are echoed in Azure Moon. The atrocity, the survivor’s guilt, the fallout on both a child prince with a heavy burden and his retainer who’s struggling with his own issues.)

After this, Finn has nothing aside from his duty to Leif, and as he sees it his duty to Leif is ultimately to see Leif placed on the throne of a unified Thracian peninsula as its sole king. He raises Leif and Leif’s companion Nanna/Jeanne (Jugdral is complicated) under a variety of harsh & tragic circumstances for the next thirteen years. Sometimes he has to forego meals to feed the kids. The people who assist him usually end up dead. At least once he gets betrayed by the citizens of the town they’re hiding in. And so on. These are not circumstances that really allow one to recover from trauma, and by the time Leif himself is fifteen years old and the game plot of Thracia 776 begins, Finn still doesn’t give a damn as to whether he lives or dies as long as he can see Leif made King of Thracia. This is where the portrayal of Finn in Fire Emblem Heroes comes from-- by this point he’s about thirty-four and he really hasn’t had a good day in his life since he was about nineteen.

One of the Cipher cards probably says it the best: His fallen master protected him, saw him through to adulthood, and entrusted him with an unfulfilled dream, and now Finn leads the way to a new era in his motherland! That complete, utter, unswerving dedication to Quan and his unfulfilled dream is what brings Finn to mind when discussing Dedue (cutscene after Gronder in Verdant Wind, anyone?) It’s not funny. It’s tragic. It’s kind of disturbing. Thracia 776 offers a lot of commentary on knights and knighthood-- not as savage as the discussions Felix has with his Blue Lions comrades, but pointed nonetheless-- and with Finn as the Jugdrali exemplar of A Knight, that criticism rebounds, directly or indirectly, on him. Knighthood is kind of effed up and so is Finn.

Finn does get the opportunity to get his revenge on Travant in FE4, as both he and Leif have boss-battle conversations with Travant making it 100% clear they’re after revenge (Leif even speaks of killing Travant with his bare hands!). Travant’s death helps clear the way for Leif to take the throne of Thracia after the war... and with the dream at last fulfilled, Finn disappears, apparently into the Yied Desert where Quan and Ethlyn died. (He does come back three years later.) He’s got nothing else in his life. He’s seemingly not equipped to take over the usual veteran-knight role as some kind of advisor or general... or, after all that, he just WANTS to disappear for a while.

(You say, this is pretty TL;DR for “the basics”; I say, “I left a lot of stuff out, especially wrt shipping” because Jugdrali shipping is complicated.)

Anyway, so that’s the outline of the plot stuff. Note again, this takes more than twenty years to play out-- more than double the time elapsed between the Tragedy of Duscur and Dimitri’s final victory in Azure Moon. Jugdral is a long, long, hard slog for the characters that survive it.

Now, here’s where we get to the interpretive part. Finn’s devotion to Quan (and thence to Leif) and his trauma and self-abnegation are not up for debate. Hell, FE Heroes provides a pretty fair encapsulation of it. What Heroes also conveys is the sheer depth of his grief for Quan after fifteen, seventeen, twenty years... a grief that leads a number of fans, including me, to see a romantic subtext there. Maybe Quan, as a happily married man with two kids, wasn’t ever thinking of his page-turned-protege like that, but in between some interesting bits of dialogue in FE5 about Finn being “cold to women” and his current portrayal in Heroes, it does create the impression that at the very least Finn’s feelings for Quan went outside the ordinary bounds of the lord/retainer relationship. As Jugdral by its nature doesn’t lead to the sorts of paired endings we see in Three Houses, that’s really something fans have to experience for themselves.

If that interests you, hopefully this essay has provided some pointers on where to find material. Have fun!

#fe16 spoilers #blue lions meta #jugdral spoilers #jugdral meta #leonster bias #finn of leonster #long post #text post

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boukenboy · 4 years

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#7:鬼神降臨伝 ONI

I enjoy samurai stories. Like any good, proper weeb, the political intrigues of that particular era are rad as hell, but yet I haven’t played many games that explore that world. I discovered Kishin Kourinden ONI entirely by accident: I was browsing through ranked a list of Super Famicon RPGs on a random Japanese website. I read a bit of the blurb the author had written, and downloaded it to play later. Weeks passed. I was going through a second playthrough of Romancing Saga and feeling a bit burnt out, as I had failed to unlock any events I haven’t seen already, and the battles were becoming an absolute slog, so I decided to give ONI a go. Kishin is the 6th (!) game in a long-running series that debuted on the Gameboy, and is the first for the Super Famicom.

Our story takes place in the Kamakura era of Japan - the relatively peaceful era of the Heian is now over, and in its place the Kamakura bakufu now rule the lands of Yamato. You play as Hokutomaru, an orphan who has been essentially adopted into the ruling family. One day, you and the son of the shogun, Yoritou, are asked to extinguish a youkai that had been stalking about the princesses’ room. She gets kidnapped, as princesses tend to do, so you and Yoritou venture forth to rescue her.

Plot-wise, ONI isn’t anything original. The first quarter of the game is devoted to rescuing the princess. Each time you clear a dungeon, you’re essentially told “The princess is in another castle!”, - it is lazy writing. but while the main plot is rather formulaic, the individual stories you’ll experience throughout each location are what really makes the game shine. Similar to a Dragon Quest title, each village has its own issues dealing with youkai: and it is up to your scrappy band of samurai to solve them. Some of these stories are funny. Some are very dark. I remember one very clearly: a family begs you for assistance, as their newborn child has been cursed by a youkai and cannot be roused from slumber. The monster in question appears and taunts the party, gloating that the baby will die unless they can prove that the child that was stolen from the once-human youkai is now living a happy life.

When she was still alive, she gave birth to a child, but died soon after and turned into a demon. The baby was entrusted to a sleazeball, who sent the child to live in poverty. The woman this youkai cursed was her sister, jealous of the happy life that was denied to her. Soon after, the youkai’s long-lost daughter is revealed to be Akoya, one of our protagonists, and the story ends on a happy note once mother and daughter are briefly reunited. Thankfully!

For a Super Famicom game that was released when it was, the characterization of your party members is superb. There’s a great chemistry present throughout the story: they bicker, they tease each other, and everyone always has a strong opinion on whatever youkai-related shenanigans occurring at that particular moment, and it’s done in a way that doesn’t feel forced or tiresome to read through, especially compared to say, a Tales Of...title.

There’s a strong theme of “found family” in Kishin. Hokutomaru is adopted into the Minamoto family after being orphaned as a child; Akoya receives an offer to join the family she saves after it is revealed that she is their blood, but rejects them in favor of the children living in the slums of her home city who she feels a deep sense of responsibility for.. Hourin, a middle-aged monk who joins your team early in the game, gives up a life of drunken laziness in order to save a little girl who looks up to him. As someone who isn’t close with his blood family, I know how important a found one can be, so the game made me quite emotional at points, so while the main plot isn’t anything special, the characterization is incredibly strong.

The battle system is, again, fairly standard, but it does a few things worth noting: once you acquire certain weapons, each character is able to transform into an oni: giving up the ability to cast magic spells in exchange for increased physical damage. The design of each oni is wonderfully gaudy and colorful, and as there are monsters who are vulnerable to oni and not much else, you’ll have plenty of opportunity to use them. While switching between forms costs you a turn, you can choose to begin battle in either monster or human status by changing an option in the settings menu. Convenient!

Characters do not learn magic by leveling up, but instead learn abilities from various gods that you meet throughout Japan. They’re all based on traditional mythology, and you’ll need to complete side-quests to receive their aid. Some of them are entirely missable, so I strongly recommend using a guide. I accidentally locked myself out of a few just in this playthrough, which is a major bummer!

Furthermore, side-quests seem to open up at random - the game provides very few hints as to what is out there, so unless you’re following a guide, you’ll have to visit each area multiples times after each major plot point in order to collect them all. Wack. That said, it is really fun once you discover something unexpected: you’re often given a choice or two, so make sure you save very often! The game has major issues with balance: at certain points of the game, you’re going to have to grind. A lot. Like, at least for 2 hours or so. Early on in the game, you’ll be locked into a dungeon with no save-point, so you’re utterly screwed if you don’t bother to level up. The game provides a recover point, but there was no warning that you wouldn’t be able to leave the area until you clear it. I wound up grinding for around an hour and a half, in one long session. Decidedly unfun.

On top of the unbalanced pacing, the encounter rate in this game is absolutely wretched, even for its time. I am a massive fan of RPGs from this era. I imagine I have way more love for them than most people. But Kishin really, really tries my patience at points. You’ll finish a battle, and get into another one three steps later. It’s BAD. This wouldn’t be so terrible if the combat system flowed a bit quicker, but they don’t. The game occasionally likes to throw you into successive dungeons with no stopping point, and these sections feel especially draining. Despite these complaints, I really am enjoying my time with Kishin. Judging from the guide I have been using, I am around 3/4ths of the way through the game, and I intend on clearing it. If you have a lot of patience and love of the genre, I strongly recommend it! There’s several more games that were released after this one, and I look forward to trying them all.

#jrpg #video games #game review #gaymer #this needs editing but im tired of looking at it #sorry lovs #samurai #historical games #oni series

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jamiefairfaxisntcool · 5 years

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/mu/core album review | Neutral Milk Hotel - In the Aeroplane Over the Sea

/mu/core album review #1

this week on /mu/core album review, we look at:

Neutral Milk Hotel - In the Aeroplane Over the Sea

Ah yes, In the Aeroplane Over the Sea. The album that’s mostly known as either, “that one weird album from the 90s,” or, “/mu/ basic bitch meme music.” If you’re anywhere past a casual music fan, you have most-likely heard some songs off this project, if not the whole thing, doubly so if you’re into 90s culture, Indie, or any sort of Art-Rock or Folk movements. As I type this, the most popular YouTube rip of the album has about 4.3 million views, a playlist separating each track stands at 500,000 views, and the title track has a remarkable 40,733,956 plays on Spotify. Holy shit, to put that into perspective: AV Club writes that, “In The Aeroplane Over The Sea was originally slated to sell about 7,000 copies,” that’s roughly 5,819 times the predicted sales numbers of the album on just that song. This also means that this song has been listened to for approximately 131,163,338 minutes, a total of around 131,163,299 more minutes than the actual album length. Humanity has spent a collective 249 years listening to In the Aeroplane Over the Sea. Oh, and that’s just the title track.

If I couldn’t spell it out so clearly there, this album is fucking outrageously popular.

Even if you haven’t heard any material off the LP, this album is memed pretty heavily in the music corners of the internet. I don’t think I can find a single music meme page or forum that hasn’t jumped upon the ITAOTS or NMH bandwagon.

At this current point in time, ITAOTS has became a permanent resident in the zeitgeist of internet music culture. NMH, and by extension, it’s creator, Jeff Mangum have been elevated to a cult of personality status. The band and this project are accompanied by a never-ending choir: 15-25 year old sad white boys who cry while sing-screeching about semen and Anne Frank and poorly play open chords on their detuned Ibanez acoustics.

It’s oddly beautiful.

The album is so deceptively simple, so creatively cryptic and has all the elements of a slog faux-folk fest filled with whining that would bore me to so many tears that they could rival the sad boy indie kids who lose their e-girls to their more socially active explore-page bait counterparts. To a person not familiar with it, ITAOTS could look like an over hyped, masturbatory depression tape. It looks boring. It looks like it should be boring.

If it should be boring, then why have I only listened to it and absolutely nothing else for the last two days?

This isn’t a joke, I revisited the album of course to refresh myself before sitting down and writing this review. I kept listening, over the course of a school day, in-between production and songwriting sets, while playing games, and as I write this, I just finished my eighth spin of the record. Before those last two days, I had only listened to the album probably twice.

I remember listening to it back in seventh grade and not particularly disliking it. I was really into Yes and a lot of other Prog and Psych bands, but I wasn’t particularly impressed with the almost yuppie voice that Jeff had used on the record compared to vocal beasts like Freddie Mercury, Bowie, and Jon Anderson. Later on, I listened in freshman year, and I appreciated it much more, and had a few songs come up in my shuffle play, but thought nothing much of it.

Now, war had changed.

part 1: i’m the fucking carrot king

As I plopped down in my computer chair, my window crackled and banged like a distant firecracker with the smack of heavy rains on a Summer afternoon. I placed my headphones firmly atop my ears, closed my eyes and leaned back in my chair. I heard the opening chords of The King of Carrot Flowers Pt. 1 and tried not just to hear the instrumentation, but also pay attention to the lyrical content of Mr. Mangum.

When you were young, you were the king of carrot flowers And how you built a tower tumbling through the trees In holy rattlesnakes that fell all around your feet

Okay, so what the fuck is actually happening here?

Upon my listens, I inferred that Jeff is speaking to another party here, most likely a female love interest, in what seemingly starts in a nostalgic tone. This sounds almost like a picturesque, coming-of-age, Americana film. Maybe one starring Molly Ringwald and River Phoenix, with a surprise cameo from someone famous back then like Jack Nicholson. Maybe John Candy, with a John Hughes script. Everything would have those faded out, classic colors, a hearkened back era. Quickly, by halfway through the first act, the tone shifts. A darker mood, a stark, grim reminder that life wasn’t always sunny and shinning in Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood.

And your mom would stick a fork right into daddy's shoulder And dad would throw the garbage all across the floor As we would lay and learn what each other's bodies were for

The Mang informs us of a horrific family life, specifically about what seems to be his dad’s, stepmom’s, and stepsister’s interpersonal relationships. The lines are obvious and straightforward, the life of our protagonist was rife with unhealthy familial and sexual relationships, and a sense of love and sweetness was not found there. Keep that in mind when thinking about later songs such as Oh Comely.

After the somber intro of Carrot Flowers Pt. 1, we reach my personal least favorite track on the album: The King of Carrot Flowers Pt. 2 and 3.

Look, I know the meme. “I LOOOOOOOOOVE JESUUUS CHUHRIEEEIISSSSTT,” and all that shit. I’m not even worked up about that line in particular, I just dislike Pt. 3. It’s the weakest of the upbeat songs on the album, with the weird yodel-screech voice that Gumman performs with really takes me out of the experience, which sucks because the buildup and atmosphere of Pt. 2 felt pretty amazing. Luckily, Pt. 3 is fairly short, so we don’t have to worry about it too much.

part 2: earth angel’s thesis

The title track for this album is one of the best songs on this album, no fucking contest. In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, Oh Comely, The Fool, and Two-Headed Boy Pt. 2 are top contenders when discussing this album. If you like the faster, fuzzier, upbeat songs you could probably substitute The Fool for Holland, 1945.

The title track has a familiar sounding chord progression and we can hear Gum from Jet Set Radio’s saccharine but yelp-y voice belt out from atop the mountains his undying love and admiration for... Anne Frank?

What a beautiful face I have found in this place That is circling all round the sun What a beautiful dream That could flash on the screen In a blink of an eye and be gone from me

In the first verse, Geoff mentions meeting or viewing a beautiful person on this fleeting rock circling round the Sun. He also matches this with the idea that it’s truly futile for him to chase after this beauty, as it is only a dream that could escape him when he awakes. El Jefé has actually mentioned that some of his surrealist lyrics are derived from dreams. Perhaps these lines could imply a more literal dream fading? I don’t exactly know, all I know is what I interpreted.

The instrumentation of this piece is nothing straying from NMH’s usual repertoire: Mandrake on Guitar and Vocals, Scott Spillane on the Horns, Robert Schneider on Bass and Production, Julian Koster playing... something. What is he playing? Wait, give me a second.

He’s playing the Singing Saw? I thought it was like, a Theremin. What the fuck is a Singing Saw?

Oh.

Okay sure, you can play that, however the fuck you do that.

And finally we have Jeremy Barnes on Drums.

The personnel handle the music with a light, bouncy feeling, and the tone and timbre remind me of a faded, old, seaside town on the east coast. Another thing to mention is that the chord progression is G-Em-C-D; I-vi-IV-V. A funny thing I noticed is that this song shares a chord progression with tons of songs from the 50’s and early 60’s, which adds to the waning Americana feeling, but it more specifically shares that progression with Earth Angel by The Penguins. In the 80’s film, Back To The Future, Marvin Berry covers the song with his band for the Enchantment Under The Sea Dance where Marty’s dad and mom have to dance to ensure that the future stays intact. There’s no further real connection, but I thought that was kinda cool to mention.

After looking through the lyrics for In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, I will admit, as a brainlet Two-Headed Boy Pt. 1 eluded me. Patrolling through Genius and some other reviews, I guess the consensus about this track was that it was about Anne Frank again? Manta Jeff’s cryptic lyricism continues to fool me. Besides the lyrics, this track mostly remains a piece of really good filler.

part 3: stop the military occupation of my brainwaves

The Fool is amazing, anyone who says it’s filler is wrong. I know I might anger some people by literally implying that Two-Headed Boy Pt. 1 was filler, but seriously The Fool just makes me a feel a way. My brain creates a scene reminiscent of a depressing diesel-punk Les Misérables. Even though Scotch Spillage’s fantastic piece for horns is beautifully imperfect, it lacks lyrical content and is short and length. So, let’s instead talk about Holland, 1945.

This awesome, uptempo, almost punk-like piece of fuzzy brass is groovy son. It’s probably the song you could show someone not familiar with this project and they’d be like, “Oh, is this Cake? Why is the lead singer singing so high now?”

Holland, 1945 is a song that you can just listen for the instrumentation. Holland, 1945 is a song that promotes peace and love. There’s so many great things I can say about Holland, 1945. How it’s theme is so perfectly fitting for today’s political climate, how it manages to blend these psychedelic and bluesy timbres with a fast and loud sound and how well it continued the semi-conceptual narrative of Joff’s admiration and love for... Anne Frank.

Okay, fuck it, I have to say it. It’s bothered me ever since I discovered it.

Why Anne Frank? Like, I know why Anne Frank, but I mean like, why, y’know? I’ll say I admire Anne Frank, she was trying her best to live a normal life in a terrifying time to be alive, but I never wanted to fuck her. xxJeffxx’s mentions of Anne kind of make me raise an eyebrow. Especially because the album’s not just about her either. When he gets sexual, it’s difficult to determine whether he is mentioning a third party or Anne, which would be pretty weird, as she was 15 when she died and Heff was 28 when he wrote this. Maybe this is just some patrician music shit that I’m too plebeian to understand, like heated toilet seats or drinking for fun rather than to drown the pain. Maybe I haven’t sat down and watched enough flowery-squarespace-sponsored-lofi-hip-hop-muzak-using-pretentious video essayists to understand it, but what do I know.

part 4: the proletariat cries

To wrap on the second half of the album, this is the half that I cried in.

Communist Daughter is a good song, but with how short it is, it left me wanting more. This track is one of the few that actually features a soft-spoken Jeffen, and its open and dark but dreamy atmosphere left my jaw agape. The mountaintops weren’t the only thing stained.

Oh Comely, Oh Comely. Oh Comely is a song that deserves its own review. The lyrical chops of The Mangum Magnum are on full display as he belts somber, brutal verse after verse, with plenty of juxtaposition between sickening, sexual and vile situations alongside a description of a sweet, innocent young girl, just trying to survive with a guitar by her side. This beautiful, lovely girl gets taken advantage by someone, some people, perhaps even Yeff himself, only seen as an easy lay, a whore, like the ones her father visits often. He disgustingly describes semen in the garden, and her making miracles with her mouth, but I didn’t get a tone similar to so many songs about “sexual-empowerment.” The song is about self-deprecating depression leading to her being used, perhaps even abused. A situation all too real, too close to many of us. As I type this, I don’t know what to think. A woman should of course have individual sexual freedom, but this song doesn’t describe that. It describes trauma, emotional, psychological trauma. Meaningless sex, a rotten smell, staining the flower of a woman, all of this language that could be simply described as gross. This isn’t a happy song about fucking bitches. This song is about how a girl wanted to play music, pluck vines and was taken advantage of, reduced to her roots, and deflowered. Fuck. I wish I could save her. In some sort of time machine.

Two-Headed Boy could refer to a number of things. I have a head canon. This girl, Comely, is being used by the Two-Headed Boy for sexual favors. The Two-Headed Boy then “repays” her in friendship and music, playing their silly little songs. On the surface, Comely assumes the Two-Headed Boy trusts her and cares for her, but really all he wants is sex. Comely, living in a broken home and without a proper male figure in their life, is conned by the Two-Headed Boy, and just wants to live a normal life. Comely is trapped. She’s living in a place that is surrounded by the texture of scum and she knows it, she just can’t call upon the strength to leave. She’s trapped in a home, a ghetto, wanting to live a normal life, but she’s been placed here by the Two-Headed Boy, who knew her mother and father were broken, and she would be too. The Two-Headed Boy broke in, claimed to be her friend, and supports her, before defiling her. Comely was pretty, bright, and intelligent. She was just in a bad situation.

Comely was Anne Frank.

Not to say that they were literally one in the same, but I mean J. Mangum (private eye) is comparing two children, ripped from their lives by this awful world, and intertwining them, blurring the lines.

Who’s the Two-Headed Boy? As I said, it could be a number of people. Nazis, Peter van Pels, hell, even Jeff Manga himself could be the Two-Headed Boy. It doesn’t matter as long as we realize the relationship between oppressed and oppressor.

There is a glimmer of hope for Comely though. Read the closing words from Two-Headed Boy Pt. 2:

Two headed boy, she is all you could need She will feed you tomatoes and radio wires And retire to sheets safe and clean But don't hate her when she gets up to leave

Comely and the Two-Headed Boy split away from each other. Comely leaves the Two-Headed Boy, and the narrator says not to hate her when she leaves. On a deeper level, this could be an introspective Jeff Mangum relating on his past. I don’t really know.

outro

Neutral Milk Hotel - In the Aeroplane Over the Sea

9/10

What did you think? Was I way off the mark, or do you agree? What should I have covered? What did you like, what did you dislike, I’m all ears. Leave a follow and a like if you liked it and I’ll see you on Wednesday.

#neutral milk hotel #music #music review #james fairfax #mu #/mu/core #folk #fuzzfolk #rock #anne frank

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mst3kproject · 5 years

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1009: Hamlet, Prinz von Dänemark

I spent a buck-fifty Canadian to download this movie. There’s not much you can get for a buck-fifty Canadian. One sour soother, maybe, or a chipped coffee mug from a garage sale that has a photo of somebody else’s grandparents on it. So now you know how much Hamlet is worth.

We all know the story of Hamlet, whether we wanted to or not. King Hamlet of Denmark was murdered by his brother Claudius, who then married Queen Gertrude and stole the throne. We can’t be having that, so the king’s ghost appears to his son, Hamlet Jr, and tells him he must take revenge. Junior then spends the whole rest of the play wandering around pondering the afterlife and battering his girlfriend Ophelia before finally running Claudius through during a climactic duel during which pretty much everybody else dies, too, except for the ones who were already dead. Nobody has ever given me a convincing explanation of why these people have names like Horatio and Laertes instead of Svend and Rolf.

I’m definitely not going to try to review Hamlet itself, Shakespeare’s play, because I don’t know a damned thing about Hamlet. I deliberately went out and murdered those brain cells with alcohol immediately after writing my final exam. Instead I’m going to have to talk about this movie in itself, how it fares both as a film and as a retelling of this story.

That second point is a big one. Hamlet has been done, a lot, and as the bots point out with their sketch about their all-percussion version, it’s really hard to do anything unique with it anymore. If you’re an acting troupe who wants to give it a try, that’s cool because it means people will get to see live theatre, but if you’re making a movie you really need to bring something new to the table. An interesting interpretation, an actor or director that people really want to see, an unusual setting or time period, something like that. This Hamlet has none of that.

I am reasonably sure that what the movie is trying to do is to look like a stage play, much as The Magic Voyage of Sinbad was trying to look like an opera. Sinbad pulled it off with extravagant sets and operatic bombast. By contrast everything in Hamlet, from pillars to thrones to flights of stairs, looks like it’s made out of concrete. There is very little music, which somehow makes the whole thing feel even more doom-and-gloom-y than Hamlet already does. The costumes go for a semi-fantasy look somewhere between Elizabethan and medieval, which is very stagey, and the effect is heightened by the fact that most of the characters never seem to change their clothes. The actors don’t look comfortable in them, though, which means they look uncomfortable in their characters as well. Queen Gertrude in particular looks like she’s too worried about damaging her gown to move easily in it, and the giant chain around Claudius’ neck is absurd.

Adding to the impression that the movie was shot in somebody’s basement, it’s lit very pootly when it’s lit at all. A lot of shots are quite dull, lit in a way that shows where things are but doesn’t create mood or drama. The film is in black and white and the characters wear black, or at least colours so dark you can’t tell the difference, which leaves night shots (such as the one where Horatio and the guards are chasing after the king’s ghost) looking like a bunch of heads floating around.

It is, of course, very difficult to judge a dubbed performance. The actors we’re watching appear to be going for a sort of heightened melodrama, part of the idea that we’re meant to feel like we’re watching a stage play. The dub actors, on the other hand, don’t seem to have gotten the memo. A lot of them mumble, particularly Maximilian Schell as Hamlet, which is really weird because he’s dubbing himself. Sometimes they manage to make the Shakespearean English sound very natural, but that often jars with the physical performances. I have no idea what sort of accents some of them think they’re doing. There are a few who don’t seem to be trying to do an accent at all, while others sound like they’re aiming for British (because it’s Shakespeare?), German (because the movie’s German?) or Damn Worwelf.

Most of the actors are kind of bland-looking, and those who stand out do so because they look weirdly wrong for the parts they’re playing. Polonius with his little mustache looks like a physics teacher who feels naked because he’s not wearing a necktie. He’s also dubbed by John Banner, so if you keep hearing this is so klandinkto! every time he speaks… that’s why. If Hamlet himself looks familiar, it may be because Maximilian Schell was Dr. Reinhardt in The Black Hole, or maybe it’s because he looks a lot like the guy in Atlantic Rim that I referred to as MacGuyver. He’s a very fine actor who won an academy award for Judgment at Nuremburg, but he’s way out of place as Hamlet. His Hollywood good looks and crooked little smile make it feel like he’s trying to play Hamlet as a dashing heartthrob.

For all that, there are a couple of moments in this movie that I quite like. The scene in which Hamlet is nodding and smiling to the wedding guests while the Too Too Solid Flesh soliloquy begins in voiceover is quite nicely done. It gives you a very visceral sense of this man who is forced to bottle up his anger and grief. I also like that during the Murder of Gonzago scene, the camera focuses not on the players but on the audience reaction. Claudius and Gertrude smile at each other when the players talk about love, and then grow uncomfortable as the play condemns re-marriage. Ophelia’s embroidery is an attempt at symbolism, the arum being a popular funeral flower. Too bad it’s so in-your-face that it loses all subtlety.

On the whole, though, Hamlet is just dull. The spartan, ugly sets and dark costumes offer us very little to look at, and in some of the darker scenes there’s almost nothing to see at all. The physical and dub performances don’t match, and neither hold the attention. Watching it feels like a two-hour slog through a tarry morass of depression.

I kind of wonder what the purpose of this movie was supposed to be. It was made for TV in the sixties, and I guess it was an attempt to capitalize on the Germans’ love of Shakespeare – because Germans do definitely love Shakespeare, sometimes considering themselves to have a better claim on him than England because unlike the English, they respect him. More Shakespeare plays are performed in Germany every year than in England, and in the leadup to World War II the Nazi regime tried to get rid of him, couldn’t, and had to settle for picking and choosing which translations were ‘German enough’ for them (this always reminds me of the joke about Hamlet being better in the original Klingon).

If this is the case, I would like to know what the Germans who saw this movie in its original broadcast thought of it. Sixty-year-old reviews of made-for-tv movies in foreign languages are hard to find even online, so I honestly have no idea. I know that people who have seen this English version hate it, and I have a hard time imagining it being much better in German even when you love Shakespeare unconditionally. The fact that the Germans do love Shakespeare just makes it seem that much more likely that they’d consider this dreary pork-filled version an insult to him.

It’s also interesting to think about what made the Best Brains pick this one out as an MST3K project. The movie is definitely bad, and in its own way it fits right in with a lot of the black-and-white crap from the Joel era that tries so hard to be important and just ends up being depressing. Yet the source material remains as something a lot of people would consider untouchable (the Germans being high on that list… although Shakespeare himself, purveyor of fine penis jokes to Her Majesty the Queen since 1591, would probably be totally okay with the MST3K treatment. He must have heard way more vicious audience commentary). My guess it was something they considered a challenge to themselves, in the same way as RiffTrax tackled Casablanca just to see if they could do it. The Amazing Colossal Transplanted Sci-Fi Channel Episode Guide entry on the episode is kind of interesting, as Kevin mentions the feeling that they had to be funnier than usual in order to live up to the play’s legend.

My high school English teachers (the same ones who inflicted The Most Dangerous Game on me) insisted that Hamlet is a play which should make you think. I’m pretty sure this is not what they meant, but the thing I’ve always found myself thinking about while watching or reading it is the idea of marrying one’s brother’s widow. The church of the time said that this was equivalent to marrying one’s own sister (Claudius indeed calls Gertrude our sometime sister) and frowned upon it most heavily, and this would have been common knowledge in Elizabethan England because it was Henry VIII’s excuse for divorcing Catherine of Aragon and marrying Anne Boleyn, Queen Elizabeth’s mother (never mind that he’d also fucked Anne’s sister Mary). By portraying this as villainous behaviour, Shakespeare was sucking up to the Queen, emphasizing that her mom’s marriage was way more legit than Catherine’s. Thank you for coming to my Ted Talk.

#mst3k #reviews #hamlet #tw: incest #60s

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xb-squaredx · 5 years

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B-Squared’s Top 10 Games of 2019!

2019 was a year full to the brim of GREAT games, and as is the custom at the end of the year, people love to rank their favorites, so…I’d like to do the same! Of course my own tastes might be different from yours so if you don’t see a thing on here that you liked, chances are I didn’t like it…or more likely, there’s just too many great games out this year, and I couldn’t get to everything. I’d like to stress to that the rankings don’t really matter all that much, especially the farther down we go. Everything on here is an easy recommendation. Without any further ado…let’s take a look at my Top 10 Games of 2019~

#10 - River City Girls

I love action games, but 2D beat-em-ups never really clicked for me. They were largely before my time and I was thinking that it’d be impossible to get me into one in the current era of gaming. And then I saw Marian’s redesign for River City Girls and bought the game. What can I say? Abs are a great sales pitch. But seriously, getting Wayforward on the helm of a beloved classic franchise is already a great way to pique my interest, and while there’s SOME aspects of this game that I don’t quite gel with, it’s a fun, colorful romp through a ridiculous universe that I’d LOVE to see more of down the line. Featuring a role-reversal, with the girlfriends saving the boyfriends this time, River City Girls has gorgeous pixel art, an AMAZING pop-synth soundtrack that’s worth the price alone, and it’s a game that clearly had fun with the concept and that fun rubs off on you. From the stylish animated boss intros, to the co-op fun that can be had with a friend, everything in this game is brimming with charm. Basic NPCs have great designs in their own right, being able to recruit enemies as assists is a neat idea, and it all adds up to a fun, bite-sized adventure with a bit of depth under the hood if you’re willing to give it a look. Can the character designers get a raise for this game, please? And let Megan McDuffie just do all the songs from now on. ALL OF THEM.

#9 - Astral Chain

Most people assumed if we were going to get a Switch exclusive game by Platinum this year, it’d be Bayonetta 3 but instead Nintendo surprised us with Astral Chain, the anime cop action game we didn’t know we wanted. The game boasts great visuals and is probably the most content-rich Platinum game ever made for starters, but for me the true draw is in the combat. Playing as your police officer in tandem with an alien creature known as a Legion, this tag-team action game is unlike pretty much anything else on the market. While the game starts off very simplistic, the Legion itself moving and attacking with no input from the player, over time more and more options unlock and things get considerably more complicated. By game’s end, you’re drowning in options, and once things clicked, combat was always a treat. With plenty of enemies to practice with, Legions to master and a gigantic post-game filled with challenging encounters, I had more fun with the combat in this game than I did with a lot of other games this year. That said, I do feel that Astral Chain could have benefitted from trimming some fat or rethinking its overall structure. For being a new IP with some bold ideas, I’m willing to accept these as kinks that can hopefully be ironed out in a sequel. Oh, and add Lappy to Smash already. You know you want to, Sakurai.

#8 - BABA IS YOU

Puzzle games are hard sells for me, since I don’t like the frustration that often comes from being stuck. You feel dumb, you get embarrassed and turn the game off in shame, or at least that’s my experience. But then sometimes you get a game so clever, so…weird, that you can’t help but be sucked into it. BABA IS YOU is a block-pushing puzzle game, with the twist being that the “rules” of a particular stage are often physically present in levels and are in fact blocks that can be pushed and manipulated by the player. ROCK is PUSH, WALL is STOP, FLAG is WIN and BABA is YOU. But what if you can’t touch the flag because the wall is in the way? Well, make it so WALL is PUSH to move it aside, or maybe make it so that BABA is WIN and you become the win condition itself. As the game goes on, more modifiers and rules are slowly introduced and absorbed into your own internal logic of the game, logic that increasingly has to be broken and remade to suit your needs. It’s a very empowering experience when the solution clicks and the results can often be hilarious and surprising. This game also GOES PLACES the further you go in, and I’d rather not ruin that surprise for anyone who might be looking into the game. Definitely one of the most innovated titles I’ve played in a LONG time. BABA is GOOD.

#7 - Power Rangers: Battle for the Grid

OK, so…hear me out. Power Rangers was a franchise I was obsessed with as a kid, and while I don’t follow it anymore, there’s still some love for it flowing in my veins. So when a small, no-name studio puts out a Power Ranger fighting game that takes the simplified controls of Smash Bros. and the tag-team craziness of Marvel vs. Capcom and slaps it all together for a cool twenty bucks or so? Well you got yourself a purchase and it ended up being WAY more fun than I expected. Power Rangers: Battle for the Grid is far from the best looking fighter on the market, it’s single-player content is lacking, and it’s roster, while interesting, isn’t as big as a lot of the competition, but damn if it isn’t fun to play. With characters taken from across the franchise’s long history, from the live-action movie reboot to the comic books, each choice has been inspired and resulted in an incredibly varied cast. With no crazy inputs for special moves, combined with a tagging system that lets you cycle through your three-Ranger team quickly, the game is the best kind of chaotic fun, but true masters can command that chaos and channel it into cool combos that make you want to say “Morphinominal!” Considering it’s a budget title, it’s also received a fair amount of updates throughout the year to pad out the roster with both free and paid DLC fighters, a full story mode and improvements to the netcode and overall presentation., so if you passed on it at launch, it’s much improved now. It’s not gonna be a fighting game on everyone’s radar, but I’d rather support it than the grind-heavy slog Mortal Kombat has become…Now just hurry up and add that monster that baked the Rangers into a pizza!

#6 - New Super Lucky’s Tale

If your name isn’t Mario or Sonic, 3D platformers are effectively dead. That said, there’s been a few up-and-comers in recent years that are trying to revive the genre. Hat Kid from A Hat in Time, the duo of Yooka-Laylee, and now Lucky from the folks at Playful Studios. The cute fox has quite the history, starting from the Oculus Rift title, Lucky’s Tale, to a full-fledged platformer on the Xbox One X, Super Lucky’s Tale and now the enhanced port/reimagining New Super Lucky’s Tale on Switch. Halfway between a full-blown sequel, and enhanced edition, the game takes assets from the Xbox original game, tweaking and refining everything from visuals to controls to level layouts. The result is a game that is incredibly well-polished. It looks great, Lucky is a treat to control as he moves from jumping, burrowing and sliding around fluidly, and the variety on display keeps things interesting. We’ve got full 3D levels, 2D levels, auto-runners, and even some marble maze levels and puzzles thrown in for good measure. It’s not a hard game, but it IS incredibly fun, and well made. We don’t get many 3D platformers these days, so cherish what little comes of the genre. I hope Playful and Nintendo continue to collaborate, as they really seem more at home here. Just…maybe don’t add more words to the title of the next game, guys.

#5 - Katana Zero

There’s no nice way to say it: there’s too many pixel-based, side-scrolling indie games out there, so the ones that DO stand out deserve to be celebrated. Katana Zero has a real ‘80s flair for starters, using bright neon, TV and VCR visual effects, and a synth soundtrack to give it some real style. When a game kicks off with you slowing down time and reflecting a bullet back at an enemy with your katana, you make a good first impression! Add in the trial-and-error that is planning the perfect route through a stage, the satisfying slicing and dicing of enemies, the unique, challenging boss encounters, and you have a game that was on my radar for a while, before I finally got into it at the end of the year. Its storyline is pretty interesting too, with some slight variances in how events unfold depending on your words and actions, though it ending on a bit of a cliffhanger is a bummer. That said, when a game leaves you wanting more, there’s worse problems to have. At the very least, there’s some DLC hinted at that might be interesting, as well as the implications that this is the merely the first in a trilogy, and at this point I’m game for whatever developer Askiisoft has in store.

#4 - Luigi’s Mansion 3

The GameCube was an odd era for Nintendo, as they attempted to innovate and try new ideas rather than rely purely on their old standbys. Case-in-point, rather than launch the console with a new Mario platformer, his second-banana brother Luigi got his first starring role in what would become the Luigi’s Mansion series. While not making QUITE as big of a splash as maybe Nintendo hoped, it’s garnered a decent fanbase, and when a sequel was announced for 3DS, people ate it up. Considering the gap between the first and second games, I think many people were surprised at the relatively quick turn-around for the third installment. I was also surprised at the overall quality and how much I enjoyed digging into it. For starters, Luigi’s Mansion 3 is easily one of the better-looking Switch titles, boasting some great lighting and particle effects, with some fun physics implemented for just about everything in the massive mansion. Luigi and company are animated with a lot of expressiveness that never gets old, and the music sets the tone perfectly too. From a gameplay standpoint, the toolset Luigi gains gives him ample options to poke at every nook and cranny, with the slimy doppelganger Gooigi being the clear stand-out. Some of the floors of the Last Resort hotel that Luigi must ascend are particularly massive and intricate too, some floors feeling like Legend of Zelda-style dungeons. While not a particularly challenging game, it’s still really satisfying to poke and prod at everything in sight, sucking in all the coins, gold bars and stacks of paper bills you can handle, not to mention slamming the ghosts around like the Hulk does to Loki. There’s also multiplayer! That I…haven’t really touched but…hey! More bang for your buck, surely!

#3 – Dragon Quest XI S

I don’t consider myself a huge fan of JRPGs. Or at least that’s what I thought before I tried out the Dragon Quest XI demo on Switch. I ended up falling for the game hard and bought the full release, carrying my demo data over and not stopping until I hit credits. Despite having never touched a Dragon Quest game before, outside of an hour or so of VIII, I was overcome with this feeling of nostalgia when it came to this game. That’s because Dragon Quest is THE quintessential JRPG game, the originator of all that we take for granted today. It was nice to feel right at home with a simple, effective combat system, rather than having to watch games re-invent the wheel in an attempt to stand out from the pack (sorry Xenoblade), and the story itself, while predictable and a little basic at times, was told well and told earnestly. It really nailed the feeling of going on a grand adventure, with enough twists on the formula to keep things interesting. The turn-based combat was elementary, but always presented me with fair challenges and lots of ways to solve the encounters laid before me, with enough quality-of-life features added in to minimize grind and make things more convenient. The Switch version of Dragon Quest XI featured a bunch of new content on top of a game that had more than enough going for it, and it’s clear a lot of work was done to make this port as faithful as could be, and it stands out not just as a great port on a system known for some shoddy ones, but as a title that’s brimming with as much polish and quality to rival first-party Switch titles. Don’t ban Hero in Smash and don’t miss out on this game if you haven’t taken the plunge already!

#2 – Devil May Cry 5

The Devil May Cry franchise has had its share of ups and downs over the years. For every game that’s considered a success, you have another game that doesn’t quite measure up. For years many thought the franchise was dead in the water after the attempted reboot, DMC: Devil May Cry failed to grow its audience, but when Microsoft’s E3 2018 show revealed to us a new installment, fans were ecstatic. Devil May Cry 5 boasts crisp visuals, deep combat and trims the fat, removing the wonky platforming and puzzles of earlier games to create a high-octane action experience that ultimately exceeded fan expectations. Its storyline firmly plants Devil May Cry 4’s Nero as a main character in his own right, wraps up the story of the Sparda brothers neatly, and if this ended up being the last title in the series, I think it’s that rare ending that ends up being totally satisfying. Combat is the real draw here though, the game giving players three distinct characters to learn and master. Nero’s robotic Devil Breaker arms allow him a decent amount of variety, while having a balanced, beginner-friendly combat style for new players. Dante remains the king of variety, having more weapons than ever before combined with his signature style switching, though the game is actually designed with all these options in mind so he doesn’t end up breaking the game like he did in 4. Newcomer V ends up being a breath of fresh air, controlling up to three demonic summons at once, forcing players to really think more strategically. The music is incredible too; Nero’s own theme, Devil Trigger, has been stuck in my head since last year and I don’t see it leaving any time soon. All things considered, Devil May Cry 5 might be the best game in the franchise, and a worthy contender for game of the year personally. Now if only we had a special edition with Vergil and the ladies playable…

#1 - Fire Emblem: Three Houses

I got into the Fire Emblem series with Awakening and really liked it a lot, however Fates, the next installment, left a bad taste in my mouth. I couldn’t really get into Echoes, itself a remake of the second game in the series, and I began to wonder if this franchise was really for me. I was willing to give Three Houses a shot, but I was not prepared for the game to blow past all my expectations. Fire Emblem: Three Houses isn’t just a good game, it’s a game that’s redeemed a franchise that’s stumbled a bit in recent years, and it likely cements Fire Emblem as a core Nintendo franchise for years to come. It has class, depth and real heart...with only minor creepy or pervy elements! Making a grand return to home consoles after more than a decade on handhelds, it goes big and it ultimately paid off, on track to become the best-selling entry in the series. The school setting might seem weird at first, and I wondered how well I’d adjust to it, but being able to instruct your units and influence their growth in battle was worth the learning curve. Things are introduced slowly enough that the flow of the game becomes relatively easy to manage, if a bit time-consuming overall. With four distinct storylines you can explore, TONS of character interactions and some interesting tweaks to the strategic gameplay the series is known for, I’m confident in saying that Three Houses is well-worth a purchase for newcomers to the franchise. Divine Pulse is a great quality-of-life addition that lets you undo mistakes, rather than force you to start over from scratch, and overall the UI and layout of the game gives you enough information to make informed decisions without overwhelming you. Makes me wonder how we survived before the games showed us who enemies would target on their turns before now. Admittedly, some aspects of the progression have some issues, especially at endgame, and visually the game really is not up to par most of the time, but these end up being tiny blemishes in the long run for me. They certainly weren’t bad enough to prevent me from starting a new path the instant I finished my first route. If I have one request…just make Claude a gay option. Give the people what they want, Nintendo!

Honorable Mentions

I’d like to add on some honorable mentions here before we close things out, though most of these are things I didn’t even get a chance to play, but they certainly might have made this list. For one, Resident Evil 2 Remake seems like a high-quality reinterpretation of the survival-horror classic, but I can’t do horror so I’ll likely pass it up. It’s also for that reason that I might not get to Control but I might try jumping out of my comfort zone for that one. The confusion surrounding both The Other Worlds AND The Outer Wilds is funny, but they’re both space-based games I’d be keen on getting to at some point down the line; the former is a great Western RPG by the folks who made the GOOD Fallout games, while the latter is an interesting space-faring puzzler with some interesting mechanics I’d rather not spoil for those not more in-the-know. Indie titles Sayonara Wild Hearts and GRIS definitely caught my attention with their great visuals, and in the case of the former, its soundtrack, even if the gameplay wasn’t quite there for me, and the weird fighting-game-but-kinda-RPG that is Indivisible demands my attention sooner or later. Bloodstained is the Castlevania follow-up I keep forgetting is out, and I hear great things about Yooka-Laylee and the Impossible Lair. The team behind the Yakuza series recently made a spin-off of sorts, Judgment that hit the West this year and while I like the Yakuza series for its quirky tone and fun combat, there’s still six other games I’d have to sift through, so going with Judgment, which is set to possibly begin a new franchise, seems like a good alternative. And how could I forget the likes of Shovel Knight as we finally receive the last expansion that’s been years in the making? I haven’t touched the King of Cards expansion yet, but I have the upmost faith in anything Yacht Club makes, so that’s surely a game of the year contender. 2019 was crazy good! Glad to close the year out with so much quality, and tons of great stuff to add to the ever-growing backlog.

Hope you had some good gaming memories made this year!

-B

#gameoftheyear #GOTY #GOTY2019 #astral chain #lucky's tale #baba is you #river city girls #devil may cry #luigi's mansion 3 #katana zero #power rangers #fire emblem three house #dragon quest 11 #xb-squaredx

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