#understanding of the characters and narratives you’ve created and a willingness to let those narratives and characters lead the way instead | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

5eforgemaster · 5 years ago

Text

Brewfest Week 2: Warriors Dirty Fighter Conversion Kit

Our first post for week 2 is advice for staying alive- no matter what it takes. Using the Tavern brawler feat and improvised weapons, a variety of unconventional tactics become available.

This one actually went up early on the foundry a little early, and you can read this article with the original formatting there.

Kit Overview

Investment Type: 'Half' Feat (In place of an Ability Score Increase [ASI])

Minimum Investment: One of your precious ASI slots- this stings less if you're a Fighter or Rogue.

Overall Impact: You are able to utilize unconventional forms of attack without penalty, making combat more expressive, and opening up new strategies.

Investment

This is one of the easiest conversion kits to access, in theory. By simply taking the Tavern Brawler feat, you have access not to a single new fighting style, but to a variety of new techniques ranging from unconventional weapons and unarmed strikes to truly off-the-cuff improvisation that may fit with any number of fighting styles.

Evaluating the investment here is a little bit odd though, because while any conversion kit does you no good unless you use it, you're likely to think you'll use this more than you actually will. You'll imagine yourself throwing stones, plucking a lit torch from a sconce and swinging it like a flaming club, or any manner of truly off the cuff attacks- but realistically, you need a plan.

And I hear you- "how can I plan to use an improvised weapon"?

But here's the thing, improvised does not strictly mean you've made the decision to use an object as a weapon in the moment. The weapon can be improvised in the sense that it is not meant to be used as a weapon- or, if you ask certain designers, a weapon being used in a way it is not meant to be used is considered improvised.

And there's the rub: the real investment is yours, not your character's. To get a plan in place, you need to understand what an 'Improvised Weapon' is in terms of DnD5e. If you're the type to use this feat, your wheels might already be turning.

So what is an improvised weapon?

It is a distinct type of weapon- it is not a simple or martial weapon.

It deals 1d4 damage, and it is a thrown weapon with a 20/60 range.

It does not have any other properties- it is not a finesse weapon, a heavy weapon, a light weapon, or two-handed weapon (By default).

It is still a weapon, for any feature which may require one.

So simply put, you can't (effectively) two weapon fight, sneak attack, great weapon fight, or similar with an improvised weapon. We'll discuss what you can do in the mechanical impact section, but I wanted to set aside any misconceptions out of the gate.

Before we move on to the narrative impact, I'm going to lay out the feat's benefits, because they're rather broad:

You add your proficiency bonus to attacks with improvised weapons.

You roll a damage die with your unarmed attacks, rather than dealing a single point of damage.

When you hit a creature with an unarmed strike or improvised weapon on your turn, you can use a bonus action to attempt to grapple the target.

(Remainder below the cut)

Narrative Impact

The narrative suggested here is obvious- you're a brawler. You fight with your bare hands, grab the nearest combatant by their shirt collar, and maybe smash an empty ale bottle over their head. But your narrative options? Those are near limitless.

Are you a fighter that catches foes off guard with shield bashes, pommel strikes, and kicks? A paladin or cleric so committed to hunting undead and fiends that they utilize holy water and wooden stakes as a matter of course? An alchemist or wizard that deploys alchemical concoctions by splashing or tossing them at nearby foes? A monk whose flowing movements and measured blows are supplemented by a pragmatic willingness to apply brute force where necessary? An assassin who deploys inhaled poisons by simply lobbing their containers?

If you have an unconventional combat tactic in mind, this feat will make it possible. The trouble is going to be getting something out of it mechanically. If you don't mind losing a little mechanical edge for a little bit of expression, there are some very cool things you can do. However, let's look at ways you can get a mechanical boost out of it.

Mechanical Impact

Okay so we've talked about how there's some interesting imagery we can get out of this feat, and maybe some mechancial benefit, but how do we get there? I think there are three broad categories of mechanical impact you can get out of this feat. In no particular order Brawling, Unconventional Weapons, and Payload Delivery.

That's a whole bunch of seemingly meaningless jargon: let me explain.

Brawling

This is the impact the feat was named for. This is best used by strength-based frontliners: the usual suspects are Barbarians, Fighters, Monks, and Paladins.

However, we're aiming for unconventional here aren't we? Blade Pact Warlocks, Rangers, Clerics, and Wild-Shaped Druids can certainly get in on the action if they have the strength to back it up- or a Rogue with expertise in Athletics.

The trick to brawling is simple: You want to leverage the feat's 3rd benefit and grapple as a bonus action. You probably want to dole out some damage on that grappled target or take advantage of the grapple to keep them disabled.

So you need two things here: a trigger for the grapple and a follow-through. Fighting unarmed or with a one-handed weapon is ideal here. Good thing this feat sets you up for that in several ways.

To trigger your bonus action grapple, you need to make a successful unarmed strike or with an improvised weapon. Depending on how many free hands you normally have, that might be quite easy, or it might be a little complicated.

Monks have it easy here, every attack they're likely to make opens up this bonus action. Afterwards you can follow through with Flurry of Blows, perhaps even knock them prone if you're following the Way of the Open Hand. You could even use both hands to grapple and do this to two separate targets while continuing to fight with your feet- though your DM might start to balk at this point. Wild-Shaped Druids have it just as easy- even if your DM doesn't consider natural attacks unarmed strikes (a fair interpretation, to my mind), nothing's stopping you from making an unarmed attack anyway- just don't use the teeth and claws until you have your target grappled.

Now if you're a Fighter wielding a one handed weapon and nothing else, well, problem solved. If you're a Fighter or maybe Barbarian wielding a two handed weapon, you can simply take one hand off of the weapon to strike and grab. You might be able to follow through by using your weapon to make improvised attacks against the target. If your DM rules that the two-handed property can't be overridden by making improvised attacks, you might be able to use knees, feet, or elbows to strike the grappled target.

If you're a sword-and-board Paladin or Fighter, well, now things are more complicated. You can drop your weapon to make an unarmed strike followed by a grapple, but your DM is unlikely to let you pick that weapon back up immediately if it doesn't work. But you can make an improvised attack with the shield, and drop the sword to execute the grapple if it works. If you're a two-weapon Ranger or similar you can execute a similar maneuver by striking with the pommel or handle of your weapon and dropping one of them to execute the grapple. The follow-through here consists of further improvised attacks with the shield, or attacks with the remaining one handed waeapon.

Unconventional Weapons

Many pieces of 'adventuring equipment' in the PHB are treated as improvised weapons when you attack with them. This feat, oddly, is the only way to gain proficiency in the use of these weapons.

Alchemist's Fires, Acid Vials, Holy Water, and Oil Flasks are the only 'official' options I'm aware of, but even these are useful as sources of on-demand elemental damage for characters that don't normally have access to it.

I struggle to think that a DM who wasn't utterly adversarial refusing to allow you to make other simple weapons- a molotov cocktail, for example. I also think it would be perfectly reasonable to deliver inhaled or contact poisons by lobbing a vial. That's pretty much the definition of an improvised weapon attack- plus there's precedent in in most of the 'official' improvised weapons for lobbing vials.

This makes for an extremely unpredictable character if you're a non-caster. Battle Master Fighters, Rogues (especially Thieves), and certain Monks can deploy a simply staggering number of tactical options- from the right damage for the situation, to devastating conditions, to denying an area to their foes.

If you are a caster, there are some neat tricks you can do with spells. Fire spells can be enhanced by oil, and using a catapult spell to launch an improvised item doesn't require you to be proficient, but at low levels it's nice to be able to use the item if you're out of spells. The primary draw of using this method with spellcasters, in my mind, is that casters tend to be proficient in the sorts of tools that create unconventional weapons, so you can keep yourself supplied.

This fits quite well with Artificers and Wizards for most tools. Clerics, Paladins, and perhaps Celestial patron Warlocks could create Holy Water. It seems less likely that Sorcerers or other types of Warlocks would use this method, but nothing is stopping them.

Frankly, if you're the type to use spells that don't deal direct damage, you're more likely to find use for unconventional weapons. If not, your damage spells will always far outstrip the usefulness of these items. If you're playing a Thief or Battle Master, you 're already looking for opportunities to apply a unique skill set- this just expands your toolbox.

Payload Delivery

There's little tactical benefit to this technique, in most scenarios. This method disregards the damage and other properties of improvised weapons, and simply uses the fact that improvised weapons are weapons to deliver the damage of another feature in a flavorful or unexpected manner.

This primarily serves the purpose of expression without sacrificing effectiveness, but you might also gurantee that you can use your class features even if your weapons are not accessible- this may or may not be important to you depending on your campaign and character.

Paladins and Warlocks can deliver their (Eldritch) Smites through improvised weapons so long as the attack is a melee attack, and Battle Masters can deliver their maneuvers at range or in melee through improvised weapons. Green Flame Blade and Booming Blade, favored by Bladesingers and Eldritch Knights, don't discriminate against improvised weapons. In certain circumstances, this might let you continue to fight effectively even if you're doing another important job with your hands, such as bearing the party's light source.

Delivering conditional damage, such as sneak attack or great weapon fighting, can be more challenging since improvised weapons don't have properties, but you might convince a DM that a rail spike should be a finesse weapon or that a table should be heavy. Talk to your DM about these sorts of strategies before you take this feat.

Kit Support

Talk to your DM. Improvised Weapons fall almost entirely under the purview of the collaboration between players and DM. Odds are good that if you aren't trying to break the game (and none of these strategies should), your DM will look for ways to reward you for adopting an unconventional strategy. Especially if they know where you're going with it ahead of time.

That said, most of the ways to enhance the use of this feat that are actually found within the system are the few items on the adventuring gear table that are called out as improvised weapons- which we have discussed at length.

Perhaps there are others floating around in various published adventures or setting books- if you have access to those books, perhaps give them a once over.

Pitfalls

I don't need to tell you that your DM can handily ruin this one for you.

What I do need to tell you is that if your plan isn't thought through, if you haven't explained your plan to your DM beforehand and they balk, or if you're expecting this feat to form your entire battle strategy rather than being a single tool for your kit, you're going to be sorely disappointed.

Otherwise, making sure your character can use at least two of the feat's three applications reduces the odds your strategy will simply never be relevant in actual play.

#dnd #dnd 5e #d&d #d&d 5e #dungeons and dragons #dungeons & dragons 5e #player advice #Advice for Adventurers #Conversion Kit #october brew festival

9 notes · View notes

lligkv · 6 years ago

Text

the smartest person who doesn’t do anything

Alison Rose, the daughter of a psychiatrist and a wealthy housewife, was hired as a receptionist at the New Yorker in her 40s—her first “real” job—and ended up writing “Talk of the Town” columns in the 1990s, striking friendships with writers like Renata Adler, Harold Brodkey, and George W. S. Trow along the way. Reading her memoir, Better than Sane, it’s clear it took Rose a long time to really achieve something, to grow beyond what she calls the “ancient feelings of freakishness” that her childhood left her with.

Her father is authoritarian and volatile. He mocks his patients and his family; he’s constantly on the verge of losing his temper with his wife and daughters. He calls them all scathing names. His wife and oldest daughter, Alison’s sister, are Babs I and Babs II, and Alison herself is Babs III, or “Personality Minus,” since she’s so quiet. Alison’s mother is glamorous and removed. She seems to treat Alison’s father as a fact of the world, one she can only accept, as she goes on to do what she likes—for instance, having children with him though he doesn’t really want them. She speaks up for her daughters sometimes, but the protests are fairly mild, in the way they might be when you’ve come to accept that the world is as it is, detaching yourself from it enough to remain sanguine.

Rose, as the product of a glamorous, abusive, inscrutable sort of childhood, is a master of the weird swerves that come from idiosyncrasy. Early in the book, she’s talking about her childhood friend “Squirrel.” “Before Squirrel’s arrival,” she tells us, “I had three mops as best friends.” “My first love, though,” she adds, “had been my pencil collection,” each member of which she names and comes to treasure. She loves the pencils because they are reliable, faithful, quiet: all the things she’s missing. And when her mother sharpens them—whether it’s by mistake or on purpose, Rose doesn’t say—it’s genuinely affecting:

Their faces were obliterated and unrecognizable. Some of them were a lot shorter, too. It was as if everyone I knew had a different head and face on a now stunted body. I couldn’t look at them anymore, all distorted like that, so I abandoned them. In the years that followed, I would see one of the pencils around the house, by a telephone, vaguely recognizable, but dead.

I came to like Alison for her humility along her halting path to some sort of accomplishment, some sort of wholeness. You could look down on her for looking up to so many famous writers, like Trow and Harold Brodkey, but her childhood left her so deeply pressed into timidity that her attachments to these magnetic figures she’s somehow become so close to is touching. Even Alison’s attachment to a youthful paramour, Billy the Fish, is touching.

Billy is Burt Lancaster’s son, whom Alison dates while she’s living in West Hollywood in the 70s, trying to become an actress. He’s a cool character, with his ironic attitude, his charisma, his “certain air of separateness”—Rose calls him “the Fish” because “it was as if he lived in its own element… [a fish] who came up for other people’s air, curious, but not very often”—and his boredom with the whole world at just twenty-two. “T’s to my E’s,” he says—short for Tears to my eyes—when he’s given a gift; “Cringe,” he says, aloud, when he feels like cringing; the people who love him, he seldom treats well. It would be easy to roll your eyes at him and wonder why Alison stays with him for seven years, on tenterhooks and speed much of the while, if her love for him weren’t so clear and so honest. “My heart liked him,” she says, simply. And the closest she ever got in life to what she calls “normal pie”—“this thing men and women get married about”—was with him.

“All of us,” Rose writes—the people who knew Billy in LA—“loved him, but he couldn’t feel it, I don’t think,” and she isn’t the type to blame him for that; she knows too well what not being able to feel love feels like. She forms deep attachments to charismatic people, the way you do when you’re raised to doubt yourself—and she’s not afraid to talk admiringly about the people who shaped her, those who challenge her notion from childhood that she’s “unsuited for human connection.” And I like that a hell of a lot more than the alternative: saying nothing or being shaped by no one.

What’s more, her self-doubt is belied by the wit she so often demonstrates. For instance, her retort to Brodkey as he calls lovingly out to her in the New Yorker’s hallway:

“My Bride,” Harold calls to me in the corridor.

“My Conscience,” I answer.

Or to Trow as he teases her when Brodkey isn’t around:

“Since Harold’s gone, why not throw a little attention my way?” George asked me that same week.

“I thought you might find it repellent,” I said.

“Not as long as you keep coming up with those snappy answers.”

In still another, more sober moment, Brodkey is trying to convince Alison to find someone other than George to bring to dinner with him and his wife. A real interest. “But Harold,” she says,

“I don’t have an appropriate suitor. You know that.”

“Not a suitor. No one likes you all that much.”

“Maybe that’s true,” I said.

Shit!

He tried to be comforting. “But nobody likes anybody all that much—it’s just moments, you know that.” After a pause, he added, “I’m the one who likes you that much, but if you get to know me better your life will be considerably shorter. Hang up now or I’ll start to cry.”

Seeing moment after moment of such quick wit from Rose, and pure honesty—such willingness to say what’s true and such refusal to sugarcoat—you see why Trow, Brodkey, and Penelope Gilliatt, another writer who often stops by Alison’s desk, like her so much. And why they seem to believe she has talent even when she does not. Anytime Rose says something Trow particularly understands, he tells her: “Darling: Write that down.”

The college-degreed writers in the office call the New Yorker “the magazine”; Alison, out of place as a Californian with no college education or work experience of any kind, calls it “School.” And the name is apt for deeper reasons than the one Alison gives, which is that she gets to write “notes to boys” like Brodkey and Trow. It’s an education. And it’s a second shot at a real life, with people who take pleasure in her mind.

“For nearly four decades,” Rose writes, she struggled with “enemy thinking”:

people deciding that the way I saw things was punishable by exile. Enemy-thinking people seem to have a ceaseless, brutal, active desire to punish; perhaps it made them feel superior and powerful. The writers at this School, who in their context were superior and powerful, were a divine present to me—their ease, which created a freedom from worrying about enemy thinking. The destruction it had done to me so far, like my conviction that I just plain didn’t belong in the world, was gone, or it felt like it.

The narrative rolls on. Alison, whose job performance is always a little erratic, is let go from her receptionist position; Trow—who tells her, in a memorable moment, that she cannot keep being “the smartest person who doesn’t do anything forever”—becomes determined to get her another place at School as a “Talk of the Town” writer; she gets the position and stays there for a while, until she leaves. Better than Sane is a force-of-personality book, and most of the things that happen in it go only elliptically explained.

But there is one narrative driver. The trauma that keeps Alison adrift can’t be gone until she confronts the people who instilled enemy thinking in her in the first place.

In the final chapters, Rose describes returning to her mother’s house in Atherton for her mother’s 90th birthday. Alison’s father drops out of the narrative after its first few chapters, but her mother has recurred throughout, often as a provoking presence in Alison’s life. And at the party, so close to her again, Alison’s character regresses. She becomes very clingy with her dog Puppy Jane, clutching Jane to her so she doesn’t have to be spoken to about anything but the dog. She behaves in alienating ways because she fears being alienated, on-the-outs with her mother and sister; better to fit their perception of her as the “crazy” one.

The crisis doesn’t resolve until Alison and her sister Belinda track down their old housekeeper Nita, now living in neighboring Richmond, to ask her about their childhood. In the conversation they have, Alison’s father returns and again comes to seem like the real enemy: “He was cruel,” Nita says firmly. “Very cruel.” “There was one person,” she tells Alison, “who wasn’t nice to you. Your father. He was real mean and your mother was so nice.”

Is what Nita says true? It’s hard to be sure. It’s certainly plausible, but Alison’s mother is a little too distant and arch for you to get a clear bead on her character, and as you hear her comment on the family’s drama, it’s clear Nita herself sees the family at some distance (which is healthy, for a housekeeper). But it is true that the person who terrifies you, as Alison’s father terrified her and her mother, is a force of nature. You don’t talk about him; you certainly don’t talk to him. Instead, you treat him as a fact of the world. You might harm yourself (or your children) as a result. Or you leave, and you push the person who terrifies you into the past. And usually the damage is still done. The anger that is permitted is the anger you feel toward the ones who are nice to you, at least sometimes, who seem as though they could be convinced and reasoned with and moved to act on your behalf yet refuse to respond to reason or persuasion or pleading or need. At the same time, terror of her father, and her mother’s seeming implacability, leave Alison timid, unable to express any of that anger or feel confidence in herself. So she wanders for years, not doing anything. And it takes Nita telling Alison, “Alis’, it was a crazy house. That’s all” for Alison to realize she can let it all go.

These final chapters—in which Alison, having finally accomplished something with her life, and having been recognized and loved by the writers at School, goes home and learns the truth, that it was her family that was crazy and not her, and is redeemed—do feel a little pat. But Better than Sane was published in 2004, and maybe that was before we all became cynical about the memoir form from seeing the familiar arc (a normal or painful childhood, an experience of crisis and failure, a fall to the depths, an opening to others, a redemption, a happy ending) play out so many times. Or maybe the end feels that much more predictable because the path Alison’s taken to get there has been so unpredictable.

The book did leave me wondering where Rose is now. Better than Sane is her only book. There are quite a few literary Alison Roses out there, but none seem to be her. There really is something “regal” about Rose, as Stacy Schiff put it in her New York Times review of the book—something deeply affecting about her honesty, the plainness of her feeling beneath the elliptical prose, the humility with which she presents herself. If she never writes again that I know of, it’d be a shame.

#literary #books #alison rose #george w. s. trow #harold brodkey #memoir

2 notes · View notes

ghostmartyr · 6 years ago

Text

SnK 117 Thoughts

Action scenes!

All the wrong people achieving minor victories!

Fist fights that are Eren’s only means of honest communication anymore!

Brotherhood.

All this and more in another edition of Eren coming closest to checking himself while he wrecks himself.

-tosses confetti-

To be honest, the most worrying thing about this chapter to me is that Zeke shows up at the end. I figured that’s how this battle kept going, but I thought that would be the last ‘surprise’ of the volume. A next month thing.

If he’s already here, signs point to the handshake that breaks the world happening at the end of next chapter.

Even having no idea what Eren’s up to, but full confidence that he’s not a hundred percent on board with Zeke’s ideas for what they should be up to... Do Not Want. Zeke and Eren are like bulls in china shops (disregarding what Mythbusters says about that). Whatever’s coming, it isn’t going to be a tiny thing like brainwashing an entire island into forgetting their history. These are young men of vision.

That’s next month’s problem, though.

This month, we get another chapter that makes me think I’m going to go back to my Return to Shiganshina motto of wondering how pretty the anime is going to make all of this.

When we’re once again in Shiganshina. And Eren and Reiner are once again brawling.

This is not a critique, it’s just me pointing out that action scenes in this series are not the fastest way to any of the ongoing trauma elsewhere in the series being resolved. ...And my natural reaction to action-heavy chapters when I’m writing these posts is to kind of gesture at the chapter and be all, “you saw it, didn’t you?”

But that’s, of course, underselling all the emotional drama we still have to sort through. Starting with Eren’s upgrade to not just confusing his friends and the audience at large, now even Yelena is probably wanting to put her head in her hands and just wonder why the fuck.

With the answer apparently being that Eren feels like beating up Reiner.

Let’s put all that in the Later tab, because Eren and his problems of being Eren deserve a little more pondering before I say anything. ...Besides one reminder remark that Eren’s inherited the Attack Titan, and we haven’t yet really delved into hat it means that Titans seem to have their own outlines of a personality. With Paths moving to the forefront, that might be changing.

Or Eren just feels like beating up Reiner.

Moving on, it’s time for everyone’s favorite topic!

Fuck Marley.

This is one of those story elements I will be much less hissy at once the story is over. Unless the story does something stupid. But for now, every single time we focus on the non-Warrior conflicts of Marley, my only regret is that Zeke and Eren’s massacre in their country was so limited.

Hyperbole obviously in effect, but

Let me try to start somewhere that isn’t mindless screaming about how Marley can just go fuck right off, and how being relieved that a child soldier you’ve crafted has made it back to safety doesn’t actually make you a better person, you absolute fuckwit.

As the narrative stands, the people from Marley are the only ones with power who aren’t fucking over their personal allegiances. Zeke’s screwed over everyone. Eren has actively damaged his friends. The 104th is powerless unless they want Armin to start really making things explode.

The Warriors and Magath have a very straightforward mission, and they’ve kept to it. This is their military operation, and there’s a plan. It makes sense that they’re kind of rolled into the protagonist role of this battle. Eren’s being fucking Eren, the Warriors have legitimate grief, they’re trying to save a child behind enemy lines...

Here, as ever, is the problem.

Fuck Marley.

Just... just to try and find some words to my indignation that only this particular set of characters can capture so well, Helos. Helos the hero. The untainted, hollow hero.

The hero who secretly made a pact with both sides to end the violence and spend a century lying about how they found peace, leaving an immeasurable mark on the state of Eldians until Willy strolls up one fine day and decides, you know what, maybe we can cool it with all this lying, but we absolutely need to go after the same targets all that lying created.

Willy was willing to die for his beliefs.

His belief was that throwing Paradis under the bus was perfectly acceptable.

Marley is full of stubborn people determined to see their missions out, but every single time we approach their point of view, it drives me nuts that we are spending any time humanizing the desire for Marley to come out the winner here.

Galliard, you have a legit beef with Eren. He uses you to kill someone you could have counted among your comrades, and the trauma alone would make any desire for vengeance immediately acceptable.

But ah yes, your home town.

I know Marley keeps their people in ignorance. I know Eldians considering that their grandest aspiration in life is to die is possibly more dangerous than simply living that fate out. I know Galliard’s mostly been involved in wars that are about fighting people they’re at war with, and protecting his people.

Unless I’ve been paying even less attention than I think, they’re in Shiganshina.

Marley cracked the walls open like a nut. They used children to do it. They committed genocide without once getting their hands dirty in order to maybe drag out the Founding Titan.

All of this built on the backs of Eldians. Having the Founding Titan means having a compliant Eldian. Having Titans at all means having Eldians.

Eren’s assault on Liberio is awful. It mirrors the horror of Shiganshina, and nothing about how the plot progresses is going to make me okay with what he and Zeke went for there.

But in terms of the devastation caused?

Eren’s willingness to kill children to accomplish his goal of wiping out the top brass is disturbing, and can’t match Reiner, Bertolt, and Annie’s naive willingness to kick down a door when they’re 10-12.

Liberio is still only one town.

Opening up the walls kills a lot more than one town. Some of it through Paradis’ own tactics, but as much as I like Galliard, and understand how much he’s lost...

Marley destroys a third of Paradis because it can.

No declaration of war, no warning. They treat Paradis the way they treat all Eldians: As a resource Marley is so entitled to they have no need to recognize them as anything more.

What Eren does is appalling and wrong.

But Galliard’s continued focus on that is its own kind of sickening. These people have never been confronted with the horrors they’ve participated in. Your home town, Galliard? Your brother?

How about your home town, your mother, your friends, a third of your country, and watching your own government send out a further 20% of the remaining population on a suicide mission so the rest of them survive.

All from a completely unprovoked attack.

Eren at least waits to hear Willy’s declaration of war.

Galliard’s motives are honestly very understandable, but compared to the history we’ve lived through with the Paradis side, it’s nothing. It’s a whining child who hasn’t realized that a world beyond him and his exists.

Then there’s Magath, and his line about putting an end to a hundred years of resentment.

What, resenting the island? Thanks to a lie your hero agreed to?

Resenting titans? After using them as your primary military force since the second you were given back your autonomy?

You people fucked up your own world! Marley policy has kept the fear of titans alive. Marley’s current strategy is bringing the hatred focused on them back to an island that, as far as they know, hasn’t had any interaction with the outside world for a hundred years.

Paradis isn’t perfect. Entire essays written solely about how fucked up Paradis is would be very easy to write. Armin’s probably written about thirty, in-universe.

What they’ve done is still not comparable to what Marley’s done.

The characters might feel the emotional weight similarly, but the crimes are not anywhere close to the same.

So having these guys arguing that they’ll claim the Founding Titan and save the world? The world they didn’t think twice about breaking whenever it was convenient for them? The world they only now care about because the strength of titans is turning obsolete?

Fuck Marley.

Reiner’s honestly my favorite part of this chapter, even if he continues to cling to the wrong theme. He’s upset over Gabi and Falco, but he looks at Eren, and he actually sees Eren. Reiner is someone who has stopped trying to find a moral high ground in this fight. He has his mission, he has his people, and trying to work out the rest is insanity.

They’ll all be dead soon.

They’re all miserable.

“What do you get... from living any longer?! Eren... I’ll end this for you.”

I said a few chapters back that this is a series about suicide. It’s Zeke’s entire motivation; getting the rest of the world to the place he is. It’s time for them all to end. Here, Reiner, despite theoretically being on the anti-Zeke side, is expressing the exact same sentiment.

They’re all going to die anyway. They’ve all suffered enough. It can be over. Ending it can be an act of kindness.

Eren agreed with that once, too.

“At the very least… I want you to end it all for me.” --65

The answer he got then was very simple.

“When I see someone crying, saying… no one needs them… I want to tell them… It’s not true.”

What do you get from living any longer?

Whatever you want. It’s your fucking life. No one else has the right to decide when it should end.

Now we get to the fun stuff, because that look Eren has comes directly after Reiner spouts his big brother’s entire philosophy. Mentally, but this is a story. Eren’s most furious look comes from something he once asked for. Reiner trying to bring him to a peaceful end.

That thing Zeke wants for all Eldians.

That’s what comes before Eren’s emotions rise back to the surface.

Yelena and her merry crew don’t understand why Eren goes ahead and starts this fight, and really, neither do I. As a beacon for Zeke to follow, it’s a seriously dangerous one, and Marley knowing exactly where Eren is means they don’t have to worry about accidentally killing other human-sized bodies on the ground. Hiding and recollecting probably would have worked out better.

But we’re far enough into this arc that I’m really mostly fine with Eren doing things that don’t make sense. If the answer is just that he’s emotionally fragile enough that seeing Reiner meant he had to fight Reiner, I’d accept that.

Then Zeke shows up, and. Siiiigh.

I don’t know what happens next, but Eren looks so young when his big brother steps in to help. Eren’s been fighting alone this entire time. He doesn’t seem to like Yelena or Floch. He’s taken steps to make sure his friends stay away from him. He accepts the assistance freely offered, but his mission is his own.

My personal opinion is that Eren has very different plans for the Founding Titan’s powers than what the narrative has told us. His furious fight for life in this very chapter is a point in favor of that.

But whatever it’s used for, there’s one other person in the world who’s trying just as hard to reach him.

Zeke and Eren are doing, and will do, horrible things. Eren’s motives might not line up with Zeke’s, but Zeke is still his partner in this. Zeke knows what it’s like to cut off everything else except their mission. He knows what it’s like to be alone without an ally he can fully trust with his vision for the world.

They might have different visions, but Zeke understands everything Eren has gone through, and in Eren’s most desperate moment, he shows up.

Until the end of whatever happens, his big brother is fighting to make it to his side. He’s here to protect Eren and change the world with him.

Eren’s a disaster, but the look on his face sells how hard all of this has been. Since he was fifteen, he’s been shouldering the fate of humanity alone. Now, he has someone in his corner who’s held that burden for even longer.

It probably won’t go well. Even this bond might fall to pieces if their philosophical differences come out.

But for right now, Eren has his big brother.

Oh and in other news, Gabi paying attention to all the wrong things means that Marley knows the requirements for making the Founding Titan go zoom.

Next chapter is just going to end with Eren and Zeke’s hands finally meeting. The last page is a blank white one that says ‘the heart’.

...I do kinda love that while this is going on, everyone in the cells just assumes that the Wall Titans are now walking around. SURPRISE! you’re at war. That’s going to be fun to cope with when your building inevitably suffers a hole.

Next month is going to be... a lot.

#Shingeki no Kyojin #SnK 117 #Eren Yeager #shingeki no spoilers #SnK spoilers #spoilers #tl;dr #chapter post

108 notes · View notes

archiveddvrpg · 7 years ago

Photo

Congratulations, ASH! You’ve been accepted for the role of CLEOPATRA. Admin Jen: I am someone who is completely enthralled by Cleopatra, both as a historical figure and a Shakespeare character. So I have to admit, I had big expectations but, Ash, you completely surpassed them! God, I can’t even express how over the moon I am about this application. Your take on Calina was thrilling to read and pick apart; from the intriguing comparisons you drew between her and her iconic historical counterpart, to the beautiful references to Cleopatra’s history and the poetic tragedy of her story, to the amazing character analysis you explored in the Extras section. These intricacies complimented your deep understanding of Calina, bringing your portrayal to life and making it wholly yours. Your passion for her really shines through and it was a beautiful sight to behold! We can’t wait to see the Queen on the dash! Please read over the checklist and send in your blog within 24 hours.

WELCOME TO THE MOB.

Out of Character

Alias | Ash

Age | 24

Preferred Pronouns | She/Her

Activity Level | Still a working gal, so I’m def still limited to nights and weekends. But y’all know I hardly leave Discord so I’m always about to plot.

Timezone | EST

Current/Past RP Accounts | Can I just… *slides tib’s account over* http://oftybalts.tumblr.com/

In Character

Character | Calina “CLEOPATRA” Sokolova.

What drew you to this character? | Cleopatra. What a woman. In both Shakespeare and in history – and while his name comes first in the play’s title, it is not Antony that gets remembered, is forever emblazoned in history, depicted in art, fashioned in costumes on halloween, celebrated as royalty, nor does he become the sole female symbol to a nation. It is her. The harlot. The seductress. The woman, who many thought did not deserve the crown to her own country.

But it is this kind of a woman that Calina is destined to become. Rising from the ashes of her past. Underestimated. Unbowed. And ultimately unbroken.

If so, the stars wouldn’t have written it that she be found in that alleyway by her adoptive mother. She wouldn’t have made it out of that brothel when she’d lost all else – her possessions, her pride, her hope. She wouldn’t have been found by Damiano and Faron and brought into the Montague fold. She was fated to be much more than a forgotten princess. She was fated to be the queen of an empire – and this is something she never allowed herself to forget again. It is this resilience that brings me to adore Calina so much. Where circumstance after circumstance forged against her was intended to make her wilt as well, she withstood. There’s a pain to that, a realness to that. These reasons make Calina not only a marvel, but an inspiration. As is her Shakespearean counterpart. When the Romans threatened to take the very empire that was her birthright, Cleopatra used the desire, she was so condemned for to create one of the most infamous political strongholds in history, to not only to save her crown but her country and her people as well. Has it not been said that the lily of the valley is the flower that blooms in spite of the darkness? There is no other soft-petaled thing that could depict Calina Sokolova more, though, it’s known she’d rather not be compared to such gentle ideals – she’s much more than that.

What also drew me to this character was the opportunity to find the balance between Cleopatra and Calina, identify the connections between their stories and personalities until they became one. What I love about Cleopatra as a person and a character manifested in Calina, is that she is the epitome of versatility. She is not so simple as to pigeonhole her into one category, one type of woman – as she is many – and she’d sooner sneer at anyone who thought her so one-dimensional. She is the prim scholar, the cultured savant, the coquettish minx, the charming socialite, the strategic tactician, the grateful soldier. There’s a quote I’ve come across and saved as inspiration – ““How many women are you,” he asked. “A legion,” I said” – and if I had to pick a sole defining string of words for my girl, it’d be this one. She’s willing to transform, adapt to whatever situation she might find herself in, an arsenal of personas at her disposal. It’s a skill that not many can master, but she does it with unfaltering grace and glamour as she’s traded her rags for foreign riches. She is every bit feline, perched high above the rest, tail swishing as she surveys and assesses before pouncing from her vantage point. A chessmaster, out-maneuvering and out-witting and out-strategizing the men in her midst, turning the tides into her favor. It is her femininity and willingness to utilize it that makes her underestimated, and perhaps that is her greatest weapon.

Lastly, what draws me to Calina is not only balancing her with Cleopatra, but sorting through the compiled contradictions that reside inside her head and heart. She knows what it is to love and be loved in return, but the beating bleeding thing in her chest is kept behind the gilded cage of her ribs now, as such loss and heartbreak cannot crack at her heart again, not when in the midst of war. Gentle things feel brittle against her skin, and yet brutality causes her to recoil in distaste. She despises those who lack loyalty, looks upon those of vicious tendency with suspicion, but cannot bring herself to be trustful of others as she wishes to observe such savagery and perhaps tailor a bit of it to suit her own purposes. She’s aligned herself with people who do despicable things all before breakfast, and yet she still has the energy to pettily turn up her nose at them all the same for it. She possesses an open mind, but tends to be unyielding and uncompromising when it comes to what she knows, casting her own judgements and aligning her logic only by her own side unless someone is in agreement with her. Hers is a superior intelligence, she knows, a quiet and sophisticated thing. She might be called shrewd or callous for the ruthless plans she might devise, the manipulations she’s deemed necessary, but it is important to note that Calina Sokolova is no more good than she is bad. Sure her origins are questionable, and her motives unknown by most, but she is not a villain – she is simply a woman trying to survive in the mess that men have so brutishly created and come out above it all. A woman trying to reclaim the second chance at life that she’d snatched from the Fates before they could sever it with cruel jagged scissors – because she deserved it. A woman trying to gain all the things she’d lost and then some. She hadn’t come to Verona seeking a throne or a crown, exactly, but if it fits…she’ll gladly rest it atop her head.

What is a future plot idea you have in mind for the character? | Where do you see this character developing, and what kind of actions would you have them take to get there? 3 future plot ideas would be preferable.

BUT SHE MAKES HUNGRY, WHERE SHE MOST SATISFIES | “A woman’s authority spelled a man’s deception.” It’s a quote I’ve crossed multiple times when doing research and looking for inspiration for Cleopatra. It alluded to the Roman narrative that had deemed her an enchantress, condemned by the men around her for her tempting ‘magic’ leading to the eventual demise of their greatest leaders. If only they knew that love was the reason, that their desire for her far outweighed reason, that being so foolish to let heart lead over head was their true downfall. But through the years, through her observation and careful practice, Calina has seen just how powerful of a sin lust can be – it’s not one of the seven deadliest for no reason. Guilty of strategizing her sexuality, she has used such wiles to obtain things that she had no money or status to simply ask for. When faced with her greatest obstacles, the hailed Queen of the Nile utilized her tactical mind as her greatest weapon too, and with forming such advantageous alliances was able to reap benefits she would never have been able to so much as grasp if so stubborn to work alone. She utilized love to shackle Rome’s greatest leader, affections to keep the independence of her country and hold an army between her fingertips. I would love nothing more than for Calina to utilize the strategy of her namesake, forge alliances of the unlikely kind, relationships of mutual benefit. Perhaps a faithless Capulet willing to build a bridge that might support her plans, her goals. Maybe even higher ranking Montagues who sat closer to the throne she so wants to sit prettily upon. ( Bonus points if such an alliance is romantic in nature. )

ETERNITY WAS IN OUR LIPS AND EYES | In history, it was a known fact that Cleopatra was led by her mind, while betraying her heart and sacrificing being with her beloved for the sake of the bigger picture. I strongly believe that Calina mirrors Cleopatra in that very aspect, her logical, analytical mind pushing her heart to the side more often than not. I hope to explore the matters of Calina’s head and heart, as they are both such fickle vitals within her. As a woman who is often led by one while prone to befalling the whispers of the other, there’s often a lot of inner turmoil inside of her. Far more used to being desired, she’s almost lost sight of what actual love should look like – though, she’d be a liar if she said it wasn’t the kind of passion and all-consuming intensity she craved deep down, the thing of fiction novels and foreign films. But she knows love has no place in war, knows she’d sooner die than find something so true, as it is often a tool forged to destroy pawns and capitalize on cruelly as leverage. Life has taught her that to love greatly means even greater loss, and she doesn’t know if she’s ready to lose again after just grabbing the reins back on her life. So she knows in her quest for power, that she must ignore the affectionate leanings she’s so inclined towards to fill such a gapingly empty hole inside of her. She is not void of fondness and she is not without her feelings (as much as she’d like to be), but it’ll come down to it when she has to ask herself which one does she want more, which one is more important: love and meaningful connection or power. A tender heart or a gilded crown? Or will clever Cleopatra find a way to have both?

THE THRONE OF OUR QUEEN IS EMPTY | Aligning herself with those that will protect her, benefit her most is Calina’s modus operandi. Distrustful of many aside from herself, Calina, ever the cynic, knows that you must be vigilant as snakes reside in the very grass she stands in. She still waits for the day that Faron might decide to collect his debt that he’d used to free her from the proverbial chains that kept her shackled to that brothel. Still waits for Damiano to name his price for extracting her to Verona. Never the type to bite the hand that feeds her, Calina is a willing and dutiful soldier, knowing that this is a prized opportunity, that not many are so fortunate to be plucked from the gutter and reincarnated as a new deity, given a new form, a new life. But she knows what desperation is like, and it tastes like bile at the back of her tongue, a lingering flavor that she wishes if only to rid herself of forever. She knows now what the elite tastes like, sweet and decadent like caramel, what it feels like, soft and rich like cashmere, and she’d be damned if she goes back to the streets of Russia she’d been made to merely exist in. Clinging to her new status is what she values most, and so she wants to rise in the ranks, secure her place in Damiano’s eyes. He has heard the stories, the words whispered about her unmatched mind, and she wishes to show him just what she can do for the Montagues. Her eyes are on an Emissary title (for now), not too keen, and far too ambitious to resort to taking orders as a mere soldier for long. But she knows her time will come – she’ll make sure of it. (And I want to see just how much she’s willing to do to achieve it.)

SHOULD YOU EVER COMPARE CAESAR WITH ANTONY | I believe I’m most excited to develop Calina’s connection with Alexander. It interests me because now that I’ve gotten acquainted with Alexander, he carries himself like the warrior Antony was, but his mind is what I know will intrigue Calina most, as she isn’t impressed with a show of muscle and brute strength (though it is entirely nice to view). He’s cunning and as sharp as the knife-carved curve of his grin, and it is this intelligence and drive that shows me shadows of Caesar in him. It is written that Caesar was truly a well-match for Cleopatra as they were intellectual equals, a power couple of sorts as they were ruled by their ambitious minds and worked through their mutually beneficial alliance together. So I’d love to see what kind of pair Calina and Alexander might make, where her intrigue of him will take her.

Are you comfortable with killing off your character? | It would crush me to kill my queen, but of course, if to propel the plot forward, I approve her demise, and it must be as grand and as poetic and as ironic of a death that Cleopatra deserves. If we got some snakes, that’d be greaaaat.

In Depth

In-Character Interview: The following questions must be answered in-character, and in para form (quotations, actions written out if applicable, etc). There is no minimum or maximum limit for your response - simply answer as you would if you were playing the character.

What is your favorite place in Verona?

She can answer the negative to this question rather than the positive. But such is customary of the cynic, is it not? She sees herself seated across from a Capulet counterpart, and only prays to the gods above that her discomfort does not shine through the darkness of her eyes. She sees the velveteen interior, she sees the girls scantily clad and palms itching, she sees Verona’s elite, their fingers offering silver and gold and the lights that have dimmed from the girls’ eyes suddenly returns if for a moment. She can’t see that last bit, but she knows because there was once a time when that had been her. She too had been the girl, glad to serve clients if only to receive payment enough to bring her closer to repayment of her debts. The Dark Lady only reminds her of a past she not only wishes to leave in the tattered pages of her history, but it’s one that needs to remain there, something of the past, a scar that had healed over finally.

“The Capital Library, of course.” Her gaze had been down, examining the pastel shade she’s chosen for her manicured hand, only for that that same hand to make a sweeping gesture, urging the journalist to cast their eyes upon even the furthest corners of her sitting room. Books, books and more books stacked neatly on shelves, perched precariously against the edges of tables, some lovingly dog-eared so she might not lose her page, others with delicate scribbles in the margins. Texts of new and old. Of the language Verona knows, and in tongues it does not. Her mind was a vast canvas, and reading is not only her solace, but the only way she might paint against it, knowledge of all kinds hanging themselves like masterpieces inside that pretty head of hers. So it’s only with a genuine spark in her tone that she continues, “There is hardly a scent I adore more than that of books.” A pause, a dainty tip of her head, the slightest tug to her lips, “Aside from medovik, of course…” She thinks then of Faron, who’d undoubtedly had a box with a slice of the delectable honey cake from their motherland left on her desk the other day. Once more, she can’t help as sentiment knocks at the door, awaiting answer, as he remembers details so minute, but she doesn’t let it in.

What does your typical day look like?

“Well–” Calina begins, eyes flitting up towards the ceiling in thought, one leg brought up to cross primly over the other, the gilded metallic G of her Gucci suede pumps catching in the afternoon light. “Waking up so horrendously early cannot seem to escape my routine.” She was forged into a creature of the night, nearly hissing as the sun’s rays would break through her curtains each morning. But she has since learned to become one with the day, after hating it for so long, detesting the sun for daring to rise when her world had descended into darkness. Nonetheless, she finds herself much preferring what happens before the sun goes down on this beautiful city. “But I do yoga, I have tea, I feed Si –” She begins her day with all things that relax her, as she knows it’ll only get more turbulent from there.

“I spend most of my day at the embassy more than I spend time here.” Cue the arrival of Osiris, her all black emperor of household, purring as he curls beneath her hand, starved from her affections as her day and night jobs keep her from their home far more than he appreciated. A jealous little thing, he was – not wanting to share his mum with anyone. “Much to this one’s displeasure,” she coos, picking up the cat, holding him tenderly to her chest. “Isn’t that right, darling?” A tinkling laugh slips past charming lips, mouth momentarily pressing to onyx fur to conceal the humor that curved her smile, “Though, I must say, my day only takes a turn for the boring from there. I meet with a few associates, and it’s instantly into interpreter mode.” She leans in then, as if sharing with them a hushed secret, “I’ll be lucky if I speak English for any amount of time.” A sigh of feigned disappointment escapes her, only for her to continue, “–and then…I suppose I come back here. Have a little dinner, a little wine. Only to rest and do it all over again the next morning.” It all sounds so trivial, and that is with good reason. There is no need for the darling journalist to be brought out of his ignorance of her true purpose here in fair Verona.

What has been your biggest mistake thus far?

A cant of her head, a knowing smile, “Do I look like a woman who makes mistakes?”

Miscalculations were a rarity with someone as careful, as cautious and as well-thought as Calina. But even she is prone to human error – not that the man who was seated across from her needed to know such a thing. Know that she was something mortal and not entirely godly. So, her lips purse as she waits, a finger idly brushing across her cupid’s bow – whether it’s deliberate, is not something you have to ask, as she intends to draw the eye there to the inviting part of her lips.

He pauses, chest rising with an inhale, the words seemingly teetering on the edge of his tongue unable to fall out, but he musters a shake of his head at her inquiry. He doesn’t think so. “Smart boy,” is her coy response, a flash of a wink in accompaniment, so quick if you blinked you’d probably miss it.

What has been the most difficult task asked of you? (tw: illusions of sexual assault)

It wasn’t asked. That was the problem.

To be asked would mean she was being gifted courtesy wrapped in a bow. To be asked would mean she’d be granted choice, the ability to accept or decline, to return or exchange with a receipt. But no – the most difficult task for Calina Solokova to face was demanded of her. (If she wanted to eat, if she wanted somewhere to sleep, if she wanted to live.)

It happened in the shadows where no one could see, perhaps it was best that way so the crystalline tears that treaded down her cheeks would never be seen by the light of day. It’s a memory pushed so far to the recess of her mind, she almost cannot recall all the details these days. But she remembers her face had been stony, still, unmoving, unaffected. The man nameless, faceless as he pushes crimson silk from her lithe frame, as his calloused fingertips touched her without an ounce of knowledge as to what kind of jewel he was holding.

Her lips press together tightly, she feels the matte texture of her lipstick between them. She pauses so she might think, might craft the correct response. It’s then that she decides playing a part might suit her well here. A breath of a laugh, a feigned bashful tuck of her hair behind her ear, “My mind’s certainly drifted, hasn’t it. What was the question again?” A fluttering of lashes, a softened, apologetic smile – the journalist is gracious enough to skip this question, and she thanks him with a deliberate touch to the top of his palm, feather light and barely there.

What are your thoughts on the war between the Capulets and the Montagues?

“War,” she scoffs, the sound gentle but her disdain carrying loud and clear.

Piercing eyes narrow, the winged tip of her kol liner sharpened like the point of an arrow. “It’d be just like men to start something so barbaric with no end in mind.” To her it was illogical, to waste time, resource and more importantly energy, on the maintenance of a petty feud. There is nothing worth fighting for, she’s realized, if not for love or for power. And she liked to think the Montagues and Capulets fought for neither. There were by far better things than to focus on – the creation of empires, the falling of others, she thinks.

“It’s primitive. Dated. If they want to continue on in this matter they might as well fight over Twitter about it.” Another pause. Her fingertips coming to her lips, as if the words had come out too soon before she could stop them, “But, you didn’t hear me say that either.”

Extras: If you have anything else you’d like to include (further headcanons, an inspo tag, a mock blog, etc), feel free to share it here! This is OPTIONAL.

PINTEREST BOARD

QUOTES:

“How many women are you? he asked. A legion, I said.”

“BELLADONNA, n. In Italian a beautiful lady; in English a deadly poison. A striking example of the essential identity of the two tongues.” – Ambrose Bierce

“Men love me cause I’m pretty – and they’re always afraid of mental wickedness – and men love me cause I’m clever, and they’re always afraid of my prettiness – One or two have even loved me cause I’m lovable, and then, of course, I was acting. But you just do, darling –” – Zelda Fitzgerald

“She is her own heroine—capricious, exacting, exquisite, very learned, and beautifully dressed.” — Virginia Woolf

“She’s a very mysterious creature, with an open smile and a closed soul.” — Colette, from a letter to Madame Léopold Marchand

“She carries herself like a god. She is a composed ocean of waves that could become turbulent if you test her.”

HEADCANONS:

TV TROPES: Brainy Brunette, Silk Hiding Steel, Broken Bird, Femme Fatale, The Chessmaster, Passive-Aggressive Aggression, I Have Many Names, The Charmer, Ice Queen, Faux Affably Evil, All Girls Are Lustful, Honey Trap

CHARACTER INSPO: Catwoman / Selina Kyle (Batman), Hathor (Gods of Egypt), Commander Lexa (The 100)

AESTHETICS: She’s fur trimmed coats and heels as high as her standards. She’s a touch as warm as a crackling fire with a stare as icy as the country from which she hails. Chin tipped up proudly as she balances a gilded crown no one can see but knows is resting atop her head. Her voice is like honey, and her laughter like wisps of smoke, tendrils floating airily above ruby-painted lips. Piercing eyes assessing and calculating, who might she charm next with the knowledge carved into the walls of her mind like hieroglyphs? The answer is: everyone.

Her mother Tatiana Sokolova was a widow and school teacher. Her husband, Mischa, died long before she could conceive a child. It was his only wish, his only hope, that they’d grow their little family in Irkutsk, that one day he’d drive his truck route through the snow long enough for them to have enough money to move to St. Petersburg. It’s a dream he never got to see into fruition, God knows they tried their best, but Tatiana always felt that she’d failed him. It’s why she’d prayed so hard, why she’d wish upon every star, why she’d memorize the scriptures until she knew them by heart, because if she prayed to her gods and believed hard enough – miracles could happen. And when her little miracle did happen, Tatiana only wished that he was around to see Calina grow, see her excel – he would have been proud of her, the woman always said.

They say curiosity killed the cat, and despite knowing that fact, Calina grew up ever curious into her original background. While she never sought for her parents, she did seek answers about her heritage, her ancestry. Taking a test, she finds that her roots lie in the motherland of Africa’s tip and in the desert sands of the Middle East – it’s only logical then that she learn Arabic, that she research the customs of such drastically different cultures, if only to feel closer and more immersed into them. One of her many dreams: to visit both Egypt and Morocco one day.

Showing the early signs of a cerebral child, a gifted child, reading was always little Calina’s favorite thing to do, always by far more excited than her classmates to get the summer’s reading list. She was the type of child who would live in the library if she could, taking out stacks of books only to return them by the week’s end because she’d finished them all, and even went through a few of them twice. It’s a habit she could hardly shake well into adulthood, as the Montagues have now become accustomed to finding her beneath the ornate embellishments of headquarters if she is missing for any period of time. To her, there is no shortage of knowledge, only fools claim to know it all. (But let’s not mistake, she knows by far more than the rest do.)

Her mother showed her how to do everything, Calina acting as her permanent shadow as she trailed behind her. She knows how to cook the perfect solyanka because she’s hovered over her mother’s shoulder while she stood at the stove. She knows how to knit her own scarf, because her mother only seemed to have the energy to calmly knit as she got sicker and sicker, and she’d help her knit-one and pearl-two when her bony fingers couldn’t go on anymore. She knew how to tend to chamomile, if only to brew the delicate flowers into steaming soothing tea, because her mother watered and sang to her plants religiously at the windowsill, and she’d do the same. She learned Ukrainian because that was her mother’s second tongue, almost spoken in their home more than Russian.

Her interests are vast and varied – a modern Renaissance woman. Languages are only the beginning. She enjoyed mathematics, was fascinated by history and geography, and marveled constantly at art. Growing and learning, she couldn’t put a finger on her favorite subjects, as she only wished to consume as much knowledge as she could.

When she does make it to Novosibirsk, Calina goes straight into state university, with the hopes to secure a job once her certificate was in her hand. She studies Linguistics, with the hopes to become a translator, maybe one day able to work for government agencies in her country or across the globe – the United Nations was one dream, among many. But she soon learned that dreaming was for the naive. Due to the illness of her mother, and no one to care for her, she has no choice but to drop out of school, and uses the remaining funds from her tuition payments to take care of hospital bills, their rent, and an decidedly ornate urn when her mother eventually passes. Her ashes are floating through the depths of the Baltic Sea by now.

A brilliant linguist she becomes, with a talent for rapid language acquisition, Calina is skilled in six languages: her native Russian, English, Ukrainian, Bulgarian, Arabic and Italian most recently due to her new ‘business’ ventures.

She alludes some her knowledge to her lovers. Sometimes her customers were sweet, in the exchange for her affection they’d wish to bring her gifts – all she’d ask for was information. A new language to learn, a new book to absorb, a new code for her mind to crack. She learns Bulgarian from Stanislav, as he purred it her ear until she could purr it back. Dariya, her favorite, shows her that English is not as difficult as she thinks, leaving her poems from authors even greater than herself. Is brought hardcover books with gilded spines and Arabic lines from Adrik, and she’d lift his delicate round spectacles so she might press her lips to his eyelids. It was her little way of making better of the horrid situation she found herself trapped in.

It had become an inherent part of her, a subconscious thing for a girl like Calina, to analyze and categorize those she interacts with according to a specific criteria, especially so once she was inducted into the Montague ranks. When she encountered someone new, she’d ask herself a series of questions that would determine their suitability of her attention: What can I gain in this relationship? What can this person give me? Most importantly, will I be willing to part with them if need be?

Dependency is her greatest fear. To live in a world where she cannot save herself, where at every turn a man will be there to rescue her, is not one she can see herself existing in. Which is why she’s more than keen to learn how to better defend herself, how to better weaponize herself and stay protected. But she’s yet to voice such desires, waiting to see who she might best employ to assist her.

Currently, she calls the Verona embassy her second home, more time spent there than beneath the roof of her own apartment. She serves as a translator for foreign dignitaries, her charm and clear command of language makes her shine at meetings to discuss ranges of topics, from foreign policy and international trade to criminal justice and matters of Verona’s security. It’s a strategic move on Damiano’s part to place her there, to be the eyes, ears, and soothing guiding voice of influence that is necessary as far as local and international governments are concerned. It’s no secret her mind cannot be resisted, and it makes all the better for the Montagues to have friends in such high places.

ARCHETYPES:

45% INTELLECTUAL – Thriving on intellectual pursuit, with a defining grace of wisdom, the Intellectual is the ultimate dinner-party guest. Engaging questions and thoughtful debate are their trademarks. They are your sages – imparting their wise words only learned through time and experience. The Intellectuals can be your scientists – juggling a plethora of ideas in their minds, willing to listen and engage in conversation so long as it properly stimulates their intellect. They are your scholars, your polymaths – brimming with bright curiosity for all aspects of life, collecting knowledge in all its forms. But they can also be your judges – masterful arbitrators, sharp and impartial, slicing through the heart of matters to create balance.

35% PERFORMER – Center stage. In the spotlight. Entertaining and exuberant. Flourishing in the face of attention and applause. The Performers are your provocateurs – walking sirens, with charm and unabashed sensuality on their side. They can get anyone to do anything for them with just the right string of words, the right look, the right touch. They are the pretenders, the seducers – dishonesty is a language they speak well, using it to sway the foolish into giving them their hearts. Nothing is as it seems, as they keep you on your toes, teasing you with portions of themselves instead of the whole. But living on the shallow surface can only go so far when it comes to real relationships.

20% ROYAL – Driven by power. On a constant quest to bask in entitlement and luxury. The Royals are your networkers – with esteem, power, charm and more importantly hundreds of contacts at their disposal, they can work any room and cozy up to the power players in it with ease to help push their agendas. They are your queens – ultimate conveyors of grace and elegance, with the ability to lead as examples, empowering those around them (especially women) to succeed. But they can also be your politicians – people-oriented, excellent communicators, with an innate talent for leadership and influence, they firmly understand that their jobs would be nothing without the alliances they can make.

DARK CORE PERSONALITY TEST:

20.11% Darker than the Average Person

TOP DARK TRAITS

MACHIAVELLIANISM (87%) – “Manipulativeness, callous affect, and a strategic, calculating orientation.”

SELF-INTEREST (80%) – “The unprincipled pursuit of gains in socially valued domains, such as material goods, social status, recognition, achievement, and success.”

EGOISM (80%) – “Excessive concern with one’s own pleasure or advantage at the expense of community well-being.”

#accepted: cleopatra #accepted

5 notes · View notes

bltngames · 7 years ago

Photo

Game Review: The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (2017)

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild might just be one of the best games Nintendo has ever made. Ever. Is that too hyperbolic? Should I reign it in a little?

So where does that put us? The Nintendo game I hold in the highest regard is Super Mario 64, which on top of just being a really good game, basically defined 3D character movement for the entire game industry. Everything from Uncharted to Grand Theft Auto and NieR Automata owes something to Super Mario 64 for establishing how to use an analog stick to control the action on screen. It was a revolution.

Breath of the Wild isn’t a revolution. This is a game cut from the same cloth as Skyrim or The Witcher 3 — an open-world fantasy game, with towns full of people and quest logs designed to distract. You’ve technically seen this game before, or at least parts of it, and on the surface it can be easy to brush it off as nothing more than a thinly veiled “me too” clone by way of The Legend of Zelda.

But here’s the deal: you’ve never played Nintendo’s version of this. Those other games I mentioned often prioritize production quality and narrative depth. A quest’s story in my examples is often more important than what you actually have to do in it, with the worst example being multiple quests in Skyrim that send you from one edge of the map miles away to the other edge just to kill a single enemy and then hike the entire distance back for your reward. Even on horseback, a quest like that would take hours of mind-numbing transit. The obvious (and likely intended) solution is to use the game’s fast travel system to teleport to the destination, complete the objective, and then teleport back, turning an all-day gameplay excursion into a something that takes less than 15 minutes. The problem is that this creates a disconnect where everything stops feeling real, because there’s no reaffirmation that these are places that exist. You come to view the world as nothing more than a piece of software that lets you materialize at your destination. There’s no sense of distance, no journey.

That’s simply not true with Breath of the Wild, which goes out of its way to make you feel like a part of the land of Hyrule. Not only does it feel like a real, lived-in space, it feels like one with thousands of years of tangible history. Ruins of what used to be litter the land, some more recent than others, but all purpose-built with a legacy of their own. The environment of Hyrule is as much a character here as anyone else, and its battle-scarred vistas tell a lonely, somber tale.

Zelda is one of Nintendo’s most narrative-rich franchises, which allows it to slip into Skyrim’s skin with ease. Just the same, Breath of the Wild is a game about journeys. It’s a game where you look over your shoulder and think: an hour ago, I was on top of that mountain. I have come so far, done so much, and seen so many things. Yes, it has fast travel and horse riding if you really need to get somewhere quickly. But why would you? Breath of the Wild is a game where there’s always something on the horizon calling out to you. Horses and fast travel might get you in the general vicinity of where you want to go, but never close enough. Eventually you have to take matters into your own hands (often literally) and venture forth by yourself to discover Hyrule’s mysteries, one cliff face at a time. Literally the entire point of this game is to meticulously sift through the world inch by inch, and it manages to feel like magic basically the entire time.

You also connect to this world in other ways. Breath of the Wild features surprisingly robust artificial intelligence and physics systems, and you’re given tools perfect for playing around in this space. Rather than acquire a stable of items from dungeons (as in past Zelda games), Breath of the Wild gives you five core abilities during its tutorial and then turns you loose on the world to use them as you please. Unlike, say, Ocarina of Time’s hookshot, which could only be used on specific hookshot targets, these five abilities are far more utilitarian in their approach. They allow you to interact with the environment in ways most open world games shy away from, like picking up physics objects or generating platforms over tricky terrain. In addition to helping you solve puzzles and navigate the world, many of these abilities have combat applications, leading to fun games of cat and mouse with Ganon’s minions.

In one particular example, I came upon a camp of pig-like Bokoblins that had set up inside the ruins of an old building. I had mostly cleared the place out, but there was still one lone Boko on patrol outside completely unaware of what had happened to the rest of the camp. From the door, he peered inside. Bokoblins don’t have great eyesight, so from the distance he was at, he didn’t really have a chance to identify me before I darted out of sight. He obviously knew he saw something suspicious, so he walked over, grabbed a club from the camp’s weapons pile outside, and then headed inside the ruins to investigate. By this point, I’d climbed on top of the ruins and was watching him from what would be the roof, if this building had one (it did not). He headed to the last place he saw me and sniffed around, hoping to figure out what he’d seen. By now his back was turned to me, so I jumped from my vantage point above him and came down on his head with my spear for a quick kill. This kind of emergent gameplay is a first for The Legend of Zelda, and it makes every combat encounter feel unique.

Perhaps Breath of the Wild’s greatest strength is its willingness to embrace this kind of emergent player expression. Nintendo could have very easily locked a lot of its puzzles and encounters down, discouraging all but the one “true” solution, but they didn’t. It brings to mind the elements that made a game like Minecraft so captivating; the only thing stopping you from getting somewhere or doing something is your own ingenuity. Nothing in the game ever has just one solution, and it fully embraces whatever ways you can find to bend its rules. Previous Zeldas were full of jigsaw puzzles that had to be assembled in the same way every single time. Breath of the Wild is more of an actual test of problem solving skills, and one where my answer might be different from your answer and neither one of us is wrong.

Of course, even the best games have their flaws, and Breath of the Wild is definitely not a perfect game. In particular is the game’s performance — I played on the Wii U, and there, Breath of the Wild suffers occasional choppy framerates and sometimes more significant stuttering. Knocking down a Moblin can sometimes make the whole game freeze for up to two full seconds. Zelda is undoubtedly simulating a lot of stuff behind the scenes, between physics, climate systems, fire propagation, and artificial intelligence, so it’s understandable when the game threatens to buckle under it’s own weight, but it’s still a problem worth talking about. My understanding is that the Switch version is also affected by many of these technical issues, but with less severity. But, even on the Wii U, I found them to be momentary annoyances and not anything to really cast the game in a negative light. For 75% of my time in Hyrule, the game performed just fine (and it’s worth mentioning that during the process of writing this review, Nintendo published a patch for Zelda that optimizes the game just a little bit more to reduce framerate drops).

The other elephant in the room deals the game’s systems, particularly in weapon durability and weather. If you use a given weapon too much, it will eventually shatter. Often, I’d leave a combat encounter with fewer or worse weapons than when I started, but once I learned not to get too attached to any given sword, shield or bow, it ceased to be an issue. Breath of the Wild is a game about making do with what you’ve got and building an ever-changing strategy around that. Enemies also scale in strength over time, providing you with a drip feed of slightly more powerful gear as you play. That being said, the game definitely could have benefited from ways to repair fragile weapons, because just about everything breaks after only a few minutes of use.

Weather, on the other hand, was probably the single biggest point of frustration for me in Breath of the Wild. You’re given an on-screen weather forecast, presumably so you can plan accordingly should something like rain come up, but sometimes it can be unpredictable as you move through the world and suddenly shift into a new biome with different weather patterns. In one particularly ridiculous scenario, I found myself stranded on a rocky alcove because if I climbed up even ten feet it would trigger a biome change and begin raining, making it too slick to continue upwards. The moment I’d drop off the cliff (or more likely slip off), the rain would suddenly vanish. Sometimes, it doesn’t make any logical sense at all, such as the time I had to light fires as part of a quest and it began raining just long enough (about six seconds) to snuff out my flames and make me start over. Nothing in the forecast called for rain, nothing on my HUD changed, it just started pouring rain and then instantly stopped. You very quickly learn to dread rainstorms, because there’s not a lot you can do about them except wait for the weather to clear.

Regardless, these problems barely register as a blip on the game’s radar. I know it can be easy to sometimes get frustrated with Nintendo’s output and design philosophies, specifically with regards to past Zelda games like Twilight Princess and Skyward Sword, but when this company pulls together and fires on all cylinders, the end result is something truly incredible to behold. Breath of the Wild is a tremendous game; even after finishing the game and putting in more than 140 hours, I wasn’t ready to leave Hyrule. I was still finding new discoveries. New places I hadn’t been to yet. No game that I can ever remember playing in the 30+ years since the NES has gotten its hooks into me this deep for this long. It may not be a revolution, but with Breath of the Wild, Nintendo has still run circles around the industry just the same. Under no circumstances should you allow yourself to miss this game.

#writing #review #the legend of zelda #breath of the wild #wii u #nintendo

2 notes · View notes

siliconwebx · 6 years ago

Text

Personas: What They Are, How to Make Them, and How to Use Them in Marketing

One of the challenges of creating a marketing strategy is predicting how potential customers will react to your content. If your strategy fails to hit home with your target audience, all of the time, energy, and resources you put into it will go to waste.

Marketing personas can help you prevent this problem. In this article, we’ll explain what personas are, how to create them, and how to use them in marketing.

Let’s jump in!

What Marketing Personas Are

Marketing personas are characters designed to represent sections of your target customer base. They’re used as tools to help understand customer motivations and predict their behavior in order to ultimately increase sales.

For example, if you create a product that you believe will appeal to teenage boys, creating a persona for them is a good idea. You’ll give him a name, an age, and state a problem of his you can solve. You can also note things such as whether he has a car, or an after school job.

This makes for more efficient and effective marketing. When you’re trying to decide how to market your product, personas help you see through your customers’ eyes. By considering their values, you’ll better know how to tap into your customers’ emotions to make your products or services seem more appealing.

Persona marketing is useful in a variety of different situations. For example, it can link with content marketing to help personas for your target readers. They can also help you determine the best way to communicate with your customers, and what kinds of promotional strategies to use. They can even be useful for inspiring new products or services based on your customers’ needs or desires.

How to Create Marketing Personas (4 Steps)

Creating marketing personas can be a time consuming process. However, if you put your personas to good use, it will be well worth the time and effort. Let’s run through four steps and discuss how to create a persona!

Step 1: Gather Information About Current or Potential Customers

The first step in creating a persona is research. You will want to gather all of the customer information you’ll need to create useful personas. Demographics including age, gender, income, family status, education level, and location are a good starting point.

However, information such as their preferred method of communication matters, too. You may reach teens on social media, but have a better time contacting older people on the phone. Determining which keywords your customers find most engaging will also be helpful.

Perhaps most importantly, you’ll want to get at the core of what drives your customers to make purchases. Aspects such as their values, biggest challenges, needs, and desires are critical components for your personas. This kind of information will be the most vital for helping you understand your customers’ motivations.

There are several sources you can use for compiling this information. Facebook Insights and Google Analytics are useful tools if you already have a Facebook profile or a website. You can also use customer surveys, interviews, or in-person interactions with customers to bring together the data you’ll need.

Step 2: Find or Create a ‘Persona Template’

You’ll find lots of methods for displaying persona information. Bulleted lists, short first-person narratives from the personas’ perspective, tables, or even a combination are popular options. Any method is fine, so long as it exhibits your personas’ information in a way that makes sense to you.

You could also create comparative personas by including charts and graphs to note information like what percentage of your customer base each persona makes up. Sliders can denote information such as personality traits, or a willingness to spend.

There are plenty of persona templates to be found online. However, if you’re feeling creative you could make your own, or mix and match parts of templates you’ve found. This way you’ll have an ideal template for your specific purposes.

Step 3: Determine the Right Number of Personas for Your Business

How many personas you need will depend on your business, and both your current and ideal customers. Persona marketing is most effective when you strike a balance between enough personas to cover your customer base thoroughly, without introducing ‘decision paralysis’ in a given situation.

First, determine how many problems or challenges your product or service solves. If each of those problems applies to a different kind of customer, you’ll need a persona for each. Niche businesses will probably have fewer personas, since they’re targeting a specific market.

You should also consider which types of customers you most want to appeal to. It’s possible that you’ll be able to identify a very large number of personas you could market to, but if you’re really only interested in targeting a select few, create personas for those types of customers and focus on those sections of your customer base.

Step 4: Humanize Your Personas

Giving names to your personas might feel a little silly, or at the very least, inconsequential. However, the opposite is true. Humanizing your personas by naming them – including details like their hobbies and job titles, and even finding photos to represent them – is part of what makes a persona an effective tool.

Persona marketing works best when it’s used to create a customer-centric brand. Rather than being a profiling tool, marketing personas are supposed to help you see through the target customers’ eyes to better understand them.

Humanizing your personas helps to accomplish this by making your personas seem more like real people. Each will have problems that you’re trying to solve with your products or services. In addition, they’ll have their own preferences, desires, and narratives that will play into how you’re able to reach them.

You can use basic tools and assets such as name generators and stock photos to help with this part of the process. You can even take things a step further and seek out the most common names for certain demographics – like age or job title, for example.

How to Use Personas in Marketing

The uses of marketing personas are vast and varied. While most people think of them as useful for developing ideas for marketing specific products, they can also help with lead generation and communicating with customers. They can even provide inspiration for new products or services.

Once you’ve created your personas, you can start creating content to attract more people to your business. Through the use of keywords in blog and social media content, you can help your business rank when customers are searching for an answer to their most common problems, bringing new leads to your business.

Personas can also help you pinpoint how best to contact your customers. For example, knowing which social media platforms are most popular among certain demographics will help you ascertain which platforms to use to get in touch with your target audience.

Speaking of target audience, personas are frequently used in content marketing to craft blog posts, social media posts, and even email blasts. Knowing your audience can help you determine the best tone, style, and language to use to speak to your customers.

Different kinds of promotions appeal to different kinds of people. For example, the frugal-minded may wait for sales, limited-time products, or other discount deals. In contrast, contests and giveaways excite more competitive types. Fortunately, your personas can help you determine which promotions are most likely to motivate your customers.

Finally, knowing the problems or challenges that your customers face can point you toward new product and service lines. Ultimately, finding ways to solve these issues for your customers could open new doors for your business.

Conclusion

When you’re able to see your business from your customers’ perspective, you’ll better understand how to appeal to them. Personas make customers’ desires and motivations more clear so you can better create content, products, services, and promotions.

In this post, we’ve explored some of the benefits of marketing personas, and how to create and implement them for yourself. Try following these steps to create your own marketing personas:

Gather information about current or potential customers.

Find or create a persona template.

Determine the right number of personas for your business.

Humanize your personas.

Do you have any questions about how marketing personas are created or used? Let us know in the comments section below!

Article image thumbnail: Graphic farm / shutterstock.com.

The post Personas: What They Are, How to Make Them, and How to Use Them in Marketing appeared first on Elegant Themes Blog.

😉SiliconWebX | 🌐ElegantThemes

#Silicon Web Design #Ahmedabad #India #Web Development #WPBeginner #Silicon URL #Web Site #Cloud Host

0 notes

djgblogger-blog · 7 years ago

Text

Facebook is killing democracy with its personality profiling data

http://bit.ly/2II99sK

youtube

Facebook's data know exactly what fits best in your mind. leolintang/Shutterstock.com

What state should you move to based on your personality? What character on “Downton Abbey” would you be? What breed of dog is best for you? Some enormous percentage of Facebook’s 2.13 billion users must have seen Facebook friends sharing results of various online quizzes. They are sometimes annoying, senseless and a total waste of time. But they are irresistible. Besides, you’re only sharing the results with your family and friends. There’s nothing more innocent, right?

Wrong.

Facebook is in the business of exploiting your data. The company is worth billions of dollars because it harvests your data and sells it to advertisers. Users are encouraged to like, share and comment their lives away in the name of staying connected to family and friends. However, as an ethical hacker, security researcher and data analyst, I know that there is a lot more to the story. The bedrock of modern democracy is at stake.

You are being psychographically profiled

Most people have heard of demographics – the term used by advertisers to slice up a market by age, gender, ethnicity and other variables to help them understand customers. In contrast, psychographics measure people’s personality, values, opinions, attitudes, interests and lifestyles. They help advertisers understand the way you act and who you are.

Historically, psychographic data were much harder to collect and act on than demographics. Today, Facebook is the world’s largest treasure trove of this data. Every day billions of people give the company huge amounts of information about their lives and dreams.

This isn’t a problem when the data are used ethically – like when a company shows you an ad for a pair of sunglasses you recently searched for.

However, it matters a lot when the data are used maliciously – segmenting society into disconnected echo chambers, and custom-crafting misleading messages to manipulate individuals’ opinions and actions.

That’s exactly what Facebook allowed to happen.

Quizzes, reading your mind and predicting your politics

Recent reports have revealed how Cambridge Analytica, a U.K.-based company owned by an enigmatic billionaire and led at the time by candidate Donald Trump’s key adviser Steve Bannon, used psychographic data from Facebook to profile American voters in the months before the 2016 presidential election. Why? To target them with personalized political messages and influence their voting behavior.

A whistleblower from Cambridge Analytica, Christopher Wylie, described in detail how the company exploited Facebook users by harvesting their data and building models to “target their inner demons.”

How did Facebook let this happen?

The company does more than just sell your data. Since the early 2000s, Facebook has provided access to academic researchers seeking to study you. Many psychologists and social scientists have made their careers analyzing ways to predict your personality and ideologies by asking simple questions. These questions, like the ones used in social media quizzes, do not appear to have obvious connections to politics. Even a decision like which web browser you are using to read this article is filled with clues about your personality.

In 2015, Facebook gave permission to academic researcher Aleksandr Kogan to develop a quiz of his own. Like other quizzes, his was able to capture all of your public information, including name, profile picture, age, gender and birthday; everything you’ve ever posted on your timeline; your entire friends list; all of your photos and the photos you’re tagged in; education history; hometown and current city; everything you’ve ever liked; and information about the device you’re using including your web browser and preferred language.

Kogan shared the data he collected with Cambridge Analytica, which was against Facebook policy – but apparently the company rarely enforced its rules.

Going shopping for impressionable users

Analyzing these data, Cambridge Analytica determined topics that would intrigue users, what kind of political messaging users were susceptible to, how to frame the messages, the content and tone that would motivate users, and how to get them to share it with others. It compiled a shopping list of traits that could be predicted about voters.

A shopping list of personal traits. Provided to the New York Times by Christopher Wylie.

Then the company was able to create websites, ads and blogs that would attract Facebook users and encourage them to spread the word. In Wylie’s words: “they see it … they click it … they go down the rabbit hole.”

This is how American voters were targeted with fake news, misleading information and contradictory messages intended to influence how they voted – or if they voted at all.

This is how Facebook users’ relationships with family and friends are being exploited for monetary profit, and for political gain.

Knowingly putting users at risk

Facebook could have done more to protect users.

The company encouraged developers to build apps for its platform. In return, the apps had access to vast amounts of user data – supposedly subject to those rules that were rarely enforced. But Facebook collected 30 percent of payments made through the apps, so its business interest made it want more apps, doing more things.

People who didn’t fill out quizzes were vulnerable, too. Facebook allowed companies like Cambridge Analytica to collect personal data of friends of quiz takers, without their knowledge or consent. Tens of millions of people’s data were harvested – and many more Facebook users could have been affected by other apps.

Changing culture and politics

In a video interview with the Observer, Wylie explained that “Politics flows from culture … you have to change the people in order to change culture.”

That’s exactly what Facebook enabled Cambridge Analytica to do. In 2017, the company’s CEO boasted publicly that it was “able to use data to identify … very large quantities of persuadable voters … that could be influenced to vote for the Trump campaign.”

To exert that influence, Cambridge Analytica – which claims to have 5,000 data points on every American – used people’s data to psychologically nudge them to alter their behaviors in predictable ways.

This included what became known as “fake news.” In an undercover investigation, Britain’s Channel 4 recorded Cambridge Analytica executives expressing their willingness to disseminate misinformation, with its CEO saying, “these are things that don’t necessarily need to be true, as long as they’re believed.”

U.S. society was unprepared: 62 percent of American adults get news on social media, and many people who see fake news stories report that they believe them. So Cambridge Analytica’s tactics worked: 115 pro-Trump fake stories were shared on Facebook a total of 30 million times. In fact, the most popular fake news stories were more widely shared on Facebook than the most popular mainstream news stories.

For this psychological warfare, the Trump campaign paid Cambridge Analytica millions of dollars.

A healthy dose of skepticism

U.S. history is filled with stories of people sharing their thoughts in the public square. If interested, a passerby could come and listen, sharing in the experience of the narrative.

By combining psychographic profiling, analysis of big data and ad micro-targeting, public discourse in the U.S. has entered a new era. What used to be a public exchange of information and democratic dialogue is now a customized whisper campaign: Groups both ethical and malicious can divide Americans, whispering into the ear of each and every user, nudging them based on their fears and encouraging them to whisper to others who share those fears.

A Cambridge Analytica executive explained: “There are two fundamental human drivers … hopes and fears … and many of those are unspoken and even unconscious. You didn’t know that was a fear until you saw something that evoked that reaction from you. Our job is … to understand those really deep-seated underlying fears, concerns. It’s no good fighting an election campaign on the facts because actually it’s all about emotion.”

The information that you shared on Facebook exposed your hopes and fears. That innocent-looking Facebook quiz isn’t so innocent.

The problem isn’t that this psychographic data were exploited at a massive scale. It’s that platforms like Facebook enable people’s data to be used in ways that take power away from voters and give it to data-analyzing campaigners.

In my view, this kills democracy. Even Facebook can see that, saying in January that at its worst, social media “allows people to spread misinformation and corrode democracy.”

My advice: Use Facebook with a healthy dose of skepticism.

Timothy Summers owns shares in Facebook.

0 notes

vileart · 8 years ago

Text

A Girl and a Dramaturgy: Louise Orwin @ Edfringe 2017

A Girl & A Gun by Louise Orwin

Venue: Summerhall, Anatomy Lecture Theatre, Venue 26

Dates: 2-27 Aug (not 3, 7, 14, 21)

Time: 18.00 (70 mins)

What was the inspiration for A Girl & A Gun?

I started researching the basis of the show, when I began re-thinking Godard’s famous statement: ‘All you need to make a movie is a girl and a gun.’ I’ve always been a massive fan of film, and the French new wave in particular, but as my politics developed I began to wonder exactly what it was that Godard was saying when he uttered those words. I felt like there was perhaps a clue in those words as to who he was making film for (spoiler

alert: MAN). Thinking about the male gaze in cinema is nothing new- I am fanatic about Laura Mulvey’s work on this topic, but at this point in time I began to really think about my own appetite for these kind of images as a reasonably well-informed, politically engaged young woman.

At the same time as pondering these ideas a few other things happened. Beyonce released her music video for ‘Videophone’ featuring her and Lady Gaga scantily-clad bearing multi-coloured guns as props; I watched Springbreakers and the scene where two teenage girls lie on a bed surrounded by guns and using them a sexual props stuck with me; and I came across the work of B-movie mogul Andy Sidaris, who essentially makes low-grade Bond-esque action films which always star playboy bunnies running around with guns. I kept thinking about the references to guns in each of these contexts, how the images were stuck in my head, how they all elicited different reactions from me (but overwhelming a mix of being reviled and attracted at the same time), I wondered about the economy of power when a woman in a bikini holds a gun (is it/can it ever be empowering), I wondered who these images were for. I then started thinking about my own appetite for these kind of images, perhaps starting to realise that it was an appetite that had started at quite a young age.

Realizing that there was something almost unconscious about my response to these kind of films, I decided I wanted to make a show that interrogated the allure of the image of the girl and the gun on film, and interrogated how deeply embedded these kind of films can become in our psyches.

Is performance still a good space for the public discussion of ideas?

Yes. I mean, I hope so. If it’s not, I’ll stop what I’m doing right now…. But, honestly, it is absolutely my belief that performance is one of the best arenas to tackle big issues. We live in a confusing world, I believe, now more than ever. With its half-read, click-bait, list-icles, and its ever-increasing platforms for political discussion, speech and demonstration, its fake news and its echo chambers. I think its hard to find spaces to really chew over ideas, to consider the grey areas, to ask the difficult, big questions. I think theatre and performance spaces are brilliant for doing just that. If done right, they can provide an hour long meditation for audiences to consider topics and issues in all their complexity. And crucially, they can do this in very different means to the mediums we are used to, which I believe can help people understand issues in different lights.

In my work, I use ambiguity as a driving force to help open up, and grease discussion for topics that irk me, or anger me, or confuse me. I dislike being preached to, and I think many people feel the same. In my mind, ambiguity can activate an audience- keeps them alive with questions, and thus part of the conversation. That’s not to say that I don’t have strong opinions, but often the work I make covers a topic where there isn’t black or white. I want to make work that provokes discussion and debate, that keeps you thinking, or keeps coming back to you, niggling at you long after you’ve left the theatre.

How did you first become interested in making performance?

I did a BA in Drama and English at Bristol which had a real emphasis on avant-garde work and film/mixed media performance which has undoubtedly had a huge impact on my work, but it was only after graduating from my MA in Performance Research from RCSSD in 2011 that I began working as a solo artist. My MA was basically a research-led course, so I spent a year in a studio banging my head against a wall trying to figure out what my practice was, and lo and behold a year later I emerged a fully-formed practitioner. Which is obviously a complete lie- it was when I graduated that’s when the real work began. But that year set me in really good stead for asking difficult questions about my practice, and the work I wanted to make. I remember a course tutor saying to us: ‘what’s that thing that itches at you? The thing that won’t go away no matter how hard you scratch at it?’ I find that’s where the good work always is- it’s a problem waiting to be worked out, worked through. And there’s a good chance that if it’s itching so much at you, its probably itching at other people as well. I guess it’s there that I realized that I had really specific things I wanted to itch at, and that it felt like performance was the only way I was going to get at them.

Is there any particular approach you took to the making of the show?

This show was quite interesting for me in terms of process, because the concept or conceit of the show (whereby the show is performed by me and a new male performer every night, reading our lines and following stage directions from a live autocue) came quite early on in the process. This meant that the show became quite fixed in its development early on. With other shows I tend to have a really long research and development phase, followed by a phase of making and writing where I let myself create without restriction, without fear of it being shit- I just produce and produce and produce. And then after this the editing phase happens. With this show, I knew I had certain things that needed to happen when I was writing: I knew that the male part needed a specific arc of narrative or development, I knew that I needed to take into account the fact that there are constantly two cameras on stage, I knew that my role on stage would have to be performer, but also stage manager, and so on.

It was also the first time I’d ever written a film script- which was interesting and fun, and a very different challenge. My work is always very visual, so I’m quite used to story-boarding my work anyway, but this was a whole new kettle of fish.

Technically, it was quite a difficult script to write. Although I could plan for my scenes, as the character of ‘Him’ is played every night by someone who hasn’t seen the script before, it was a balancing act between trying to be as clear and demonstrative as possible for that person, while still staying true to the ‘experiment’ of having an unprepared performer on stage with me. Not knowing quite what this performer will do, or how they will perform their role is exciting, but you still need to make sure that the show holds together as much as possible.

Does the show fit with the style of your other productions?

Yes, there are definitely elements in it which I think are very ‘Louise Orwin ™’ – its use of mixed-media on stage, its participatory engagement, its tone which is playful and possibly slightly threatening at the same time, its willingness to provoke an audience in dark and surprising ways. But the format is probably something which is very different to other shows of mine too. Plus it’s the first time I’ve assumed an actual ‘character’.

When I’m on stage I’m normally playing some heightened version of myself, I call her ‘Louise in inverted commas’. The role I play in this, ‘Her’, is like a development of that- she is very campy with her Southern Belle accent, and her cherry stalk twirling and her flirtatious gestures, but in other ways she is also just an extension of myself. She is the femme fatale character I wanted to grow up to be as a child, she is everything I love and hate about hyper-femininity, and in this way she is everything I feel about my own femininity made physical, visible on stage.

I like to play with audience perception of myself, and so there are moments when this character might slip- but the audience will struggle to identify whether this slippage is real or another part of the production. I like to keep my audiences guessing, keep them alive in the experience. If you give them everything, with no work of their own to do, you might as well just let them sleep through the show and deliver them a FAQ after.

What do you hope that the audience will experience?

People often leave the auditorium feeling like they’ve been ‘part of something’. I think the device of using an unprepared performer on stage can make the audience feel as if they are watching one of their own up there. There is always laughter, and also a few tears. I’ve had women come up to me and tell me that the show spoke to them about how they seem themselves in society, or about struggling with past abusive relationships. I’ve had young men come up to me and tell me that they’ll never be able to watch their favourite films in the same way again.

There are loads of hidden references all over the script and staging to popular cinema which makes the show feel super familiar to audiences- people have come up to me afterwards asking me if parts of the script are directly lifted from films, but its all original. This was a deliberate choice to give my audiences a feel of the uncanny whilst they’re watching, in the hope that this may help they see anew.

I’m really excited to bring the show to Edinburgh too, with its plethora of performers (fresh meat!) and its saturation, and excitement, and its jaded audiences. I’m wondering how the show will develop and change each night, and how it might change doing the show for such a long time too.

vimeo

A Girl and A Gun Trailer from Louise Orwin on Vimeo. p.p1 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times} p.p2 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px} p.p3 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Tahoma} p.p4 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Tahoma; min-height: 14.0px} span.s1 {font: 12.0px Times} from the vileblog http://ift.tt/2uvsrxo

#Theatre #Blogger #visual art #Edinburgh Fringe #Experimental Critique

1 note · View note

ghostmartyr · 7 years ago

Note

I love this chapter as long as I can completely ignore the real world implications behind Gabi and Kaya’s talk. The Jewish parallels were one thing, because at least the Marley Eldians were clearly the victims, but Gabi listing off imperial japan’s worst war crimes and the narrative framing her as being wrong for feeling bad about them left a really bad taste in my mouth. In the story context, she’s wrong. If you look at what isayama is saying about the real world through her... yikes.

So, I have never once taken a world history class in my life, and that’s where I’m left approaching this kind of thing. It makes it easier to let fiction be fiction, but obviously that leaves gaps. I’m not very knowledgeable about a lot of stuff I should be.

Starting with the fictional side, I will say that I don’t think Gabi is presented as being wrong for being upset over all the horrors of the Eldian Empire. Her target is wrong, but if there’s one thing the story has always been upfront about, it’s that genocide and war crimes are wrong.

That’s why you have the Restorationists clinging to the idea that their people never did such things. They invent their own history where the Eldians were the good guys and the rest of the world couldn’t handle it.

Again, that’s something that is vividly depicted as misguided, and it’s deeply connected to Grisha’s own ruin. The man who’s claiming Eldia could do no wrong is the man who abuses his son into becoming a fanatic capable of turning his parents in for the cause.

Paradis is not the Eldian Empire. Characters wanting it to be are painted as dangerous, and they are. Paradis, very specifically, is an island built by someone who wanted the Eldian Empire to be overthrown. Karl Fritz sought peace. He locks himself and his people away, and hands over the fate of the remnants to Marley to do with as they will, since they are the primary victims.

As part of this, Karl rewrites the memories of everyone he takes to his island, and murders the rest.

Comparing Paradis to the current Marley, you’ve got easily defined good guys and bad guys.

Paradis in a vacuum is fucking horrifying. It’s built on one ruler making executive decisions for thousands of people. He enforces those decisions by stealing their memories of the world and murdering anyone he might not be able to control. His closest associates are aware of this, and continue the program. For a hundred years, the people with the greatest chance to change things are forced to follow a dead man’s will.

After Wall Maria falls, twenty percent of their population is thrown to the wolves so that everyone else can live. They don’t call it a culling. They call it a mission to retake the wall.

Twelve-year-olds join the military because that’s when they are eligible, and it’s a mark of shame not to. During their training, it is a common occurrence for recruits to end up dead.

Before Uprising, the government is still fine telling its people lies to get rid of what they perceive as threats to their power. They frame an entire military branch to maintain the status quo. They express willingness to let even more of their own people die to keep themselves alive.

The new government is established with the hopes of doing better, but as we see in this very chapter, things are sliding. A regime that starts out with the intent of being honest with the people is putting soldiers in jail for telling those people the truth. They have offered their verbal consent to use their monarch as a breeding tool so that her children will be weapons of war.

Paradis is not all that great. Parts of it actively suck. The reason they’re generally cast as the heroes is because they are working to undo the cycles that created Paradis. The reason the story is so dark at the moment is that it looks like they’ve failed.

Then we take a look at Marley, and… oy.

Marley uses up Eldian bodies like gunpowder. From a very young age, every little Eldian is taught that they’re making up for the sins of their former Empire, and the roots of that Empire still exist on the devils’ island. In order to prove that they are not like them, they’re actively encouraged to become Warriors. Weapons of mass destruction that will expire in thirteen years.

For Eldian children in Marley, one of the greatest things you can wish for ends with being eaten alive. That is the grand dream. Laying down your life for the lie that your people will be recognized as good Eldians, not like the bad Eldians.

Very straightforward, very fucked up.

The initial snag in it is that Marley itself has taken over from the Eldian Empire. They do not have the range the Empire is said to, but they use the same tools. They don’t force people to have children, but Eldians in internment camps know that if their child becomes a Warrior they receive special treatment. They go to war with child soldiers as their primary weapons, and terrorize their enemies. They rob Eldians of their sentience and throw them to a battlefield they have no choice in entering.

For the majority of the story on Paradis, titans are a force of nature. They’re mindless eating machines. Much of the terror they inspire is linked to that. There is nothing there to negotiate with. There is nothing you can do to bargain or beg. When you come against a titan, you will die, and it will not care. It is an inhuman, indifferent monster.

The walls live in fear of them. Not actively until the fall of Wall Maria, but every part of their lives, as far as they’re aware, has been designed to hide them away from the titans.

Titans are a weapon of mass destruction by virtue of their size, but their greatest use is as a weapon of fear.

Marley utilizes that fear against their enemies and their own recruits. They have no qualms setting the monsters loose. They have no problem creating more of the monsters that symbolize the terror of the Eldian Empire. They have no compunctions about drilling the fear of becoming those monsters into every Eldian child so they won’t dare disobey an order or question their lives.

“Eldians spent thousands of years using the power of the titans to rule and oppress the world! They stole away the cultures of other peoples! They forced them to have children they didn’t want! They killed countless human beings!”

Those are the crimes of the Eldian Empire, for which Paradis is blamed.

Every single point is something that Marley is actively, presently, complicit in.

Marley has created a boogeyman in Paradis for their Eldian prisoners, and they’re attempting to translate that to the world at large. All these evil things? All this awfulness? The only cause of it is a dead Empire. Their sins were so great that it is just to continue punishing every bloodline connected to it.

Pay no attention to the present day. All that matters is what they did.

From a real world context, Paradis is… possibly a dodgy bit of wish fulfillment. It isn’t simply that a hundred years with no contact with the rest of the world has gone by; every person on the island is forcibly enslaved by their King’s revisionist history. Except for key figures in a corrupt cabinet, the citizens of Paradis have been supernaturally removed from the actions of the Eldian Empire.

The extensiveness of that removal means that Paradis is as close to a blameless victim as you can make out of a country. Even though the Empire Paradis is initially part of is definitely not.

In the real world, no, people do not have magical brainwashing powers. They still have corrupt officials invested in denying the truth of their nations’ past crimes and teaching that denial to citizens as gospel. There are atrocities that have been committed that countries would rather deny entirely than admit to being an agent of.

As I understand it (which is an understanding that is severely limited), the specific language Gabi uses is a red flag, because those are all the things Japan insists did not happen, and for very obvious reasons, that rightfully pisses off a lot of people.

Putting that justified outrage in the mouth of a child who has been abused and brainwashed into believing that the evil she is fighting for is really the good guys’ squad… I can see why that would be a concern to audience members. Especially the ones who remember the tweet from a few years back. There are some topics that are best received with caution.

The problem I have with drawing a direct line to the real world is that you have to cut the context almost clean off to get there.

No one except for the Restorationist cult thinks the Eldian Empire was a good thing (and the framing cuts them to pieces for it). Everything we’ve heard about it suggests that it’s better off not existing. Karl Fritz, who is perfectly fine committing mass brainwashing and genocide against his allies, designs the Eldian Empire’s downfall because it is just that awful. He is the highest moral standard of that era.

He’s a dick, in case I haven’t made that clear enough.

What the Eldian Empire is said to have done is probably accurate enough, but Paradis is another victim of its crimes, not a perpetrator denying its involvement. Again with the conceivably dodgy wish fulfillment, but as far as the story is concerned, Paradis has had nothing to do with the rest of the world for a hundred years.

Marley is claiming that crimes that took place a hundred years ago–crimes that Marley itself adopted, crimes that no living person (except maybe the Founding Titan) remembers–is reason enough to justify slaughtering all of them.

That’s the rhetoric Gabi has been indoctrinated with her entire life.

My world history is nonexistent, but I do know a thing or two about American history. The crimes Gabi shouts that Eldians are guilty of are crimes that every perpetrator of genocide in the world has been guilty of. It is not a particularly creative endeavor. The United States slaughtered Native Americans, poisoned them, raped them… honestly, it’d be faster to come up with human rights violations they didn’t check off.

The world Isayama has concocted is one where the people who are loudest about the evils of genocide are the ones currently committing it.

I do not know how loaded it is for a Japanese man to be using that language in such a way. The real world context is lost on me. However, the fictional context is on the up and up:

It is wrong that these things happen. Marley has weaponized that morality in its Eldian citizens. They believe in that wrongness so thoroughly that they’ve become blind to their participation in it.

The monsters aren’t titans. The machinations of evil don’t belong to a single bloodline. The monsters are humans.

I don’t think Isayama is always the most subtle of authors. Especially when it comes to darkness. Several people I know stopped watching the anime when its second season opened with Mike’s death. They felt it was gratuitous and unnecessary. Most of my complaints about the series follow that line. When he wants to make something obvious, he hammers it in.

Marleyan Eldians don’t just wear identifying markers in their internment camp, it’s a damn star.

Isayama borrowing from the real world to enhance the reality of his fiction is a tried practice, but when you’re writing a story about the evils of genocide, and your borrowings include some of the language discussions of real world genocide has brought about…

You have to work to keep the fiction as the primary consideration when someone is overly familiar with the reality it comes from. Otherwise that reality imposes itself on the fiction.

When the reality you’re borrowing from is at odds with its use in the fictional story… Congratulations, you have formed a mess, you should have maybe not done that. Most of the people upset about genocide nowadays are not perpetrating it or hysterically brainwashed. That role tends to go to the deniers.

The story is blunt enough about what it thinks of genocide that one of its common criticisms is that the antagonists are cartoonishly evil. Its morals and themes are not remotely subtle.

That doesn’t mean its application of language can’t be really stupid.

I don’t think there’s anything suspect about Kaya and Gabi’s conversation from a fictional perspective, and even from a meta perspective, it’s still being very clear about what it thinks of the harms done to children by evil, and what’s defined as evil unquestionably is.

Gabi isn’t wrong to hate the evil in the world. She’s been lied to about where it is. She has a stronger connection to the Eldian Empire than the people of Paradis, but she doesn’t hate herself or her fellow Marleyan Eldians. Just Paradis.

All present day Eldians are victims of the Eldian Empire and Marley. Paradis comes to be from the last Eldian Empire King ripping away their agency, and Marley makes sure every Eldian under their watch knows to hate themselves, and that the world never forgets to hate their abilities.

The story is very anti-genocide. It’s very supportive of the victims. The conversation might have shades of a reality that doesn’t belong to those messages, but the overwhelming feel is that these are children, and because some people thought genocide was a gr9 strategic aim, they’re all horrifically traumatized.

So they help each other.

Falco offers Kaya closure. Kaya offers them a way to make it back home. They’ve been too hurt to want anything but healing, so when they see someone in need of it, they reach out a hand.

I don’t know much about the real world, but… the victories in this series are achieved when people embrace their idealism, and try to be better than what came before them. That isn’t a story I have a problem with.

#1 #2 #3 #4 #5 #SnK 109 #tl;dr #attack on asks

32 notes · View notes