#I haven't seen any of her stuff outside of her Lostbelt but like... her having a hopeless crush on MC seems... I dunno | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

fatedtime · 1 year

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Can you explain what you were talking about with the whole author intent vs. reader intent surrounding LB2 criticisms? I kind of get it since a lot of LB2 opinions I've seen are proposals for alternate paths the story could have taken/character shuffles (I remember "swap Beo and Napo" was hugely popular back when the LBs first came to NA), but I haven't really seen much recently/it still feels kinda off from what you alluded to. Maybe. Just pickin your brain a bit, if ya don't mind.

Okay, so, first I'm going to stipulate that I haven't read Lostbelt 2 since it's release, so my recollections on its specific themes (or, what I gathered from it, because I find Lostbelt 2 to be kind of muddled generally) are going to be inexact.

The simplest way I can explain it though is how fandom treats Skadi. Skadi is a pretty widely-hated character, characterization wise. I think, in terms of passion of how much the people who hate her do hate her, she's matched by extremely abrasive characters like Medb. I've heard tons of people talking about rewriting Skadi, tons of people emphasizing distaste for her direction, and METRIC shittons of people dismissing anything the author wanted to say with her as 'she's waifubait', without taking any time to actually dissect the intention behind her. Conversation around Skadi immediately devolves into assuming nothing about her themes has any narrative value, and that the totality of her builds into one thing: Skadi only exist for men to sexualize her.

This is sexism, full-stop, but plenty of other essays exist that dissect fandom culture and the tendency to put no effort into analyzing mediocre female-characters while fixating heavily on mediocre male characters, fleshing them out and developing them far beyond what actually exists in the source material.

Which like, I think Skadi is a mediocre female character, but every time I've seen Skadi discussed, it is with two motivations: either to dismiss her as a waifu, or throw her personality out entirely in a 'rewrite', discounting every single thing the author is trying to say with her and putting the reader's own desired Skadi in its place. These rewrites tend to make her 'cooler' and give her 'more agency' without understanding that Skadi's lack of agency is the point.

Lostbelt 2 is Ophelia's Lostbelt, a character defined almost entirely by her own lack of agency and her romantic fixation on a man who doesn't really care about her best interests. She exists as a satellite to him, doing his bidding and entirely willing to sacrifice herself for him, without any hope of reward. She wants what he wants. Her dreams are his dreams.

Skadi parallels this.

She's a woman who, in her Lostbelt, is so paralyzed by the weight put upon her that, in lieu of making any real decisions, instead constructs a world of child-farms. Skadi and Ophelia are both infantile in their decision-making ability; they defer entirely to other people (or, the lost images of another person.) These are clearly meant to be toxic relationships, and LB2 is a story about relationships and what happens when the parties within them are emotionally immature. How if you can't grow up, you can't live, and will make it impossible for those around you to grow and live as well.

This is why the story has sympathy for Skadi, too. It's a fucking awful position to be in, and getting mad at people who are emotionally stunted is an exercise in fucking futility. The world has failed them, of course they'd fail others. The world has failed them -- what is the point in another goddamn revenge fantasy of punishing a woman who wasn't given the tools to live as an independent being? Society itself tells women that enough already, while also telling them that they have no worth outside the men they serve. There are enough stories about it in the world.

The stuff with Surtr, the stuff with Napoleon is all about relationships -- positive and negative, cold and hot, immature and mature, healing and hurting. I firmly don't like the idea of swapping Napo out for Beowulf because Napoleon exists to be like, the ideal of Napoleon's hope and freedom. It's this ultra-positive idea of self-actualization and belief in yourself. Beowulf just... doesn't... have that? I feel like it's another thing that exists without considering what would be better for the characters already existing.

Now. Do I think the various characters and their relationships are like, examined well and the ultimate thematic core of it conveyed well? E.....eeeeeeeeeeh. I mean, I've already said I think Skadi is mediocre, and ultimately, I don't like the story. But when approaching suggestions of what to change, I'd want to keep the author's intent in mind, because it's not my story. It's hers. Its what she wanted to do. Examining it through a different lens, with different ideas, and theorizing on how these ideas could be reflected and transformed into other things is valuable, but can only really effectively done with the heart of the writer is taken into consideration first.

This is something I think fandom generally has trouble with. Online fandom and the relationship to creators that has developed is like, deeply, toxicly fucked up. Those who create have been dehumanized to such an extreme extent, their so-called fans stripping them of any humanity and consuming their content in pure, decadent self-absorption, that no thought goes into the hearts of those who put their work out into the world. Idolized or demonized or forgotten, if you create and share it, you are doomed to having your watermarks filed off, your intentions disregarded or maligned, your work fed to AI to be regurgitated en-mass, and all manner of assumptions placed into the void of your privacy as people slander you, harass you, or glorify you into an inhuman caricature of yourself.

Like, THE REASON IT IS NO LONGER STATED WHAT AUTHOR WROTE WHAT STORY-CHAPTERS IN FGO IS BECAUSE OF THE NUMBER OF PEOPLE WHO SENT SAKURAI FUCKING DEATH THREATS. ANY DISCUSSION OF SKADI AND HER INTENT AS A CHARACTER, ANY NEGATIVE ASSUMPTIONS MADE ABOUT WHY SHE WAS WRITTEN THAT WAY, IS WRITTEN ABOUT A WOMAN WHO WAS TOLD EN-MASS TO GO DIE FOR HER WORK, SIMPLY FOR THE CRIME OF A GACHA GAME CHAPTER BEING KINDA BAD.

When talking about her ideas, her stories, her characters, just... think of Sakurai as a human being, please. That's what I mean with all this, a generalized plea to remember that every story was penned by a living, breathing human being. Creators and their characters aren't thought of as people anymore, and analyzing a character or story while paying no regard to them or what they were trying to say fucking sucks. There's value in examining how you'd approach something, but editing someone's work and saying 'I did it better!' is cruel. Dismissing the writing of women by calling them waifus, talking about how 'clearly, the author was stupid and didn't take any time to research' about new story-chapters, without yourself thinking through what the author could have been trying to say with it is... just... treating people like they're soulless sacks of flesh meant for you to dispense content as it pleases you.

No creator in this world gets paid enough for that horseshit.

-- Thank you so much for the question! This wasn't inspired by any kind of immediate take I saw, by the way, I was just trying to dissect the authorial intent of Mephistopheles in the last JP event and got to thinking a bit about LB2, Skadi, and how even if I don't like her, I viscerally hate it whenever LB2 comes up on Beast's Lair.

#fgo #i could talk a lot about how much i hate the word waifu and how much i think it's enabled people to be sexist assholes #about female characters #but that's a rant for another day

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