#I understand why that gesture got popular among all other italian gestures because it looks funny

[zeroducks-2]

When I see this (🤌) emoji, I don't think WTF, I think Chef's Kiss, which are completely different vibes. Honestly I didn't even know that it was used as a negative thing, if I see it somewhere I assume it's a positive. The more you know, I suppose! I'll have to make sure I don't use it anymore in my fic comments, I don't want someone to misunderstand and think I didn't like it when I did

It's because you (and many other people) mix up the "chef kiss" (which is achieved by doing the ok hand emoji, this one 👌, and kissing your thumb) and the "what the fuck" Italian gesture which is this one 🤌.

Let me provide a visual reference.

this is a chef kiss.

and this is the "what the fuck" Italian gesture.

That gesture is rude, you do it only if you know that the people around you won't get offended. Depending from different social contexts, it's considered borderline insulting or anyway people might think you don't have manners. Doing it to someone while angry means you're saying that the other person is full of shit, and what they're saying makes no sense (if you're ranting to a friend about something and do that gesture, it means that you think that whatever/whoever you're ranting about makes no sense or is full of shit). When I see it under an art or a fic it makes me crack up because it essentially reads as "what the fuck is this". I did laugh about it a whole lot when I found it on my fic, for sure. Obviously I understood that the commenter didn't mean anything bad, but still I assume people would wanna know if they're using a potentially offensive gesture lol.

And obviously the misunderstanding is not your fault, anon. You use it as you saw other people using it, and mine wasn't that much of a serious post anyway, it's easy to read intentions regardless of the emoji. Just know that if you're using it to mean "this is good" and OP is an Italian person, the first thing they'll think when seeing it is not what you were trying to convey.

It's the same feeling I get from something that goes more or less like this: "Oh this is awesome, I really love the emotions you poured into this art🖕" lmao

#my asks #I understand why that gesture got popular among all other italian gestures because it looks funny #but yeah it doesn't mean anything positive #please don't go about doing it in front of italian people they'll awkwardly laugh at you lol

[iturbide]

Will admit my dislike towards Shez is mostly based on how everyone seems to now be bashing Byleth for it, because "Oooo it was SO easy to make a protag with personality" or "Ooo Shez is doing the bare minimum and is still better" like?? You don't HAVE to put a character down when you say you like a character? And Byleth did have personality i thought - they're even shown to have a little in the brief glimpse you get before they get snapped out of the demo in my opinion. Or maybe I'm just being too sensitive :P

-- wait people are bashing Byleth because Shez exists?? What's even the point of doing that??? They're two different characters with two different personalities and please excuse me I'm about to devolve into an AC3 rant.

Okay so I have been an Assassin's Creed fan for a long time. I played the first game when it was newly out. That's how I got into the series. I have kept up with it...well enough? I played the first "three" (yes I'm counting the Ezio trilogy as a single unit, and I have played all of them), I eventually managed to get through the next trilogy of Black Flag, Unity which I loathed we do not speak of it, and Syndicate, and I keep trying to play Origins/Odyssey/Valhalla but the major changes to the control scheme have made them impossible for me to succeed at so at some point I need to go in and overhaul the controls so I can actually progress out of what amounts to tutorial land. This isn't about the later games, though: this is about that original trilogy, and you will understand why shortly.

So you might have noticed that the first "three" bit is a bit odd. See, the first game took place during the Third Crusade (1191), focusing primarily on the cities of Acre, Damascus, and Jerusalem and followed master assassin Altair as he royally fucked up, got demoted, and then worked his way back up through the ranks and learned some humility (among other things). He was kind of full of himself at first, but while he was an interesting enough guy overall, it was really the wider story and open world game mechanics that proved to be the major draw of the game and got it greenlit for another.

The second game took place during the Italian Renaissance, and followed a young Florentine nobleman Ezio through his teenage years and the trauma of losing his family to a conspiracy, becoming an assassin under the tutelage of his uncle, and hunting down the men responsible for having his family killed. Ezio was...well, very Italian: very expressive, very emotive, very suave, very charming, lots of gestures when he talks, very open and expressive and emotive. And he was popular -- so much so that, rather than going to Assassin's Creed 3, they instead did two spin-offs that continued to follow Ezio through his life: one covering the Borgia papacy and set mostly in and around Rome, and a second covering the rise of the Ottomon Empire in and around Constantinople.

Revelations brought Ezio's story to a close, at which point the series finally moved onto the "third" game, set during the American Revolution. And this was where they did something that to this day I find incredibly clever: they start the game having you play as Haytham Kenway, a British man working to establish an operative network in the colonies and find the use for a key he stole back in England. You spend roughly five hours with him, going through all the usual motions of an Assassin's Creed game, and while he's rather more brutal than Ezio was he still acts and talks just like the assassins we've come to know over the years...

...and then at the end of those five hours he gets together with his operatives and speaks the Templar phrase and pulls the fucking rug out from under you

Look to this day I think fondly of that reveal, that for all their enmity and their millennia of war the Assassins and Templars basically operate the same way such that there's very little to distinguish one from the other when approached from an outside perspective, it's brilliant and it plays so beautifully into the game's overarching themes

So after that, the main game opens up and we start following Ratonhnhaké:ton (who goes by Connor, in interactions with people outside his tribe), the son of Haytham Kenway who was raised by his Kanienʼkehá꞉ka mother among her people, as he sets out to join the Assassins for the sole purpose of stopping the Templars who threaten his people and their way of life. The whole game with him is probably my favorite narratively, and Connor is my favorite assassin to this day.

Fandom hates him.

Or at least it did when I was playing. For all I know opinions have changed. But there were lots and lots and lots of criticisms about Connor being emotionless, uninteresting, etc. despite the fact that he...really wasn't? He had a quieter emotional affect: he was generally more measured, more tempered, but that meant that when he raised his voice you knew he meant business. I loved his generally more stoic handling and how powerful that made his more emotive moments, but the fandom just looked at him and said that he had the emotionality of a brick wall and generally dismissed or derided him...in favor of his dad. Who was an upper class British man, cultured, polished, and emotive in familiar ways.

A lot more similar to Ezio, basically.

They latched onto the character that was more similar to the one they'd just spent three whole games with, and that sent the message to Ubisoft that that's what people wanted -- which is why the next three games featured Ezio clones as their protagonists: Edward Kenway, Arno Dorian, and Jacob Frye are all very Ezio-adjacent, though some more successfully pull it off than others. Connor became a failed experiment because people didn't want to bother learning how to read a new character: they just wanted more Ezio.

And that's what immediately comes to mind with Shez bringing on Byleth bashing. People want an emotive avatar for their Fire Emblem game: they don't want someone with a more nuanced emotional affect, they want Brash Shounen Protag, and when one appears they will bash the more nuanced character for being "emotionless" or "not having a personality" (which, for the record, I do think Byleth does have -- seeing how they become more emotive through their Supports in 3H is great, the way they become more expressive in B and A conversation, says a lot to me about how they're willingly adapting to the norms of people around them in order to better interact) when they're just not seeing what they want to see and therefore not paying attention.

Anyway, Shez is fine enough but I still prefer Byleth from all I've seen so far (though I do love Arval being a sassy little shit).

#answered #anonymous #fire emblem: three houses #fire emblem: three hopes #assassin's creed 3 #i do not care for haytham kenway myself #frankly loathe the man #give me more connor any day #shez is fine #byleth is great though #thank you for reading my long-winded rant