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bananaofswifts · 3 years

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For Women's History Month 2021, GRAMMY.com is celebrating some of the women artists nominated at the 2021 GRAMMY Awards show. Today, we honor Taylor Swift, who's currently nominated for six GRAMMYs.

When we met Taylor Swift in 2006, it was immediately apparent that her songwriting approach was like ripping a page out of her diary.

"Just a boy in a Chevy truck/ That had a tendency of gettin' stuck/ On backroads at night/ And I was right there beside him all summer long/ And then the time we woke up to find that summer gone," she lamented in the first verse of her debut single, "Tim McGraw(opens in a new tab)." The way the then-16-year-old Swift could turn personal anecdotes into instantly memorable hooks mirrored the prowess of an industry veteran, appealing to more than just the teenage girls that could relate to a short-lived high school romance.

Now, nearly 15 years later, Swift has introduced another layer of intrigue with a foray into indie folk, unveiling a pair of albums, folklore and evermore, last year. Recorded entirely in isolation after the COVID-19 pandemic hit in March 2020, folklore has been widely acclaimed(opens in a new tab) as Swift's best album, touted for its intimate songwriting and cinematic dynamics; evermore has received similarly glowing reviews(opens in a new tab).

folklore was 2020's best-selling album(opens in a new tab) and earned Swift five GRAMMY nominations at the 2021 GRAMMY Awards show, including her fourth Album Of The Year nod. (evermore will be eligible for the 64th GRAMMY Awards in 2022.) As her 10 previous GRAMMY wins suggest, though, this new chapter isn't an abrupt departure for the star—it's a masterful continuation of her evolution as a singer/songwriter.

If there's one thing that Swift has proven throughout her career, it's that she refuses to be put in a box. Her ever-evolving sound took her from country darling to pop phenom to folk's newest raconteur—a transition that, on paper, seems arduous. But for Swift, it was seamless and resulted in perhaps her most defining work yet. And folklore’s radiance relies on three of Swift’s songwriting tools: heartfelt balladeering, autobiographical writing, and character-driven storytelling.

While there was always a crossover element to Swift's pop-leaning country tunes, her transition from country starlet to pop queen began with Red. The album’s lead single, the feisty breakup anthem "We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together(opens in a new tab)," was Swift's first release to reach No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 (and, ironically, scoffed "indie records much cooler than mine"). She declared a full pop makeover with 2014's 1989, but the response proved that her bold move was the right one: Along with spawning three more No. 1 hits, the project won Swift her second GRAMMY for Album of the Year.

From there, 2017’s Reputation, a response to media scrutiny, and 2019’s Lover, an often bubbly exploration of all facets of affection, followed. Although they shared similarly grandiose production, Lover featured a handful of poetic ballads, including "The Archer(opens in a new tab)," a self-reflective love song that teased Swift's folk sensibilities through storybook lyrics and ambient textures.

Swift’s ballads are key in understanding the full essence of folklore. They’ve regularly marked standout moments on each of her albums, both thanks to her poignant vulnerability and rich tone. Fearless standout "White Horse" earned Swift two GRAMMYs in 2009; Red's painstaking "All Too Well" was an instant fan favorite; 1989's "This Love" and Reputation's "New Years Day" provided tenderness amid otherwise synth-heavy sounds.

The raw emotion she puts into her downtempo songs comes alive on folklore, introducing a new wave of neo-classical sonics that elevate her fanciful penmanship to an ethereal level. Whether or not Swifties saw a full indie-pop record coming—at least not yet—the shift isn't all that surprising. Folklore’s romanticized lyrics and relatively lo-fi production are arguably what many fans have been patiently waiting on.

Lyrically, the super-personal nature of Swift’s music has always captivated fans and naysayers alike; diehards and critics dissected each of her albums for its real-life subjects and hidden meanings. While she played into those conspiracies at the time—whether she was revealing names in titles like "Hey Stephen(opens in a new tab)" and "Dear John(opens in a new tab)" or scathing the other girl on "Better Than Revenge(opens in a new tab)"—even Swift herself admits that her teenage method had an expiration date.

"There was a point that I got to as a writer who only wrote very diaristic songs that [it] felt unsustainable for my future moving forward," she told Apple Music's(opens in a new tab) Zane Lowe in December of 2020. "It felt like too hot of a microscope ... On my bad days, I would feel like I was loading a cannon of clickbait when that's not what I want for my life."

That realization is what helped make folklore so memorable: Swift stripped away the drama to let her artful storytelling shine. Sure, there are occasional callbacks to personal happenings ("invisible string(opens in a new tab)" references sending her exes baby gifts and "mad woman(opens in a new tab)" alludes to her legal battle with Scott Borchetta and Scooter Braun). Still, she largely shies away from her autobiographical narratives to make way for her imagination.

"I found myself not only writing my own stories, but also writing about or from the perspective of people I've never met, people I've known, or those I wish I hadn't," Swift wrote in a letter to fans(opens in a new tab) on social media the day folklore arrived. "The lines between fantasy and reality blur and the boundaries between truth and fiction become almost indiscernible."

folklore might be her first full project dedicated to creating characters and projecting storylines, but Swift has shown a knack for fantasy from the start. Tracks like "Mary's Song (Oh My My)(opens in a new tab)" on her self-titled debut and "Starlight(opens in a new tab)" on Red saw Swift craft stories for real-life muses ("Mary's Song" was inspired by an old couple who lived next door to Swift in her childhood; "Starlight" was sparked from seeing a picture of Ethel and Bobby Kennedy as teens). Even when songs did pertain to her real life, Swift often had a way of flipping memories into whimsical metaphors, like the clever clap-back to a critic on Speak Now's "Mean(opens in a new tab)" or the rebound relationship in Reputation's "Getaway Car(opens in a new tab)."

To think that we wouldn't have folklore without a pandemic is almost surreal; it's already become such a fundamental piece of Swift’s artistic puzzle. There was no telling what may have come after the glittering "love letter to love itself” that was Lover, but it seems isolation made the singer rethink any plans she may have had.

"I just thought there are no rules anymore because I used to put all these parameters on myself, like, 'How will this song sound in a stadium? How will this song sound on radio?' If you take away all the parameters, what do you make?" she told Paul McCartney in a November (opens in a new tab)Rolling Stone(opens in a new tab) interview(opens in a new tab). "And I guess the answer is folklore."

Even if she hasn’t been making indie music herself, Swift has shown an affinity for the genre over the years through curated digital playlists(opens in a new tab). Those included four songs by The National including "Dark Side of the Gym," which she references on folklore single "betty(opens in a new tab)," and "8 (Circle)" by Bon Iver, Swift's collaborator on folklore's gut-wrenching "exile(opens in a new tab)" as well as evermore’s title track. (“Exile” is one of folklore’s GRAMMY-nominated cuts, up for Best Pop Duo/Group Performance.)

The National’s guitarist Aaron Dessner co-wrote nine and produced 11 of folklore's 16 tracks, soundtracking Swift's imaginative tales with sweeping orchestration and delicate piano. Their partnership started with "cardigan(opens in a new tab)," a melancholy take on teenage love(opens in a new tab) that's up for Best Pop Solo Performance and the coveted Song of the Year. The team-up was a dream come true for Swift, a self-proclaimed National superfan and a career highlight for Dessner, who shared in an Instagram post(opens in a new tab) about folklore that he's "rarely been so inspired by someone." He sees the album as a pivotal moment for both Swift's career and pop music.

"Taylor has opened the door for artists to not feel pressure to have 'the bop,'" Dessner shared with (opens in a new tab)Billboard(opens in a new tab) in September. "To make the record that she made, while running against what is programmed in radio at the highest levels of pop music—she has kind of made an anti-pop record. And to have it be one of the most, if not the most, successful commercial releases of the year that throws the playbook out.

"I hope it gives other artists, especially lesser-known or more independent artists, a chance at the mainstream," he continued. "Maybe radio will realize that music doesn't have to sound as pushed as it has. Nobody was trying to design anything to be a hit. Obviously, Taylor has the privilege of already having a very large and dedicated audience, but I do feel like it's having a resonance beyond that."

Swift's other primary folklore collaborator was Jack Antonoff. He has been her right-hand man since they first paired up on 2013's promotional single "Sweeter Than Fiction(opens in a new tab)" (Swift referred to him as "musical family" in her folklore announcement(opens in a new tab)). Even after years of creating stadium-ready pop smashes, Antonoff said in his own folklore Instagram post(opens in a new tab), "I've never heard Taylor sing better in my life / write better."

As Swift recognizes herself, folklore ushered in a new way of thinking for the superstar that not only brings out her best, but sets a promising precedent for what's to come. "What I felt after we put out folklore was, 'Oh wow, people are into this too, this thing that feels really good for my life and my creativity,'" Swift added in her interview with Lowe. "I saw a lane for my future that was a real breakthrough moment of excitement and happiness."

Her enthusiasm is tangible on both folklore and evermore. Dubbed folklore’s sister record, evermore further expands Swift’s newfound mystical atmosphere. Much to the delight of many Swifties, the follow-up also calls back to her country beginnings on tracks like the HAIM-assisted “no body, no crime(opens in a new tab),” as well as her pop expertise on more uptempo cuts like “long story short(opens in a new tab).”

Together, the albums are a momentous reminder that Swift is a singer/songwriter first. Her wordcraft is some of the most alluring of her generation, and that’s never been lost on her music, regardless of the genre she’s exploring. But now that Swift also feels she's at her best, it’s evident folklore was just the beginning of Taylor Swift in her finest form.

#taylor swift #folklore #Grammy #WOW

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hopetofantasy · 4 years

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'wtFOCKDOWN: the first Flemish quarantine fiction has arrived'

Translated interview about the behind-the-scenes of wtFOCKDOWN

- Source: Knack Focus (16/04)

Scenes in FaceTime, dialogues in WhatsApp and a director who gives directions in Google Hangouts: the youth series wtFOCKDOWN is the first Flemish fiction series in lockdown mode.

The candidates of 'Blokken' play from home, soaps 'Familie' and 'Thuis' get an early season ending, 'Dagelijkse Kost' has a director at distance, 'Topdokters' sends out corona diaries, 'De Ideale Wereld' does telework. Just about the entire TV world has had to adapt to the new reality in recent weeks and find creative solutions. Usually with the help of FaceTime. Or Skype. Or Google Hangouts.

There is a striking amount of video out there.

However, no Flemish series had to go as far as wtFOCK. The youth phenomenon - in good weeks 450,000 unique visitors go to wtfock.be - always strongly focused on real time and the current living environment of young people. If a character experiences something during the lunch break at school, the video goes online in the afternoon on a school day. For example, if the elections are coming or GOT has its last episode, the characters will refer to it.

Which also means that when the schools suddenly closed indefinitely, all plans for the upcoming fourth season couldn't go through. If all your viewers are home, it makes no sense that the characters still go to school. wtFOCK's solution: the first 'social-distancing drama' in the world, as production house Sputnik, which makes the tv series for SBS and Telenet, calls it. Fiction that not only takes place in quarantine, but is also turned into quarantine. On April 1st, the first video went online, a video conversation between characters Senne and Zoë. Since then, the experiment seems to get more interesting every day.

wtFOCKDOWN is the most far-reaching TV answer to the lockdown yet. How did you come up with a 'social-distancing drama'?

Rutger Beckers (producer at Sputnik TV): As soon as the government closed schools, we knew we had to throw all our plans overboard. It was clear that this wasn't just for two weeks: the lockdown would take much longer. Quickly, we started thinking about a plan B within the team, a very young team, and there were some very long video calls. The term 'social-distancing drama' had fallen quite often. Everyone is in the same situation, everyone runs up the walls. Especially young people. In one weekend, their reality has completely changed and their lives take place between four walls. It seemed interesting to adapt the fiction to that new reality. Plus, we hope it can also be a support or refuge. Everyone is in the same boat: that kind of feeling.

We then put together a small team to see what was possible. A few practice scenes have been written. We tested things with the actors. What works? What not? After a few tries, everyone was very enthusiastic. They were also immediately involved with Telenet and SBS. This was much more than a little plaything or filling a gap in the schedule. It soon became clear that, with the right storylines, this was something fundamentally new. Something no one had ever done before us.

The lockdown was announced on March 16th, on April 1st the first video of wtFockdown went online: that is impressive.

Beckers: Especially in the world of fiction. It helps that we were already very tight regarding film schedules of wtFOCK. The recordings are made four or five weeks before the broadcast, which is short for fiction. Even on set, we continued to adapt storylines to current events.

With wtFOCKDOWN, we can plan everything even closer. The circumstances compel us to do so. Nobody can get together - we are very strict about that. So no locations have to be sought, no extras have to be collected or soundcrew have to be booked. We also have to make it with a very small team. wtFOCKDOWN is shot with the actors, a director and someone who does social media. Everyone is also at home and is available. What makes that you can switch very easily. Simply put: tonight we will decide what things we have written today, will be played out tomorrow.

The videos all start from the home screen of the characters' laptops and cell phones. The story is told in WhatsApp conversations, video calls and video messages. A kind of found footage, but in real time. That is cleverly done.

Beckers: Because it also makes sense: for most young people, the screen of their laptop or smartphone is their only view of the outside world these days. Then it makes sense that you tell the story like that.

Moreover, it is the technology that we really use to create the series. The actors act in their own room with their own laptops and mobile phones. First, we rehearse in a video call, while the director watches. When a scene is right, the actors video call each other and record the scene. It also doesn't matter if the quality of image or sound is a little less: that just increases the authenticity.

wtFOCKDOWN has been running for two weeks now, but as an experiment in mobile television it is interesting to say the least. Real-time WhatsApp conversations set to music, where you see the letters typed, for example, turn out to provide good scenes.

Beckers: That is also something that we ourselves are happy with: that these storytelling techniques work. wtFOCKDOWN was a leap of faith. There were no examples, no anchor points. When we put the first videos online, we had no idea what the response would be. But you feel that our enthusiasm after those first tests, is now also the same as the viewer.

That is also exciting as series makers. It started with a few tests. Then a few videos that came online. Then we started building bigger storylines. And it just keeps getting bigger. Every day we are faced with new surprises and new problems to solve. But that feeling that we are creating something new, something that can be valuable in the situation that young people are living in today, only increases enthusiasm. Especially with the people of eighteen or nineteen years old in our team: you feel that they now want to go for it. Maybe this could be the start of a new kind of genre. Real-time fiction, played decentralized. Who knows.

You're sure no one has ever done this before you?

Beckers: I certainly haven't come across anything. We also noticed that countries abroad have been interested in the concept. In the meantime, we're in contact with the Norwegian public broadcaster NRK, who made Skam (wtFOCK is one of the many remakes of Skam internationally). They were very intrigued by our plans and went to show it to Spain, Germany, Italy and France, where local versions of Skam are also running.

While wtFOCKDOWN explores new horizons, a large part of the Flemish television world seems to be on hold. 'Familie' and 'Thuis' must finish their season early. It is unclear what will happen for programs such as 'Mijn keuken, mijn restaurant' and 'The Voice Kids'.

Beckers: Today the situation is very strange for the TV world, especially with the commercial channels. The ratings are going up. Much more TV is watched than in recent years. Only: there are far fewer advertisers.

It is indeed striking that programs such as 'De Mol' hardly have any commercial breaks.

Beckers: Many brands do not want to advertise now and have postponed their budgets until after the summer. Which will soon cause another strange situation. Autumn normally gets very busy, but hardly any production houses are making programs right now. Almost all productions have been shut down. Running a normal fiction series is simply impossible today.

Will we get a lockdown version of the soap 'Familie' soon?

Beckers: I think that chance is slim. (laughs). With wtFOCK, the new technology is just a bit more in the DNA of the program.

The main thing is that no one currently knows. Everyone is waiting for the situation to normalize and to get up again. It only starts again, when there is insight into the matter.

You are in a precarious situation with wtFOCK, I just realized.

Beckers: Why?

When the government announces that schools remain closed, doesn't it mean that all the plans and footage from the fourth season will be thrown away?

Beckers: That's also the disadvantage of the time limited fiction: the time. All of the references to the end of the school year, or festivals, will be tossed. These caught up with the reality. But we'll see how we are going to get around that. We don't have anything meaningful to say about the future. If I have learned one more thing about the past few weeks, it's that you constantly need to adapt to the new realities and to find new solutions. So it's not just about the wtFOCK.

#wtfock #wtfam #behind the scenes #wtfockdown #wtfock bts #skam #skam remakes #skam bts #skamverse #skam belgium

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radiosandrecordings · 4 years

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I love TTRPGs as a storytelling medium. Not even for anything inherent to the gameplay of it, more just for the way in which they force people to tell stories and create characters. Because what I think TTRPGs like TAZ and RQG and Skyjacks do best is character, and character interaction.

Because built in to a TTRPG is a concept that I adore: That there is no one singular protagonist.

Because every is not acting, not reading off a prewritten script someone else wrote. They are embodying a character. They are writing as they go. They are leading their own narrative and view themselves as the main character because only they truly know how their character works. If an actor reads a script they get the words on the page, but in a TTRPG the player is forced to construct the whole character in their head, their motivations and backstory and hundreds of things that will never make it into the show but inform the decisions that character makes. It’s beautiful.

I’m going to take Skyjacks specifically as an example because I think it exemplifies most what I mean what I say ‘Every character is a protagonist’. In Skyjacks, the four player characters are: A nonbinary amnesiac fallen angel as old as time who may or may not have killed god, a 200 year old changeling, a teenage doctor turned necromancer who ran away to be a sky pirate, and a fifteen year old boy who has godlike abilities and can sometimes see the future.

In literally any other story type it would be too much to have all of them in one show. They’re all ridiculous, over the top characters that could carry a seven book series with themselves as the protagonists on those small premises alone, not to mention the things they go through and how they change throughout the series. But here it works!! Somehow!! And Skyjacks is one of the few shows I cannot choose a favourite in (RQG mentioned above being another) and it’s because of this! It’s because every character is a protagonist in their own right and it’s absolutely captivating! They’re all given equal storytime (There’s an exception but it’s a spoiler but Skyjacks fans know it was justified) wheras in a scripted piece, save something with two narrators or something, you’d normally be confined to one person who is The Big Fancy Protagonist. Take another popular podcast, The Magnus Archives. I love it! But there’s few characters I’d want to hear narrate the story other than the protagonist of it. With Skyjacks I could spend hours being told about each of them. But somehow they work cohesively. You’re never bored because in separate scenes they all stand up on their own and create compelling stories. But together? They thrive.

And that’s the other thing I love. TTRPGs are the richest genre I’ve found in terms of the term ‘Found Family’. A group of characters (sometimes involving literal family, see The Taako Twins and many others) all brought together by an outside force and forming an unbreakable bond due to how their experiences have forced them to care about each other. They are family through choice. This is often due to simply A) TTRPGs often feel more personal than just reading off lines and acting, so understandably there’s less romance (or less intense romance) than in other things as the players, or a player and DM, don’t really want to spend time flirting with each other in characters that can often be viewed as extensions of themselves, especially because the players are often Friends Who Would Find It Weird, or siblings (Gable (PC) and Hildred (NPC) get their romance in Skyjacks but it’s just small humerus flirting and a kiss described by the DM, and in TAZ Taako (PC) and Kravitz (NPC played by the player’s brother) also have a romance, but it largely happens offscreen or through narration, not RP).

And thus there is this lack of romance. Romance is so often shoehorned into media to show how Deep and Meaningful a character’s connection to another is and TTRPG’s, foregoing this, have the chance to explore these beautiful and complex relationships between characters without the constrictions of ‘they’re doing it for romantic love’ in there. Zolf and Sasha have this kind of half brother-sister, half father-daughter relationship in RQG and I adore it and I feel like in the hands of any other genre it would have turned into ‘and then they get together because this is a story and this is how those end’. But it doesn’t and I’m so grateful it doesn’t because god I love exploring actual in depth, layered and beautiful dynamics that aren’t just romance.

I also think TTRPGs often fall into these found family dynamics because they know they have to rely on character interaction and RP to make a good podcast. It’s an audio medium (Or video, but then it’s just the players holding up lil miniatures on a map) and as much as a fight in a TTRPG might be fun to play, it’s boring for a listener if not done well. So TTRPG podcasts have to create characters who are interesting to hear interact with each other. They are, as I said, all the protagonist at all times, because they’re all present. Not including times an actor can’t appear for an episode or something, there are no times the characters are not with each other. Sure there are side quests, and splitting the party, but they always gravitate towards each other. There’s no New Protagonist introduced for a new arc besides NPCs and they take a backseat usually (with exceptions like TAZ, which is STILL found family within those NPCs!). No protagonist gets left behind or killed off for pure shock value (and if they die, they’re placed by another, equally important PC). Your characters are your driving, central force because they are the story tellers and the world bends around them are their choices. There is no risk of them being forced into a plot that doesn’t fit the character because whatever the character does is what that character acts like because they are being crafted in real time from the only person that knows how to properly play them.

This is long and rambles, but in summary: I love TTRPGS and the way they bring people together to tell a collaborative story. I think they are one of the best forms of storytelling because it is not just built off of one person’s experience and their ideas but of a whole group, usually friends who know and love each other and find fun in the creation of the story. I think that might be a large part of why it’s resonating with the current youth too. It is a storytelling medium that is so unique to itself and just... Incredibly beautiful

#My Post #this ones for you rowan #Skyjacks #Rusty Quill Gaming #Since I use them as refs specifically

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r0b0tb0y · 3 years

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2020 (Fanfiction) in Review

Tagged by the awesome incredible @jkrockin thank you!

Fics written this year: [deep breath] I’m just gonna link to my works page

Hanging the Moon (finnpoe post-TROS epic)

The Lost Art of Keeping a Secret (Poe/Din one night stand)

The Lost Art of Keeping Two Secrets (Poe/Din round two)

The Moment the War was Over (how finnpoe could have kissed, should have kissed, and actually kissed)

Fairweather Friends (Cassian/Din, oh my god they were cellmates)

Like Clockwork (Din/Paz, don’t look at my fucking boner while we fight)

Past Perfect (Pedro Pascal/Oscar Isaac don’t look at me)

kind, but sad (Padmé lives to raise Leia AU)

In the Presence of Royalty (finnpoe, surprise meet the parents)

Too Hot For The Hotheads (finnpoe, Black Squadron mud wrestling)

The Lesson (finnpoe, drowning and mouth-to-mouth)

The Running Stitch (finnpoe, Finn teaches Poe to sew)

The Errant Heart (finnpoe Regency AU)

A Ballad for the Rats (finnpoe rock band AU)

Plausible Deniability (Oscar Isaac/John Boyega, yeah you heard me)

Highwater (finnpoe winter soldier postcanon darkfic)

Villains of Circumstance (Cassian/Din, round two)

1 Rogue Street (Cassian/K/Bodhi paranormal investigator AU)

Go With The Flow (marshmando shower scene)

The Texture (Cassian/Jabba, unfortunately)

The Maple Pecan Latte Incident (Rogue Street tie-in, coffeeshop AU)

That Other Time (Cassian/Kay unrequited voyeurism)

Find What You Love and Let It Kill You (Narcos: Mexico/The Thing crossover)

A Person of Interest (Kallus has a chance encounter with K-2SO)

Long Slow Goodbye (marshmando angst)

unrevealed Star Wars rarepairs exchange fic

You, Me, and the Monsters Inside Us (Cassian/Bodhi/K now with cybernetic enhancements)

unrevealed Covert exchange fic

Takeaways from reflecting on your kick-ass writing, or kick-ass lack of writing, during a year more focused on survival than perhaps any other: The range! I can see my comfort zones and the areas I want to work on as a writer. I got a lot more just-do-it this year, settling into a pretty strong pattern of writing consistently and confidently. Fanfic makes me happy and it makes others happy, so I dedicated a lot of time to it. By staying pretty consistently in one fandom, I was able to try lots of scopes, relationships, styles, and genres.

Most surprising fic you wrote this year: It has to be 1 Rogue Street, the paranormal investigator fic. It started as a joke about sleep paralysis demons and turned rapidly into a 45K horror comedy. I think it’s one of the most interesting, most unique, most enjoyable things I’ve ever written. I had some amazing friends encouraging me throughout the drafting, so even though it didn’t get much attention on ao3, I count it as a cult hit.

How you grew as a writer this year: I got more confident with writing action scenes, a major feature in Hanging the Moon, and horror doing Rogue Street. I didn’t worry too much about repeating myself or recycling ideas, which meant I could explore splinter ideas I might have discarded in the past. I literally grew as a writer by getting a lot of subscribers and friends: knowing that there’s probably someone who’ll read that silly thing I was planning to slap on my works page is so encouraging and empowering. I also did some really fun experiments with narration: Highwater made me a lot more confident taking risks with storytelling. I’m excited to see what comes easily and what new challenges are next!

What’s coming in 2021: I want to wrap up Flying Blind, my Din Djarin-centric series: I’ve been waiting until season two ended and now I need to shuffle some things around to keep it roughly canon-compliant. There’s a collaborative OT3 project I’m still really keen on. I haven’t contributed to the lovely ship of kalluzeb yet, so let’s pencil that in. If I step outside Star Wars, it’ll probably be to dust off that adoribull outline and try to get it out before Dragon Age 4. But having just wrapped my lastest multichap draft, I’m leaving myself open to suggestions at the moment (yes, you can prompt me).

Tagging: @bright-elen @intricatecakes @semisweetshadow and every other writer following me! Lie and say I tagged you!

#1 rogue street #hanging the moon #highwater #flying blind

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aion-rsa · 3 years

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Anime For Beginners: Best Genres and Series to Watch

https://ift.tt/2N0s0pf

The past decade has seen anime’s popularity increase in dramatic ways, whether through a much broader spectrum of series receiving dubs, the growing success of anime feature films in theaters, or the sudden prominence of streaming services. There’s never been a better time to be an anime fan and the medium has become more accessible than ever. There’s a lot of anime out there, but the wealth of new series can often blend together or not be given a fair chance. Additionally, there are definitely certain types of anime that are more prominently showcased outside of Japan.

How to Watch Anime Online: The Best Legal Anime Streaming Options

By Daniel Kurland

Upcoming Anime 2021: New and Returning Series to Watch

By Daniel Kurland

For the uninitiated it’s easy to assume that anime consists of giant robots, monsters that battle, and strong fighters and magical girls that transform, but that’s really just a fraction of what the medium has to offer. Words like shonen, shojo, isekai, and even reverse harem are used in reference to anime, which can sometimes feel overwhelming when someone just wants to watch a silly romantic comedy or superhero clone. Here’s a helpful breakdown of all of the major anime genres and where to get started with them all.

Shonen

The shonen genre is by far the most popular brand of anime and the majority of breakout hits and major successes like Dragon Ball Z, Naruto, and One Piece all fit into the shonen brand. What’s interesting about anime genres is that they’re treated more like demographics and shonen is content that caters to boys with a young male protagonist. Shonen is so accessible because beyond this basic disclaimer, it’s able to cover a wide berth of content and a show like My Hero Academia can be completely different from Yu Yu Hakusho, yet they can still fall back on the same values.

Shonen anime has largely been generalized to be series that feature lots of fighting and battles, which isn’t always the case, but has become quite representative of the genre. Shonen series are ideal for people that want lots of action and are hungry for a show that has hundreds of episodes to consume.

Notable Series To Watch: Yu Yu Hakusho, Hunter x Hunter, My Hero Academia, Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba, Attack On Titan

Shojo

Shojo is the female counterpart to the shonen genre that caters towards an audience of girls rather than boys. The shojo genre isn’t entirely bereft of battles, but it’s a style of anime where relationships and emotional drama is the priority or the source of power. There are many eclectic kinds of shojo series that are content to explore awkward relationship drama where there’s typically some kind of atypical supernatural element afoot.

The Resplendent Queerness of Sailor Moon

By Michael Mammano

Culture

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However, the most popular style of shojo that’s largely become emblematic of the genre are “magical girl” series where regular girls transform into powerful warriors. There’s also typically a bright and pastoral aesthetic to shojo series and characters, both female and male, are beautified. Shojo anime is absolutely the place where the power of love will triumph over evil.

Notable Series To Watch: Sailor Moon, Cardcaptor Sakura, Fruits Basket, Vampire Knight, My Love Story!!

Seinen

Seinen is the R-rated evolution of the shonen genre that’s geared towards a more adult male audience that can handle mature storytelling. That’s not to say that shonen series can’t be violent or deal with adult situations, but seinen series often center around antiheroes and adult characters who are disenfranchised as opposed to optimistic youth that want to save the future.

Some of the most sophisticated and challenging anime series come out of the seinen genre and it’s a great place for people to jump in that are looking for a story that’s not overly drawn out and achieves the same dramatic peaks as prestige television. Seinen once more comes down to the viewers’ preferences and there are science fiction, horror, and fantasy seinen shows that all deconstruct their material in different ways. As a point of comparison, major anime movies like Akira or Ghost in the Shell both fit into the seinen genre.

Notable Series To Watch: Kill La Kill, Berserk, Ping Pong The Animation, Vinland Saga, Dorohedoro

Josei

Josei is the more mature version of shojo content and it’s full of series that are designed for women as opposed to girls. Romance is a big component of josei series, but it’s more concerned about the harsh realities behind relationships than the flirtatious courtship that kicks things off. Josei love stories are messy and full of heartbreak and they’re less romanticized than shojo’s interpretation of love.

A trashy way of putting it would be to say that Twilight is shojo, but Fifty Shades of Grey is seinen. Matters of the heart don’t always have to fuel josei series and there are also plenty of shows that center around adult women as they negotiate through professional and creative endeavors. It’s a place to find less flowery female-driven stories.

Notable Series To Watch: Chihayafuru, The Gokusen, Honey And Clover, Nana, Princess Jellyfish

Isekai

The isekai genre is perfect for fans of fantasy and this style of anime has become wildly popular over the course of the past decade. Isekai anime is any show where a character gets transported away to a fantastical new world. It’s a classic storytelling idea, but anime has been able to run with it in some creative new ways. There’s an abundance of isekai series that incorporate video game aesthetics and there are now just as many series where characters are trapped in a video game world than some alternate fantasy dimension.

Isekai can focus on the protagonist’s mission to return home, act as a savior in their new world, or simply kill time and enjoy the vacation. There are even reverse isekai anime where a supernatural character gets stuck on Earth and must acclimate. Arguably the biggest most mainstream example of isekai content is Spirited Away, but even something as foundational as Alice in Wonderland would qualify.

Notable Series To Watch: Overlord, Re: Zero – Starting Life In Another World, That Time I Got Reincarnated Into A Slime, KonoSuba, No Game No Life

Ecchi

Ecchi is that brand of anime that’s generalized to be the oversexed content that’s likely to make someone blush if they were watching it in public. Ecchi is any sort of anime series that prioritizes a certain sexiness and isn’t afraid to showcase its assets and indulge in “fan service.” Ecchi anime usually has a lot of skin on display, but it’s far from empty content and there’s an important distinction between something like this and actual pornography.

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Ecchi series titillate, but they still are concerned about their story and characters. There’s inevitably going to be some overlap between ecchi and seinen content (Kill La Kill is a series that really tows the line between both), but there’s often more of a gratuitous playfulness that drives ecchi content. Sexualized characters may bring in the audience, but the series are still deep enough to maintain their interests.

Notable Series To Watch: High School DxD, High School Of The Dead, Rosario To Vampire, Strike The Blood, Prison School

Mecha

Mecha anime are widely prominent and the visual of gigantic robots locked in combat as they fly through outer space feels like a tentpole of the anime industry. There’s a large awareness towards mecha series and it’s even entered mainstream live-action content through works like Pacific Rim. However, this visibility also makes mecha content easy to generalize and some may write it off without understanding the versatility of the genre. Mecha anime can be broken down further into real robot and super robot series, each of which apply a different level of realism to these unrealistic creations.

Real robot series might focus more on the humans that pilot the machines and the politics that surround mecha, whereas super robot content can feature robots that destroy planets with giant lasers. There can be a lot of gratuitous action in mecha series, but the human element in shows like Appleseed and Neon Genesis Evangelion, or how various Mobile Suit Gundam properties are dedicated to the casualties of war, is proof that mecha anime can be a lot more than just giant robot battles.

Notable Series To Watch: Mobile Suit Gundam, Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann, Appleseed, Mobile Police Patlabor, Neon Genesis Evangelion

Harem

Romance is popular in any medium and there’s often exceptional tension that’s created from out of a love triangle. One genre of anime takes that idea and seriously exaggerates it in a way that can sometimes be problematic, but has spawned a popular style of anime all the same. Harem series center around a hapless male protagonist who stumbles into some incredible situation where a large group of girls–all of contrasting personalities–fall head-over-heels in love with him.

Harem anime can come across as baseless wish fulfillment fantasy, but the broad structure allows many other genres to mix together with it in a productive way. A lot of the time these series will center on the actual characters and the complex relationship dynamics involved and try to say something that may not be explored in a josei or ecchi series. There are also reverse harem series, which take the same idea, but flip the genders where multiple men fawn over a woman.

Notable Series To Watch: Tenchi Muyo!, The World Only God Knows, Nisekoi, To LOVE-Ru, Ouran High School Host Club

Gag

Anime series are able to achieve a lot of things that just can’t be accomplished in other forms of animation or programming. Comedy is something that’s able to connect extremely hard in anime and operate at an absurdist level that uses visuals, timing, and premises that are rare to find elsewhere. Many anime series have a sense of humor or are even specifically designed as comedies, but gag anime are a different breed that operate at an overwhelmingly relentless pace.

Reality and the fourth wall are just things to break in gag series, which often engage in wild parodies and lampshade anime as a whole. Some gag anime have extended storylines, but they often operate in shorter vignette style sequences that allow the comedy to really pop. Gag anime thrive in pop culture references and some of the hardest times I’ve laughed in my entire life have been at gag series like Mr. Osomatsu and Gintama where comedy is king.

Notable Series To Watch: Gintama, The Disastrous Life Of Saiki K, Pop Team Epic!, Mr. Osomatsu, Excel Saga

Slice Of Life

Slice of life anime are those endlessly soothing series that don’t try to create major spectacles where the planet is at risk, but instead celebrate the mundanity of life. Slice of life series may center around the staff at a job, a group of friends in a high school club, or just a loner that’s moved to a new community. These are series that elegantly display the tiny moments that make life important and the bonds that create eternal friendships.

The stakes are often more muted in slice of life anime, but that doesn’t mean that they’re without tension or can’t dabble in fantastical material. There are still slice of life anime series that involve magical creatures or are set in unbelievable worlds. It’s sometimes even more humbling to learn that some planet in a far away solar system has a struggling chess club or that a dinosaur can be obsessed with different brands of candy.

Notable Series To Watch: The Melancholy Of Haruhi Suzumiya, Toradora!, K-On!, Dagashi Kashi, Clannad

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scgdoeswhat · 5 years

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Unpacking The Elementalists Finale

I’d like to dedicate this to my dear Kane anon (and other TE anons) who have been hitting my ask box up for the last several months. I’m sorry this took forever to get out and I know it doesn’t ease the fact that they ixnayed Kane, but hopefully this makes a little more sense of TE’s abrupt ending.

Without further ado...

I’ve been wanting to make this post since Book 2 Chapter 10, but life has been hectic. TE’s finale finally forced my hand and so here I am, with a bunch of theories, points, and thoughts I've had noted since the book came back from its hiatus. First off, now that TE is officially over (😭) we now know that the hiatus was primarily used to tie up all the loose story lines and to give us a tidy ending. The writing in the second half of the book was more solid, concise, and had a clear cut vision of what the writers wanted and where the plot was headed. As much as I hate to say it, the first half of the book may have been overly ambitious. They introduced the Moral Compass, potentially two villains in Kane and Alma, and a plethora of different storylines. I had a number of people tell me through the first five/six chapters of Book 2 that they were confused with the plot because it became too convoluted and hard to follow along. I think they introduced too many elements into the story, which dragged down the arc. Let’s break down some of these individually: The Moral Compass was something we were all excited to see implemented, because it gave us the potential to be an evil MC. In the end, we know it didn’t make much of a difference, save for dialogue and/or violent options. I think this was originally something intended to be greater than what it amounted to, and part of it is the limitations of the medium that the app is and simply, resources. This also ties into…. The plot involving Kane and Alma. I don’t believe having Kane as the Big Bad was supposed to be as defined as it ended up being. The two Sources were written far more ambiguous in the beginning, with the chance that depending on your choices, you could side with either one by the end of the book and/or series. The hiatus streamlined the plot, discarding elements that were difficult to pull off, including multiple MC point of views that may have held the possibility of being evil or choosing Kane, therefore placing Alma as the antagonist. In a narrative story app such as Choices (as opposed to Lovestruck, where the routes have the same players but different stories altogether), I just don’t think this advanced storytelling would have been doable. These plots are primarily linear, and MC being evil/with Kane/etc, it would present a different set of problems, including the fact that this becomes an entirely different story while there is supposed to be one solid ending. (For what it's worth, I enjoy the MC customizability of Choices more.) Looking at the group of friends, obviously Beckett was incredibly fleshed out while the others were not as much. I wanted to delve further into our friends’ backgrounds a bit more, and I think at the beginning of the book, we were on that path. Aster and her wood nymph family was a perfect example of table setting. We had two or three scenes before the hiatus to go to the forest, and I thought the Wand Wars and their involvement against Kane was slated to be more prominent. I think the writers had something bigger planned, but how would it all tie in if players started choosing the evil choices? Again, having too many choices causes a domino effect that makes it nearly impossible to navigate when the story is supposed to end with a particular goal in mind. The chapter where we can receive the wand was a symptom of ending the book early and I think the execution of the actual Wand Wars scene was lacking the emotional punch the initial introduction of it warranted. This is unfortunate because the setup they had in Book 1 made it seem much more violent, disastrous, and full of hate compared to what was shown (i.e. Attuned just being greedy bastards). We were introduced to Shreya's Serene & Sublime business and the potential of family disapproval and lack of support in the beginning, but everything was tied up with the gala chapter. Looking back, I was curious why it was so easy to get so many financial backers this early into the series, but knowing that TE only went for two books makes much more sense why we knew whether S&S succeeded or failed. (Tangent - for anyone who didn't secure backing, is S&S successful at the end of the book?) I think Griffin, his scholarship, and his decision between Natural Sciences and Thief was also slated to be a bigger subplot. We never met his parents, despite them being brought up very early in Book 1. If TE had gone the originally planned three or four books, I have no doubt his family would've been introduced and MC would have needed to help sway his parents (and the committee for the scholarship) whether Griffin continued on the NS or professional Thief path. Doing the Griffin scenes (even as platonic friends) influenced his standing for the scholarship and not doing them made him lose out to Amy, if I'm not mistaken. Question for everyone regarding Zeph and the Thief captaincy: Does he get it in everyone's playthrough? I wonder if the writers always planned for Zeph to get the captaincy or if Griff would have kept it depending on your playthrough if they had all four books to use. Another big plot point that resolved itself out of nowhere was Atlas and MC butting heads over their Sun Source mother. I was not a fan of this storyline at all. I felt like the disagreements between the siblings was unnecessary drama that came off as forced. They tried to explain Atlas' position, and I understood where they were coming from, but Atlas was very unreasonable with their constant “who cares about mom” shtick.

I think this was something that could have been more impactful if there weren't so many plotlines happening and more focus could have been given to it instead of a few screens of Atlas saying they were pissed off before storming away from MC. This was also a plotline that was directly influenced by the Kane/Alma decisions. If MC sides with Kane, it makes much more sense for MC and Atlas to be against each other as opposed to MC being good/siding with Alma.

Five major subplots were opened, but how do you seamlessly weave these elements into a 17-19 chapter book? In my opinion, you can't. Each time something new was introduced, I felt things were glossed over, despite big chunks of chapters being focused on whichever subplot the chapter was about. Throw in the romance and I think it is nearly impossible to resolve each aspect in a complete manner.

What also hurt was the pacing of the series. This was also seen in Book 1, where sometimes a chapter would span one or two days, only for a huge time jump to occur in the next chapter.

So many ideas could have been explored through the course of four books (which is what I believe they had planned), but all the different elements should have been introduced at different times. Instead, Book 2 was an amalgamation of so many ideas but not enough time, space, or resources to thoroughly hash out and have a satisfactory resolution. For what it’s worth, I don’t think it was having too much Beckett that hurt the series. He obviously kept the series afloat and was one of PB's biggest moneymakers in recent history. Despite the constant complaints on tumblr, people fail to realize that the ENTIRE online fandom (FB, IG, Twitter, Tumblr, Reddit, Wiki) comprises maybe 0.5% - 2% of the ENTIRE player fan base. It only made sense that PB capitalized on him because their numbers dictated that the resources should be spent in that manner. The fallout from this was that Beckett was the only one who had his storyline relatively complete, and that was due to the spending power of everyone who romanced him. I think what hurt them the most was the multiple storylines and the indecision of which direction they wanted to go. They had a grand idea of the direction through Book 2 (and Book 3, let’s not lie here) but in-game mechanics and the type of game Choices is made it difficult to pull off. The app wasn’t the correct medium for what they envisioned. In my opinion, the overall story arc had the potential to be brilliant, but again, the app wasn't designed for the type of story the writers wanted to tell.

I also think the timing and having a very short turnaround hurt, as well. Players had high expectations and when you factor in the hype around the other books that were also released on Fridays, TE lost some of its sparkle. Most players didn’t get a chance to miss it for the regular 2-3 months we’ve been trained to wait for sequels. (I recognize that I’m an anomaly and the previous three sentences do not apply to me at all.)

Even with all this, I applaud the writing team for wanting to deliver a story that was worthy of a magical world. I love all the Pend Pals (‘Motley Crue’ for me), the familiars, the side characters, loved to hate the villains, and from someone who is not into Harry Potter lore at all, I was absolutely sucked into the magick universe that the writers built. (Metal Att for life ⚙!)

If TE does return in the future (and I REALLY hope it does), I think it will be even stronger than the first two books because the world building is complete. We know almost everything we need to know now. Instead of using a Book 3 to search for Sun Mama, the family is complete, MC and Atlas are attuned to all the elements, and there are so many open-ended questions that Book 2 left us.

If they implement a time jump where MC and the Pend Pals are all post grad/mid 20s, it also gives the writers a chance to move the story from the Young Adult genre to a more mature setting. We saw this in the later diamond scenes, where the writing appeared similar in their vividness (and coding in the final scene - THANK YOU, glorious writing team) to Open Heart, Bloodbound, and A Courtesan of Rome. This removes the restrictions placed on the group of being college kids, and therefore are almost fully developed with their magick, giving the possibility of moving the story out of a university setting.

If you've made it all the way here to the bottom, thank you for sticking with me and apologies for spelling/grammar since this has all been on my phone 😂 I think this comprises almost all my notes I've been keeping for the last 2 months. Feel free to agree or disagree; I just wanted to post my thoughts on this book and series that I love so much.

Now, I'm going to go back to my holiday (don't worry, I didn't write all of this while on vacay lol) and I'll try to answer asks when I have downtime.

#the elementalists #beckett harrington #shreya mistry #griffin langley #aster d'yew #playchoices #choices #beckett x mc #griffin x mc #shreya x mc #aster x mc #zeph hernandez #atlas ernhardt #te

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jorrmungandr · 4 years

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2019 was a good year for games.

Lots of interesting new ideas in the space, and some refinements of old ones. Here’s a list of my personal favorite games of this year, in no particular order. Making an ordered list can be fun, but it’s ultimately pretty pointless.

Video games are such a diverse medium at this point that it’s really like comparing apples and oranges. How does Baba Is You stack up against Dragon Quest XI S? They have almost nothing in common, and their aims are so different that it makes no sense to compare them directly.

Speaking of….

Baba Is You

There are a lot of indie puzzle games out there. Making a little mind-bending puzzle is something that’s easy to do on a relatively small budget. There are also a lot of games that mimic old pixel art aesthetics of earlier game systems, to greater and lesser success. Making a truly great puzzle game, though, is a true accomplishment. Something that combines a wildly different array of elements in interesting ways, but maintains a simple readability that allows you to return to puzzles after months away and instantly recognize what’s going on.

Baba Is You is a game that accomplishes this and more. It operates on very simple, basic rules, but the way they escalate over time and require you to think outside more and more boxes with every single puzzle is simple astounding. A lot of puzzle games escalate their difficulty so quickly that it’s easy to get discouraged, put off by the impossible tasks you’re being asked to perform. Where Baba shines is that it gives you a perfect runway, teaching you things slowly but surely through a series of challenges.

This is a game where you will instantly go from feeling like the world’s greatest super-genius to a complete and utter fool in a matter of moments, from finishing one stage to starting the next. Over and over again, for dozens and dozens of levels. No game has ever better demonstrated the value of brain rest, stepping away from a problem and letting your subconscious work on it for a while. Every time I came back to a puzzle after a couple hours, I would suddenly see some option I never saw before.

One final note, the graphics are actually a perfect fit for this game. A lot of times, pixel art feels like a gimmick, something to do when you don’t have a good idea, or just mindless nostalgia-baiting. But here, it serves a gameplay purpose, giving you an absolutely clean view of the elements in play at a glance, and also serves as an homage to the simple-yet-challenging puzzle games of those older eras.

Code Vein

And now, for something completely different: An extremely anime-styled souls-like. I remember hearing about this game years and years ago, and thinking that it looked kinda… bad. But, in the meantime they really brought it all together into something fun, if not very innovative.

Code Vein is exactly the sort of thing I look for in a souls-like: it takes the basic formula and adds some new mechanics to it, and has an identity of its own. Instead of a medieval fantasy world, it’s a post-apocalyptic modern city crawling with vampires and zombies. It takes inspiration from stylish, gothic anime of the past couple decades: Code Geass, Blood+, Tokyo Ghoul, etc. The character creator is extremely detailed, but mostly when it comes to clothes and accessories.

The gameplay is… fine. It’s balanced around always having an AI companion, so they can throw bigger groups of enemies at you. It doesn’t require the same sort of intense caution of the Souls series, but that makes it more of a fun, casual experience. At least until you’re fighting a boss, then it suddenly requires you to really be on your game with dodging. If I have one complaint, it’s that the difficulty is incredibly bumpy, some areas are a cake walk and others have you struggling through every encounter.

Oh, also the area aping Anor Londo from Dark Souls. Not because it’s derivative, that’s totally fine, but because it’s a maze where everything looks the same and it’s a real pain to get through. Souls games are at their best when areas have good landmarks and make a kind of logical sense. Earlier in the game you pass through a big parking garage, and it’s perfect, just the sort of thing that translates well to this kind of game. But this cathedral-ish area… it just sucks.

It really is quite shameless.

Overally, it’s just a solid souls-like. I enjoyed the crunchy RPG elements, switching classes and balancing your weapons and armor to get good mobility and damage. The ability to just equip cool-looking attack moves as skills you can use, like spells in Souls games, is something I’d really like to see in more games in this sub-genre.

Fire Emblem: Three Houses

I was kind of skeptical about this game before it came out. Mostly because it was bringing back weapon durability, a mechanic I’ve always hated in these games, but that ended up being a non-issue. Also the school setting made me a bit wary, thinking it was just gonna end up being some Persona-esque thing where you spend tons of time on mundane nonsense while an actual war is going on.

That was all baseless, it turns out. They balance the idea of a military academy with a traditional Fire Emblem structure remarkably well, giving you a lot of freedom around what you want to do when you play the game. You can run around the monastery talking to students, managing your relationships, or you can just do a ton of tactical battles if you want.

The storytelling was remarkably good, though I feel like it was harmed a bit by the weird way it handled multiple routes with different big mysteries. Some routes ended up completely ignoring or just not getting around to some pretty major mysteries. I’m a person who likes long games, but expecting someone to go through all four routes to figure out what’s going on is a bit much.

But more than that, the way it holds back certain reveals hurts the writing in other ways. The actual revelations can’t really have any effect on the characters and their relationships because it all happens at the very end of the game. It keeps the world feeling a bit flat, without any reactions. The mysteries feel extraneous to the plot, in a weird way, when they are so important to certain characters’ identities and the core conflicts that drive the second half of the game.

The gameplay is okay, though a few of the maps are way too big. The portable Fire Emblem games reigned in the map sizes from the old NES and SNES ones, which was a great thing. But now we’re back to moving a whole army one unit at a time for multiple turns just to get to the next group of enemies. The class system was fun to engage with, balancing learning different skills to open up new opportunities, but the gender-limited classes were a real disappointment. Why can’t men ride pegasi? Why can’t women punch good? It’s bizarre, and honestly felt like it had some stuff left over from early drafts, like the pointless dark mage classes.

This has been a lot of complaining about a game I played for close to a hundred hours. Why is this game even on my list? Because the characters are fucking fantastic, and on a basic level the tactical battles are a lot of fun. It offers a paternalistic form of power fantasy, fostering and guiding your children-warriors and then seeing them destroy your enemies. It is just incredibly satisfying to play. And for all that the mysteries end up a bit frustrating, they are intriguing, and do a good job of motivating you to get through a very lengthy game.

Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night

Ah, love a good IGAvania.

This was a year where I really reached for comfort food games a lot, and this is maybe the king of that category. It’s just an old style of game that doesn’t get made anymore, done extremely well by the guy who used to make ’em all the time. Nothing super different or innovative, just the same old thing with a couple new tweaks.

It’s an easy game, but that’s entirely by design. It’s about running around this castle killin’ monsters, collecting new abilities, just exploring and poking around the corners. It’s a game that is, ultimately, designed to be comfortable. And in a time of such strife in the world around us, what could be better?

Disco Elysium

There’s already been a lot written about this game, tons of praise heaped on its writing and its interesting, hauntological world that is so similar to our own, and yet so different. Frankly, I’m really glad I got turned into this before it even came out, if I heard all that overblown praise I’d never have ended up actually sitting down and playing it.

Here’s what I’ll say: This game is a look at an ugly world, and it gives you a lot to think about, but it actually doesn’t take itself too seriously. There are a ton of extremely funny moments, a lot of straight-up goofy-ass jokes. This is not medicine that you have to suffer through, just take it as it comes and it’s a good time. This is what allows its writing to really land, it’s not lecturing you from on high, it’s engaging on a lower, more personable level.

It’s also not some super serious text that you have to pore over and consider extremely closely at every moment. It’s a game, you can save scum and try to exploit mechanics and look up answers to mysteries. Much like Souls games, people come up with all sorts of weird rules about the “proper” way to play games like this, but in the end your experience is up to you.

One final note: the game does start off with a kind of off-putting ironic tone. Some people try to downplay this, but it’s there. I can only say this: if you give this game a chance, you’ll be rewarded. It is worth getting through a few sarcastic jabs to get to the good stuff later on. It’s not some perfect audio-visual experience that will entrance you from the opening moments to the credits, it’s just a video game.

Dragon Quest XI S

I first played Dragon Quest XI last year on PC, and I enjoyed it a lot! But I didn’t actually finish that version, not really. I put a lot of time into, but ultimately burned out on the grind towards the very end.

The form that games come in is very important to how they are experienced. Dragon Quest games work best as portable games, I truly believe. It also helps that this version on the switch added the ability to speed up regular battles, so you don’t have to sit through some long attack animations over and over. The more important aspect, though, is simply the ability to pick it up and put it down more easily.

Sitting down at my PC, plugging in my controller, and pulling up a game is a subtly labor-intensive thing. It means I’m devoting a lot of attention to a game, and it has to do something to earn that on a moment-to-moment basis. The ability to just push a single button on the switch and get back into means that I’m willing to forgive a lot more down time.

Anyway, the game itself: this is not just a very good Dragon Quest game, it is the ultimate Dragon Quest game. It truly shows the value in iteration over pure innovation, taking all sorts of different mechanics and ideas from past games in the series and bringing them all together in one big package. But it doesn’t feel overstuffed, it’s just doing the same thing these games have always done, just really, really well.

Dragon Quest XI successfully pays tribute to the older games in the series while also telling a new story with entertaining twists and turns, and fun and interesting characters. It’s beautiful, everything runs smoothly, the writing is charming and light. It’s not on the same level as Disco Elysium, but it’s not aiming for that sort of thing. It’s a fairy tale, a fable, a reflection of the world in a different sense.

A lot of game critics missed this game because it’s long. And that is absolutely fair, it’s hard to fit a 100-hour game into a review schedule in this day and age. But it’s an absolute gem, a truly wonderful experience from beginning to end. I’d recommend it to anyone who just wants a game to relax with at the end of the day.

Monolith: Relics of the Past

Like some sort of Christmas miracle, there was an expansion pack released for one of my favorite roguelikes on Christmas day, just last week.

Monolith is the best twin-stick shooter roguelike, I will make no bones about it. Forget your Gungeons and your Bindings of Isaac, this is a classic NES-styled game with an absolutely pitch-perfect aesthetic and sense of humor. It serves both the twin-stick shooting and the roguelike parts of its genre perfectly, giving you a strong basic weapon to rely on, and also a guarantee of something more interesting but random in every run.

Man, there are games that I enjoy more, but I really, truly feel that this is one of the best-crafted games of the past few years. And this expansion only made it better: fixing up the UI and tooltips to make things more clear, rebalancing the weapons so that they are all useful, adding more variety to runs.

I’m not the best at Monolith, it took me quite a while to get a full win, but that doesn’t make it any less fun to play. In my youth, I was really quite good at bullet-hell games, but nowadays those reflexes aren’t there. It’s a game designed for people who can dodge endless bullet curtains, and also, now more than ever, for those who struggle with it.

It’s truly inspiring to see something that takes from the past and the present and fuses it together into something so wonderful. There are other games that really capture the NES aesthetic and sensibility, like Odallus or The Messenger, but this one really gets the spirit of that whole era of games. It is at once light and airy, and also punishingly difficult. It offers tricks and outs, but also remains utterly mysterious and intimidating.

And that’s it. There are more games I enjoyed this year, like the remake of Link’s Awakening, but these are the big ones that stick out in my mind.

There are a lot of big narrative-heavy games I never got around to finishing, or even starting. It just doesn’t really fit with how I play games these days, listening to podcasts and aiming to relax, not engage with something on a deep level.

That’s okay, though. I’ll get around to ’em in the fullness of time.

Games of the Year 2019 2019 was a good year for games. Lots of interesting new ideas in the space, and some refinements of old ones.

#baba is you #Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night #code vein #Disco Elysium #Dragon Quest #Dragon Quest XI S #fire emblem three houses #goty #Monolith #video games

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rpgmgames · 6 years

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September’s Featured Game: Ghost Hospital

DEVELOPER(S): Lev, Kip, Rose, Tredlocity, C, Bittersweet ENGINE: RPGMaker MV GENRE: Adventure, RPG WARNINGS: Anxiety, Body horror, Implied child harm SUMMARY: Ghost Hospital is a game about anxiety, depression, despair, mental rock bottoms, and, of course, ghosts. You play as Robin, a twelve-year-old girl who has an anxiety disorder and is very much alive in this hospital meant for beings that are not alive. Frankly, her anxiety was already bad enough before she landed in a hospital full of dead people, the still-shambling shells of ancient ghosts who try to take her down for a sweet taste of life, and the hospital directors hellbent on keeping her contained, and more importantly, away from the reason she's REALLY there. Thankfully, you have your new friends Jay and Sarcastic Ghost- Jay is a ghost about your age, and still a very new arrival to the hospital, and Sarcastic Ghost…well, he's an amorphous blob of a ghost, who talks a lot despite not having a mouth.

Download the demo here!

Our Interview With The Dev Team Below The Cut!

Introduce yourself! Lev: Hey, my name is Lev! I'm an artist and storyteller, and though I've wanted to make games for a long time, this is my first serious attempt! Most of my work is about my experiences in mental illness. Kip: I'm a freelance artist being allowed to write cheap jokes in ghost form. Rose: I'm a freelance writer and editor for the game! I also work on dialogue and story drafting. Tredlocity: My name is Tredlocity! I do some character designs and writing in the game! C: c / ghoul is a character designer, comic artist and Halloween enthusiast. They're currently apart of several indie game teams and are writing the webcomic, This Dark Forest of Ours. Bittersweet: I'm Kendall (AKA Bittersweet), and I'm the resident music person (one of two, technically, but the other left the project unfortunately.) This is my first (and thus far only) major soundtrack composition project, but thus far, it's been a satisfying one!

What is your project about? What inspired you to create your game initially? *Lev: Ghost Hospital is a game about anxiety, and the game was born out of an idea to put someone in the shoes of someone with clinical anxiety and depression without going for the prototypical 'horror game' or 'walking simulator', giving more game-friendly, practical narrative and gameplay examples of how it effects people.

How long have you been working on your project? *Lev: The game started development in late 2016 as a thesis project for college. At its inital completion, it was more of a beta or proof of concept than a demo- in its current state, it's far closer to what we have envisioned for the final project.

Did any other games or media influence aspects of your project? *Lev: Absolutely! The biggest influences are OFF, Yume Nikki, and Sweet Home, and a lot of Gameboy Color graphics and aesthetics- namely, Pokemon GSC and the GBC Zelda Games.

Have you come across any challenges during development? How have you overcome or worked around them? *Lev: RPG Maker is a versatile engine, but still fairly restrictive, so getting all the effects I wanted to work was challenging. Mental illness and real life have been taking a toll on development time, too. Getting things to work took teaching myself some javascript, and after being in serious development for this long, I've found ways to motivate myself to keep working. Having other people checking in on you helps, too.

Have any aspects of your project changed over time? How does your current project differ from your initial concept? *Lev: In its very first inital pitch, it was much closer to Yume Nikki, being more atmospheric and serious. At some point in character and world development, though, I couldn't bear to make it a stoic adventure, and with most of the stuff I already take inspiration from, it's hard for me to not put jokes into the media I make, anyway.

What was your team like at the beginning? How did people join the team? If you don’t have a team, do you wish you had one or do you prefer working alone? *Lev: At the beginning, it was just me working on everything. The first people I brought on board were my concept artist, Kip, my writer, Rose, and my musician, Bittersweet. I can't do music on my own, and I knew from word go that I wanted this to be the kind of game with a strong story and a lot of unique NPCs.

What is the best part of developing the game? *Lev: Call me biased, but the most fun part is making the art for it. It's hard for me to motivate myself to keep working if I'm just using default placeholder sprites, I have to make new NPCs to keep myself interested. It's not the most convenient, but it's fun to do, and it actually really does help with my workflow.

Do you find yourself playing other RPG Maker games to see what you can do with the engine, or do you prefer to do your own thing? *Lev: Oh, absolutely. RPG Maker games have a bad reputation for being very cut-and-paste, and there's a lot of those out there. But it just takes a bit of effort to make yourself and your game stand out, and it can be done absolutely beautifully! The latest one I've played was Hylics, completely surreal and wonderful.

Which character in your game do you relate to the most and why? (Alternatively: Who is your favorite character and why?) *Lev: Robin is a sort of proxy character for myself, so...I'm a bit biased on her. I love Jay a lot, too, he's kinda the friend I wish I had in elementary school when all this first showed up, haha. *Tredlocity: As someone who faces anxiety on a daily basis, I relate to Robin a lot. Though I would say my favorite character is Jay, since he can shoot plasma and has blue hair. *C: I'm partial to Coop [upcoming character], not just bc I designed them but bc I love big sister types. *Rose: I also relate to robin and jay! i try to control my anxiety while remaining positive and hopeful about situations. *Bittersweet: As an anxiety-riddled person, I relate immensely to Robin. However, my favorite character by far has to be Carna. (There's another character I'm particularly looking forward to when the full version of the game is released, though~)

Looking back now, is there anything that regret/wish you had done differently? *Lev: Honestly, there's a few things I wanted the game to be able to do at the start that I wasn't able to make happen. I spent a LOT of time trying to get it to work without having to go in and code it myself, and I wish I'd been able to take a step back, remind myself that this is my first serious project, and just stop worrying so much about what, in the end, would've been a minor detail, anyway.

Once you finish your project, do you plan to explore the game’s universe and characters further in subsequent projects, or leave it as-is? *Lev: Chances are I'm gonna leave it alone, but if I go back, I HAVE had a bit of a 'Ghost College' AU where they're exploring a haunted old library on their college campus instead of being trapped in a ghost hospital. It'd probably be cool as a point-and-click adventure, but it wouldn't exactly be a canon exploration of the postgame.

What do you look most forward to upon/after release? *Lev: I'm actually working on a few other projects, so being able to work on those more freely would be great, especially considering I'm really bad at keeping my own limits in mind, haha.

Is there something you’re afraid of concerning the development or the release of your game? *Lev: Mostly, I'm afraid that making a game about a subject like this, as a minority and with other people in my team that would be considered minorities, that releasing this game to the mainstream public would get me a lot of negative attention from people who think that people like us don't belong in the gaming sphere. It's pretty nerve-wracking, but after the positive reception of games like Undertale and SLARPG, it's getting easier to convince myself that I should be more afraid of people just generally not liking the game, haha.

Do you have any advice for upcoming devs? *Lev: Have someone to work with! DEFINITELY have someone to work with. Even if it's just a friend to bounce ideas off of or someone to ask if you've been working on the game, having someone else involved helps a lot. And specifically for RPG Maker- if you can, replace your default font with a different one. It's a minor detail, but it goes a long way towards making your game feel more original. *C: Always have a backlog of different projects. I have about four or five ideas constantly on rotation so I don't burn myself out on just one. *Tredlocity: My advice for any creatives is to start small, and just get it out. Feedback is a great motivator, and the only way to get better at something is to keep doing it! *Rose: I think some good advice is to write a few drafts of whatever it is you're working on in order to see which version you'd like to continue! let your work have different scenarios and situations based on various elements you insert or take out of a story, game, or other piece. *Bittersweet: Don't pressure yourself to a dead-set deadline. I know, you want to get this project out eventually, and if you're on a roll with development then all the power to you, but if you're struggling, don't let it burn you out. That's just unhealthy.

Question from last month's featured dev @toxicshroomswamp: How do you feel about your main character(s)? What piece of life advice would you give them? *Lev: I love my main characters, I love them like my own children. I would probably tell Robin that she'll learn to handle everything, it won't be so scary forever. I'd tell Jay that stopping for a minute and thinking is way more important than it seems. I'd tell Sarcastic ghost to shut up.

We mods would like to thank Lev, Kip, Rose, Tredlocity, C, and Bittersweet for agreeing to our interview! We believe that featuring the developer and their creative process is just as important as featuring the final product. Hopefully this Q&A segment has been an entertaining and insightful experience for everyone involved!

Remember to check out Ghost Hospital if you haven’t already! See you next month!

- Mods Gold & Platinum

#rpgmaker #rpg maker #indie games #pixel games #ghost hospital #ghost hospital (game)#game of the month #gotm #game dev #game making #gotm september #september 2018 #2018

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sweetcatminteareblog · 5 years

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11/11/11 Tag

Thanks for tagging me @storyteller-shealie! It was fun to learn more about your wip!

Rules: answer 11 questions, write your own 11, tag 11 people

1. Do you ever notice that the media you consume (books, tv-shows, etc) influences your writing in some ways?

I have a habit of picking up the narrative voice of whatever I was reading prior so there’s a cool down period between reading and writing so it (hopefully) doesn’t sound like I’m having an identity crisis while writing XD I also learn more about my characters because it’s fun to slot them into someone else’s universe and see how they go :3c

2. What was your favourite part about the last scene or chapter you’ve written?

The last thing I wrote was for flash fiction Friday. My favourite part is probably the mental image of the captain hanging off the side of the ship trying to get closer to the mermaid. Somehow its both touching and humorous? (to me at least)

3. What was the most difficult part of writing that last scene or chapter?

Romance really isn’t my deal. I don’t read much of it or have any real world experience. It was hard to convey the intimacy of the characters in the quiet scene.

4. Do you write everything in order, or do you find yourself often moving scenes around?

For short things, I write it in order. For longer ones, I try to write in order but will write later scenes separately if I have a vivid image in mind. I don’t want to get the information out of order so I try to keep it chronological.

5. What’s your writing software of choice? Why do you like it?

Microsoft word. I’ve used it forever so that’s what I go with.

6. What’s your favorite writing environment? Do you need to be alone, or maybe you’d rather write in libraries or coffeeshops? Do you prefer silence or music?

I write on my bed with quiet background noise playing. I try to match the noise to the scene. While writing the pirate story, I had ocean noises playing from this site. I can’t write if there is too much noise or silence :v

7. If someone distracts you in the middle of a writing session, how do you usually react?

Ask them to wait until I finish my thought, attend to whatever they need, then finish the scene.

8. Do you like writing sprints?

I haven’t participated in one. I like having deadlines though.

9. Have you ever done NaNoWriMo? Why or why not? What are your thoughts about this type of challenge?

I haven’t! November/October are big months for art challenges and I’m usually working on themed/ gift art and exams at that time. I think it’s pretty awesome what people can accomplish during NaNoWriMo!

10. Do you find it easier to write short stories or novels?

It’s hard to stick to a low word count but I have barely written for my long stories :v They both have their strengths and weaknesses. Long stories give you a chance to really explore the characters and create immersive scenes but they can be daunting and I lose my drive. Short stories are restrictive but the end is clear.

11. How are your WIPs born? Do you start with characters? With a plot idea? With a worldbuilding thought, like “what if there was a world with sentient dragons who were the source of magic”? Something else?

A mix! My main wip started with a dream about GetBackers. I really liked the character my sleepy self had created and worked on her until she was more tangible. In creating her and characters within her universe, I justified characteristics through plot points and what not.

My secondary wip comes from wanting to explore the past of a different character.

My most recent idea came from listening to a song that sampled lines from the purge. The purge is dumb -> can I spin it to be less dumb? -> borrow from an old concept -> new story.

Questions for you

1. Do you need visuals to work with characters? Or do you just start writing and the ideas come?

2. What do you want your readers to leave the story with?

3. What’s your favourite and least favourite genres to write in and why?

4. Do you like to leave your ideas to marinate or must you write them immediately?

5. What’s your current favourite book?

6. Has fanfiction/art ever gotten you into a show/book/etc?

7. Given the choice, would you like your story to be recreated through a graphic novel, 2D animation, live action film, a podcast, or a stage production?

8. What do you think your writing ‘tell’ is? Something that is relatively consistent through your style.

9. If you could have expert knowledge on one thing to help your writing, what would it be?

10. Who is your favourite character you are currently writing (or have written)?

11. Do you prefer short or long stories?

Tags -> @inkovert, @kainablue, @typewrxter, @paper-shield-and-wooden-sword, @goblin-writer, @inkjackets, @candy687, @inexorableblob, @ragethegemini, @wingedcatwblr, and @hannahs-creations

#tagged #CatMint Responds #11/11/11 tag #writing #writblr #long post

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pomegranate-salad · 6 years

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Pom’s Summer reads (as she was stuck in the hospital)

Hey guys ! Sorry I haven’t been around in a while. The reason is… I was back in the psych ward. Mental health is no fun. But this time around, I was so bored out of my mind that I actually took a look at the scarcely furnished, yet surprisingly eclectic hospital library. Which consisted of two shelves of donated books in various states of decay. But since beggars can’t be choosers, I went and started reading randomly selected books from this motley collection. And I thought it would be fun to make a reading list out of it to share my findings. I have terrible ideas.

So, here’s what I read over the last two weeks :

- Mythologies by Roland Barthes

Genre : Essay – Philosophy

Length : average

Available in English : partially

I had only read excerpts of this staple of cultural criticism before, so I thought it was high time I read the whole thing. This takes a look to the making of modern myths from a Marxist perspective, finding meaning in items as deceptively trivial as laundry detergent and haircuts in movies. This book consists of a first part made of a series of small commentaries, and a second part that takes a deeper look into the mechanisms and power of myth making. Some of the essays of the first part are not included in the English version of this book, presumably because the references studied were too “French” to speak to foreign readers. The references as a whole have aged (I had to google quite a few things, even as a French reader) but it speaks to the quality of the commentary that the thoughts expressed in this book are still relevant to our modern culture. You can probably find one of its most famous bits online, an essay about wrestling and the theatrical culture it illustrates.

This is an important and interesting book, but one that’s maybe a bit arid to read cover to cover : I found picking it up at intervals to read one essay or two was the best way to enjoy this book. You can of course also check out Barthes’ highly influential essay on the Death of the Author, but I also enjoyed his lesser-known essay The pleasure of the Text and his collection of Critical essays.

- The Sand Child by Tahar Ben Jelloun

Genre : Novel

Length : average

Available in English : Yes

Content warning : explicit sexual content

This was a weird, weird but pretty amazing one. Assuredly the best surprise of the lot. This starts off as a straightforward tale of a girl raised as a boy by a traditionalist father in modern Morocco as told by a storyteller on a marketplace, but it quickly devolves into several levels of metatextuality and dreamlike elements until story, characters and storyteller are interweaved into a reflexion about the nature of stories itself.

Aptly enough, this reminded most of Sandman, but also of Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon, both excellent things of which to remind someone. This is also the rare reflexion on gender roles and identity within the context of Islamic culture. But most of all, this is all written with a unique style, as if the author was drunk on language ; it’s a bit hard to get into, but it’s also captivating at the same time. Of all the books in this list, this is the one I would reread again and again just to try and understand all its levels. If you like this kind of surreal literature, definitely check this one out.

- Oyster by John Biguenet

Genre : Novel

Length : average to long

Content warning : mild violence

This was a frustrating one. It’s not a great book, yet it could have been one. This is yet another story of rivalry, secrets and revenge between two poor white families, this time living from oyster farming in Louisiana in the late fifties. The plot is fairly standard, and narrated in such a way that it constantly gets in the way of its dramatic potential. The writing is I think the problem here, especially around dialogue and plot progression, making the whole thing feel flat. Which is a shame because when the book lingers on details of the life of poor oyster farmers, it can be remarkably evocative.

This is the kind of book I want to put in a shaker and shake to put each element back where it belongs. I’m not difficult when it comes to Southern Gothic : I will basically read anything as long as it reminds me even a little bit of William Faulkner and Tennessee Williams. So it was frustrating to see this one being able to conjure its own atmosphere while not sticking the landing with its story. If you know of any good modern Southern Gothic novels, please send them my way, I’m hungry.

- The ghost in the Noonday sun by Sid Fleischman

Genre : Novel

Length : short

I have no idea how much of a staple of children’s literature this book is, so maybe all of you are already familiar with it. Personally, I hadn’t read it in quite a while since the version we have at home is now missing some key pages. But if by chance you haven’t read this, please go invest an hour of your life into reading this funny, witty and earnest pirate story about a teenager who gets kidnapped by a superstitious pirate who believes he’s able to see ghosts in order to locate the treasure of his old captain who was buried with it.

In a just world, there’d be a cult movie based on this book instead of one of dubious quality staring an erratic Peter Sellers. This is children’s literature of the best kind : one that takes its audience seriously, is able to create an atmosphere and is still a fun to reread as an adult. This was kind of super-nostalgic to me to pick this one, but I couldn’t resist.

- The Awkward Squad by Sophie Hénaff (and its sequel Stick together)

Genre : Novel – Crime

Length : average

Available in English : Yes

I had to have read at least one crime novel in this lot, but in the end I only read two, since the other options were Mary Higgins Clark books and since I have a grandmother, I had already read those. It’s a shame that French crime novels don’t have as much of an international reputation as Scandinavian or American ones, since we do have an interesting tradition of our own : books mainly based on ensemble casts of motley characters, with a poetic streak and a sensitivity to absurdism. The premise of this series is that in order to get better statistics, the new policer commissioner has decided to regroup all undesirable police officers they can’t fire in one single squad, and make sure this lame duck unit doesn’t attract any attention. But some people from this unit have of course decided otherwise.

These books held pretty well as far as crime novels go, they are a lot of fun at times and read easily. The character work and dialogue are definitely this series’ best asset, as it is the case with many French crime books. If you want the best the genre has to offer, check out my all-time favourite, the Adamsberg series from author Fred Vargas, in order : The Chalk Circle Man, Seeking whom he may devour, Have mercy on us all, and Wash this Blood clean from my Hand.

- The Three-Arched Bridge by Ismail Kadaré

Genre : Novel

Length : short

Available in English : Yes

This was hardly a surprise that I loved this one : I’ve been a fan of Kadaré for a while. This is yet another of his books that explores the frontiers of reality and legend, superstition and magic within a fascinating historical context. Here, his subject is the building of a bridge in Albania toward the end of the 14th century, as the Turkish invasion is looming. The narrator, a monk, relates both political and mundane events surrounding the isolated region, as increasingly troubling phenomenon surround the construction site, announcing the troubled future of the country.

I do love my historical/supernatural novels, and Kadaré is a master of the genre. This reads easily while making a lasting impression and leaving you hungry for more. If you do, I can’t recommend enough checking out more of Kadaré’s work, his classic The General of the Dead Army, and my personal favourites The Pyramid and The Ghost Rider.

- The Pursuit of Happiness by Douglas Kennedy

Genre : Novel

Length : long

I picked this one deep in my “I’m fucking sick of reading, but there’s still nothing else to do” phase, since I needed something that would be easy to read and at least somewhat good, and old Douglas did not disappoint : this book might be almost 800 pages long, it reads in a dedicated handful of hours. This is primarily the story of two women, one who just lost her mother and the other who appears in her life after the funeral, apparently knowing a lot about her family, to give her a manuscript retracing her story. The portrayal of the main characters is realistic, both are flawed individuals with distinct stories and personalities, so cheers to that.

This is the kind of familial saga-that’s-also-a-reflexion-on-destiny-and-the-American-dream you never get tired of until you do. Don’t let my snide deter you though : this is a very good book, maybe just not singular enough for its genre. If you’re looking for something more particular, you can of course check out Steinbeck’s East of Eden, the metric by which all American familial sagas are judged, and Roth’s American Pastoral, which contrary to what you may have heard, is a weird goddamn book.

- Allah is not obliged by Ahmadou Kourouma

Genre : Novel

Length : average

Available in English : Yes

Content warning : extremely disturbing and graphic description of atrocities in wartime

A first-person description of tribal wars in Liberia and Sierra Leone during the nineties from the point of view of a fictitious child soldier. It doesn’t pretend to stick by its premise though, and dives into detailed record of the political climate, all while taking us through the daily horrors of life in war-torn countries. The extremely down-to-earth and downright crude descriptions are interweaved with magic realism rooted in West African voodoo and culture.

This one was one of my favourites, despite the writing and narrative bordering on gimmicky at times ; especially at the end, where the story seems to have exhausted itself and seems more interested in recounting the political history of the region. The subject in and of itself is fascinating (and this is a great read if you’re not familiar with it) but sorts of impinges on the main storyline and the development of its characters.

Despite its flaws, I can only recommend this book, especially if you’re looking to delve into West African literature as this makes for a good introduction to the genre. Be aware however that this book is extremely hard to stomach and triggering in about every way possible. If you do like it, I recommend checking out my favourite book by this author, Waiting for the Wild Beasts to vote.

- Hymns of Hate by Dorothy Parker

Genre : Poetry

Length : short

I have a complicated relationship with poetry : as in, I am fond of it and some poetry books have come to mean a lot in my life, yet for some reason I never seem to be in the mood for picking one. So the reason this chapbook got picked is probably that your brain functions differently when the world around you is an ocean of noise and agitation due to a little event called the World Cup. Yes, even at the hospital, the French victory was dutifully celebrated, so this was the best time to isolate yourself with some earplugs and a poetry book.

Dorothy Parker is an acerbic poetess from the twenties who takes a comical and critical look at society, which leads to what I’d call comedy roast as poetry. It’s not the most moving kind of poetry, but it will make you laugh and reflect on yourself a bit, as I can guarantee you’ll recognize yourself in at least some of the vivid portraits this book draws. Of course, since I read it in French, it probably lost a lot of its musicality, which is the eternal dilemma when it comes to poetry : would I rather have something be lost in translation, or in reading in your non-native language ?

This kind of impertinent poetry, even if it doesn’t get as much press as big romantic oeuvres, is still a breath of fresh air that puts a smile on your face while still giving you an insight into the author’s personality. The only poet I can think of that produced the same effect on me is Jacques Prévert. I highly recommend checking out his two chapbooks Paroles and Stories.

- Six characters in search of an author by Luigi Pirandello

Genre : Play

Length : short

Available in English : Yes

So before you say anything, I didn’t know he was a fascist before I picked this one. But you do now, so feel free not to read this one as a matter of principle. That being said, this is a very good play. This is the kind of hyper-conceptual play that interrogates the relationship between characters, writer and comedians. The story is exactly what it says in the title : six characters imagined by an author but who never got their play written tumble into a theatre as actors are repeating a play and ask them to write their play.

This play has stage directions for days and is a little bit hard to get a sense of when you read it instead of seeing it, yet once you get how the whole thing works, the ideas expressed are extremely interesting. This reminded me of Ionesco’s works, particularly The bald Soprano and the criminally underrated The Chairs. The theme of characters escaping the grasp of their authors can also be found in Paul Auster’s Man in the Dark which, while by no means one of the author’s best works, is still a fun and meditative read so don’t hesitate to check it out.

- What money can’t buy, the moral limits of markets by Michael J. Sandel

Genre : Essay – Economy

Length : average

I picked this one primarily because it was the only one in English, and also because I like to periodically remind myself why I left business school. I ended up having a good time reading it, because it’s more about thinking the market than explaining it. This book discusses the things that money can buy today – cutting in line, naming rights, stakes on someone’s life – and whether we should be alarmed of this growing market mentality. In the true tradition of English essays, this book makes its thesis clear at the beginning and then reiterates its point through examples. This is completely different from the French tradition of essays, which starts at the observable phenomenon and then takes us to its core thesis through organic reasoning. This means that past the introduction, you’ll know what this book is trying to prove, and the rest of the book is more about illustrating the demonstration. However, each set of examples come with their own ethical and practical problems, and you end up being more conflicted than you originally thought. A fiery onslaught against capitalism it is not, but this has the advantage of considering market mentality from the inside and then wondering how it looks from the outside. If nothing else, it should give you a good set of arguments to shut up libertarians and their ilk.

So that’s all I have today. Do tell me if you want me to make more reading lists like this !

#reading list #should i make more of those ?

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aroworlds · 6 years

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Aro-Spec Artist Profile: Nate

Our next aro-spec creator is Nate, better known on Tumblr as @astriiformes!

Nate is an asexual, aromantic, neurodivergent and mentally ill trans guy/person continuing the tradition of aro-spec creators demonstrating an impressive diversity of talent. He writes, cosplays, creates filk music and produces visual art--and that’s when he’s not playing D&D and attending conventions!

You can find him on Twitter as planar_ranger and on 8tracks as azhdarchidaen. He’s also found on AO3 as azhdarchidaen, with a prolific selection of works for the Gravity Falls, Doctor Who, Critical Role and Pacific Rim fandoms! If you have a dollar or two you’re wanting to invest in worthy aro-spec talent, please take a look at Nate’s Ko-Fi!

With us Nate talks about expressing emotions through creativity, the intersection of aromanticism and perfectionism, the importance of storytelling as self-expression and his passion for D&D as a way of giving voice to his aromantic experience. His love for fandom, creativity and storytelling shines through every word, so please let’s give him all our love, encouragement, gratitude, kudos and follows for taking the time to explore what it is to be aromantic and creative.

Can you share with us your story in being aro-spec?

While I didn’t know the word “aromantic” until I was 15 or 16, and took a while to embrace it even then, when I look back on my childhood I can definitely see some of the earliest signs. Perhaps the most prominent was my mild disappointment at age 12 or 13 in discovering the Star Wars EU novels only to learn that Luke Skywalker, one of my most pervasively favorite characters since I first watched the movies and likely my earliest aro headcanon, ended up getting married! I ended up writing what was technically my first fanfiction after that discovery, an alternate take on the post-Return of the Jedi universe in which he didn’t.

But I didn’t really start to realize I was aro, or even know it was an identity at all, until two things happened. First, I joined an LGBTQA+ group on a writer’s forum I used to frequent and started to not only learn the vocabulary but also that identifying as something other than straight or cis was even allowed. Second, I entered what was essentially the closest thing to a romantic relationship I’ve ever experienced. By some measures it probably was one, but there really wasn’t much romance involved – because I wasn’t pushing it (for reasons that are now obvious to me), and the guy I was sort-of-dating was pretty respectful of my boundaries and was probably waiting for me to make some of those moves before trying himself. The relationship eventually broke off several months after he moved to Europe. He messaged me to say he felt bad about the fact that our long-distance “relationship” was probably holding me back from finding someone I could be happier with, and he would be more comfortable breaking it off. The fact that I felt no real sadness over that was a fairly big bit of evidence for my aromanticism, second only to the fact that I had actually become more comfortable with our situation when he moved across the Atlantic Ocean.

Clues like those eventually lead me to adopt the label and really begin to understand myself, I think around age 16 or 17. I went through a slow process of accepting all my queer identities one-by-one and kind of see them all as pretty interconnected. The aro one was in the middle.

Can you share with us the story behind your creativity?

I really like making things. For all the frustration I experience trying to write something I’m happy with, or panicked near all-nighters trying to finish props before a convention, I really am at my happiest when I have projects to engage in. I take a lot of pride in my identity as a content creator as a result, though it also means I can set discouragingly high standards for myself. That being said, there’s nothing that makes me happier that someone enjoying something I put time and effort into and being able to go “I made this.”

Writing was definitely my earliest outlet (I did draw things when I was younger, but I didn’t show my art to anyone until this time last year). I was posting fics (under a different username, fortunately; I don’t want my early teenage writing unearthed ten years later) on ff.net by early high school, a narrative I’m sure I share with plenty of other creators. I’ve done more interesting things with my writing since migrating over to AO3 though, and I continue to feel like my writing is growing (even if, sometimes, I worry it’s going too slowly).

Getting into cosplay was something I picked up only a year or so later, though again, comparing my current work to those first few attempts feels almost silly. My first cosplay was a patched-together Eighth Doctor mostly made out of thrift store finds that looked only debatably like the real deal. Since then, I’ve gotten better at sewing my own things and have realized one of my true strengths lies in elaborate props. My two most recent cosplays were Stanford Pines from Gravity Falls, with a fully-illustrated and screen-accurate copy of the third journal, complete with blacklight effects, and Taako, from The Adventure Zone, with an Umbra Staff that I had re-covered in fabric and had fully-functional LED “stars” built into it, stars I could make twinkle via a secret remote. I’m attempting two characters that are even more ambitious for conventions this year, but we’ll have to see how that actually goes…

My filk contributions aren’t massive, but the community aspect (and that it connected me to someone who is now one of my closest friends, who made me go from enjoying the genre to contributing to it) and some of the things I’ve done as a result of it make me feel it has a place as part of my creative identity. You haven’t lived until you’ve performed decades-old songs about space travel with your friends, in cosplay, in a crowded convention center! (Okay, a debatable statement. But a truly wild experience.) It’s also been a good outlet for me in some ways, because music is a powerful way to get across emotions. I play viola and piano, and have for years, so I knew that to some degree before I started writing my own lyrics to things. But personalizing songs by making them be about things you have really strong feelings for is another level entirely.

And then, art. Like I said, I never really shared it with anyone (or drew much at all) until about a year ago. Part of that was due to wanting to try my hand at digital art but not really having an understanding of what programs to use or how to get started with it, and part of it was the inertia of feeling like “if I’m not good at something immediately, I shouldn’t try at all!” The thing that really got the ball rolling for me is the long D&D campaign I’m currently in. When I was excited about other stories, chances were someone else had drawn art of it that I could enjoy and reblog. That’s not really the case with one you’re telling with only 5-6 other people. I had a sort of epiphany moment a couple months into the campaign, as the story really started picking up, that if I wanted to see the kind of art I appreciate for this new story I was falling in love with, I would probably have to do it myself. I’m still not incredibly happy with my work, since I’m surrounded by friends who are incredible artists and my style is fairly simplistic and oddly stylized, but I have gotten to a point where I draw fairly regularly, and generally put up what I create on our shared campaign blog. The same D&D game has wrenched over 15k words of original writing from me, which is pretty astonishing. Most of that isn’t anywhere to be found on Tumblr just yet, though – it’s largely still-top secret character backstory.

Are there any particular ways your aro-spec experience is expressed in your art?

The most obvious way is that I write fics about characters being aromantic and dealing with their aromanticism. All headcanons, unfortunately (I’m yet to find a canon aro in anything I love that I didn’t help create myself), but there are several stories on my AO3 about characters from Pacific Rim, Star Wars or Gravity Falls realizing they’re aromantic. And the fics that don’t deal with that are still all gen – I’m too romance-repulsed to write anything else, and I feel the world needs a lot more genfic anyways.

One other way, though I feel a bit silly calling it “art”, is that I am intentionally playing an aromantic character of my own creation in my current D&D campaign. I’ve been playing for several years now, and did have another character back in high school who I also imagined as aromantic. (Partially because of an awkward flirting mishap – an enemy tried to get my character off her guard with romance and it all backfired because she didn’t know how to respond. All my own fault – I don’t even know how to roleplay that!) But none of the campaigns I’ve played in until this one were particularly intent on exploring characters and their feelings all that deeply, or really making them a part of the story.

With my current character, it’s become incredibly validating to view him as aromantic and asexual, like myself. It’s that same impulse that got me started doing more art – if the fiction I like isn’t going to provide me with aromantic characters, I’ll have to make one myself! And it’s slowly leading to some very interesting explorations of aro identity and the normalising of it in our world. We’ve established that identifying that way isn’t particularly unusual for elves and talked about what that means for worldbuilding. Do they hold platonic relationships in the same regard as romantic ones? Is there a special kind of relationship that signifies that? What if we put friendship under the banner of the goddess of romantic love too? Though at the same time, I’m exploring some of the same feelings I experience with him – he’s a particularly lonely person, who worries about people actually wanting to stay with him, both of which are prominent features of my own aromantic experience.

What challenges do you face as an aro-spec artist?

Like many of us, I do worry that my genfics will be less enjoyed or circulated as a result of choosing not to include ships. And whenever I post a fic about a character actually being aro, I definitely get that little stab of “Someone is going to have a problem with this” fear.

I also feel that my experience with aromanticism has shaped a lot of my perfectionistic tendencies. Because I worry so much about trying to remain important in my allo friends’ lives, and because I think of so much of my identity as associated with creativity, I tend to get really wrapped up in my work needing to seem amazing somehow, to make people think I’m worth their time. It’s a silly thing to get preoccupied over, but it has had an impact on me. In some ways wanting my work to be really good is not a bad thing – it encourages me to do my very best whenever I can – but the motivation is really all wrong.

How do you connect to the aro-spec and a-spec communities as an aro-spec person?

I’m honestly pretty disconnected from them. I might be less-inclined to be if this website wasn’t suddenly experiencing such backlash against a-spec identities, but as is I’m almost afraid to engage with anything that might make me a target. Which is really unfortunate. That being said, whenever I do make any aro content and I see it circulated to other aromantic people, I get a lot of joy from it. The comments on my multiple aromantic-focused fics are some of my favorite ones I’ve ever received. If I can channel my experiences into something that elicits that kind of a reaction from our community, I consider my work well done.

How do you connect to your creative community as an aro-spec person?

When I’m able to talk to other aromantic people about headcanons (or even some of my very understanding allo friends who absorb them from me, too), pretty well! Unfortunately, that’s a pretty tiny fraction of my fandom experience. Even some of my interests where you’d think I wouldn’t run into problems have been difficult at times. I once had someone dressed as a character often (non-canonically) shipped with the one I was cosplaying, and they assumed that I would be interested in hearing that they shipped our character. Instead, they just made me very uncomfortable, particularly with the way they chose to do so.

In general, the expectation that as a member of fandom, producing fandom works, I will be interested in creating and consuming romantic content is hard to deal with. I’ve had people ask me to put ships in my fics, the aforementioned convention incident, and been heckled over having aromantic headcanons at all. That being said, aromantic headcanons were how I met at least a few of my good friends. Finding each other may be hard, but since we all feel so isolated I think that finding other aro creators inhabiting the same or similar spaces can lead to pretty quick bonding, or at least an appreciation of each others’ works. I do like that.

I’ve also, as I have mentioned a couple times now, realized the worth of telling my own stories, particularly if I have other people to share them with who will respond positively. Right now, most of my D&D group is not aro, but they are a group that respects my and my character’s identities, and being able to tell an aro narrative that means a lot to me and get a positive response is a breath of fresh air. I count them as fellow content creators and they’ve really encouraged the story I want to tell. I hope that someday the inspiration I’ve gained from that will lead me to publishing my own original fiction (with aro characters, of course), but it’s been due to this small start that I’ve decided that’s something I could realistically pursue.

How can the aro-spec community best help you as a creative?

Comments on my fics are one of the biggest things that keep me writing, so they’ll always be a boon to me. Even old ones. It makes me happy to see people still reading and enjoying them. Same goes for reblogs of any of my stuff – art, writing, filk, cosplay photos, anything else I might post. The biggest thing that keeps me wanting to create and share more creative works is knowing that other people are enjoying them, so if you do enjoy them, any way you can let me know that is wonderful.

I do hope that in some point in the future I’ll have original fiction available and a science writing blog (I consider non-fiction to be creative expression, as long as you’re putting your spark into it!), but neither exists quite yet. If you follow me on either of my main platforms though, those might pop up someday. Seeing either be circulated when the time comes would be massive. I also intend to, perhaps in the much nearer future, start publishing D&D content (likely homebrew 5e subclasses, but who knows) on the DMsGuild, starting with a pay-what-you-want model for downloading my content. If that goes up and I make something you’re interested in, and you want to pay something for it at all, I would be massively grateful.

Can you share with us something about your current project?

I’ve been working on a Critical Role Modern AU story since January or so that places heavy emphasis on the platonic relationships in the show (Percy and Keyleth’s is particularly dear to me, so they’re likely to get a fair bit of the spotlight) that’s my most current fandom fic.

I’m also tackling two ambitious cosplays at the moment, though the timeframe is making me wonder if I’ll actually pull either off. Especially given what I need to get done. One involves sewing pseudo-historical menswear, and I’m going to have to learn how to make armor for the other one. If I can figure it all out though, I’m really excited about them both!

Have you any forthcoming works we should look forward to?

Hopefully the next chapter of the CR fic, if I get hit with the inspiration (and motivation) to work on it soon. I also have another aromantic Luke Skywalker fic I really want to get down on paper at some point, though thus far it’s proven a little elusive.

My two big cosplay projects are Percy de Rolo (from Critical Role), which I intend to take to a local convention, and Erwyn, my own D&D character. I hope to do a photoshoot with the rest of the players as their own characters sometime late this summer.

As for art, I fully intend to keep drawing major or touching moments from my ongoing campaign, likely with much more frequency than any of the things above. It may not be as engaging for people to interact with as my fandom-focused projects are, but I still really do love sharing it.

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patrick-yates · 5 years

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Forefront - The Legend of Korra

Today I shall be revisiting one of my favourite animated shows ever, The Legend of Korra. The show’s inception falls just outside of the 5 year recency bracket, first airing in 2012, but the dramatic 3rd and 4th seasons and season finale debuted in 2014, and I regard it as one of the most well realised and successful Western animated series of recent years.

fig 1. a shot from the show’s opening sequence, featuring Korra herself

This show, alongside its parent series Avatar: The Last Airbender (2005), is one of my greatest animating inspirations, and so I wish to take a look at what makes it special, and try to relate it back to how I wish to incorporate that inspiration into my own work. Many of these points are mostly relevant to the narrative and storytelling side of animated film, but as this is a big part of my practice, my love of the form and my career aspirations, I want to take a look at each of them. There are a great number of reasons why I count this show as one of my favourites, so many that I feel I may have to list them in bullet point form as a primer: 1. The well-written characters, and character-driven narratives. Variety, humanity, humour, flaws, emotion, the works. 2. The worldbuilding and lore. As fantasy series go, this presents an extremely well-rounded synthesis of real world philosophy and culture with fantastical elements, complete with political discourse, personal/emotional problems, and often obscure and interesting presentations of morality. 3. The plot itself. Spanning 4 seasons or ‘books’, each one explores a different philosophical conceit, eg. power, change, balance, often through the decisions and successes or failures of the eponymous lead Korra. In many ways it is a coming-of-age story about her personally learning to deal with responsibility, while developing relationships and self-sufficiency too - and saving the world, of course. It is a deeply relatable story, told through a ridiculous lens. This is one of my favourite narrative modes, and one at which animation excels. 4. The animation. While mostly impressive for the superbly choreographed fight scenes (which always make exciting and inventive use of the rules of the world and the characters’ abilities, drawing on real world inspirations), there is so much to love about the sense of scale and style in this show, especially in the award-winning 2 part miniseries ‘Beginnings’ from Season 2. 5. Representation. This is increasingly a strong feature of modern media, and one I am very excited to see personally, but I remember having such a wonderful experience watching this show and thinking to myself, midway through an episode, how many strong and unique female characters took the lead of much of the story, but how it felt so natural I never even noticed. Not only that, it features many characters of different skin tones, religious denominations and philosophies, and sexualities, none of whom are ever reduced or reducible to those characteristics. It’s a very human and very powerful way of writing characters, and something for which I will always appreciate this show. It would be a dream come true to have the chance to work on a show half this accomplished, as it has meant so much to me personally. But what aspects of my own practice can I relate to it, and what elements of it can I learn from? Let’s go back to these bullet points.

1. CHARACTERS. It has been taken as given, as part of my creative heritage in writing, that characters form the crucial basis of any powerful story. They must be complicated, sympathetic, dynamic entities that can exist outside of the page or screen, whose reactions to situations we as readers could anticipate as if they were our friends or family. I hold these ideas central to any narrative process I undertake, and often keep in mind the strong sense of character shown in shows like Korra. I also make it a priority for the stories I wish to tell to be character-driven - for narrative advances to be made based on how characters react to what they are given. As character often forms the strongest basis for relatable story, so it follows the importance of individual personalities in narrative decision-making is difficult to overstate. The very best stories tie this into a larger schema involving several characters, their relationships, their circumstances, the wider politics of the world and its central themes, while staying true to their respective tone. It’s a difficult thing to do, but if it wasn’t, everyone would be doing it.

2. WORLDBUILDING. This is generally only relevant to fantasy and sci-fi storytelling, but given how many animated films and series focus on these genres, I esteem it a big consideration alongside character in creating an effective undertsanding of animated storytelling. The Reality Effect is something discussed by writer Roland Barthes in his essay of the same name: it deals with the presentation of minutiae in storytelling, often needless or tangential to the plot, in order to achieve a greater sense of realism - the idea that the film world is not only comprised of an interlinked tapestry of character and plot, but of a thriving ecosystem completely independent of the narrative thread. Korra/ATLA establish world on a massive scale, incorporating nations, culture, history, food, wildlife, religious praxis, politics, technology, etc etc. All of this, whether helpful to the plot or not, builds a great impression of what this world would actually be like, and has the effect of increasing the viewer’s overall investment in it. When writing any scenario, I try to include as many tiny hints and illusions to the broader idea of that world. I am reminded of a famous quote from Ernest Hemingway, someone of whose work I am not a massive fan personally, but was undoubtedly a great creative force:

If a writer of prose knows enough of what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an ice-berg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. A writer who omits things because he does not know them only makes hollow places in his writing. (fig. 2)

3. PLOT. Korra is a wonderful story because, as discussed, it combines many different tenets of great storytelling, but (almost) always manages to tie together its many threads and come to a satisfying conclusion. Above these superficial successes, however, I am a firm believer that the duty of a storyteller should be in telling stories that need to be told, which Korra manages to do all the time. It tells grown-up stories about trust, about change, about growth, depression, pain, belief, abuse, parenting, sexuality, fascism, and it communicates them all to a young audience without ever being consdescending or reductive. This kind of balance is something I hope to achieve in my own stories, but am still getting the hang of. Something I am always considering is, who will receive the messages I am trying to communicate? How ‘difficult’ should I make my narrative, and how do I ensure I strike that balance? What choices will impact the tone of my work, and what aspects of the story should I focus on making the most prominent? It’s a real balancing act, but I am hoping practice will make perfect.

4. ANIMATION. This one is slightly more pertinent to how I am learning at the moment: how can I make characters’ feelings and personalities shine through movement? Korra has a very strong sense of body language, partly because it ties very strong links between spirituality and physicality: the martial arts practised by each character, and the way in which they move their bodies to use them, almost always reflect in some way how that person thinks, an in some sense how they might react to a personal problem rather than a physical one. In some ways I realise this is hyperliteral and relatively specific way of approaching physicality, however I think engaging with the subtlety of body language is one of the great tools both actors and animators have at their disposal in telling a story, and something which can be largely lost in literature. Here are a few examples of how characters in Korra may be understood by their body language:

fig 3. Korra and Opal bond with ‘airbending’. Their smiles, open positions and relaxed lines show us they are content in each other’s company

fig 4. Lin, hardline chief of police, stands cross armed and wary, yet clearly demonstrates emotion in her face and movement. She is personally attached to this interaction

fig 5. Child of the streets and pro-fighter Mako is guarded yet quick and efficient. He has the air of someone deteremined yet cool under pressure

Hopefully these examples demonstrate some of the admirable ways in which character is presented in Korra (as well as the relatively quality and conciseness of movement, which I also love about this show’s style).

5. REPRESENTATION. At this juncture, I have yet to attempt any broad stories, or even any with more than 2 characters. I am also aware of the dilemma of faithfully representing characters of different backgrounds than myself. Yet I believe in a world of colour, variety and synthesis, not renditions of the same experiences over and over, and animation, as a radical form and as my chsoen art, is as good a place to enact those beliefs as any. I take Korra as a prime example for reasons already mentioned, and hope to refer to its wonderful, dynamic world as often as possible in my own work, and keep diversity and representation politics at the front of my practice both on-screen and behind the scenes.

References

1. Korra

2. Hemingway, Ernest. Death In The Afternoon. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2014. pp. 316

3. http://avatar.wikia.com/wiki/Opal

4, 5. Tumblr

#practice 1 #forefront #reflective

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plumbobpost · 6 years

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Fan(fic) Friday: Spotlight on Peni Griffin

Sul sul!

Today, I have a special treat for you guys. I had the chance to ask the very delightful @penig a few questions about Widespot and The Sims in general. For those of you who aren’t familiar with her work, she has created two widely popular hoods for The Sims 2: Land Grant University and the aforementioned Widespot. It’s longer than usual, and Peni expressed the concern that it would needed to be edited down, but in all honesty, her responses were such a wealth of information, deleting any of it seemed wrong.

I’ll stop teasing you, and let Peni speak for herself:

What inspired you to create Widespot?

“I’m always in story creation mode. This has been a large part of the appeal of The Sims 2 for me, as it allows me to tell a particular kind of story that I will never, ever be able to write for publication, and have always wanted to: the story of a community in which we see every character as the hero of her own story, and how all the stories intertwine (often without the protagonists recognizing it) and affect each other as they all go about their business.”

“At the time I started Widespot, I was in a situation in which my normal professional outlets were not available to me. You will excuse me from going into detail on the subject, which can be summed up as Health Crap. For our purposes, the important thing was that I needed a project, I couldn’t work on a book, I had been thinking for some time about the potential of my favorite game as a storytelling medium, and enough discussion of the matter had been generated over at MTS that I found/was directed to the late lamented Mootilda’s thread on creating a clean, safe, populated neighborhood for sharing. ( http://modthesims.info/t/455403)”

“I actually went into some detail about the process on my writing blog at the time.”

( https://penigriffin.blogspot.com/2013/02/so-you-want-to-share.html )

Did you take inspiration from the Maxis neighborhoods?

“To a certain extent, yes. I decided that what I wanted to create was a neighborhood that would feel and play as if it had shipped with the game, but with less mess. No dead people without full character data, no memories that outright contradict each other, no hints in the bios that can’t be fully explored in the game.”

In your neighborhood, you included different story elements for each family that interconnect. What is your process in developing this story?

“Somewhere around here, I have the notebook in which I first started working it out, but I’d have to dig to find it. I remember starting with the admonition to myself to keep it simple, as your first attempt at publishing in a medium should be simple - you have enough to do mastering the new medium without trying to make something complicated with it. I knew my genre was soap opera, and though I’ve never been much of a soap watcher, my mother and husband are, so that set my parameters. I listed the tools at my disposal - the five base game aspirations, the jealousy mechanics, and the generational play. The question I asked myself at the start of the process was: “How do I create the most Drama for the least amount of effort?”

“Probably the notion of having five aspiration-themed households came almost at once, possibly as I started making name lists. I wanted to give elders a big role, because I had noticed that a lot of people thought elders were “boring,” and I knew they were wrong! I’ve always felt that Maxis missed a big trick by not having a Scheming Matriarch in Pleasantview. I wanted to shake up some stereotypes and have sims who didn’t obviously “belong” in their aspirations - shy Romance sims, outgoing Knowledge sims, lazy Fortune sims. I wanted all the households intimately connected to each other, which meant that for simplicity’s sake the story (story being defined as “person with a problem”) should center around one particular event that triggered events in all the households, a cascade of consequence. At which point I wrote down “It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a fortune must be in want of a wife,” and decided that the wealthy Mann family coming to town with a highly marriageable son and a Dark Secret was a good place to start.”

“That turned out not to be the trigger, but you have to start somewhere.”

Aside from your official captions, how did you set out to convey plot to those who play Widespot?

“I tried to take pictures of enough key moments that the players could inspect the albums for clues. By playing out the development I had ensured that some important information already existed in the memories and relationship panels, but I also went in and inserted memories that seemed to me significant. I had specific meanings in mind when I gave Mary memories of potty-training her younger siblings that extend all the way back to teenhood and manipulated some of her relationship scores with the testing cheats, but I wanted the players to be free to interpret those memories and relationships according to their own ideas, so I tried to background my own opinions as much as possible.”

“The plot, after all, is the players’ job, not mine!”

As far as literal world building goes, how did you factor in your characters’ surroundings to both their plotlines and their characterization?

“The smallness of the town, necessitated by the decision to keep things as simple as possible, gave me the starting point and the town’s name - it’s just a wide spot in the road, hardly a town at all. Rural areas have a certain vibe; certain types of people grow up there, and certain kinds of people wind up there, so this was on my mind as I designed the characters, built their homes, and decided what order they should be created in CAS and moved in. Each house has a history, not all of which is necessarily made explicit to the player, and some of which really, really made me long for something more than BG Maxis content! But I think most people get that the Land cabin was built piecemeal over time, that a lot of Skye’s house was DIY, that the Beech house is Daytona’s house and the rest of her family just lives there, etc. Skye only got educational toys for his kids, but the Lands have a teddy and a dollhouse as well. The Mann’s house is the only one with a fence, and Rich ensures his privacy with stained glass windows in certain rooms. He also has that ominous closet full of aspiration rewards. (I hate that I couldn’t get him a counterfeiting machine - he clearly needs one.)”

“Some details were dictated by the game mechanics. Penny needed a double bed to get pregnant in, but there’s no particular reason for one to exist on her lot; so the heck with it, everybody in that house gets a double bed and I don’t even try to explain it. The lowest-numbered playable in the hood is always the telescope slapper, so I had to create the Mann family first in order for the guy with the Dark Secret to be the one who was incensed at the possibility of being spied on. But who would beard Rich in his own den when he, Lana, or Junior used the telescope in the daytime? That would be the local cop, wouldn’t it? This is why the Land house (with the nubile Land daughters) is right behind the Mann house and the Mann telescope is pointed straight at it. I also used the house to train the Manns - especially Junior - into wanting to buy things by furnishing it minimally to start with, and then adding items as wants were rolled for expensive artwork, games, etc.”

“When I gave characters their starting skill points, I assigned them partly at random, partly according to the implied backstory and role, and partly according to what would be possible in the game. If logic or a random roll indicated that someone in a household had a skill, I made sure that suitable skilling items existed in that household. Woody has an easel because it’s a solitary tool for gaining creativity points; the other families have the more sociable piano. Neither family is much concerned about the impression they make on the outside world, so they are not oversupplied with mirrors, unlike the other families, where Charisma matters.”

“This all works back and forth; the character or situation requires something in the setting, and then I realize that having this thing here means that I also need this and that means I should improve the relationship between these two characters, or whatever. My first and best playtester insisted to me that Goldie needed a teddy bear, and made a good case for it based on Goldie’s characterization, both in the bios and as played; and she was right, so I added it almost at the last minute. (Which is why, so often, the first thing Rhett does it pick it up and try to talk to someone through it.)”

“One thing that I was aware of during development, but am a little reluctant to discuss, is the possible implications for the setting of the racial makeup of the neighborhood. At the time I was born, in the state where I was born, the Land and Beech marriages would have been illegal; and I had that in mind when I mentioned familial disapproval in the Land bios. Some people pick that up and run with it, most people ignore it. Most people look at the Hart’s Spanish-style house and decide (despite the name) that the family has a Mediterranean or Mexican background, but others have decided that Valentine is black/white biracial and all the Spanish influence comes from Angel. I have no desire to dictate anybody’s interpretation or play style, but I do want to enable as many interpretations and play styles as possible, and this variety is an indication of success to me.”

In a lot of ways, fans have come to regard Widespot as highly as they regard the original three Maxis neighborhoods. Did you envision the neighborhood being this popular?

“I beat my “expectations” about the reception of any particular work to death years ago. While I was building Widespot, I told myself that if the only person who liked it was Aegagropilon (my first playtester), that would be good enough and anybody else’s approval would be gravy. Well, Aegagropilon loved it; and I’ve lapped up quite a bit of gravy since then. I don’t have much of a grasp of how popular it actually is, and that’s not the important thing. The important thing is that I know some people are playing it, and enjoying it, and using it in different ways. How many there are, and how it stacks up next to the many other (and in some cases far more sophisticated) fan made hoods out there, is out of my hands. I’m better off not dwelling on that.”

How did Widespot evolve after you started? Were there any massive deviations from your original plan?

“Development was an alternating process of playing (including building, character design, and actual play) and working things out on paper in illegible notes, which is always how I work. I haven’t properly thought anything till I’ve written it down, but I’m a “pantser” rather than a “plotter” - i.e. I tend to fly by the seat of my pants when creating. Too much planning kills the story for me. So once all the preliminary work had been set up, and the broad strokes of the storyline determined, the rest was done directly in the game, with a little help from the testing cheats, Tombstone of Life and Death, and so on.”

“I knew I needed to wind up with a baby for every adult woman, but I didn’t always know who specifically would be the father of each baby until I saw how characters interacted. I knew one of the households would have a ghost, but for awhile I thought it might be Lana. I assumed Candy would have two lovers but I thought one of them would be Hamilton until she informed me otherwise. As mentioned earlier, I thought the Manns would be the central, triggering household rather than the Harts. I had no plans for the teens or children at all, and they took care of their own storylines”.

On a different note, what was your inspiration for the dynamic between the Harts and the rest of Widespot’s inhabitants? How did you develop the idea for these entanglements?

“As a family of Romance sims, their job was to wreak havoc. And boy, howdy, did they! But only after I realized Angel had to be the town ghost. The family ran much too smoothly when she was in charge - she and Valentine constantly smooching it up, Rhett being Mama’s boy, Candy being Goldie’s social support. Kill Angel, and everybody falls apart and starts making bad decisions. I designed Valentine as a Dirty Old Man; but he refused to be only that. I designed Rhett as a heartless jerk, and he can be that - but he’s also the only one of the immature Mama’s boys in the hood who has lost his Mama. I designed Candy as a golddigger, and yeah, she is - but she also made friends with Daytona and Goldie without any prompting from me, and she put herself in the middle of what turned out to be the hardest knot to untie in the whole hood, the Mann Triangle.”

“And Goldie - well, Goldie was a darling who autonomously put the rest of her family ahead of herself repeatedly, could never finish her homework, and never once brought anyone home from school or came home with anyone else.”

“TL;DR: I didn’t develop the Harts. They did.”

You’ve been very active on both Mod the Sims and Tumblr for a while now. How has The Sims community evolved since you first got involved? Why do you think there is still such a strong following of the series?

“It’s hard for me to speak to how it’s evolved, since I was never part of the Age of LJ and only started playing Sims 2 since after Sims 3 was already out. Also, having been on the fringes of a lot of subcultures in my life, I have become adept at keeping away from the stuff that stresses me out. So I’ve never hung out at SimSecret. I block tags on tumblr. I avoid anything smacking of edition wars, don’t allow anonymous communication, and back out of controversies as fast as I can - with an apology if necessary, because face it, everybody’s a jerk on the internet sometimes, and the most you can hope for is to not be one any more often than you can help.”

“So I have no idea how the Sims community as a whole is going on, and I only have a limited knowledge of the portion of the Sims 2 fandom that hangs around specifically at MTS and attracts my attention on Tumblr (often by tagging Widespot). Within this limited sphere, I have noticed a few changes. I used to see it assumed as common consensus that all Maxis premades were “ugly” and that “ugly” is a bad thing; moreover, that certain sims - Goopy Gilscarbo and Sandy Bruty in particular - are more “ugly” than most and are to be avoided at all costs. Now people are shipping Goopy and Sandy (that’s largely @holleyberry’s doing, I believe) and embracing the cartooniness of sims with enthusiasm.”

“On older websites I often see “realistic” (i.e., modeled on airbrushed photos in fashion magazines) sims that, as far as I can tell, are identical to each other and to the ones on the other old websites they link to. With current websites, however, I can not only tell the sims from each other, I can tell Person A’s versions of the premades from Person B’s at a glance. This is especially marked on tumblr, where I often know who originally posted the pics I’m looking at regardless of the attached avatar.”

“And there has been such a flowering of creativity in so many directions in the last eight years it’s overwhelming, though I don’t know how that compares to the days before I started participating. I like to think of Widespot as the vanguard of a Golden Age of hood-sharing. Nobody moans about the lack of clean fan made neighborhoods anymore; they’re agonizing over whether to play Europa or Widespot or Emerald Heights or Polgannon. And suddenly people are making new face sliders. Neighborhood deco lights up at night now. There’s mods for parking on the street, taking toddlers and pets on vacation, hunting, foraging, beekeeping, on and on and on.”

“I think the main difference between now and eight years ago is, that people were defensive about still playing Sims 2, and a general air of playing a “dying game” hung over us all. Now we are joyous and defiant and declaring that Our Game is the Best and Will Never Die.”

“Or maybe that’s just the people I self-select to see. How would I know?”

As a writer by trade, did you find many similarities between creating Widespot and writing a novel?

“My experience has always been that there’s an underlying unity among all kinds of creation, and in particular that storytelling is storytelling, whether it’s the language of text, sound, line and color, or whatever. My writing habits and skills translated seamlessly into the medium of the game. The chief difference, once you factor out technical matters, is that in most forms of storytelling, you need to provide a discrete unit of Story and give the reader the pleasures of closure and narrative structure, pruning out everything that disrupts that weakens the sense of completeness.”

“When making a sims neighborhood, though, you need to be as open-ended as possible, and you need to discern the optimum moment to turn the hood over to the player, while it’s still bristling with plot hooks and unresolved situations. You don’t need, as I did, to deliberately choose the moment at which a bunch of hard choices must be made immediately; but you need to put the player into a situation in which the choices he makes will matter and shape how the neighborhood develops from that point.”

You often play neighborhoods like Pleasantview and Strangetown. Do you prefer playing your own sims or those created by Maxis?

“That’s like asking if I prefer to read Diana Wynne Jones or Megan Whelan Turner. (And if you aren’t familiar with those authors, boy do you have some great reading ahead of you!) The answer is “both.” I enjoy playing characters I’m engaged with, regardless of who made them. Sometimes I wonder what’s going on with Vidcund and want to play Strangetown; sometimes I want to reconnect with the sims in Drama Acres, my personal custom neighborhood; sometimes I want to play with some of my own plot hooks from Widespot. It’s all good.”

If you had to pick between Widespot and Land Grant University, which would you choose?

“I’d attach LGU to Widespot and play them both. I don’t do either/or choices.”

(She just defeated the Kobayashi Maru.)

Do you intend on creating more neighborhoods?

“I actually have three on hand right now: a downtown called Bigg City (an empty version of which is available on SFS http://simfileshare.net/download/207580/ ); a Seasons/Pets neighborhood I call Knotthole County; and an AL neighborhood called Port Cochere. The populated Bigg City got real complicated, real fast and when Health Crap is in a certain state I can’t work on it. Knotthole County is almost completely built but got interrupted while I was designing the characters; and Port Cochere is an SC4 map and a bunch of illegible notes. And at the moment I can’t work on any of them because I need two disk drives in order to use AGS, and one of them has gone wonky. However, I should be able to replace that soon, and then - well, maybe I’ll finally get that last week of work done on Bigg City. Or maybe I’ll decide (again) that if I’m organized enough to work on that, I should seize the moment and get queries out instead.”

Your content is themed around The Sims 2; have you played other titles in the series?, If so, which installment in The Sims is your favorite to play? For storytelling? For building? For creating sims?

“I’m a late adopter by nature. I started with the original The Sims and played it till I felt I didn’t have anything more to discover in it, at which time I started looking into the Sims 2, assuming that I’d eventually plumb its depths, too, and move on to Sims 3 about the time Sims 4 came along. Then I discovered that Sims 2’s depths are unplumbable, and that it was the perfect vehicle for that all-community storytelling I’d always longed to do.”

“The more I learn about the later iterations, the more certain I am that I will never play them. I’m sure they’re fun in their own ways, and I certainly don’t look down on anyone who chooses to play them; but I don’t like the way they look, I don’t like the lack of a storytelling tool, and most of all, the mechanics and structure of the game don’t enable my style of neighborhood play. The Sims series consists of four distinct games with four distinct sets of strengths and weaknesses; and the first two are the only ones I feel any call to play.”

Lastly, why do you still continue to play The Sims? Do you feel that the games provide a positive creative outlet?

“It still gives me pleasure. And I still have Health Crap and need projects, and have a computer that will play it. The Sims 2 is as much a part of my life as reading and playing tabletop RPGs and board games with my friends. So why would I stop?”

“The game is a positive creative outlet - it has nothing to do with my feelings on the subject. One of the most rewarding things about having made Widespot and LGU is seeing people use them as springboards for developing and experimenting with their own creative capacities. Also, a lot of simmers are deliberately using the game to control or relieve some condition or other. Depression, OCD, chronic pain from which they need distraction - I’m not the only one with Health Crap, and I am honored whenever anyone uses something I made to deal with theirs.”

“They could have done these things without me, of course - but they didn’t. They used something I made for their own benefit, and I can feel good about that.”

Any parting comments, teasers, spoilers, public service announcements, etc.?

“One of the core concepts by which I live my life is that creativity is the quality that defines humanity best, and that it is the birthright of every single one of us. But we’ve been educated to think that it’s something special and separate, accessible only to certain special “talented” people; and brainwashed to think that personal creativity that can’t be monetized is a trivial use of time. On the contrary, creativity is to a large extent what time is for. Whether it’s a book, or a game, or a prom dress, the process of making is fulfilling and enriching, and sharing what we make is nourishing to us and to those we share with. So whatever your medium is, whatever resources are available to you, whatever ideas are quickening in your brain and hands - go for it.”

“It is not a silly waste of time.”

To those of you who haven’t played Widespot, go check it out; you won’t regret it. Thanks again to Peni Griffin for allowing me to pick her brain, and I hope you all enjoyed reading it. I certainly found a new favorite word in “pantser.”

If you have any questions, comments, or suggestions, feel free to visit my ask box. If you are interested, give Plumbob Post a follow, and reblog for anyone else who you think would enjoy this blog. Stay tuned for upcoming posts!

Dag dag!

#the sims #the sims 2 #fanfic friday #widespot #peni griffin

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thewoodedbastion · 3 years

Text

Roleplay Roadblock

This is something that has been on my mind for a while. I know talking about things and writing them, for me, makes them a bit more tangible. Once something is tangible I often have a better ability to navigate it. I am hoping this is the case with this topic. I want to have a deeper more immersive experience at LARP and in character in general. I want to not so much internally get lost. Like I don't want to be so inside a character that i'm disassociating. I do want to get lost in the process of exploring and expressing a character. I want to be less timid as characters and with how i perform them. Especially at a LARP where i get to spend a weekend away as a character, I want to be able to exist more naturally and thoroughly as a character without second guessing myself and my choices. I have found through thinking about it as well as through talking about this with friends that I have several road blocks. Many of the conversations have come up in regard to future games that I will be soon attending in person. At Seventh Kingdom IGE I was very much a novice to LARPing as a whole as well as still technically a noob in related genre's such as ttrpgs and forum roleplaying. Though i had such a great time, I did not exist in the game as deeply as I could have for as long as I could have. I felt I was just hitting my stride as game was nearing and end. I expressed a desire to up my game so to speak, but in so i had to acknowledge my roadblocks from my previous experience. One thing that kept me from going full tilt in a lot of situations was knowing the power I wield as a performer. I'm not a god tier performer by no means. However I am sitting on a performing arts Bachelors degree, one of which is still actively engage with via my job and my other hobbies. When it comes to performance I know I can turn up as my peers would say. This may sound silly, but I was afraid of taking too much spotlight. I was afraid of accidentally stepping over other people. I know many of my larp peers don't have a performance background. I know many are just gaining the kind of confidence that allows them to take charge of things. I know folks come to these weekends to be heard, and affirmed. To feel powerful and capable. I always would clam up because i had a fear of taking that away from someone else. Its kind of something i saw happened a lot from the background. I watched it happen to other cool people who i thought were smart and capable, but just didn't quiet have the confidence all the time in certain settings. So this was a real fear for me in those moments. I'm not going to say that i never took moments. I definitely got some where sometimes. But even in moments i generated for myself as a bard, I had such a weird feeling of going "hey guys, look at me be cool" and it made me feel icky despite knowing that folks did not feel this way about me. I had a fear of separating myself from everyone else. I know that how I experience things is a bit extreme and the kind of experience is often deeper than what most folks around me want. I've been hearing for most of my life that what I want to experience is "A lot" or "too much". And for most folks it is. It doesn't come from a place of hate. It was never in a bullying sense. It does however make one lonely in the universe. So i've always been afraid to go to the full extent that I want to experience because it feels like putting myself on an island away from other people. I do want to do my thing and be my best me. I have been doing that all my life solo. LARP gave me one of my few real tastes of what it is like to get to be the real me with other people. The deep me that doesn't get engaged with very often. That is still part of my core needs, as much as digging deep into immersion is. Along these same lines, I am afraid of giving someone the wrong impression of me. There are some characters that I want to play that are going to be purposefully scary and off putting. There will be times where i may get into a groove of a character that folks stop seeing who I really am for that time

being. What happens if I accidentally make someone uncomfortable while i'm in character? What happens when they don't feel safe to talk to me? I don't want to inadvertently have a negative affect on folks because of my deep level of immersion On a more personal side ive realized i'm kind of afraid of committing to the bit. I'm afraid of how it might affect me. Its unknown territory, and i'm aware that mentally and emotionally i'm not indestructible. Its less about losing a sense of reality. That I feel pretty solid and grounded in because i love fantasy and immersion so much. I'm afraid of how it might affect me in the long and short term. I'm afraid of possible bleed. I'm afraid of the come down from being in character for the weekend. I'm afraid of how it might affect my mental emotional state if I haven't been doing the best. Its kind of the fear of going to a new place all together and realizing there is a huge world of possibilities both positive and negative. I'm a deep feeler and i know this. I'm also very committed to the things that I do. So i'm just a bit afraid of stepping past that unknown threshold into deep immersion and exploring. Something i've learned recently from a roleplay experience i'm having with a friend of mine is that i'm afraid of the "hard road". I'm afraid of making choices that will make my time at game as a player harder. I'm afraid of not being able to overcome obstacles, and not being able to I guess do cool things or even basic things successfully. In the case of the roleplay i've been doing its been because of the RNG of digital dice rolls, but what I was seeing was still another obstacle being put in my way. I'm often so much better as just me overcoming obstacles so you'd think it wouldn't matter, but for whatever reasons the hard road at a LARP is scary and mentally exhausting to think about. So i know there is a part of me that wants to shy away from choices that maybe genuine but would make things suck a bit. Then of course . . .What if I fail? What if i'm just bad at being in character? What if as my character i mess up a plot or a mod? What if I become an obstacle for people instead of a partner in story? What if I just mess up? What if my accent is awful and insulting? Just general anxiety of an anxious Cabbit. I'm almost certain i'm not the only person who worries about this. So explaining my fears helps at least get them out in a real way. Talking about it is only one part to it. For this situation to improve I need to be able to work past theses issues in some tangible way. I need to make choices and shift my perspective about these situations. I need to remember that I am a player too and have right to be seen and heard like everyone else. Part of my training is the ability to be able to share space with other people. Partnership is part of my gig, and what is LARP if not collaborative storytelling improv. I need to take the chance and speak up. I need to step up into my characters but also keep myself present enough to be aware of other folks around me who are trying to participate. Part of the facilitation I do at my job is bringing folks into conversations and making space for them to speak. I'm proficient in this and I can apply it to how I roleplay with others at game. I don't have to completely sacrifice myself just so others can have space. There is plenty of room for all of us. I'll just have to remember to both step up and step back from time to time. I have no way of absolutely knowing that I will be separated or ostracizing if I go to my full performance potential. I know I can be a lot but there have been times in my LARP history where folks have expressed how much me being me made a good experience for them. Times were I did the absolute most. If I am afraid about being to much I can talk with folks about it and get their feelings. I can tell folks about my ideas for my character expression and gauge their response. I might even get some input. I can negotiate roleplay boundaries with folks I could potentially interacting with, in game, and

possibly create some roleplay partnerships throughout the weekend. Talking to folks before and after game, as well as during NPC shifts will give everyone a chance to see me beyond my characters. This will help create some separation from the characters I play and me as a person. Also NPCing in and of itself will give folks a chance to see me as other characters so the get the chance to just recognize me as a performer and experience me in various characters. If I am worried about my mental state I can up my general self care to hopefully help with any possible adverse effects. I can add grounding and centering routines to my larp weekends before and after event, and during if necessary. I can build a personal debrief/decompress session into my overall larp wellness routine after game is over. I can try to find a buddy to do check ins with during events if I need them, either at game or off site. I need to sit with my discomfort with the struggles of a character. Challenge is part of the game. Obstacles are necessary for a character to have an interesting narrative and to grow. Its ok if things are difficult. Even video games are difficult sometimes (I'm looking at you Super Ghouls and Ghost), but can still be fun. I need to learn to process that discomfort with struggle and not be afraid of it. If I can overcome real life obstacles i can figure out in game ones as well. It will make the character cooler, but it will make me feel like I have actually accomplished something. That is a rewarding feeling. All of these fears I have are super manageable. I really want to be a great character artist someday. Not just in dedication but in actual ability. I gotta screw up a bit before i get there and that is ok. I want to do cool things not just for others, but for myself as well. I want to have fun. My kind of fun. I want to have that fun with friends.

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