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fill-me-with-your-memes-daddy · 3 years

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Watching the Rise of the Titans movie and I'll be documenting all of my thoughts/reactions here. [Spoiler Warning]

So instead of reblogging every new update, I'm just going to have this post up on my phone as I watch and type my reactions in a bullet list format.

Nari's human disguise is so cute. As someone who does have a cottagecore aesthetic, I want to cosplay her so bad

Are Skrael and/or Belroc non-binary coded? Regardless, I'm also obsessed and I want to fuck Skrael and be Belroc.

STEVE CARING ABOUT JIM BEING HURT YESSSS!!! My god his redemption has probably been one of the greatest there is because he doesn't just suddenly go from being a bully to a completely good person. You can see the gradual shift in learning better throughout the shows which is awesome.

IN NEW YOOOOOOORRRRRRRK!!!!!! CONCRETE JUNGLE WHERE DREAMS ARE MADE OFFFFFFFFFFFFF!!!!!

The mugshot montage reminded me of season 1 of trollhunters when toby and Jim were arrested at the museum.

STRICKLER PUT A RING ON IT??? HE'S THE ONLY DILF IVE EVER ACTUALLY AGREED WAS HOT WYM I CAN'T HAVE HIM??? well I'm still really happy about his arc over the series probably one of my favorite character growths.

Eli my guy got his growth spurt!!! As an 18 year old who is still 5'0", I'm happy but envious for him

So I went into this movie without watching any trailers or promo, but I doubt anything could have prepared me for the existence of mpreg. In fact, I wasn't going to document my reactions until I saw that.

NAMURA!!!!!!!!! MY BELOVED!!!!!! I CAN STILL THIRST FOR YOU WITHOUT GUILT

The coach teacher just called the kids zoomers so I have to dock one point from my final rating just because of that. Unforgivable

Those husky animation models suck lmao

Oh fuck the titans got power ranger zords!!

God why did they include the mpreg??? This movie would have been perfect without it.... After that plot point being revisited only one time I'm already beyond done with it

Like it's bringing me back to the v*ltron days where they're was a suspiciously high amount of klance omegaverse and mpreg fics and art created and it physically hurts because Steve and Keith's voice actor is the same person meaning this is especially cursed to me since I was unfortunately in the v*ltron fandom and remember all of that

But like on another note, how old are these characters again??? I haven't checked any wikis because of spoilers but is Steve an adult??? I know aja might be technically a lot older than 18 because alien but is whatever age she is equivalent to an adult as far as emotionally and physically in Akaridion development??? IS THIS A TEEN (M)PREGNANCY IN A KIDS SHOW????

Like bruh I saw a singular post on here before going into the movie that was like "rott spoilers without context" and there was a pregnant belly but I was absolutely not expecting the actual context of it. I'll find the post after I finish and edit this post to tag the creator right here: @makoden

This entire post is just gonna be me ranting about mpreg huh

Anyway I love the whole roundtable allusion to the legends of king arthur (not the toa version but the one he's based off)

THERE'S 3 TO 5 BABIES????? I need to take a break bruh this is just too much

Alright I've taken a 30 minute break got some food and did some things i love (decompressed by tactile stimming with some owl plushies and watched some videos on my favorite owl, Garu. He lives in Japan with his owner and is a domesticated eagle owl who basically just acts like a sky cat. If anyone else needs some eye bleach, here is their YouTube channel)

Blinky and ARRRGHHH!!! saying their "if one of us doesn't make it" talk my god one of them is going to die I can see it and I will be utterly crushed. Jim can't lose another father figure and Toby can't lose his wingman again I will riot if this happens

On a similar but unrelated to the movie note, can we just talk about how toa started with Jim having 0 dads and (if strickler and blinky live to the end) will end with 2 dads? Like I just really feel happy for him that he has two dads who actually figured out how to put the past behind them to not have any infighting between them so that both of them are healthy father figures. Jim has already been through literal hell and back losing his actual humanity in the process so if he loses one of them, I'm going to be really pissed because at this point, this is just Jim torture porn. Y'all know how as SpongeBob SquarePants went on, the show just became Squidward torture porn? It's starting to feel that way for toa and I really hope they cut the shit by the ending

Jlaire is such a good ship but like I feel like it's too perfect they never disagree with each other

YESSSSSSS Someone finally doesn't treat toby like a fat waste of space who messes stuff up!!! I think out of all the characters that would have been most deserving of a rewrite, it's Toby. Sometimes I just feel he's only comic relief and any heartfelt moments he's had in the series was also born of stupidity (ie his flour baby project being unharmed was seen by him as divine intervention from his parents but was actually just Eli and Steve behind the scenes).

Ohhhhh yesssssss Archie's father!!! I was hoping I'd see him again because we got so little of him last

Ooooooooooh Asian trollmarket!!!!!

Oh never mind slavery trollmarket

Bruh titanic camelot

I feel like we're not seeing enough of the villains because I completely forgot about the power ranger zord things

NAMORA NOOOOOOOOOOOOOO MY LAST CRUSHHHH

STRICKLER NO NOT YOU TOO PLEASE

WHAT THE FUCK!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

THE ONLY TWO CHARACTERS I SIMP FOR ON THIS SHOW DIED WITHIN FIVE MINUTES OF EACH OTHER

THAT WHOLE ASS RANT I WROTE IS COMING TRUE FUCK THIS MOVIE THIS SERIES IS JUST JIM TORTURE PORN

WAIT JIM'S SPERM DONOR INFO?

Oh thank God I don't want to know anything about that person

For the record, I call that man Jim's sperm donor because he has no business being called a father to him. All he did was donate some swimmers to the creation of him and give him abandonment issues

Oh another blind troll elder???? This fucker is just if vendel was a bad guy

Bruh I was grieving

PACIFIC RIM WITH GUN ROBOT VEX AND THE BELROCZORD? I've never seen that movie but I know the reference

Bruh Blinky doesn't read horoscopes? Does he realize conspiracy theories are just the manly version of horoscopes?

NO DON'T KILL VEX STOP KO-ING FOUND FAMILY MEMBERS

Oh thank God he's okay

NO NOT ARCHIE AND CHARLEMAGNE OH MY GOD

oh never mind they're just gonna coup de tat I believe in them :))

But I want to see him again

But I'm glad to see vex

Yay they're in arcadia!

But yeah I wondered why the trolls and Merlin didn't keep the whole "daylight doesn't hurt trolls" feature from the eternal night but now Guillermo del Toro I see you were playing the long con in that just to kill my girl Namora :(((

Oooooh I love the animation of the Narizord over Chihuahua!! It looks very good and realistic (if only they could have put some of that into those huskies from before smh)

Bruh the character designs of the arcane order are so good I want to be them

Nari making sure the Skraelzord doesn't crush the bus

DAMN DOUBLE HOMICIDE

Bruh I'm just glad we finally have an answer on why arcadia had everything going on as opposed to literally anywhere else!! I always found that as a weird coincidence for plot convince.

BRUH WERE BACK TO THE MPREG IM SO JEALOUS I FORGOT ABOUT THAT EVEN THOUGH IT WAS BECAUSE I WAS GRIEVING THE LOSS OF MY LOVELIES.

Oh that's real convenient that the ninth configuration meant all of them. Way to not decide which character gets more attention. Though it probably was a smart way to not have any infighting in the fandom between each character's stan group.

Bruh I just realized where is Barbera did they just ditch her on the Camelot ship???

And where are the other trolls that migrated at the end of trollhunters s3? They said something about new jersey but obviously Jim and the other main characters got on Camelot instead.... This feels like a plot hole

And we never learned the process of how changelings are made and bonded to humans and stuff. We just know it's super painful but I'm curious ffs!!!!

THE DONT THINK BECOME HERO SPEECH ALL SAID TOGETHER!!!

BRUH THEY REALLY HAD TO SHOW HIM GIVING BIRTH??????? WAS THAT AN ABSOLUTE MUST??????

Plus the main audience for this series is little children (the rating for the movie is literally TV-Y7) so even though my adult ass is not in the target audience, I STILL DONT UNDERSTAND WHY WOULD MPREG AND ANAL BIRTH WOULD BE AN IMPORTANT THING TO 7 YEAR OLDS???? THIS IS A LITERAL FETISH HIDDEN IN KIDS CONTENT ITS ELSAGATE ALL OVER AGAIN Y'ALL 😭😭😭😭😭

Though it's probably hypocritical of me to think fetishes don't belong in kids tv when I've openly admitted to thirsting for strickler and namora

HUZZAH

NEW AMULET WAZ GOOD????

STAB THAT BITCH JIM

WAIT NO I SAID STAB NOT GET STABBED

Alright good job just missed the directions at first but you fixed it

SEVEN KIDS?????????

T O B Y ????????????

W A I T NO

N O

IS HE ACTUALLY

OH MY GOD THERE'S HOPE

NO THERE ISN'T

F U C K THIS SHIT THEY REALLY JUST HAD HIM TO BE BULLIED THEN KILLED

Y'ALL IM ACTUALLY CRYING THIS NEVER HAPPENS

I NEVER ACTUALLY GET SO EMOTIONAL OVER MEDIA THAT I CRY IT ONLY HAPPENED ONCE AT THE END OF VOLTRON BUT AHHHHHHHH

W A I T

HE'S GONNA BE BROUGHT BACK?????

HOLD UP THEY'RE JUST GONNA BRING ALL THOSE DEAD PEOPLE BACK??????

WAIT IS HE

BLINKY CALLED HIM A SON

HOLD ON IS THIS GOING TO BE A CLIFFHANGER???????????

BRUH THEY REALLY JUST CAN'T END THE SERIES WITHOUT CLIFFHANGERS like there's always an open ending

TROLLHUNTER TOBY????? You know what forget the whole rants I had on how toby was written they just redeemed it all

And that's all! I'd rate it a 6.5/10 because it's definitely the weakest of all the sequels but still had amazing animation and some good plot points. It's just really hard to look over the bad stuff enough to rate it any higher.

#tales of arcadia #rise of the titans #trollhunters #rott #rise of the titans spoilers #rott spoilers #toa #3 below #athena's own original post!#jim lake jr #claire nuñez #toby domzalski

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stardestroyer81 · 3 years

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On September 11th, 2020, I posted this, a teaser for a 'faux Earthbound-inspired project' featuring four brightly colored silhouettes of its four main characters. The concept and characters were shrouded in mystery up until April 7th of the following year, where I posted yet another teaser in the form of an in-game screenshot, revealing the character of Lauren Henley and the project's placeholder title, Project 2000.

In that post, I mentioned that Project 2000 isn't the project's final name, and that I would be unveiling its true name later on down the line. The truth of the matter was that I could have gone and revealed the true name as early as... well, 2020 if I wanted to. But a lot of the project was still being figured out at that time (Including the designs of its main characters!), and I wanted to hold off on revealing anything more until I knew I was 100% ready to explain what this 'Project 2000' even is.

Now, nearing a year after I posted the initial first teaser, I feel as though it's about time to introduce a few more original characters of mine to this blog, and with that being said...

Let's talk about Override!

Shigesato Itoi's 1994 cult classic Earthbound (Known as MOTHER 2 in Japan) flopped due to misleading marketing when it came around to being released in the states, but its witty humor, nonstandard JRPG setting and its colorful visual presentation proved to be a hit to the American audience in due time.

This, of course, led to creators opting to shape games around a similar basis to Earthbound, whether its in terms of graphical style, humor, battle tactics, and much more. I think the most popular example when the phrase "Earthbound-Inspired RPG" comes to mind is undoubtedly Toby Fox's Undertale, which shared a lot of the same humor as its inspiration as well as a similar graphical style.

Some fans liked the MOTHER series so much that they wanted to take the franchise into their own hands and create the next installment after Shigesato Itoi stated that MOTHER 3 was the last game in the franchise, and MOTHER 4 began production by fans. Many Winter 2014s later, it was unsure if the game was still in production, though the project was officially rebranded as its own entity as Oddity in 2020.

Override is, essentially, my kind of Undertale/Oddity, mixing elements from Earthbound, MOTHER 3, the Y2K bug and the general 2000s aesthetic together into one. By that first part, I mean it's an Earthbound-Inspired RPG crafted by my own hand (Dating as far back as mid-2019); it, of course, isn't an actual game, but rather a collection of conceptual art pieces and faux in-game screenshots I've made detailing what it would look like as a real game (Like Mega Man Ultimate).

Oh, right, the plot! Bear in mind that a lot of the finer details of Override's story haven't quite been figured out yet, but I can say that I at least have enough to finally get around to talking about it.

Charles Feldman, CEO of Synergon Robotics, longs to spearhead a dystopian world with an invincible army of technologic law-enforcers, though finds it almost impossible to in his current time, the year 2095, where such technology is commonplace.

For years, he has meticulously shaped a plan where he, a team of subordinates and all the robo-security he could need would time travel back just before the year 2000, wherein he would corrupt all technology at that point with a 'Y2K Bug' and force the denizens of the world to live a lifestyle not unlike the events of the novel 1984, wherein humanity's every move is closely observed, and if someone steps out of line, they fall to the wrath of the Synergon Police.

His plan, for the most part, is successful. He travels back to the date November 18th, 1997 to have enough time to prepare for his eventual world-ruling plan on midnight, January 1st, 2000. The aforementioned Synergon police are armed with powerful devices called 'Psiometers', which are watch-like gadgets which connect to the user's neural network to unlock the powers of the mind.

Psiometers alongside other tech necessary for Feldman's ploy are transferred base-to-base in the middle of the night via drones, which are equipped with cameras and can hold up to twenty pounds of equipment. However, on the night of December 30th, 1999, a flaw in the wrap-up of Feldman's ultimate plan occurs, when a last minute drone delivery of two Psiometer units results in a crash.

The drone lands in the yard of the Henley residence. Nine and a half year old Lauren Henley overhears the crash and goes outside to investigate, finding the busted drone amidst the snow. After another brief malfunction, it shuts itself down, and Lauren, vowing to figure out its origins, drags it into the garage and goes back to bed...

December 31st, 1999. Lauren brings the Synergon drone to her neighbor's house, and shows it to her best friend, nine year old Casey Treverton. The two shortly discover the drone's contents, and Lauren instantly suspects there's more to the Synergon story. They ultimately are short on answers for the time being, and keep the whole thing a secret from their parents until later that night...

One minute until the new year. Casey and Lauren hurry to the downstairs of the Treverton residence to catch the ball drop for the new millennium. Whatever weirdness happened earlier is put on the backburner as the two flop down in front of the TV, eagerly counting down the seconds left of 1999.

"5... 4... 3... 2..."

Then, a nationwide power shortage. Nobody has any clue what's going on. Eventually, the TV flickers back on, and instead of the new year festivities they had been watching prior, the picture depicts a grizzled although finely dressed man in front of a white backdrop; Charles Feldman.

He states that his message is being broadcast across every television in the country, and reveals his lengthy plan to create a highly technical dystopian society overseen by Synergon Robotics, threatening to rewire any technology he pleases for the worst should anyone oppose him.

Casey and Lauren grimace at each other.

Three months pass. Not a lot has changed this early on in, though the citizens of Maywood are under close surveillance by various automatons to make sure nobody tries anything funny. Lauren decides that she has had enough of this 'Synergon Business' and asks Casey if he's interested in figuring out how the Psiometers work and using them against Synergon to ultimately take them down.

At first, Casey is unsure, true to his nervous personality. There isn't any rational way two children could lead to the downfall of an entity which has taken over the world, but Lauren is sure of their success, and with enough coercing the two embark on a mission to take back what's theirs. Who do they meet along the way? Just how deep does the Synergon plan run? And will they reign victorious? Only time will tell...

Well, now that we have the lengthy scene-setting out of the way, let's check out the good stuff; checking out the four heroes of Override which were teased last year! It's a good thing I chose to wait to show their designs off, because the silhouettes shown in the teaser weren't the same designs as what I have now. So, let's get right into it!

It may have taken much longer than I expected to show Override off, but at the very least that means I can now get around to posting/writing about what I've come up for it! I have a lot of Override-related content on the way, though I find that this is an excellent way to introduce its world! A LOT of work was put into this, so I hope you've enjoyed everything this post has to offer!

#Override #Project 2000 #Casey Treverton #Lauren Henley #Bradley Snider #MacKenzie Connors #My OCs #Earthbound-Inspired #Game Concept #Sprite Art #2000s Aesthetic #Y2K Aesthetic #Coolness #IT'S F I N A L L Y HERE.#It feels SO GOOD to finally show the Override crew off.#I love these characters a whole lot and getting around to talking about them was just so nice to finally do.#Trust me when I say a good portion of Override stuff is on the way: there's quite a bit of it!#I knew I couldn't post any of it until I got an introductory post written...#... which ended up being much longer than I thought it would... apologies #But I'm glad that it's finally up for all to see!#Fun fact: Do you see the font that's used in the character bios/section headers?#Yeah. I made that.#I designed an ENTIRE FONT for Override.#Granted a lot of it is pretty identical to EB's font but there are some tiny differences throughout the typeface #It's not the only font I've made either though more on that in a future post #Oh and uh #Long Post

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peace-coast-island · 3 years

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Diary of a Junebug

The trail of the Whispering Winds

The Moonlit Woods transforms into a different place after midnight. It's still as eerie as ever, but in a different way though - as in different vibes. I hardly venture out here for good reason so when I do, it's usually with a group, preferably those versed in magic and supernatural stuff.

Last time I came to the Moonlit Woods was with Team Magic - Pippa, Mariposa, Angie, and Willow. While hunting for gyroids we came across an old travel log and found a cocostar tree, which is super rare, so we struck gold with that discovery. Being with the girls made me feel a bit more confident about venturing into the woods so since then, planning out my next adventure has been in the back of my mind.

Speaking of Team Magic, the girls are looking forward to coming back for another gyroid event. Mariposa's been working with Daisy Jane on gyroid designs since then and they're pretty much ready to go. We just haven't been able to set a date yet because the girls are busy with school and college apps but they're hoping to drop by sometime in the near future.

Instead of Team Magic, we have a new group accompanying us in the woods. They don't have an official name but they have been working as a team for years. There's Taiki, a freelance exorcist who comes from a family that has dealt with the supernatural for generations. He's a friend of Miki's, having gone to the same university together.

Nene's his best friend from his hometown - she actually spent a semester at Tome U so she also got to know Miki a bit. She's also the artist Rika has been following, the one who just set up a Patreon and is in the process of getting her webcomic, Seven Wonders, published.

Haru is what they call an untethered spirit. He used to haunt the halls of the school Taiki and Nene went to before it was demolished. Basically Taiki contacted Miki who contacted her brother and his friends at the consultation center so they can find a way to keep Haru around. I only know this because Mikayla asked for some sparkle stones and essences a while back.

Then I got curious and decided to do a bit of research. Turns out there's a lot of different kind of procedures that have varying results. So what Taiki and the others did was no easy feat and they succeeded either by luck or some other factors. In other words, Haru's still a ghost or a spirit, but now he also has a physical form. He looks young - 13 or 14 at the most - but he's obviously a lot older than that - though for the most part he's like any other guy as far as I can tell.

Nene is an artist and the author of Seven Wonders, a webcomic about a girl who befriends a spirit who resides in her school. The story's loosely based on her life - as well as Taiki and Haru's. She started writing it a few years ago, originally a side project to keep herself busy. Then she began updating it regularly and grew a following, prompting her to expand the story. The webcomic then reached international audiences when Taiki offered to translate her work into English so that's when it really started taking off.

The three of them go way back, having first met almost a decade ago. Nene managed to summon Haru in hopes of granting a wish, similar to what happens with the main characters in Seven Wonders. The two end up in a series of misadventures that result in them being bonded by a curse, resulting in Nene being connected with the spirits of the school. Then Taiki came along with the intent of exorcizing spirits such as Haru, only to end up befriending him.

They've been through a lot together, even defying fate (Haru's words) so they can have this future they're living in right now. From what I've heard, dealing with the supernatural - willingly or not - always has a price to pay. It's one of those things where no matter how lightly you tread, you'll step on a landmine either way.

In other words, there's always something to lose.

Taiki was never one to have a "normal" life considering that he comes from a family of exorcists. He has an older brother and younger sister, both who are powerful and pretty well known back home. Miki mentioned that he hasn't really spoken to his family much since moving out. According to Nene and Haru, Taiki was close to his brother, having looked up to him a lot back in the day. Nene and Miki have both speculated that the rift between Taiki and his brother was probably one of the reasons why he decided to stay in Mina Creek instead of going back to Inazuma.

Nene stuck around Inazuma before deciding to join Taiki. Even after graduating she stuck around the school to see Haru, working as a janitor so she'd have an excuse to be there. But when Taiki graduated the following year, the trio didn't see much of each other. Taiki went abroad to Tome University and while Nene still visited Haru and the other spirits, she had to focus on her studies.

Then Nene signed up for a study abroad program, which happened to take her to Miki and Taiki's school. I remember Miki talking about helping out this freshman who was an international student. She said he was struggling quite a bit so it was lucky that they ran into his old friend - his senpai, as he called her back in the day. During her time there while reminiscing with Taiki, Nene was inspired to write Seven Wonders so that's how it all began.

Nene ended up dropping out of university after that semester so she became an artist/content creator while working as a school janitor. Along with that she was also the bridge between the living and the spirits, a role she carried since becoming Haru's assistant when they first met.

In the years that followed, Nene and Haru got involved in supernatural affairs while Taiki offered his assistance once in a while. Things were going well until the school had to close due to financial problems. If that wasn't bad enough, the city was going to demolish the school and a bunch of other old buildings in that area. So Haru was in a tight spot as he would have nowhere to go since he couldn't be outside of the school. And as for Nene, she didn't really have anywhere to go either since being a janitor was what kept her afloat.

Thankfully Taiki and the others were able to come up with a solution or else Nene and Haru wouldn't be here with us. Taiki made the offer for Nene to join him in Mina Creek, something which she was understandably on the fence about. She says she's been adjusting to the move a lot better than she thought, probably because she has been here before so it's not too drastic of a change.

However, it's a big leap for Haru considering that he's been restricted inside a school for years and now he's in a foreign country surrounded by a lot of unfamiliar things. He does seem to be a fast learner - Nene and Taiki were surprised at how quickly his English's improving and if I didn't know, I'd think he'd been studying the language for at least a year or so. Taiki's obviously quite fluent while Nene's sorta in between - Taiki serves as an interpreter when they need a bit of help, which is pretty much what he does during his non-exorcist job.

So far Nene's enjoying life at Minai Creek, though she admits to missing home. She finds the change in scenery intimidating but also necessary. On one hand she's sad to leave the school and the other spirits but at the same time she feels it's probably for the best. Haru's holding his own, though Nene worries about him as the changes they're going through can't be easy on him. She's also worried about Taiki too, especially since it seems like he's completely cut off his ties from his home - by that she means his family.

Nene definitely comes across as a big sister/mom friend. Taiki sometimes calls her onee-chan, which is a way one addresses their older sister in Japanese. I've met Taiki a few times before and I see a different side to him when Nene's around. Or maybe it's because this is the first time I've really gotten to know him? He just seems more ...himself? open? ... when he's with Nene and Haru. It's sweet how much he looks up to Nene - whenever he talked about her in the past you can tell how much he respects and admires her - and now that I finally meet her, I can see it. I think Nene and I are gonna be good friends.

Taiki's had his eye on the Moonlit Woods for a while as there's a section that's kinda dangerous to tread if you're not well versed with spirits and such. Only the bravest exorcists venture there to help clean up the place a little and contain the bad karma by doing what's necessary. He did his research extensively before considering going to that place due to rumors of seasoned exorcists being ill prepared and becoming corrupt, which is the worst case scenario.

Since strength lies in numbers, Taiki needed a reliable team to keep things under control and make a speedy retreat if necessary. Haru and Nene's connections to the spiritual world are valuable, especially since Haru has a bit of a pull with certain higher status spirits that can come in handy in case things go south. As for me and the campers, we're kinda the brute force, serving as the muscle and sort of an anchor to keep the others grounded. Something about certain spirits having an effect on those who can see and interact with them and taking advantage of that by blurring the lines between reality and delusion so we have to keep them from straying.

I don't know how the trio does it, especially Taiki and Nene. To live between mortals and spirits is not easy, more of a curse than a blessing to many. For people like them, they have no choice but to fulfill their roles - Taiki in damage control and Nene in being the communicator. And for Haru, being a spirit who voluntarily chose to stay in the world of the living after being bound to one through a curse, I can't imagine that being easy on him either. There's a lot to unpack with these three and whether I'll get to know the full story or not, it's clear that there's a lot on their shoulders.

Like I said, there's always a price to pay when it involves things beyond our understanding. I just hope that it was worth it. Me being cautiously optimistic, I'd like to think it was or else they wouldn't be together.

The Whispering Winds trail, as expected, was full of perils. On one hand, it was kinda good that I was kept in the dark in an ignorance is bliss sorta way. But that also makes it a bit harder to know exactly what's going on. In a place where the spirit world and mortal world becomes blurred, it gets disorienting, to put it simply. We know we're there when us mortals can see some spirits so it's important to keep our guard up.

There's a reason why they call this trail the Whispering Winds. I heard voices from all around - it wasn't a pleasant experience, to say the least. It was jarring at first but then I grew numb to it. Still, it was an unsettling feeling - 0/10 do not recommend. This is why it's best to go in a group because unexpected things will happen so it's better to be (over)prepared.

In between exorcism rituals we did a bit of sightseeing, which helped lighten the mood. Haru introduced us to some spirits he knew to be harmless and they served as guides through areas they were familiar with. Taiki and Nene did most of the heavy lifting when it came to the rituals while the rest of us stood guard. From what I've seen, it looks like a lot of work - the kind of thing you should leave to the professionals.

All around us were these blue light orb things - spiritual remnants that serve as trail markers according to Haru. Depending on the traces the remnants can leave behind, Nene can manipulate them to open up new pathways. The deeper we go into the trail, the harder it is to navigate as it's supposed to be like that for good reason. Nene's the only one who can directly interact with stuff like that so people like her are the ones who really are granted access to forbidden parts such as these. According to Haru, he and Taiki can't touch them because it can cause trouble due to their blood - meaning it's off limits for exorcists and spirits.

The light orbs also gave us some much needed visibility as well as an eerie glow. When things got quiet, it sorta felt like we were just walking down a long, dimly lit path. When things start to get a bit hazy, that's when it was time to investigate. The feeling is heavy, almost suffocating - a heavy burden to bear indeed. When the heaviness is gone, we move forward, going as far as we can before hitting a dead end. From there, our trek is over and instead of venturing a different path, we go back the way we came, careful not to disturb the newfound peace.

It was an interesting experience - again, it's probably for the best that I don't know too much about it. There's a whole 'nother world out there with exorcisms, spirits, psychics...as curious I am about these sorts of things, I respect that it's not my place when it comes to certain aspects. It's a fascinating world out there but we can't experience or begin to understand certain things that are beyond our scope. It sucks sometimes being just a bystander or outsider but it is what it is.

#animal crossing #animal crossing pocket camp #Diary of a Junebug #headcanon ramble

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missnight0wl · 4 years

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Unpopular opinion: I wish dating was never introduced to HPHM.

I was always rather open about the fact that I don’t have much interest in dating content in HPHM, so you might say it’s very subjective rambling. But I think I also have some more objective arguments for that statement, so… hear me out (or don’t; I can’t tell you what to do).

Some spoilers for the Festival Fun TLSQ, the Celestial Ball TLSQ, the First Date TLSQ, the Valentine’s Day TLSQ, the All-Wizards Tournament TLSQ, and “Cooking Up Trouble” SQ.

First of all, I want to address the most obvious counterargument for my wish: “but people want dating!”. Yeah, I know. But here’s a thing. A long time ago, almost at the very beginning of the game’s existence, when we were only speculating about any love interests, people were referencing one article. The article where the creators claimed that romance is planned for the future (among other things). And if you ask me, it was their mistake. It was a mistake because it created expectations which they had to react to. The problem is that they were never ready to introduce such type of content. I mean, just look at the past events. Andre mentioned dating when he was first introduced back in Y3 (!), and he said then that most people don’t date until they’re in the fourth year. And yes, the Celestial Ball was eventually placed as Y4 Achievement, but the main story was well into Y5 already! What I take from this is that at best, they had only a rough idea for the ball when they wrote Andre’s comment in Y3 (if it took them so long to actually create the quest). And so, I have to wonder – why they even talked about dating in Y3 if they were not ready? Now, I’m not saying that nobody would ask for dating if Jam City didn’t mention it in that article, or Andre omitted that topic in Y3. There’d definitely be people still wishing for some romance. But there’d be no actual reasons to expect that. Because HPHM was created as a mystery story (even if people don’t remember about it anymore), and a mystery story doesn’t really need romance.

The second thing I’d like to point out for the sake of this discussion is that the dating quests require quite a lot of work from the devs team. Admittedly, the quality of those efforts is sometimes questionable, but still. I’m also no tech or game design expert, but here are some things which I believe make dating quests more time-consuming than most of the others:

Designing outfits. Each of the datable characters is given a new outfit (+ new outfits for MC). I also want to notice that most of those outfits are one-time-use. Well, except maybe for the bundles available to buy for real money…

Creating new locations/characters. To be fair, some of “regular” quests require those too, although the majority uses things already existing and being used in the main story.

Creating new animations: dancing, holding hands, pecks on the cheek, more (new) dancing.

Creating multiple routes for different date options – and even if it’s mostly copy-paste, it takes time nonetheless.

To be clear, creating new things for the game is not bad. My point is that basically every dating adventure required ALL of that invested in one single quest – and pretty much none of that can be reused outside of dating. In fact, they’re not even reusing those animations completely for each new date. The kiss from the Valentine’s Day was different from the recent one, the Festival had new dances added to make it more diverse in comparison to the Celestial Ball etc. And what those unique quests have to offer? One cute moment with your date, which is… kind of meaningless. I’m sorry, but dating stories are basically irrelevant in the bigger picture. I mean, yeah, they’re adorable, but that’s it. And it’s just NOT proportional to all the work put into them. Because look…

The dating quests add very little to nothing to flesh out the characters – and if they do, it has nothing to do with dating.

The Celestial Ball did a pretty great job at adding to Rowan and Ben. People often criticise MC for “forcing” them to come to the party, but the problem was clearly about them feeling not good enough to go (not necessarily about them not wanting to go), and so I really loved working on their self-confidence. Bill also grew a lot in that quest, overcoming his rejection from Emily Tyler. Andre discovered his styling talent, so he was no longer “just” a brilliant Quidditch player. Even Penny had some insecurities to face as she wanted to prove that she’s not only popular but she can also create fantastic decorations. So… couldn’t it just be a quest about FRIENDSHIP and our friends growing? The whole dating subplot felt kind of forced to me, or maybe rather detached. Not to mention that THAT was kind of a dick move to leave Rowan and Ben after using the argument:

The next quests were more oriented on dating itself, but at the same time, they’re focused less on the characters’ individual personalities. Sure, there are some differences between dates, but it’s more about distinction than adding anything new. For instance, in the Festival Fun TLSQ, every character yells out loud that you’re on a date (unless you chose to keep it a secret), MC just points out that it’s unlike them in the case of Talbott, Jae, and Chiara. Next example: I thought it’s pretty amusing that Jae writes dreadful poems with cheap rhymes, but it turns out that the note with Butterbeer could also be left by Barnaby. I know that in MY playthrough, Barnaby didn’t leave it, but I can’t see it as Jae’s characteristic, simply because it wasn’t written for his character – it was written to fit Jae and Barnaby, so it’s kinda meaningless in my eyes.

Another thing is that even if those dates added something individual, it’d be relevant only for a limited audience. Like, I’m really happy for people who wanted to date Badeea, but for me, she barely existed in this quest. It added NOTHING to her character. During the First Date quest, Tulip revealed that girls in her family are being named after flowers (her cousin is called Marigold), which is a pretty neat fact, but I wouldn’t know it if I didn’t put extra effort to see different options. And believe me, there’s a big part of the payers who don’t do it. I’m still seeing on social media people being surprised that Rowan’s gender and House are connected to MC’s.

And speaking of that already: this is why the dating options are being cut off. And honestly, it sucks, but I get it, I really do. The devs have to spend the same amount of time on a character dated by 6% of the players as on a character dated by 36% of the players. Let’s add real money to that, and let’s say that 10% of all players buy gems/energy on TLSQs. Jam City will make more money out of that 36% than out of 6% - it’s as simple as that. At the end of the day, they are a business. Would it be nice to make all players happy? Of course, but it’s easier to keep the majority happy.

The dating quests don’t really matter for the main story – and they won’t matter more in the future.

Why? Because it’d be too complicated at this point. All we’re getting (and what we’ll ever get) are subtle differences in dialogues. And you know what? Even that doesn’t matter much. For example, in Y6, there’s a scene where Talbott calls MC to the Owlery and offers his help in searching through the letters. He talks then about their friendship, and if you took him on a date, he mentions it as well. The thing is that Talbott is pretty heart-warming here in general, how he opens on us being friends:

Sure, that one additional line is pretty cute, but again, is it really a satisfying pay-off from the dating quest, considering how much was put into it? And I don’t think they even can do more because they always have to keep in mind the players who didn’t manage to finish TLSQs in time or just didn’t want to do it.

I don’t want to be only negative about dating because that’s not really my point, so here are some ideas on how to invest all of that time better (and no, it’s not just the lore and in-depth history of the Cursed Vaults because I know I’m in the minority who cares about it):

More outfits for NPCs which could be used for variety. I don’t know about you, but I’m sick of seeing characters like Penny, Merula, Ben, or Talbott in their full school robes ALL THE FREAKING TIME. Ideally, I wish every character to have three outfits: full school robes, some variety of a uniform (so something like Tulip and Barnaby) used in the school but outside of classes, and something totally casual used outside of the castle.

More animations between characters like hugs, patting on the arm etc. Anything which could be used almost on a daily basis, and which would make our interactions looks more natural and less stiff. Seriously, I’ll take a supportive hug instead of a peck on the cheek ANY DAY.

More character-centric quests. So many of our friends need their own SQ: Tulip, Badeea, Liz, Diego. The rest could probably also use them to expand their characters – because those SQs do a great job at this. Like, I took Jae to the festival, and it was alright, but to be completely honest, his “Cooking Up Troubles” SQ was SO MUCH BETTER for his character. We learnt new things about Jae, we had some really cute friendship moments (like this and this)… And it was a super simple quest with only seven parts in total! It just needed to be written: no new locations, animations etc. Yet, the pay-off was just… better, more meaningful.

Another thing that could be done in those character-centric quests is more focus on the relationships between our friends because, in my opinion, this is needed as well. I want to talk here a little about the “All-Wizards Tournament” TLSQ, which I think is really underrated. This is probably because of people claiming that Jam City is reaching too much to reference the books events AND because of Rowan’s absence. And don’t get me wrong, those are valid objections. But when it comes to the characters… this TLSQ was pretty great. We saw a lot of our friends' insecurities (Barnaby, Jae, Liz), we saw their more competitive side (Andre, Badeea)… Badeea was especially interesting to me as she showed that she can be quite cunning when she somehow learnt about the first task. She also didn’t reveal that information to Merula and Ismelda because they were occupying the training dummies, but she did share with MC (meaning that you really want to have her on your side…).

It somehow made me think about the situation from Y5 when she admitted that she tricked Jae into thinking that she knows Apparition by using an Invisibility Cloak. It’s nice to know there’s more to her than meets the eye, which was also cohesive with the main story (even if we don’t see it much). The TLSQ also showed some dynamics between our friends, like Jae and Andre (which I mentioned here). And of course, I really enjoyed the ending conclusion: that some tasks can be dealt with only when you work together. Again, I’d love to see this theme being explored more because it creates such a compelling contrast between Jacob and MC. Jacob didn’t have many friends at school. We only know about Duncan and Olivia, and it’s still unclear if Olivia was an actual friend or a colleague they worked with. Not to mention that it was implied that for some time, Jacob was working all alone. Meanwhile, MC has basically the whole army at this point. It’d be interesting to see that this is one of the things which makes MC stronger than their brother.

Now, the reason why the “All-Wizards Tournament” TLSQ could focus on all of that is because we didn’t waste the time on all of “secret admires mystery”, “oh, who should I choose” etc. So, just as a thought experiment, let’s think about how the Festival Fun could improve if we’d eliminate the dating aspect. First of all, more characters could get more screen time, like Badeea, maybe Tulip… Liz? Diego (our dancer!)? Ismelda? Even Talbott didn’t have a big role unless you chose him as a date. The plot could also be more dynamic instead of a whole bunch of stalling. I’d leave the investigation with Andre because I think it’s a great addition to his character, but it’s also fucking sad that any development he’s getting is around dating. Like, the boy deserves so much better. So, let’s change that! Let’s say he asks MC for help because he’s styling some summer outfits for the upcoming festival, but one of his fabrics is missing. Perhaps it’s a bit more expensive material, so they suspect that Jae might’ve “borrowed” it to make some money. Jae, of course, is deeply insulted because he’s a smuggler and an occasional cheater, but not a thief! They argue with Andre, but eventually, they come to understanding. Then, MC remembers that Badeea wanted to experiment with painting methods, so perhaps she decided to incorporate some fabric into that. We find Badeea and Barnaby, they don’t have what we’re looking for, but there’s some action going on there, maybe including Talbott… Long story short, it turns out that Tulip needed it in preparation for Cruppies race or something. I don’t know, I’m coming up with it pretty much as I write. The point is that the time spent on talking about dating could’ve been used on something more specific, individual, which could be more meaningful in the light of the main story. And since there’d be no routes, all of that would be relevant for everyone after completing the quest. Want it to be even better? Make it a regular side quest, not time-limited.

All right, but couldn’t we just have both: characters development and dating? Of course, that’d be ideal. But as I said before, Jam City is a business and rarely any business is ideal. They’ll always prioritise a limited number of things, and since people whine about dating, we’re getting dating. And again, I’m not saying that dating is totally worthless, and I get that people find it cute and whatnot. I just believe that what dating ultimately adds to the game is not proportionate to the time and effort those quests require to be created. That it could’ve been invested better. Dating is basically stopping us from getting better content (at least in some areas). And we’re kind of asking for that…

#long post #hogwarts mystery #hphm #hphm spoilers #hphm mc #jacob's sibling #andre egwu #jae kim #badeea ali #talbott winger #hphm dating #jam city #unpopular opinion #let's talk

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gffa · 4 years

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Hi! Of course it’s all right, I’m always delighted to get even half a chance to talk about this stuff that I love so much!I will say, of course, there are few true concrete answers to any of this, even if word of god commentary lays out a direct answer, because several of the creators have spoken about how it’s important to maintain the sense of speculation and theorizing, as that was one of the things that was such a joy to them before they started making SW, too. As well as, you know, just the basic fact that everyone’s going to interpret things differently and that doesn’t make one more inherently valuable than another, as well as word of god commentary and, hell, even canon is only as meaningful to you as a fan as you want it to be!That said, I like the case I make for the things I’m passionate about, so I’ll make my case again because I enjoy doing it! We‘re always told that the Dark Side is evil and Light is good. But if you divide it like that, what does true balance mean? Fundamentally, light is good and dark is evil, that’s absolutely true, but the thing is that it’s never meant to be about a purity thing, but instead being about what you embrace as a worldview. Each one of us has both good and bad in us, the way you keep balance isn’t by exorcising the bad and then you’re good forever, but to every day keep making the choice to embrace the good. George Lucas explains the Force in, at its most basic terms, that the light is selfless (love, compassion, caring) and the dark is selfishness (greed, anger, hate, suffering). The only way to rise above the dark side is to discipline yourself against it. (George Lucas Explains The Force in a The Clone Wars writers meeting + transcription here) On the dark side specifically, how the Force works: “Once you become afraid that somebody’s going to take it away from you or you’re gonna lose it, then you start to become angry, especially if you’re losing it, and that anger leads to hate, and hate leads to suffering. Mostly on the part of the person who’s selfish, because you spend all your time being afraid of losing everything you’ve got instead of actually living.” How Yoda explains how the dark side/the Force works in The Phantom Menace:“ Fear is the path to the dark side. Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering.“ These are literally the same exact explanation, which shows us that, yes, Yoda and the Jedi are absolutely correct about how the dark side of the Force works! Another example: “In the end, it’s about fundamentally becoming selfless moreso than selfish. It seems so simple, but it’s so hard to do. And when you’re tempted by the dark side, you don’t overcome it once in life and then you’re good. It’s a constant. And that’s what, really, Star Wars is about and what I think George wanted people to know. That to be a good person and to really feel better about your life and experience life fully you have to let go of everything you fear to lose. Because then you can’t be controlled. [….] These are the core things of Star Wars.” –Dave Filoni, Celebration Chicago 2019, Rebels Remembered Panel “Attachment leads to jealousy. The shadow of greed that is. [What must I do, Master Yoda?] Train yourself to let go of everything you fear to lose.” –Yoda, Revenge of the Sith “[Anakin] turns into Darth Vader because he gets attached to things. He can’t let go of his mother; he can’t let go of his girlfriend. He can’t let go of things. It makes you greedy. And when you’re greedy, you are on the path to the dark side, because you fear you’re going to lose things, that you’re not going to have the power you need.” –George Lucas, Time Magazine These are also echoes of each other and the themes of how the dark side works in Star Wars, again showing us that the Jedi are correct in their understanding of how the Force works. And this is also what the Jedi teach: That you must face your inner darkness (your fears, your hate, your guilt, your anger) because it comes from within and it’s a lifelong thing. It starts with them designing their tests for younglings to move forward in their training by going to Ilum, where they will face the things they fear, the things they must overcome, to not become trapped in their mind.

It goes hand in hand with the Jedi’s bigger philosophy of understanding yourself and controlling yourself, that these things aren’t bad, but you need to get a grip on yourself (especially when you have these tremendous psychic powers and connections and can be influenced by outside emotions that you don’t even realize aren’t your own, as happens more than once in canon). Which is why one of the earliest lessons we see baby Jedi being taught is about meditation and understanding yourself, looking within to know who you are:

One more example: “All of my movies are about one thing. Which is the fact that the only prison you’re in is the prison of your mind. And if you decide to open the door and get out, you can. There’s nothing stopping you.“ –George Lucas (American Voices, 2015) “You-you said we would be trapped.” “Not by the cave you were, but by your mind. Lessons, you have learned. Find courage, you did– Hope, patience Trust, confidence, and selflessness.” –Jedi younglings + Yoda on Ilum, Star Wars: The Clone Wars, “The Gathering” The Jedi teach that this is what they must guard against, must discipline themselves against: “Qui-Gon whispered, ‘The dark side?’ He knew it was a thing all beings carried within them, a part of himself he would learn to guard against—the crèche masters had taught him all that.“ –Master & Apprentice, Claudia Gray “[The] only way to overcome the dark side is through discipline.” –George Lucas What do the Jedi mean, when they say „Trust in the Force“, and „May the Force be with you“? They’re blessings, basically! “Trust in the Force” is that the Jedi believe the Force will guide them, that if you can quiet your mind enough to hear its whispers, it will guide them into the moment and direction they’re meant to be in. Many times, they cannot possibly know the Force’s plans, so they kind of just have to shrug and go, “Well, we’re limited mortal beings who cannot possibly have an omniscient point of view like the mystical energy field that we can tap into a small fraction, so if you don’t know which direction to go, all you can do is trust the Force to guide you.” And “May the Force be with you” is the similar, that they’re saying “good luck” and that they hope the person has good fortune in whatever they’re going to go do. Are they always just talking about the Light and totally disregard the Dark? I would say they’re definitely not disregarding it, because the dark is part of everyone, it’s a lifelong challenge to overcome it, it’s not a one-and-done thing, but that doesn’t mean they embrace it. Nor does it mean that temporary, momentary emotions are the same thing as embracing the dark side–we see Jedi having darker emotions all the time and nobody’s like OH SHIT I HAD A NEGATIVE FEELING, I’M A BAD JEDI. No, they just don’t let it control them and don’t act based on those feelings. For example:

Negative emotions! Worry, anger, sorrow! All from “perfect” Jedi characters! Characters who are Jedi Masters and who believe incredibly strongly in Jedi principles and teachings! And not once do any of them say, oh, shit, no, I’m not allowed to feel that–instead they express their feelings, but do not let those feelings control them. They do not embrace the darker emotions, but instead face them and then let them go. What would be the fundamental difference between how a Sith like Sidious, a sort of grey Jedi, like Ahsoka, and someone who tries to be the perfect ideal of a Jedi, like Obi-Wan, use and see the Force? It’s all about how you approach it, basically. The dark side is not sustainable, the dark side corrupts, it cannot be balanced with the light, Matt Martin of the LFL story group explained that that’s one of the things George Lucas was very clear on and thus why “Gray Jedi” can’t really be a thing! If someone tries to embrace the dark along side the light, eventually they will fall into the dark. (Mystical, immortal creatures don’t count.) But momentary anger and upset and fear and selfish impulses are normal, so the goal Jedi strive towards isn’t the eradication of these things, but the honing of the skill to let go of them. (As “letting go” is a theme that’s rewarded in the word of god commentary and in the narrative, such as Anakin letting go of his hate and rage and doing something selfless is what allows him to become a Force Ghost, the only way to achieve that is through selflessness, the dark side cannot do it.) Ahsoka, for all that she isn’t a Jedi later on, who probably allows herself more darker impulses before she lets go of them, because she doesn’t have the same weight of granted authority over others placed on her, is still very much a light side user, she’s not gray at all! Same for Qui-Gon, while he’s something of a maverick, he very much adheres to the light side of the Force. As for Sidious and other dark siders, the Force is the Force is the Force, it’s all about how you use it. While there’s a certain element of how this can manifest in external ways (ie, certain places are stronger in the dark or the light) that press down on the person from the outside, in using the dark side or the light side, it’s about how you approach it. Do you do so with selfless intent? Then you’re on the light side. Do you do so with selfish intent? Intending to hurt people, embracing the pain and suffering you can psychically or internally feel? Then you’re on the dark side. It’s about how you choose to act on the things inside you, what you choose to hold onto and what you choose to work towards letting go. "Knowing that the film was made for a young audience, I was trying to say, in a simple way, that there is a God and that there is both a good side and a bad side. You have a choice between them, but the world works better if you’re on the good side.” –George Lucas The light is about how your feelings should be cherished, but you cannot let them rule over you, because you’ll hurt people. Like Ezra getting so afraid when the Grand Inquisitor threatened Kanan, that he caused the fyrnocks around him to attack and could have really hurt someone. Like Padawan Dooku cannot tell his own feelings from what he thinks is an external source of the dark side in Dooku: Jedi Lost. Like Anakin gets so angry in a training session that he literally brings the training room’s ceiling down on them before Yoda saves them, because he couldn’t control himself in Choose Your Destiny: An Obi-Wan & Anakin Adventure. Like Obi-Wan says in The Clone Wars, it’s not like (romantic) feelings aren’t allowed, they’re natural. But he senses a deep well of rage in Anakin and he needs to face that and deal with it. The Jedi are about, “Get your shit together because, when you have level 100 psychic abilities, you can hurt people, so you have to get a grip on that. Because the dark side lies, it twists things, it lingers in your head and poisons your thoughts, it’s not a reliable narrator.”

#jedi order #obi wan kenobi #mace windu #yoda #qui gon jinn #depa billaba #dark side #light side #the force #meta #long post

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killingeveperspectives · 4 years

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Perspective: Did Villanelle’s character arc in Season 3 get lost in translation?

Killing Eve Season 3 became something of my object of fascination by the odd disjointed experience I have watching it. It feels like it makes sense at first, but the whole lot is rather off. The more I revisit it, the more it appears that what we see on the surface is but an attempt at telling a very different story. But precisely by failing to convey their intended story (Or not committing to), the authors inadvertently created a slate with enough inconsistencies that it fits any rationalization the audience wants to impose on the final product. Its lack of clarity and internal logic made it adaptable to several points of view. I can impose the interpretation that Villanelle was given an irreconcilable redemption arc, or that she is still a psychopath and it will still somewhat work.

However, when the season is consumed stripped from our expectations, there is a dissonance between the narrative and the other elements of storytelling which sends mixed signals, especially in the most developed storyline in the season: Villanelle’s character arc. In the midst of this confusion and inability to get a hold of the character, I tried to grasp the intent of the author instead of the material itself. Upon reading interviews with Suzanne Heathcote, Sally Woodward and Jodie Comer, many of my initial interpretations of her arc were challenged. They seemed to never seek to rectify Villanelle’s psychopathy or nature, but to explore her deep need to belong. There seemed to be an awareness towards the truth of the character, and the journeys they have been on so far. It appears that their idea is that her impulses are her true self and the tension arises from the inescapability of her own nature and its exploitation, which becomes the sole designator of her worth as a being. This is indeed much more interesting than what I initially interpreted. So, I want to revisit Villanelle’s character arc with new eyes... in more detail... and see if I can find something new.

Villanelle’s initial motivations set-up a “ Self-affirmation” arc, not a Redemption arc

Initially, the show seems to set two main motivations for Villanelle: a search for autonomy and a search for belonging, which will prompt her desire to become a keeper and find her family. Objectively, her motivations set up a journey for authentic self-identity.

The opening wedding sequence is a good way of introducing her search for autonomy. Six months after Rome, Villanelle is gold digging her way through life, still very psychopathic of her. This is the first time we see Villanelle exist without a parental figure and without the tight control of ‘The 12’, and it turns out she is doing just fine. Where her wedding represents her agency and autonomy, being dragged into ‘The 12’ by Dasha has her sitting in the back of the car like a moody toddler. Her relationship with ‘The 12’ is infantilizing, controlling and coercive. It does plant the seeds for her struggle by visual storytelling, which I dismissed for a silly comedic effect.

Villanelle seems more aware of the power plays behind her bargain to come back, contrasting with her previous aloofness. This time, she seems keen on cutting her own part of the deal which is to become a Keeper (which oddly never involves getting the names of ‘The 12’). Her request is so absurd, and their agreement to make her a keeper so obviously fake, that it shows how Villanelle is truly unaware of the magnitude of what she is dealing with and how little leverage she actually has. But her effort to carve some degree of freedom and agency within her world is an authentic motivation. Her overall disinterest for the job also helps to solidify the idea that she is dreading being controlled, and only agrees to perform the kills as part of her promotion process. Which should not be confused – although it easily is – with a lack of enjoyment in Killing. In fact, Villanelle thoroughly enjoys herself in the kills she performs before Episode 5, be it improving on a relic, stealing a baby, or scaring hiccups away. Villanelle isn’t opposed to killing, she is tired of being ordered to kill. As welcomed as this development is, in many moments her motivations could be mistaken by childlike Villanelle just being capricious.

Parallel to her self-affirmation comes a search for a sense of belonging. This is a deep foundational motivation for the character that had always been in the subtext of the show. There is a fascination towards family and normal life in Villanelle, that she tries to recreate with those she “loves”. Arguably not even the character can articulate this urge, so when Season 3 sets to explore it, it feels forced. Villanelle seems intrigued by the gratuitous affection the baby elicits in people, including those that don’t own it, leading her to kidnap the baby as an experiment, then literally toss it away. It did not elicit in her the gratuitous affection it elicits in everyone around her. She is a psychopath. When the baby is reunited with their father, she is once again puzzled at the happiness in the dad’s face. The baby belonged to him. Did she ever belong to someone? This question will lead her to seeking her own family, taking her to Russia.

Being so far removed from the events of season 2 and considering that Konstantin and Villanelle’s scene was completely overshadowed by the subsequent events, I found it hard to add weight to this motivation. A large part of the audience is understandably eager to learn about Villanelle’s past, however there wasn’t enough development to justify why the character wanted to learn about her past. Instead, she enunciates her newfound fascination with babies, without elements or events to convincingly move the character in this direction.

Villanelle’s journey home: nuanced and conflicted story telling got lost in translation

I have broken down how I believe this episode not only retcons her background, but soft retcons Villanelle’s psychopathy and her entire character – and I still believe in practical terms it inevitably does - but it’s a shame, because the episode in itself doesn’t. It’s all about perception and expectation tainting interpretation. The writer’s original idea was to have the audience go on a journey with Villanelle to this disconnected corner of the world, as she is surprisingly charmed by the oddity of what she finds. It was the perfect escapism from her claustrophobic world of ‘The 12’. We wrestle with the nature x nurture question as Villanelle wrestles with it herself, we feel at home, we connect with the family and feel rejected and deceived as Villanelle does herself. This episode was written from Villanelle’s perspective alone, she is the voice telling the story, we are literally asked to see it from her eyes:

But there is a catch: Villanelle is an unreliable narrator. The writer did plant elements that challenge Villanelle’s narrative, mainly as glimpses of other characters perspectives: Bor’ka has a normal loving drawing of his mother on the fridge; Pyotr likes his mother alright and challenge’s Villanelle’s perception of their mother meanness, by stating Villanelle herself used to be mean to him, implying a connection between the two; the husband reveals that Tatiana still cries every night because of the whole thing. All of which becomes the core problem with this episode: Villanelle is an unreliable narrator but we don’t perceive her as such because of our emotional investment in the character. Who is to say Villanelle’s tendencies and behaviour didn’t genuinely scare and tear the family apart and without knowing what to do after her husband died, Tatianna abandoned Oksana in the orphanage, despite genuinely suffering from the decision? Tatianna is a very flawed mother and Oksana is a very troubled child, both these realities are valid and interconnected, in the most nuanced, emotionally challenging and complex episode of the entire show.

Underneath Villanelle’s standpoint, Suzanne Heathcote managed to hide a sensible and honest perception of that family’s complicated past: the heartbreaking reality is that deep down, despite all the layers of pain, trouble, blame, shame and guilt, both characters wished it was different and they could somehow connect, but the truth is that they were, and still are, unable to. Thus, both characters were speaking their truths, however we are not afforded a chance to truly see her mother’s perspective because we are stuck in Villanelle’s world and Villanelle has empathy for no one (Except for her little brother but I don’t want to beat on this dead horse). Despite her manipulative and violent behavior towards her family, from where Villanelle stands - and within her own perspective rightfully so - her mother was simply neglectful, abusive, and worse: saw her as something alien. Thus, having her mother admit her own “darkness” was so important: This darkness I carry belongs to you, therefore I belong to you. Ingenious. Upon revisiting this episode, I truly appreciate it as a showcase of the potential of Suzanne Heathcote’s writting, with beautifully crafted storytelling that seems straightforward at the surface but invites us to dive deeper. Unfortunately, this gem is lost in translation.

The episode was all about how Villanelle made sense of herself and her past, not about what really happened, as the writers claimed they didn’t want to excuse Villanelle’s actions nor erase her psychopathy. It wasn’t about the authoritative writers explaining Villanelle’s past to the audience and deliberately painting Villanelle as a child tortured into becoming a monster because of her upbringing… the problem is that it feels like it was. And when later you add Dasha’s abuse to the mix, the retcon of her psychopathy is irresistible to the audience, but the creators are not naïve and especially as the word “psychopath” seem to have vanished from their vocabulary, when previously it was the selling point of the show; something doesn’t add up. Killing her mother marks a turning point in Villanelle’s character arc, and here things start to get complicated...

Killing her mother sets Villanelle in an identity crisis but what is it exactly?

When Villanelle gets rejected, she kills her mother and sets the house on fire mirroring the orphanage arson. In the train scene, we see Villanelle wearing her mother’s clothes and listening to crocodile rock while crying, smiling, jamming, reminiscing. Despite her efforts to wrap herself in the elements that symbolize the moments she felt like she belonged with that family, she is still alone and there is a lot of pain – fair, psychopaths are not painless. But what that scene represents for Villanelle is an enigma, and I believe not Jodie Comer, nor Suzanne Heathcote, nor anyone, actually knows what this scene is really supposed to mean emotionally for Villanelle.

I want to contrast this scene with another scene in a movie where we watch an actress cycling through many emotions in a long shot as she listens to music: the final 2:30 minute long take in Portrait of a Lady on fire. The scenes parallel each other, and kudos to the unafraid acting of Jodie Comer and Adele Haenel. However, there is a key difference between the two: Celinne Sciamma (screenwriter and director) knew exactly what she was looking for and walked the lead actress Adele Haenel through all the emotions she would be evoking, their succession order and meaning. All the emotions conjured in the scene were carefully crafted in the audience throughout the entire movie, generating a deep connection and understanding of the characters, the story and its symbols, that culminates in an apotheotic cathartic release. That scene was not just a beautiful, emotionally loaded scene: it had intent, it had a clear meaning. And from there on is where Villanelle’s emotional scenes start to break apart.

The display of a person suffering through emotional pain will obviously evoke feelings of compassion, care and empathy in the audience, but this level of immediate reactive connection does not equal an understanding of characters’ emotional reality. It’s important that audiences not only know that the character is in pain but what that pain means, even more so when you are exploring the boundaries of emotion in a character that has a fundamentally different subjective experience than the audience. Given the lack of build up and more extensive exploration of the mother and daughter relationship, it’s not only harder to add the appropriate emotional weight as it is to understand it’s ramifications. Thus, despite lots of tears, Villanelle remains an emotional black box after coming back from Russia.

On the other hand, there is this interesting motif with Villanelle that death brings freedom: once a person is dead, they cease to have a hold on her, allowing her to reinvent herself. For example, when Eve hurt her in the season 2 finale, she kills her to break free from her hold. In her own words: “I’m so much better now my ex is dead”. This motif is again brought up in her conversation with Bertha Kruger in episode 04. As Villanelle tries to reinvent herself after killing her mother and whatever that meant, she learns she was being tricked by ‘The 12’ and that her promotion was a farce, bringing her full circle. She went through these journeys and still didn’t break free: she was still controlled and still rejected, thus her only solution was escape literally and metaphorically.

Her mother rejected her because of her violence, which is precisely the only worth ‘The 12’ see in her. Both of her Nemesis reduce her to the same image: she is a violent kid that kills. Thus, her shifting relationship with killing becomes more interesting when it is framed as a desire for self-affirmation and not as a rectification of her nature as the result of a new found moral compass and compassion, which places Villanelle in the same territory as traditional female assassin characters before her. She is reclaiming her identity, from her past and from her subjugators, hence the motivation to not kill could be seen as a deliberate act of rebellion. However, it is unclear how concrete this motivation is, given that she does indeed keep murdering, and how it interplays with the emotional changes we are shown the character is going through, altogether making her distancing from killing narratively elusive.

Character development couldn’t commit to a narrative, going from nuanced to disorienting

Part of the charm in Killing Eve is what is left unsaid and implied, but nevertheless registers, connects. This relies on the smart use of character expositions and film language to efficiently get the audience on board with the character’s world organically. All previous season’s made good use of monologues and dialogue to flesh out the world and specially characters. In Season 1, Villanelle was explored and developed through excellent dialogues, and in Season 2, when exploring her intimate inner reality, the writers opted to use the AA meetings for a direct exposition via a monologue that tied together previous visual and narrative set up elements.

This type of efficient character exploration doesn’t lend itself well to the nuanced layered exploration the writers set out to do in season 3. And still, they stubbornly committed to it, withholding characters from fleshing out information through dialogue, while overplaying ‘show don’t tell’ trying to convey character’s inner realities with fragmented elements scattered over a disjointed plot, thus relying heavily on the actors to create a semblance of coherence out of the cacophony. I truly believe this choice was extremely detrimental to the season, since it created unnecessary challenges for the main goal which was character exploration. The result is an unsettling gap between the writers’ vision of the characters and their arcs, and what we, the audience, experience.

I want to take a moment to explore examples of storytelling choices that I found confusing in developing Villanelle past episode 05, by taking a look on her 3 murders after she comes back from Russia.

In the Romania kill, we see Villanelle sitting on the bed halfhearted, downgraded into taking this job after her promotion debacle. The title card links us back to the scene in the beginning of the episode when she realizes she was conned. This is bullshit, this job is bullshit, and yet she has to do it. All elements are underlying the conflict in her search for autonomy, but then the song in the background evokes sentimentalism, underlying Villanelle’s growing feelings, subtly implying she feels bad about the act of killing. The scene composition sends mixed signals. Then it cuts to Villanelle ready for the kill with the upbeat recap intro music playing (????), she can’t focus, gets stabbed and cut to an angry tear-eyed Villanelle stitching up her own wound in the bathroom floor, fleshing out how she felt used and that she wants out. Then for a moment, the scene gets more intimate and she says - or even confesses? - she doesn’t want to do it anymore. We look down to a defeated and vulnerable Villanelle underlying the characters impotency or is it a moral struggle? The entire sequence purposely avoids committing to whether she failed because she didn’t want kill, or because she couldn’t kill. These two conflicts have completely different implications in interpreting and understanding the character development, but we remain in the limbo, confused as to what it could be.

To make matters worse, both these motivations: quitting ‘The 12’ and stopping killing, will be flipped when Villanelle pro-actively asks for a job and decidedly kills Dasha (who survived out of plot contrivances luck ). The scene with Helene is also interesting. When Villanelle meets Helene there is a conflict around identity and belonging. A particularly childlike Villanelle is again falling into tears as Helene breaks into her personal space with an embrace. Villanelle gives in to the embrace then pulls away at the mention of the word monster. That is not the identity Villanelle wants, nevertheless it feels good to be accepted. Then Villanelle asks an exasperated Helene for another job, not before being reminded she is a child, again powerless.

“Look what you made me do” playing in the background.The song alludes to the power domination she is under and her motivation to break free, but the entire scene alludes to her conflict over her self-perception and belonging with Helene as a mother figure. I’m nor sure I follow what the character wants, I’m hanging on a spiderweb on the wall, Villanelle is crying, and can we please stop torturing this character into feelings for five minutes? Who is this reformed character? Jokes aside, there is one message that emerges, which is Villanelle doesn’t want to be a “monster” (violent killer, or more subtly violent in general) but she is forced to do it. This scene does succeed in softening Villanelle by emphasizing this new narrative leap following her seeming new found conscience: that Villanelle was made into a violent woman, but she is not naturally one. Her brutality is not transgressively hers anymore, it is a burden imposed onto her, which again places Villanelle’s character back into the comfort of the place designated to violent female characters: sad broken woman went murderous. Which stands in sharp contrast with Villanelle characterization so far, and what made her character iconic in it’s own right. The only way to make this narrative work is assuming killing her mother erased her psychopathy and gave her the whole bag of feelings and empathy. But if episode 05 fails to sell that, then the following episodes feels like tumbling down a rocky narrative slope. But the seed still lingers on my mind after reading paratext from the creators and cast: if you’re not trying to retcon Villanelle, then what does this all mean?

Rhian’s murder is a pivotal moment in Villanelle’s arc that fell into obscurity by jarring storytelling. Here the narrative seems to finally address the elephant in the room: when push comes to shove, can she control her violent impulses, which, no matter if inherited or cultivated, became a core part of herself? The ballroom tea dance effectively distances Villanelle from killing, but Villanelle and Rhian’s exchange show things aren’t so simple. More overtly so, Rhian and Villanelle subway brawl is all about giving Villanelle a chance to fully articulate the conflict around her subjugation to ‘The 12’ and her self-agency. Villanelle beats up Rhian, which could symbolically represent her refusal to be an obeying “sheep”; but, despite trying to get a grip of herself, her nature takes over and she kills, which could represent the uncontrollability of her impulse. Thus, the interaction between these two scenes, ballroom dance and Rhian’s kill create a conflict surrounding Villanelle’s nature, self-control and capability to change that goes beyond the central conflict of each scene alone. Interesting, better explore it late than never, right?

The next scene seems to give us the resolution of this conflict, as Villanelle exits the subway, marching forwards, defiantly looking at us while we hear “Nothing matters if you bury it deep” in the background. It sends a message that Villanelle ultimately embraced her nature, and perhaps herself, and by doing so symbolically broke free from the oppression, emerging victorious. One could say she found her mojo back by killing on her terms. However, this never has any effects on the character, Villanelle is still as conflicted about her self-identity and still expresses her desire stop killing when we meet her again in the final scene as if her march after killing Rhian never happened. so what was the writers trying to say with the Ryan’s kill sequence when, despite disconnecting and contradicting the previous and following scenes with Eve, it seems to have no effect on Villanelle herself? What narrative are the writers committing to?

Villanelle’s character arc: the faithful translation of a uncommitted vision

Villanelle’s character arc, not that it is her privilege, gets muddled by deliberate ambiguity, character isolation, confusing motivations, and overall disconnected narrative as the writers refuse to commit to a vision. Thus, set-ups, pay-offs, conflicts and cause-effect are muddled, devoiding the character development of tangible meaning or aim – nuanced or otherwise. Despite it all sort of working moment-to-moment, it’s hard to keep up with what is being established overall, the ever shifting and clashing elements making it impossible to crack these characters and their journeys. In threading the fine line between the said and the unsaid, Season 3 had its characters bottling up so much that we are alienated from them. Simply saying “something changed inside her, and she is facing lots of things” doesn’t mean anything. Having the character state that she doesn’t want to kill (be it in general or for ‘The 12′) only to have have your character still actively killing both for ‘The 12′ and for personal reasons and ignoring the conflict it creates, shows the character’s motivations don’t mean anything. Villanelle was in search for an authentic self-identity but in the end who is she? What was this journey all about? Honestly, fixing Villanelle to allow a romance no one really knows.

So my overall impression is that Villanelle’s character wasn’t lost in translation because there wasn’t any coherent vision behind it, but a succession of floating undecided moods and motivations tied together by powerful performances that leaves you feeling like Villanelle was redeemed. Thus, the audience - and arguably the cast and creators - are left relentlessly rationalizing Villanelle so the character doesn’t fall apart. Some see Villanelle truly in love, some see her as obsessing, some see her as emotionless, some see her as a pastiche, some see her as blossoming into her true self, some see her as two different characters (Oksana/Villanelle), some just think she cries a lot, some think she is remorseful, some think she isn’t, some believe she is a psychopath, some think she matured, some think she was never a psychopath and some think she is outright cured. No one fully grasped what is happening with Villanelle, not because her character is complex beyond comprehension but because her character remained conveniently inaccessible. Ultimately, Villanelle’s character growth is a mystery the show teased at but did not commit to crack.

#killing eve #killingeve #killing eve review #killing eve analysis #killing eve season 3 #killing eve s3 #killingeveperspectives #ke #ke s3 #villanelle #villanelle analysis #killing eve retcon #villanelle retcon

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the-lightning-strikes-again · 4 years

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I really don’t get why people keep saying Allura was SO awful or horrible to Keith after learning about his heritage. She just gave him the cold shoulder for an episode or two, and it’s not like they brought this up later in the show as a way for her to hold some other grudge against him. People are just blowing it up as something bigger than it actually was. And like many people have said, her liking or “suddenly” being nice to Lotor wasn’t bc oH he’s Altean (1/2)

Continued anon message: “There were several moments between their first close encounter and him revealing his heritage which prove that trust was developing before then, but I guess people just overlook those (2/2)”

Hi, anon! Thanks for the note! Yeah, haha, this topic of “is Allura racist?” is an interesting one because for me, it boils down to looking at the show’s design decisions and details. And those design decisions came from real human beings who aren’t any more objective than the rest of us. So as a content creator myself (who feels incredibly human and and whose stories and portrayals are also imperfect by virtue of their imperfect creator), I have to recognize that it’s impossible to create a totally woke, unproblematic creative product—and it’s also impossible to ensure that everyone around the world interprets everything in exactly the same way, no matter how well-intentioned the project.

That said, I do think a lot of fans are victims of how this show may have manipulated/gaslit them to feel, not just about Allura but also about other characters and events as well—and that there are benefits to analyzing what went wrong with VLD.

My hope is that, as content creators and fans, maybe we can learn from VLD’s narrative mistakes or even better understand how two fans can have totally opposing interpretations over the same creative work. In the case of VLD, as I’ve mentioned before, the show uses a screwy and imbalanced narrative lens when portraying victims. To add to that, the show design also consistently undermines details foundational to the show universe (such as using an unreliable narrator to express what the show actually accepts as objective fact or history). This is important, because the way in which something is told/shown ultimately manipulates audience emotion for or against something. This gets into how propaganda and subliminal messaging work at a technical level. And when the narrative lens is handled in a biased way that undermines other story elements, audience reaction/interpretation gets messy, no matter what the stated events/facts are in the story. We are attuned to pick up on cognitive dissonances (inconsistent patterns) as part of our human survival instinct.

I’m not convinced that VLD dev team wielded the Power of the Narrative Lens very well—if it had, season 2′s portrayal of the conflict with Keith and Allura would have looked different.

In an s2 with a more balanced narrative lens, we likely would have seen at least flashes of Allura’s memory, showing some s3 backstory of Allura’s fear upon realizing that previously faithful Galran allies were killing multiple civilizations upon an order from their own kind...and coming for Altea next. Or maybe there would have been something/someone else involving Allura’s traumatic experiences so that the audience could have an empathetic, emotionally connective moment with her. We would have, in equal parts, still seen Keith’s plight as the suffering saint trying to figure out what being half-Galra means. And we would have seen the other paladins trying to resolve the conflict and understand how to recalibrate together as a team and a family.

Instead, in provided canon, we see Hunk (of all people, why Hunk?) make racist microaggressions at Keith, further alienating Keith without any recourse. And for Allura, the visual lens shows her making a cold glare at Keith without further explanation. It’s a very alienating moment. In season 2, you feel that coldness from Allura because the show’s visual lens aligns you to Keith’s gaze for several agonizing seconds, and the narrative bias of the animation is to show Keith as the singular victim in this situation. It is a very targeted, lonely, and disquieting moment for Keith. The other paladins and their reactions to Allura and Keith even feed into this. It’s not until s3 that we get an emotional glimpse into the omnicide of an entire solar system—and even then, that history focuses more on the motives of the instigators rather than showing the brutality experienced by victims. By that point, we’ve blown way past the s2 issue, which creates another layer of cognitive dissonance: that the situation doesn’t feel totally...resolved, somehow, even though plot-wise it actually is.

So I think there are indicators that the dev team’s own biases and agendas informed, at times for the worse, the very lens through which we consume the VLD story. I don’t think the dev team was aware what tackling genocide while visually portraying Allura’s trauma as antagonistic and alienating would result in? And I think this oversight gets into why some fans feel a certain way about literally anything in this show, haha. So I feel like we’re all victims of a show with amazing potential and incredibly fascinating elements but just…poor execution.

One other thing I have to give faith on when I have a disagreement with another show fan—it’s a 78-episode show. How often are people holistically watching and critically reviewing this show in order to catch every little detail? I’m pretty sure I can’t remember all the details either, even though I re-watched the show not that long ago. So there’s a whole other layer here, where fans have a separation from the source content itself. So take those emotional negative “impressions” people developed while watching s2 or any other moment where Allura has been less than the ideal woman (oof, fandom is so forgiving with men but so unforgiving with women), and then suddenly muddy those memories with 2 years of not re-watching the show holistically. Typically, the brain is better at storing negative reactions than positive ones. So if someone had a negative reaction to Allura’s actions with Keith in s2 or elsewhere, without an empathetic moment to balance it out, then that negativity is going to stick, and every detail to the contrary is going to fade out.

I know for me, I’ve really had to fight the memory problem because after over a year, for example, I was building up impressions about VLD history that actually were missing some important details from s3. And that was kind of a shock to me. So I do think selective memory plays a part in adding to a biased dissonance one might feel from the actual story.

Ultimately, this whole unnecessary fandom split on “is Allura racist?” is one reason why I feel that VLD—for all of its good things that I genuinely love so much—had a lot of troubling issues. Despite all the canonical good that Allura ends up doing and how she overcomes trauma to champion genuine peace for all, there’s subliminal messaging against her because of how the visual and narrative spins or hides things. And that issue has nothing to do with the characters but everything to do with the development team and how the show was written/directed. And that, I think, informs ongoing fandom perceptions of Allura and creates just some really painful and unnecessary messes, to the point of creating an overall inaccurate take like “Allura is racist” when in fact, she’s just traumatized from very real and significant abuses and overcomes that, even.

It really makes me, as a writer, try to look at my own stories and attempt to understand “why” I portray certain things as I do while writing—and if that lens portrayal is really the best one for the effect/message I want. Because the way in which a story is conveyed can really play mind games with the audience, and that might not be the right effect for a story that isn’t another Inception or Crying of Lot 49, lol.

#Voltron #Allura #Keith #VLD #Writing Techniques #Subliminal Messages #Biases in the Visual Lens of a Story #VLD had an incredible lack of empathy for victims #it shows in the very way it portrays their stories and then villainizes or undermines them #Thanks for the note anon!

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ardeawritten · 3 years

Text

Halo 4

The game-player in me is thrilled with the very pretty levels, new weapons, flashy enemies and more creative, less linear methods of level progression/interaction. Lovely soundtrack as always, though the random peppy upbeat music overlaid on a race-to-save earth battle is still hilarious. This game was fun and enjoyable to play, a great few evenings' worth of distraction and some nice catharsis for a little current-events-related attitude. The last quarter felt like a meat-grinder slog, but then, it's endgame of an FPS. What else is it going to be?

The writer in me is rolling their eyes.

(there’s an whole essay under the cut) ((I really hope these cuts work on all platforms, if not I am sincerely sorry; it’s like a thousand words long))

Ok, so the first three games were a fairly standard blank-slate FPS protagonist. Play as an armored super-soldier fighting to save Humanity from the Monsters, with a Sexy AI Sidekick and some Battle Buddies. Not what I'd call high art in gaming, but I can understand its popularity and the enduring appeal of a simple, straight-forward "if it moves shoot it" style of play. No escort missions, no puzzles, really no boss battles requiring tricks and analysis. Just "if that didn't kill it, keep shooting or use a bigger gun."

Writing-wise, there's not a lot of characterization but overall Indications that MC is well-recognized, well-liked, has a sense of humor and a camaraderie with his co-workers, is pals with his Sexy AI and is a generally level-headed person-shaped brick. It's an early 2000's Military FPS, it's not about the characters, it's about role-playing as an indestructible military hero who always saves the girl. It's the game equivalent of John Carter of Mars-genre action hero stories (books, not movie.) This does not absolve it of the crime of woman-as-sexy-or-dead, but it is par for the course.

So on to game #4.

This game was released in late 2012, in a post-Mass Effect gaming market. #4 has a ME2/3 feel to it, which makes sense. They're both very popular flashy scifi action games with similar graphics/design feel (and with Sexy AIs but that's another conversation about the literally unreal 'idealization' of womanhood in a male-dominated creator/created space!)

It opens with the storyline revelation that MC is a brainwashed and conditioned child-soldier, alleges he's got some issues with performing basic human functions and clarifies that Cortana's existence is the "band-aid" applied to that problem. On the MC side, Cortana's expiration date has passed and she's fragging out, giving MC a personal reason to want to get home. This combines to give the player a sense of urgency- if Cortana dies, it's not just "sad," it's "MC will lose his band-aid and all his humanity will bleed out." This is also I think the first time the POV is, narratively-speaking, third-person (we know things MC doesn't or couldn't know) instead of solely first-person (I'm not counting Arbiter’s story as breaking first-person, as it's still limited to player character POV.)

As a Writer, here's my issues:

- MC is given a traumatic backstory as a brainwashed child-soldier to what? Justify a damaged emotional state, as if emotional wounding and isolation isn't a very common, very human point to reach after having experienced and participated in war at any age? Justify being unable to function without Cortana’s hand-holding? And then the game never goes back and addresses that opening cut-scene.

- Cortana's existence had a built-in, known expiration, but she was still (retconned?) created to provide MC his primary band-aid. Either this was extremely short-sighted of the Spartan R&D team, or MC likewise was expected to expire on the same timeline. There's no talk of planning ahead for this problem that would render an extremely expensive asset fundamentally useless. (ok there’s Cortana’s “they’ll pair you with someone else but it won’t be me” line, but that isn’t exactly smoothing the transition any.)

- We the audience/player now know Cortana's death will have personal, negative repercussions on the MC's health outside of grief and trauma over loss of a friend and partner. She exists solely for his benefit, and must continue existing for his benefit, and the plot's urgency driven forward by his need to continue benefiting. It's not about saving Cortana, it's about saving MC. This would be fine if her character existence was framed as "computer service program," but it isn't. Prior to this game, narrative and gameplay repeatedly tells the audience she's a character and not just MC's security blanket.

- The above, coupled with her "stock naked lady sexy" design, has Implications of how the writing team figured they could fit a female character into their narrative. So far we have A) woman who fails to complete a heroic sacrifice and is shot in the back and dies pointlessly, B) woman whose visual and intellectual existence is tailored solely to benefit the MC and has no autonomy outside of that existence and C) woman as 'fallen mother/evil crone' who perpetrated the brainwashing on the MC. (Female Spartan in the mammoth got a whole three lines; female scientist with a bag of nukes? She… died pointlessly.)

(I swear I did not intend this to be an analysis of female roles in the Halo main game franchise but hey, my first memorable introduction to the FPS genre was Mysteries of the Sith where, playing as female jedi Mara Jade, you save the guy by making him acknowledge the value of a non-romantic peer relationship! That game was made in 1997.)

For Cortana, in 1 I got the impression she was a shipboard AI like EDI in Mass Effect, not an AI specific to MC. Her characterization feels like it's been shifted each game from a warship AI capable of coordinating fleet-wide maneuvers and going toe-to-toe with Guilty Spark to a cowering captive of Gravemind needing physical rescue to a Pocket Pal for MC to cover for his emotional shortcomings and inability to interact with technology more complex than "a button."

Having an AI programmed to be essentially a therapy dog or social caretaker, and exploring the complexities of that role related to the invisible and unquantifiable damage violence visits on the human body and brain would be a very interesting story. An AI designed for coordinating war on a massive scale who despite "winning" each battle finds its platform systematically reduced until the only "ship and crew" left are just one person would also be an interesting story! Why are we left with "my girlfriend's dying and I'm going to starve because she's the only one who knows how to cook."

tl;dr: the opening cutscene was detrimental to the plot, characterization and world-building. The game would have been fine as a story about a soldier coming to terms with his best friend’s inevitable death while trying to save the planet, and would have preserved Cortana’s game 1 identity as an autonomous AI who lost her ship and partnered up with MC of her own free will. The ending of “we saved each other, if just for a little while, and will grieve but will continue on” would have been stronger IMO than “I’m going to save you-I’m going to save you-NOPE.”

#text post #long post #long text post #long ass essay text post writing rant #also why does she get more naked with every game #I mean I know why from a revenue standpoint but what's the in-world justification #here let me beat what I'm sure is a very dead horse because I'm eight years late to the party #don't worry there's a tl;dr in there at the end #does anyone else remember the AI in Flubber who fell in love with the MC and then gets mashed and copies herself?#because that was a more satisfying character arc #Ardea Plays Halo

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nadziejastar · 4 years

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Let's imagine an alternate universe where Isa/Saix is female, but otherwise she's written exactly the same. How do you think audiences would react differently from the male version? Would she be more popular or less?

I think Saix would have been very popular in a similar way to Larxene. People are longing for female characters that aren’t stereotypically nice and feminine. Saix was cold and sociopathic, and I can see a female version being popular in a similar way to Azula from ATLA. If we were just going by KH2 and Days, I think a female Saix would have been more popular.

BBS, now that’s a bit different. Isa was already a very feminine pretty boy in that game. He is described as shy and only comes out of his shell for Lea. There was nothing creepy about him; he was very cute design-wise. He was sarcastic, so he might have been seen as slightly tomboyish if he had been female. Either way, Isa steps outside the gender stereotype box. I think he/she would have been equally popular either way.

I think really, the main thing Isa needed was a proper backstory and character development to explore his/her friendship with Lea. If he/she received that, then he/she would have been a very popular character. Isa never got that, though. If he had been a girl, I think it would have been FAR more easy for people to see the intended romantic hints between her and Axel/Lea, especially in the novels. I think the only reason people couldn’t see it was because Axel and Saix were both guys.

One of the creators of The Legend of Korra made a comment about watching with a hetero lens. Well, that’s exactly how I feel about Axel and Saix. They were intended to be a gay couple that would kinda slip under the radar due to it being so subtle. But for some reason, Square changed their minds and became terrified of LeaIsa/AkuSai by the time KH3 came out. I definitely think it was more than just Nomura changing his mind on a whim. It was self-censorship. They needed to focus on a girl so they didn’t seem too gay.

I think if Saix were a girl, people would have been a LOT more critical of her relationship with Lea and what it was reduced to in KH3. Saix’s relationship with Axel/Lea was handled in such a dismissive and hands-off way in KH3. Saix, even after he admitted he was jealous, simply grumbled that Lea wouldn’t get it out of him a second time. That was their heart-warming reconciliation. Without a doubt, it came across as extremely homophobic to me. But homophobia is normal in society, so many people didn’t really see the problem. Saix and Axel were just normal dudes being bros. And bros don’t get all touchy-feely with each other, right?

If Saix had been female, people would have been extremely confused about why the story was so quick to resolve her relationship with Lea, and why it was so insistent on focusing on Subject X instead. Why would a female Saix be so obsessed with a girl she barely knew and completely destroy her relationship with Axel over it? On top of that, almost ALL the focus went to the Sea-Salt trio’s reunion. Perhaps that was because that trio was less controversial. There was no potential homoerotic undertones with them. They were deemed as “safe” to depict. LeaIsa? Nope. Too risky.

If Saix had been a girl, I think her bond with Axel would have been given waaaaaay more focus. I definitely don’t think the game would have been so terrified to show their closeness and intimacy, like it was in KH3. That was solely the result of them being two men. KH3 went running and screaming in the opposite direction at the idea of two men expressing that type of intimacy.

Kairi

Kairi, who was a tomboy in KHI, became a little bit more mature in KHII. She changed a lot outwardly since at that age girls grow a lot faster than boys, but her lively personality didn’t fundamentally change. Enough that ‘with Riku and Sora gone, right now Kairi is the strongest person on Destiny Islands’ is an actual premise. I like the scene in KHI, when she watches the sunset with Sora, and tells him not to change. I thought it showed very well her anxiety and loneliness over how as we get older we find a distance growing between us and our close friends. –Nomura

If Isa had been a girl, I think a LOT more people would have been able to notice that her story line was unfinished. One of the main recurring themes in KH is the idea that things change as we grow older. We grow apart from our closest friends.

“Kingdom Hearts is not too realistic, but I do want my players to grasp a sense of reality from it as well,” Nomura said. “For example, I’m sure you had friends when you were young, a good group of friends, but as you grow older things change and it doesn’t always stay the same. I think all I can say is please play to the very end and see what happens. But I think Kingdom Hearts 3 does depict how each character feels about each other in this new storyline.”

This idea was carried on even in KH3. For better or worse, it influenced the ending.

RoxasA lot of thought was put into this character. Based on the premise that he was ‘an expression of the reverse, hidden inside Sora’, I gave him pretty much the exact same face as Sora, just with slightly narrower eyes. And then, I made white the basis for his clothes, in contrast to KHII Sora. The black and white checkered pattern, ‘neither darkness nor light’, was to be a hint. My absolute favourite scene of his has to be the one at the end of the opening of KHII, when he says 'looks like my summer vacation is over’. I put a lot of feeling into creating that, as I intended it to feel, for a moment, like the end.–Nomura

Roxas had the same issue to deal with in KH2. He was growing up and things weren’t going to stay the same between him and his friends. The end of Roxas’s summer vacation was an iconic scene.

This was also one of the main themes of Roxas and Xion’s tragic relationship. When Xion stood up slowly, the shot was extremely similar to the one where Kairi slowly stood up in KH1, with Sora just watching. Then they were watching the sunset and Kairi told him to never change. Xion literally changed—into Sora.

IMO, Roxas and Xion’s romance was a further exploration of Kairi’s relationship with Sora. Only the roles were reversed. Xion was even based on the KH1 tomboyish Kairi. The day Xion disappears is called “Tears” and Roxas cries. Afterwards, that’s when Axel discovers the WINNER stick that Roxas left him.

Talking to Roxas and Xion always brings back memories of my human life, back when I was a kid. It’s a weird sensation. I ought to be able to share all this with Saïx, but I just don’t feel like it anymore. It’s strange, but I’m content with just missing what’s gone. I’m not the one who changed. You did.

Axel was dealing with the exact same thing. After a while, there was a distance growing between him, Roxas, and Xion. Not to mention the fact that Axel wasn’t growing up. He was already grown, which presented a unique hurdle. And at the same time he was growing apart from Roxas and Xion, he was remembering how Isa had changed. This was something that needed to be resolved. Clearly, this was something that caused Axel a tremendous amount of pain. Did his relationship with Roxas and Xion need to be resolved? Of course it did. But I’d argue that his relationship with Isa caused Lea more pain than any other. Yet, it got comparatively little focus.

“Yeah. As long as we remember one another, we’ll never be apart. Got it memorized?” Roxas grinned.

A wish that they could always be together—was longing for the impossible. But at least they could always remember one another.

Saix stood up very slowly in their clock tower scene in KH3, like Kairi and Xion did. He also got a WINNER stick, which I’m sure had a lot to did with the backstory of Axel’s tear marks and him being a “crybaby”. All very deliberate. If Saix had been female, I don’t think anyone would have had trouble seeing that Axel was thinking about Saix all the time in Days. He wasn’t just the friendly “dad” of the sea salt trio. He was NOT happy in Days. He was watching Roxas and Xion grow more intimate, and remembering how he and Isa used to be the same way. He was miserable the entire game.

Axel cared about Roxas and Xion, but he didn’t really want to be a dad to them. At least not from what I could see. He wanted to protect them from experiencing the pain that he felt. And he also wanted to relive his lost innocence through them. I think if Saix had been a girl, people would have cared more about her relationship with Axel getting an actual resolution in KH3.

I wanted us to stay together. All I wanted was to hold on to our happiness as a trio in the Organization. But I told myself to grow up and stop wishing for the impossible. Well, I’m done with that. That’s not the answer I want.

If Saix had been a girl, people wouldn’t have treated Axel’s relationship with Roxas and Xion as SO much more important than his relationship with Saix. There would have been no mystery about the origin of his tear marks. They were due to Lea wanting to be together forever with Isa, and crying over thinking that would be impossible. Lea couldn’t bear to lose Isa. If Saix had been a girl, Axel would have been able to cry for her without shame, the way a Roxas was able to cry for Xion.

If Saix had been a girl, I don’t think anyone would have been okay with their relationship suddenly revolving around some random new girl that was never mentioned by either of them before. That wouldn’t be something exciting that players are meant to look forward to. People would have been wondering: what happened to their bond with each other? If Saix had been female, I think waaaaay more people would have been confused about why Axel and Saix weren’t a couple at the end of KH3, the way Roxas/Xion or Sora/Kairi were.

#akusai #leaisa

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commentaryvorg · 4 years

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Danganronpa V3 Commentary: Part 6.11

Be aware that this is not a blind playthrough! This will contain spoilers for the entire game, regardless of the part of the game I’m commenting on. A major focus of this commentary is to talk about all of the hints and foreshadowing of events that are going to happen and facts that are going to be revealed in the future of the story. It is emphatically not intended for someone experiencing the game for their first time.

Last time in trial 6, Shuichi’s pain over losing his friends reached breaking point as Maki was manipulated into sacrificing herself, causing him to finally realise how real they still are (and by extension how real Kaede and Kaito and the others were, even if he didn’t mention it directly), he figured out that these very efforts to overcome suffering are what the audience (supposedly) wants from them and stood up against it, the vast majority of the audience clearly didn’t actually want such a meaningful storyline as they stopped caring about Shuichi in favour of Keebo’s hope nonsense, a far-too-unreasonably-tiny fraction of audience members maybe started to see that Shuichi had a point, and Keebo finally realised that his inner voice is the bad guy and started ignoring it, giving us Shuichi back as our real protagonist again.

Shuichi has decided to abstain from voting (for reasons that he really shouldn’t be so sure will actually end Danganronpa), so now he just needs to convince his friends to do so too.

“Makoto”: “H-Hold on, everyone. If we keep thinking, we can find a better ending and—”

Shuichi: “Himiko, Maki, will you abstain from voting with me?”

Hah, I love Shuichi completely ignoring her bullshit and getting to the actual point. Now that he’s found his strength again and knows exactly what’s up, he is not sitting through any more of her pointless nonsense.

Shuichi: “Himiko, we can put an end to this insane killing game. We’re going to use our lives to end this madness!”

Himiko: “Use our lives…?”

Shuichi: “But Himiko… you have to choose, okay?”

It’s lovely how Shuichi makes it clear that this is still her choice. He’s asking his friends to choose to kill themselves to end the killing game – of course that’s a huge thing for them to do, so he doesn’t want to be forcing them to do it if they’re not genuinely okay with giving up their lives for this.

(It’s a lot like how Kaito was. He never forced people to agree with his philosophies and advice. He’d say his bit in the hope that it’d inspire and persuade them, but in the end he always gave people room to choose to buy into his words on their own.)

Shuichi: “Only those who have found the truth can choose their destiny!”

This is something Kaede said to him, during their elevator ride to the first trial! (Admittedly this is a different wording than Kaede used, probably thanks to lack of localiser communication, meaning I never picked up on this until literally right now doing the commentary. But still!) He’s using the strength his fallen friends gave him to do this!

And then Himiko gets to be the protagonist for a little bit! I love that the narrative does this. This here is the actual Danganronpa-ending moment of the real protagonist inspiring his friends to make a choice, the thing that Keebo’s Mass Panic Debate was a cheap inferior imitation of. But instead of just making it about Shuichi shooting some kind of bullet at them, which would almost kind of seem like he’s forcing them to change their minds, we get to play this as Himiko and Maki, as they make up their own minds and decide on their terms to agree with Shuichi!

It’s also just lovely that they briefly get to be protagonists, because they are, even though Shuichi has been the protagonist we’ve been following. “Each of you are the heroes of your own stories! So act more like it!” Kaito was so right to say that and so good to see everyone around him that way! Everyone’s story is important!

Himiko: (If we don’t stop this killing game, these tragedies will keep happening… Tenko and Angie… wouldn’t want that!)

And it’s nice to see in Himiko’s thoughts here that she’s still thinking about Tenko and Angie and what they would have wanted.

“Gundham”: To choose death is to blaspheme against life itself!”

…

“Sakura”: “That would be a meaningless death.”

(Tsumugi is still terrible, but I like that she chose to use these two characters here who had philosophies and stories that are relevant to this idea.)

Himiko: “Even if I am a fictional character, my life is real… That’s why killing games are fun, right? It’s fun to see two lives clash, right?”

This is presumably meant to be justification as to why the in-universe audience is okay with watching this happen to actual real people and couldn’t settle for just literal fiction. But this particular reason doesn’t really make it any easier for me to buy this. In actual fiction, it’s fun when lives are on the line because it gives things high stakes and keeps the story tense. But that doesn’t need real lives to be on the line to do that – simply using the suspension of disbelief and thinking about how it’s real within the completely fictional universe is enough for that. Using actual real people who really die should just make the whole thing extremely sick and tasteless and no longer fun at all to watch.

And clearly this audience mitigates that for themselves quite a bit by telling themselves “oh it’s fine because they’re not really real people right” – but in that case, it’s essentially equivalent to them watching fiction anyway, so the supposed fun of watching “real lives” clash would also be lost, no?

There’s a much more appropriate potential reason for why this audience prefers this kind of “real fiction” over actual genuine fiction. Using real people means things aren’t entirely scripted by a writing team, which means that more unexpected and exciting events can happen than if everything was truly fictional. And in that vein, it could still be possible for them to be telling themselves that the characters are only “real” in the sense that they act outside of their creators’ expectations, kind of like an AI simulation can do unexpected things that a human wouldn’t have imagined, but they’re still not real people with real lives so it’s fine, right? (Man, Keebo’s robot issues could have been made so relevant to what everyone else is now going through.)

It is still a stretch no matter how you try and spin it, I admit. But ultimately, the fact that people happily watch real death games is fundamental to the basic premise of V3’s outside world, so we’ve just got to accept it. Kind of like how Junko having managed to spread her despair to apocalyptic levels was pretty difficult to buy but necessary to accept anyway because that was the whole point of that outside world.

Himiko: “So Tenko, Angie, and all the past victims can rest in peace…”

Aww, Himiko. I wonder if she might be thinking about this fairly literally, too. She was willing to do the seance to speak to Angie, so she may well believe that they have some kind of spirit that’s not going to be able to rest unless nobody ever has to go through what they did again. And by “past victims”, she’s not just talking about the other victims of this particular game, because it isn’t only about them. This is about everyone who’s suffered in every single real killing game in the past, who fought so hard to end it only for their efforts to ultimately be meaningless, until now.

“Himiko, don’t die!!!”

Huh, even Himiko has some fans! And this one actually seems like a reasonable person, not wanting the character they like to die.

“Himiko hats are nearly sold out!”

…Man, that’s so completely realistic and understandable but also so fucked up. Himiko’s identity is just being sold as a costume that anyone can wear and use to pretend to be like her even though she’s a real goddamn person who never consented to this. Her outfit was originally designed by Tsumugi, sure, but she didn’t know that and has always felt like it’s hers and a part of her identity. I bet this has happened a lot for everyone who’s died, too. When the three of them escape, they’re probably going to sometimes bump into people casually cosplaying their dead friends like that’s not incredibly gross and messed up. Maybe Tsumugi is onto something when she says that it’s wrong to cosplay a real person – not because it’s disrespectful to the act of cosplaying, though, but rather because it’s disrespectful to the person and their loved ones.

“Himiko’s eyes are open.”

It’s not certain, but… this person might get it? They might be acknowledging that Himiko is making the right choice and this is what needs to happen.

“Is it our fault?”

Yes! Yes, this is your fault, and you deserve to be feeling bad about it, and you should be trying to do something to fix it!

“I’ll end the killing game.”

Maybe this person means what they’re saying, too. Maybe some people are starting to come around. But even if they are, they are still only a tiny, tiny minority. I’m pointing them out because they’re worth noting, but the majority of commenters are still very not on board with this.

“i wanna protect Shuichi <3”

No, you don’t. If you really want to do that then you’ll stay the fuck away from him.

“Imposter Byakuya”: “Perhaps that thought is just another work of fiction, following along my outline.”

Tsumugi: “It could be a part of my script, just like Maki falling for Kaito, y’know?”

Tsumugi seems to have given up on persuading Himiko out of this and is now targeting Maki. It’s not just about the Kaito thing – the entire idea that her thoughts and actions have just been decided for her by someone else and she never really had any of her own agency is something which is deeply relevant to Maki’s issues, and that’s been tormenting her a lot in this trial already. Tsumugi does appear to understand that this idea is likely to shake Maki the most – maybe I should be giving her a little more credit than I was earlier. Or maybe she’s only realised this because of the way Maki reacted earlier.

Tsumugi: “Cuz if none of you vote and I do, then I’ll be the only one who survives! Doesn’t that sound exactly like something the big bad mastermind would come up with?”

That’d honestly be more of an actual “despair” ending than the everyone-lives-boringly-in-the-academy ending she’s actually pushing as the “despair” option for the vote.

Not that that should make it an entertaining ending that the audience would want either. What’s most fun about despair is the moment when characters lose hope and fall into it, and then sometimes if that despair then causes them to do awful things because they don’t care any more, like when Maki was willing to get everyone else killed in trial 5. But usually, the part after falling into despair is simply boring, such as earlier in chapter 5 when everyone had seen the outside world and lost all motivation to do anything. And a despair ending where everyone but the mastermind dies is definitely the boring kind.

Maki: “…”

Maki’s wincing. Tsumugi’s argument makes enough sense to her that she’s starting to doubt herself. She still hasn’t quite shaken off the feeling that their goal should be to “defeat despair” by killing the mastermind, even though that’s the thought that was manipulated and written into her.

Shuichi: “It’s okay, Maki. Believe in me. And believe in yourself, just like you believed in Kaito.”

Maki: “Believe… in myself?”

This is what Maki’s entire character arc comes down to in the end: she’s been gradually learning to believe that she has worth as a person. Not only that she deserves to have friends, but that her feelings and desires and choices are important and worthwhile and hers. Kaito believed that about her from the very beginning and never doubted it for a second even after learning her secret. Maki can believe that easily enough about everyone around her, especially Kaito and Shuichi after all they’ve done for her. But the hardest thing for her is still believing it about herself.

Shuichi: “That’s why you have to fight, even if you’re scared. Because you have that strength.”

Maki is definitely still scared to believe in herself, even though she has the strength to do it by now thanks to Kaito and Shuichi’s support. It’s a little surprising that Shuichi is saying this, though, because he never used to properly see Maki as “weak” like he was, not when her type of weakness was so very different to his. So I wonder if Shuichi is partly thinking about and saying this to himself here.

Shuichi: “Come on, it’d be a lousy story if the hero gave up so easily!”

And this is something Kaito said to him! A lot more word-for-word this time (except Shuichi swapped the “crappy” for “lousy”). Kaito was saying that about himself at the time, but that doesn’t mean it can’t also work as a sentiment for everyone to hold onto. Everyone’s the hero of their own story, after all!

It’s a shame that Maki doesn’t actually know these are Kaito’s words because this was from the hangar conversation where Shuichi and Kaito were alone. But I’m sure she can figure it out anyway – Kaito was always the one to talk about heroes, after all.

(Also, here’s yet more emphasis of the fact that Shuichi and his friends are making a really good story here, and why in the hell is this not what the audience wants to see?)

Maki: (My desire to end this killing game may be fictional…)

Makiii, why would you doubt that. Anyone who has an ounce of sense would want to end the killing game; people not being horribly killed any more is objectively a good thing!

Maki: (All of that might be implanted as well… Just like my feelings for Kaito…)

Bullshit, Maki Roll. Don’t listen to her manipulation. You made it very clear yourself that your feelings for Kaito came from the kind of person he was and everything he did for you, and all of that was real! You’re the only one who knows exactly how you came to feel that way about Kaito, so you should know better than anyone else that that was all you!

(And even if her feelings were implanted (which they still definitely weren’t) that wouldn’t make them any less real now that she’s feeling them.)

Maki: (Everything is fiction. A story written by someone…)

Only some of it was written, not everything! Listen to what Shuichi’s been saying about how real you all still are!

Tsumugi: “Even your thoughts are works of fiction.”

…That is not how thoughts work, Tsumugi. Maki has a real brain that is really thinking those thoughts. Flashback Lights can influence them to some extent, but you cannot possibly have written every single thing that is going through her head.

Shuichi: “It’s because of everyone’s sacrifices that we’ve come this far. Their deaths have to be more than just fiction…”

Of course they are, because they really died! Even the ones who were always scripted to die, like Kaede and Kaito – that doesn’t make the fact that they died any less real!

Maki: (I’ll end this killing game… I’ll believe in my feelings!)

Yes, Maki! You are a person and your feelings and desires are yours and they matter! Screw anyone who tries to tell you otherwise!

Maki: “I will believe in myself!”

This is Maki’s voiced line when she shoots the bullet of agreement at Shuichi, and it’s lovely. For her, this isn’t just about ending the killing game; it’s about finally pushing herself to believe for sure that her feelings are important and finally, finally reaching the culmination of her character arc, here right at the end of chapter 6.

Maki: “If I can’t believe in my feelings, then my existence will have no meaning.”

And you’d just be a puppet doing whatever awful things other people want from you and never having your own life. You don’t want that any more, right, Maki Roll?

Kaito would be so, so proud to see her here. He’d be just as proud of Shuichi too, but in that case, it was more like Kaito already saw Shuichi as the hero he’s being now, even if Shuichi didn’t see it himself. With Maki, though, Kaito always believed she had the potential to reach this point, but I think he also knew she hadn’t quite reached it yet while he was still alive. So he never got to see that in the end, and that’s such a shame. It would have made him so happy to be here for this.

Maki: “If we can change reality, then we won’t be just fiction… Our lives will have significance.”

The camera pans to Kaito’s death portrait here, suggesting that Maki is thinking of him and that this’ll mean his life has significance too. If Maki gave up and decided that everything she’s gained from Kaito was just meaningless fiction, then it really would be like he never had any significance. The idea that he’d just die for nothing without having had any impact at all was exactly what Kaito was so terrified of when he realised he was dying. But Maki’s not going to let Kaito’s fears come true. He’s going to live on through his sidekicks and be remembered as the life-changing hero that he was, just like he deserves to be.

(oops i’m doing myself a very big emotion again)

Maki: “And hopefully… my feelings will have significance, too.”

They already do if you decide they do, Maki! Nobody else needs to decide that for you but you! The only thing that matters is what you want to believe!

{Later addendum edit: Turns out that while doing this commentary, I missed a set of audience comments that were only on-screen for literally two text boxes at around this point. Since I spotted these and copied them down way later than I wrote this commentary post, I wasn’t really in the commentary-flow mood of picking out individual ones to rag on, so instead, in this addendum edit, you get literally every one I could see.

LOL are we the baddies?

Why does Keebo exist anyway?

Maki, too…

I’m gonna cry ;_;

For Shuichi’s sake <3

Let’s stop.

If Maki dies, I’m out a million bucks.

Where’s the hope vs. despair?

lol jk… I was wrong

I’m starting to feel guilty.

I’m starting to get into this.

im triggered by suicide mentions

The characters’ lives…

i’m 12 please visit my channel

I wanted to keep watching

super lame if they committed suicide

They remind me of my daughters

if it’s not fun, it’s not Ronpa!

I bolded the ones that indicate a few of the audience members at least vaguely acknowledging that they’re in the wrong… and you can see how much of a minority they’re still in, even at such a late point in this trial. Geeeez.}

“Hiro”: “Man, why do you guys wanna die so badly!?”

Shuichi: “It’s not that I want to die! We fought so hard to survive… Of course we don’t want to die. But it’s not just about us.”

The thought that they’re all going to sacrifice their lives after everything they’ve been through is heartbreaking when you think back to the fact that Kaede and Kaito and the rest of their friends all desperately wanted them to survive and get out of here. It almost feels like Shuichi’s betraying their wishes right now. But the thing is, this has become so much bigger than just them and just this one killing game. This is about everyone who’s ever suffered and died in one of these awful games, and everyone who ever will if they don’t stop this right here. If the only way to get it to stop is to sacrifice themselves, then that is worth it. And I think their fallen friends would be able to accept that too, if they were still here to see this.

Shuichi: “Everyone who died in the killing games felt the same way. They were all desperate to live. They wanted to survive. For themselves… and for someone else. That desire… isn’t fictional to us! That pain isn’t fictional to us!”

I appreciate having a little more focus on how Shuichi has realised that none of them were ever really fictional in any meaningful sense of the word, including his friends he’s lost, and that everyone really meant everything they did and really felt all of that pain.

And the way he says “killing games”, plural, indicates that he’s thinking of every past killing game as well. Neither we nor Shuichi have seen any of those games, but we can use this one and these characters we knew as an example to imagine that everyone from those previous games must have felt that same kind of pain and suffering and desperation to live. This is for them, too.

Tsumugi: “As long as the world wants killing games, Danganronpa will not end!”

Shuichi: “Then we have to change it!”

Tsumugi: “There’s no way you can change it! Fiction could never change the real—”

Keebo: “You don’t believe in the power of fiction?”

It’s a little odd to me that it’s Keebo who cuts her off by saying this. The person in this room who clearly believes most strongly in the power of fiction is Shuichi, with everything he’s been saying here, and appropriately backed up by the fact that he likes novels. Meanwhile, nothing has ever indicated that Keebo is a particularly avid reader or has any investment in the topic of fiction himself.

This would work if Keebo went on to cite some of the things he’s still been hearing from his inner voice that show how much Danganronpa has affected and changed people’s lives, but he doesn’t do anything like that. Not helped, of course, by the fact that this audience is not even remotely coming across as the kind of audience that has actually had its life changed by this fiction. Keebo is just so much missed potential.

Keebo: “If fiction has the power to touch people’s hearts, then that power can change the world! That is what I believe!”

Instead he’s just waxing lyrical about fiction in general with no indication of what brought him to feel this way and believe this so strongly. This is a good sentiment, but Keebo’s use of it here just feels forced.

(You know who else other than Shuichi would very believably be a strong advocate of the power of fiction? Himiko! She’s presenting a fiction to the world all the time, all for the sake of giving people smiles! If her magic makes people smile even though it’s really fictional, then that means that it’s her fiction that’s doing all the real magic! The fact that things that we know full well are completely made-up can nonetheless draw us in and make us want to pretend it’s real and feel genuine emotion really is just freaking magical, and that goes for stories just as much as magic tricks.)

(…Not that Himiko would actually admit her magic is fiction, but I can see her getting this idea across by saying something like, “My magic is definitely real, but fiction can be almost as powerful as magic, you know!”)

Tsumugi: “Are you serious?”

Maki: “Are you getting flustered? Your costume changes are less frequent now.”

Hah, I like Maki calling her out on that. That’s the kind of thing it’s supposed to be my job to point out, but honestly I might not have even noticed the significance of that here without Maki’s insight.

“Nagito”: “But what about hope?”

“Junko”: “What about despair?”

Keebo: “Do whatever you want with hope and despair.”

I love that they all just do not give a fuck any more. Even Keebo! Honestly, him having finally realised that all this hope and despair stuff is bullshit is the biggest character growth we’ve seen from him this whole game.

Monokuma: “…Voting Time? No! Not yet! This killing game will continue!”

And now we get the sequence where Monokuma and Tsumugi keep trying to force Shuichi to “play” the game even though they’ve obviously already lost. You’re meant to run out this Nonstop Debate’s uniquely short timer, but another way to end it is to turn the “Continue the Game” bullet into “End the Game” by “lying” and fire that at any statement. It’s neat that they thought of that option.

It’s cute bit of fourth-wall-leaning that they then force you through multiple trial minigames that you have to stubbornly ignore… but this doesn’t actually make any sense. In-universe, this is a live reality TV show and not a videogame, and Shuichi doesn’t actually get given these minigames to play.

Oh look, it’s a Psyche Taxi segment that I don’t have to complain about! Because I don’t have to play it! Welp, I’m officially declaring this to be the best Psyche Taxi in the game, right here.

…For some reason, the car still moves ever so slightly even if you don’t press the accelerate button. And the fact that I have skills equipped to make this minigame go faster means I got closer to completing the question than other players would.

What must you never give up?

- Hope

This wouldn’t even be an interesting story if they played along, though. This would just be Shuichi spouting meaningless platitudes about hope, like Keebo was a while ago.

Shuichi: “We’re trying to survive! You’re the ones who want us to be entertaining!”

Remember the bit back in chapter 5 where Kokichi called Kaito “not boring” as he was supposedly about to die from the poison, and Kaito’s only response was a bewildered “What?”? That made me think of this line here. Nobody here has ever given a crap about whether or not what they’re doing is entertaining… except for Kokichi, because he was very like the mastermind of this game in a lot of ways.

“This was totally miscast.”

…Do some of them seriously think these are still actors? It’s sort of vaguely plausible that people might have been led to believe that until now, but these developments should definitely have blown the lid off of that deception even if that were the case.

“I don’t care as long as Himiko lives.”

Himiko still has a fan or two! But if they were really her fans, they’d want what she wants at this point, even if it means she has to die.

“I paid to see the punishments!”

“Make everyone die.”

There’s still plenty of people here who aren’t even believable viewers of fiction in any way. If all they’re here for is seeing people die, then clearly they don’t actually care about the characters, in which case what the hell was even the point of watching in the first place? Plus, a downer ending in which everyone dies presumably wouldn’t bother these people!

“This is why I wanted Kaede to live.”

Why? Kaede would be advocating for the exact same thing that Shuichi is right now, you know!

(This line does imply that the out-universe writers expected some of their actual audience to have wished Kaede had lived instead of Shuichi. But this doesn’t make nearly as much sense for the in-universe audience to think, because Kaede was never presented to them as the apparent protagonist.)

“Shuichi is mine! <3”

No, he isn’t, leave him the fuck alone.

The general gist of the audience’s comments, however, is them complaining about how they’re not enjoying this.

Shuichi: “If you’re going to complain… perhaps you should just stop watching.”

(More proof that Shuichi and the others can actually see all of these comments.)

This is still so awkwardly disconnected from reality. Everything that’s been happening since Shuichi realised what was up and started fighting back has been a way more compelling story than any of the nonsense that was going on while Keebo was being the protagonist. An actual reasonable audience wouldn’t be complaining about this at all – the only part of it they should have any potential issue with is the thought of no more killing games after this, but this killing game is getting a far better ending than it was looking like it was going to have a little while ago.

The conundrum that the out-universe writers have here is that they’re simultaneously trying to present an ending that’s supposedly boring enough to the in-universe audience that it ends the franchise, while not actually making the story boring to the real audience because they still want us to enjoy their game. They’re doing a decent enough job of keeping things compelling for us, at least in terms of how Shuichi and his friends have been acting here… but apparently the only way they could then try and sell the idea that the in-universe audience isn’t enjoying this like the out-universe audience should is by presenting the in-universe audience as mindless assholes who are not remotely relatable and nothing like a real audience of fiction would be. Which extremely compromises the point they’re trying to make about why this has gone on for so long in-universe.

But really, it would have been better, and easier, for the out-universe writers to have simply not given themselves this conundrum in the first place. Shuichi doesn’t actually need to try and give the audience a boring ending to end Danganronpa. If he did achieve it that way, it still wouldn’t fix the underlying problem this world has: that people think real-life killing games are a cool idea in principle, even if Danganronpa has apparently stagnated as a series enough to have ended. What Shuichi should actually be trying to do, already, is persuade the audience that they shouldn’t want this or anything like this any more, because real people dying is not worth anyone’s entertainment. That’s the only reasonable way things can end, and he should already be able to see that.

This wouldn’t be so hard to do if the audience had actually been presented as a vaguely reasonable audience of fiction who had been mostly wilfully ignoring the fact that everyone’s real until now. Because now, the fact that the audience has been watching real people die is part of the story, in a way that it’s never been before for however many of the 53 seasons have been real. It’s no longer something the audience can possibly ignore, no matter how much they may want to. And the audience should be reacting to this like any reasonable audience would – by rooting for the characters to get what they want, even if, in this case, it means the audience no longer gets what it wants. If this fiction was going to be powerful enough to change the world, all of that power and influence to be able to do so should have already happened through all five previous chapters of getting everyone more and more attached to these characters and invested in their goals. The majority of the audience should already be on Shuichi’s side here.

Obviously this would still be hard for a lot of people to accept – that they’re the villains, that in order for their heroes to win and get a happy ending they’ll need to stop getting their favourite show, that actually they should feel awful about having ever enjoyed the show in the first place. There’d still be plenty of resistance – but it should be meaningful resistance full of people having conflicted, human reactions to realising that they’ve always been in the wrong, not any of this one-dimensional “hurr durr this is boring everyone should just be yelling about hope and/or dying”.

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[Next post]

#danganronpa #danganronpa v3 #drv3 #ndrv3 #chapter 6 #class trial #commentary

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duhragonball · 5 years

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Dragon Ball GT Retrospective (5/7)

[Note: I originally wrote this on January 14, 2013.]

The final arc of Dragon Ball GT is one big slap in the face of anyone who held out hope that it would somehow get better. I remember when Funimation promoted the last round of episodes premieing on Cartoon Network. "The Shadow Dragons Saga". That just sounds epic, right? They couldn't possibly screw that up, right? I mean, Shadow Dragons have to be awesome, whatever they are. It's probably a law or something. Well, someone call the cops, because Toei found a way to take a concept like "Shadow Dragons" and make it suck.

The story begins with the fallout from the Super 17 Saga. Goku and his friends gather the Earth's Dragon Balls to repair the damage caused by the Hell portal, but when they find the balls, they're all cracked. Unsure how to proceed, they decide to summon the Eternal Dragon anyway, and to their horror the whole thing goes pear-shaped. Smoke billows out of the cracks of the balls, and the dragon that emerges is completely different from the Shenron they usually deal with. This dragon smokes a big cigar and he mocks the heroes when they ask to make a wish. The Smoke Dragon then takes the Dragon Balls away and dissipates. At this point, the Elder Kai contacts Goku and explains what the hell just happened. The whole issue stems from a throwaway line from the end of Dragon Ball Z. Then, the Elder Kai disapproved of using the Dragon Balls to revive the victims of Majin Buu. He trusted the Namekians with the power of the Dragon Balls because they refrained from using them, but he felt that frequent wish-making would interfere in the "natural evolution" of the universe, or something like that. At the time, everyone just assumed he was being conservative, but this Smoke Dragon is what he had been worried about from the beginning. The short version is that the Dragon Balls have side-effects. Each time you make a wish, it introduces bad karma to the balls. They store the negative energy until they can't contain it any longer, and if that happens they crack and release an evil dragon that can destroy the world. Normally the safety valve for this is that the Dragon Balls scatter across the planet after each use, and they take centuries to find again, which is plenty of time for the negative energy to dissipate. But Bulma invented the Dragon Radar, which has allowed her and her friends to gather the Dragon Balls multiple times in a matter of decades. This latest attempt was the straw that broke the camel's back. Bulma quickly shifts the blame to Goku, since she never would have been able to gather the Dragon Balls without his help, and Goku decides that the only way to make things right is to go kick some evil dragon ass. Pan tags along with Giru (the robot who assimilated the Dragon Radar), and that's the status quo for the next several episodes. The Smoke Dragon separates into seven evil Shadow Dragons, each with a Dragon Ball embedded in his body. Giru locates them with the radar, Goku fights them for a while, repeat seven times. As you might have anticipated, I have several problems with this premise. First, the Dragon Balls aren't some magic talisman that appeared out of nowhere. Granted, they didn't come with an instruction manual, but over the course of the story, we learn how they were created and how they work. The Namekians essentially "invented" the art of making Dragon Balls, and the general rule is that a set of balls is only as powerful as its creator allows it to be. Thus, the Earth's Dragon Balls could resurrect the dead, but they were helpless against Vegeta and Nappa, who were stronger than Kami, their creator. The Namekian Dragon Balls could grant three wishes, but they could only resurrect one person per wish. Dragon Balls can also be "transferred" from one creator to another. When Kami merged with Piccolo, Goku recruited another Namek, Dende, to reactivate his Dragon Balls. Dende not only accomplished this, but he took requests, and rearranged the wishing power of the Dragon to grant two wishes instead of just one. As a bonus, you could just make one wish, then come back and make the other four months later instead of waiting a full year. When Guru, the creator of Namek's Dragon Balls, died, Moori became their new caretaker, and he removed the whole "one resurrection per wish" limitation. The point I'm trying to make here is that the "technology" of the Dragon Balls is pretty well understood, and while it might seem magical to the uninitiated, experts like Dende, Mr. Popo, and Moori were always happy to answer questions and explain the rules. So why didn't they ever say anything about the dangers of overuse? When the Smoke Dragon appears, Mr. Popo mentions how an evil dragon destroyed an entire star system once. Why didn't he say anything about this before? Of course, it's not like the good guys used the Balls frivolously. Most of the time it was kind of an emergency, or a matter of stopping a bad guy from using them first. But still, at some point they should have come forward and explained the risks. "Look, we seriously have to stop using the Dragon Balls or else." Second, assuming the Dragon Balls were designed with this limitation in mind, why do they only turn to stone for a single year? Whoever wrote this episode of GT never considered the fact that the Dragon Balls already had a safety valve in that they can't be used continuously, even if you have the means to re-gather them all. If the safest course is to use the Dragon Balls only once every 100 years, as Elder Kai says, then why not fix it so the Dragon Balls remain inert for a full 100 years? This is the same problem I had with the Black Star Dragon Balls destroying the world after each use. Why would anyone create something so inherently dangerous? This would be like Sauron forging the One Ring and if he doesn't take it to Mars and polish it exactly seven times on every seventh Thursday it blows up and kills him. No, that's dumb. He made it convenient for himself. If he loses it, it'll find its way back to him. It's indestructible unless you take it deep within the heart of his own territory. That's not airtight, but it's pretty safe. I could accept that the Black Star Dragon Balls were a flawed, overpowered creation, but this "negative energy" idea holds that any Dragon Balls are flawed and overpowered. What good are they if you can only make one wish every century, and there's no one around to enforce that rule? Third, no one ever brings up the Namekian Dragon Balls, which were used almost as often as the Earth's set. If each wish contaminates the Balls, then a set that grants three wishes a pop should be even more dangerous. Worse, the Namekian year is roughly one-third of an Earth year, so the Namekian Dragon Balls can be used three times more frequently. The Namekians themselves had little need for that many wishes, but after the battles with Frieza, Buu, and Baby, they had to use them to help out the people of Earth at least five times. That's fifteen wishes, dammit. So where's their evil smoke dragon monster? No one even attempts to explain this, which just makes the premise that much harder to believe. I'm not saying Dragon Ball or Dragon Ball Z were free of plot holes, but Akira Toriyama worked pretty hard to establish the rules of the story and keep them straight. With GT they just do whatever and hope the audience doesn't think about it too hard. Fourth, why don't they just kill Dende? The deal is that if the Dragon Balls' caretaker dies, then the Balls and the Dragon both go inert. Usually this is a obstacle to be overcome, but in GT the Dragon Balls seem to cause more problems than they solve. Piccolo sacrificed himself to prevent the Black Star Balls from being used again, so why doesn't Dende take one for the team and end this Shadow Dragon crisis before it starts? Of course, he doesn't have to die, he could just use his power over the Dragon to deactivate it, right? Again, I could live with this as long as someone on the show offered an explanation why this won't work. The whole premise seems to hinge on the idea that the negative energy contaminating Shenron is much stronger than the powers of Shenron himself or his creator. But why should that be? If the negative energy is a backlash to the energy used to grant wishes, then shouldn't evil Shenron be exactly as powerful as regular Shenron? He can be despicable and uncontrollable, but physically he's no stronger than before. King Piccolo killed Shenron with one hit, and Goku's like a million times stronger than that in GT. And yet the Shadow Dragons are strong enough to give a Super Saiyan 4 a hard time. I can appreciate the poetry of the Dragon Balls themselves being the final boss of the Dragon Ball mythos, but it just doesn't line up with everything we've known about the Dragon Balls leading up to this. For all the hype, Shenron was never omnipotent, and he's actually pretty fragile when you get down to it. His main role is to solve problems that can't be fixed with punching or explosions, so putting him in a situation where he has to trade punches with Goku is kind of dumb. Toei tried to solve this problem by beefing up Shenron, effectively turning him into an unrecognizable set of characters. Instead of one giant dragon who looks pretty scary, we get seven humanoid-looking goofs who are supposed to be insanely powerful, but most of them just suck. More than half of the Shadow Dragons are pathetic. I'm not saying that to insult the concept, I mean they are literally pathetic characters. Goku shows up and they go all to pieces, mostly for the sake of bad comedy. Then they use guile and treachery instead of strength, and Goku only wins when he finally stops screwing around. I suppose this was a deliberate plan to make the Shadow Dragons feel like other groups in Dragon Ball. Each Shadow Dragon is stronger than the last, and the real challenge is to beat the one at the end. Fair enough, but why would Shenron divide himself so unevenly? For that matter, why do the good guys play along with that? Goku wants to fight them all by himself and no one has a problem with that? Considering how weak most of the enemies are, they would have been better off sending Goten or Majuub to wipe out some of them while Goku handles the tough ones. Anyway, the worst part about the Shadow Dragons is that they each get at least one whole episode to show off how much they suck. The Two-Star Dragon: Funimation gave each Shadow Dragon a name, and they called this one "Haze Shenron" because he deals in pollution. He's the weakest Dragon, but his pollution powers make his enemies even weaker, so that's why it takes twenty minutes to beat him. This is dumb, because all the heroes in the show are adept at sensing ki, the life energy everyone uses for shooting fireballs and flying and so forth. Goku can tell that Haze Shenron is weak just by looking at him, but for some reason he can't sense his own power fading. Of course, if he'd just destroyed Haze at first sight, he could have avoided the entire issue, but they had to stop and talk to him first. Haze's weakness is his overconfidence. Once he has Goku and Pan beaten, he tosses them into a polluted lake, thinking the acidity would corrode their flesh in minutes. Instead, Giru (who is unaffected by pollution because he's a robot) rescues them and drags them to a cleaner part of the lake. Not only does this clean water revive them, but they stay down there for like five minutes without drowning. Now that they have a second chance to beat Haze, they take him out with one hit and recover the Two-Star Dragon Ball. The Five-Star Dragon: This guy was named "Rage Shenron", which doesn't make sense unless rage has something to do with electricity, which is his power. Rage looks like a deformed bird fetus, and he controls purple slime that feeds on electricity. He's not much stronger than Haze, so he uses all of his electric slime to create a giant replica of himself to ride around in. Goku turns Super Saiyan 4 to fight him, but his attacks are useless against Rage's slime, which can absorb ki blasts and redirect them. Rage's weakness is his overconfidence. Once the battle starts going his way, he gathers so much electrical power that his slime body grows to the size of a small town. Goku and Pan are helpless against him, but fortunately it rains. Rain short circuits the slime, destroying it, but Rage's body is so large that he can't take shelter. Goku and Pan literally float in the air and watch the dumbass beat himself because he was too sloppy to check the weather forecast. Rage makes a fake surrender ploy at the very end, so Goku blows him away with a Kamehameha just for good measure. The Six-Star Dragon: They called this one "Oceanus Shenron", although he seems to be more of a wind elemental than a water one. At this point, the continuity starts to get fuzzy, because it seems like Goku and Pan have only been at this for one afternoon, but by the time they track down Oceanus, he's already established himself as a local legend in this fishing town. His tampering with nature somehow causes fish to fly out of the ocean and onto dry land, and the villiagers gather them up instead of fishing like they're supposed to be doing. For no apparent reason, Oceanus assumes the form of a green woman called "Princess Oto", but Goku and Pan see through the disguise immediately. Oceanus mostly spams this one attack, Whirlwind Spin, which resembles a hurricane. Even though Goku once broke a mountain in half with his bare hands, the air pressure it strong enough to pin him down. He could power up to Super Saiyan 4, but he doesn't. I have no idea why. Oceanus' weakness is his overconfidence. Pan is too stupid to figure out the flaw in Whirlwind Spin, so a seagull demonstrates it for her. Like a hurricane, the center of the attack is relatively calm, so if you fly in directly overhead, you can get in a free shot. Pan hits Oceanus with a Kamehameha, and Goku uses his own for good measure, and that's it. The Seven-Star Dragon: This one is named "Natron" or "Naturon". I don't even know what that means, since he's a body thief who digs tunnels. He hot dogs it for a whole episode just so he can pretend to lose and trick Pan into taking his Dragon Ball. This allows him to take control of her body, which he uses to become much stronger (his first body was an ordinary mole, so it's a big step up). Pan's not that strong in Dragon Ball Z terms, but apparently Pan + Natron Shenron is somewhat impressive. It's kind of hard to tell how strong he is, though, because Goku keeps holding back for fear of killing his grandaughter. Natron's weakness is... his overconfidence. Goku plays possum near the end, and Natron taunts him by allowing Pan to partially emerge from his body. Goku yanks her out, leaving Natron stuck in his true form, which is somehow even smaller and crappier than the other three Shadow Dragons we've seen so far. For some reason Goku's totally cool beating up this sad sack in his SSJ4 form, even though he barely bothered to use it against the other three. Kamehameha, and we're done. They spent two episodes on this bullcrap, so I especially hate this one. The Four-Star Dragon: This one has fire powers, so Funimation named him "Nuova Shenron". I don't know why they spelled it that way, unless it was for trademark purposes. They didn't call the Two-Star Dragon "Haiz Shenron" though. Nuova looks pretty dumb, but compared to the first four he at least looks like a worthy opponent. He's also the first one who can actually fight worth a damn. So of course Toei introduces him just as Goku's inexplicably weakened from hunger. It's not like they're in the middle of nowhere. Goku could fly back home in a few minutes and grab something to eat in between dragons, so why did he walk into Nuova's turf unprepared? The result is a whole episode of pointless stalling. Nuova wants to play cat and mouse with Goku, even though he seems to be able to kill him in a toe-to-toe fight, thanks to his heat powers. Goku scampers around and whines about how hungry he is, and Nuova calmly walks around looking for him, apparently forgetting that he can a) fly, b) fly at super speed, and c) melt anything in his path. If Goku punches Nuova, he'll only burn his hand, so the only hope he has is energy blasts, which he can't use because he's too hungry. Nuova's weakness is sloppy writing. Even though Goku just got done complaining that he's too weak to fight with energy blasts, he turns around and starts harassing Nuova with energy blasts. The idea seems to be that he can't land a heavy blow, but he can whittle him down with hit-and-run attacks. This leads to Goku using the sewers for cover, and when Nuova chases him into the sewer, he's briefly stymied when he runs into a dead end. Blocking Goku's path is some sort of giant ventilation fan. He doesn't want to fight Nuova in close quarters, but that fan you guys. It's turning at speeds exceeding 3rpm. It must weigh at least twenty pounds, and it's probably made of solid aluminum. How can Goku possibly get past it? Well, he digs down deep, and somehow finds the courage and skill to time a perfect jump through this enormous, slow-moving fan that probably wouldn't have hurt him even if he missed. What's more confusing is that Nuova didn't just shoot him dead while he was waiting for the right moment. Once they're out of the sewer, Goku then decides to fight Nuova as a Super Saiyan 4, even though he was too weak to do anything else for most of the episode. Intermission: Now, in the midst of all this, Vegeta's back at home having a midlife crisis. This is probably the best episode of Dragon Ball GT, simply because it's roughly 50% flashbacks of cool scenes from DBZ. Vegeta's frustrated because he hasn't gotten to do anything for the whole series, mainly due to the fact that he never advanced beyond Super Saiyan 2, while Goku is two levels above that. He wants to help round up the Shadow Dragons, but Bulma warns him he'll die. Look, maybe he's not the strongest guy on the block anymore, but I'm pretty sure Vegeta could have taken out the first four Shadow Dragons, and I'm really sure he could have blasted apart that ventilation fan that stymied Goku. Also, Pan's a lot weaker than Goku and she managed to stay alive this long. Anyway, Bulma figures out how to turn Vegeta into a Super Saiyan 4 so he can join the battle. I'm kind of surprised it took this long for them to try it, since her plan is to just use the same technology that turned Vegeta into a Golden Great Ape during his possession by Baby. Cleansed of Baby's contamination, Vegeta can repeat the process, and jump from Golden Ape to SSJ4, the same way Goku did. Come to think of it, Vegeta could have just undergone the same procedure Goku used to grow his tail back. It's been like a year since SSJ4 was discovered, so it's not like he hasn't had time to work on that. What sucks about this episode is that they spend the entire time teasing SSJ4 Vegeta, but we don't get to see it until several episodes later. The Three-Star Dragon: While Nuova Shenron fights SSJ4 Goku in a halfway decent battle, his comrade "Eis Shenron" shows up and interferes. See, he has ice powers, so Eis=Ice, or something. The gag with Eis Shenron is that he's Nuova's brother, and while Nuova's been teasing a face turn during his battle with Goku, Eis is a cowardly opportunist. He uses Pan as a human shield, has no qualms about using dirty tricks to win, and when Nuova refuses to help him, he feigns surrender and blinds Goku with a.... You know, actually, I have no idea how Eis blinded Goku. He's on his knees surrendering, he surreptitiously dips his fingers into a frozen puddle on the ground, and then he swipes at Goku's face. The implication is that Goku's eyes have been poisoned somehow. I mean, is it poison ice? That doesn't make a lot of sense. And yet, afterwards, Goku washes his eyes out with water, and Nuova gives him a small bottle of "antidote" (where did he get it?). So I don't think we're talking about frostbitten corneas or whatever. The point is that Goku spends the next four episodes or so with his eyes shut. Eis' weakness is that Goku can kick your ass with his eyes shut. He stupidly assumes that blinding Goku "halves" his strength. Except Goku can sense his enemies' ki, so he can still fight just as effectively without looking. This has been demonstrated countless times in the past, so I don't know why Toei would pretend to ignore this years later. Eis and Nuova are supposed to be the strongest enemies Goku has encountered to date, but they fight like amateurs. Goku punches a hole in Eis' body and follows up with Super Dragon Fist, which would have been satisfying if he hadn't waited so long to use it. Nuova Shenron decides to withdraw, feeling that it would be wrong to fight Goku until he regains his sight. I find Nuova's change of heart ridiculous. The Shadow Dragons entire reason for being is to destroy the world. When Goku meets him, it's in the ruins of a city he presumably attacked and destroyed. He claims to have a code against hurting innocents or the defenseless, except he's made from evil energy and his ultimate goal is to destroy the world. Goku never questions him about this apparent conflict of interest, and it doesn't really matter because Nuova gets killed before it really becomes an issue. Just as he gives Goku the antidote to Eis' blinding attack, both he and the medicine are cut down by.... The One-Star Dragon: This guy doesn't have any elemental powers, so Funimation just called him "Syn Shenron". He's easily the strongest one, which begs the question of why he didn't just come after Goku from the start. He no-sells all of Goku's attacks, and leaves him battered and unconscious. Seems like a winner, right? Syn's weakness is GT Logic. Just when all seems lost, Goku's family and Trunks show up to help him. Gohan, Goten, and Trunks agree that they're not strong enough to fight alongside Goku, but they plan to donate their energy to Goku so he can recharge to full power. Majuub tries to hold off Syn Shenron, but to no avail. Despite the fact that Syn dominated a Super Saiyan 4, the boys manage to hold him off long enough. So if they can do that, why can't they just fight Syn directly? And if they really are no match for Syn, how are their combined powers sufficient to re-energize Goku? Of course, this whole paradox is just a retread of the last time SSJ4 Goku needed a recharge, back when he was fighting Baby. Goku insists on taking more energy from the boys than is safe to use, because he needs extra juice to cope with Syn's power. This is irritating, because it really isn't clear what the risks are in this situation. Gohan and the others are no worse for wear, in spite of giving "all" their energy to Goku, and Goku doesn't seem to get much stronger for the boost. It's just a lot of sound and fury signifying nothing. Goku does manage to get the upper hand on Syn, although it seems less like Goku is stronger and more like Syn just overdosed on stupid pills. Even though we've established that Goku can fight just as effectively while blind, Syn still tries to exploit the weakness by throwing a clockface from a tower at him. Goku then blows him away with a Kamehameha-Super Dragon Fist combination. The only catch is that it doesn't get the job done. Though beaten, Syn absorbs the other six Dragon Balls, transfoming into "Omega Shenron", the final final boss of Dragon Ball GT. Hoo-boy. NEXT: The Omega Glory

#dragon ball gt #really sucks #2013gt #no seriously i'm rereading these as i go and i'm seeing stupid bullshit that i had forgotten about #every once in a while i think to myself 'well gt wasn't *that* bad'#but no it was fucking awful #goku #pan #giru #rage shenron

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thecartoonarchivist · 6 years

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Weekly Spotlight #6

Welcome, Welcome, one and all~!

To the Weekly Spotlight

In honor of this sppppooooooppppyyy season, this week’s spotlight is....

*drumroll* *very pathetic trumpet*

Over The Garden Wall

So, this series isn’t very old. The pilot aired in 2013 and the full mini-series aired in 2014; thus it’s very easy to say that this show is very fresh in my mind.

When this show was first airing, I remember watching part of an episode of it and becoming very intrigued. Initially, I felt no desire to watch it as when they were advertising the special, this originally gave me the vibe of The Misadventures of Flapjack, Chowder, and other rather strange and, at times, grotesque cartoons that never really tickled my fancy. So, I was more than willing to let this series slide off my radar and into some obscure corner of my knowledge never to be heard of or talked about ever again.

But one day, a episode happened to be playing and, for whatever reason, I found myself watching. I knew I was about to leave the house soon so watching some TV show I never really cared all that much about didn’t seem like a bad option at the time. The episode I was watching, I’ve come to learn, was Mad Love. I didn’t actually start from the beginning of the episode, if I remember correctly, but I started near the beginning. Here they were talking about how Quincy Endicott had somehow managed to fall in love with a painting in his labyrinth of a mansion and I ended the episode with the revelation about Beatrice and the heart-to-heart that Wirt and Beatrice had.

It was then that I knew I had to sit down and watch this show from the beginning. I could feel it in my bones that this show had potential and that it would continue on for a long time.

It ended four days later and I felt like I had missed out on something very special. I never realized it was only a mini-series and as a result, I felt that I saw something very beautiful be snuffed out very quickly. I’d have this curiosity and regret linger in the back spaces of my mind for several years. During this time, I’d see videos pop up on YouTube now and again, talking about Over The Garden Wall: analyses on the writing and why the series was so good, cosplay, various musicians playing music from its soundtrack. Over all, I got the impression that the series was something to celebrate and so I added it to my list of series that one day I’d sit down and watch.

But every fall season, Over The Garden Wall would pop up on my radar now and again and I knew that this time I had to sit down and watch it. Luckily, Over The Garden Wall was on Hulu so I snuggled up in my pajamas and fuzzy blanket and spent a little over 2 hours watching this series.

So, why don’t we take a look at its history?

This mini-series was a created by Patrick McHale for Cartoon Network in 2014. Originally, the series was pitched under the title, Tome of the Unknown, in 2006, however the series was much different than the one that was aired. It was originally designed to follow two brothers, Walter and Gregory, as they travel the Land of the In-Between to track down pages from a book of forgotten stories after signing themselves into a contract with a devil named, Old Scratch. However, McHale had difficulties creating a larger story arc for the series and as a result, it was placed on hold for a number of years.

McHale would go on to storyboard for The Misadventures of Flapjack (makes sense why I got that vibe) and co-develop the famous Adventure Time where he would serve as Creative Director and eventually, as a writer. After having more experience underneath his belt, Cartoon Network returned to McHale and asked if he would like to pilot another series. McHale, then, returned to Tome of the Unknown; polished it up; pitched it to the network again; and it would pilot on Cartoon Network in 2013. After having piloted the episode, McHale sat down with the network again where they would decide that instead of an entire, full-blown series, they would simply trim it to a mini-series that would air over 5 days. It was initially envisioned as an 18 chapter (or 18 episode) series but due to budget and time constraints, it was trimmed down to 10 episodes

The interesting thing about this series is that I don’t think I’ve ever had the opportunity to experience another cartoon as dark yet oddly whimsical as this series. In some regards, I would almost like to call it a darker version of Studio Ghibli’s Howl’s Moving Castle but even then, I don’t think that it would actually do this series justice with that sort of comparison. As I was watching this series, I couldn’t help but feel a similar feeling as when I played those one-sentence stories games as a kid. You know which one I’m talking about! Everyone is gathered in a circle, or a campfire in my case, and each person had to say a sentence that would add to the story. You couldn’t change what the previous person said, but you could change the context of how it would affect the story.

For example, if someone said a sentence along the lines of, “Trapped inside the closet, Susie began to cry loudly and alerted the monster of her hiding place.” that doesn’t exactly leave you with a whole lot to work with. Your immediate conclusion is that the monster will find Susie and that she will be eat/maimed/destroyed/etc. However, with a little bit of creativity, you can change the situation to something like this, “Susie, frantically searching for some sort of weapon to defend herself, finds a panel on the back wall of the closet that leads to some place that was not part of the house.” This can lead you to a crazy situation where Susie might find Narnia, or another dimension that is almost exactly like this one, or that there’s a curse on the house because a body in this secret, unmapped room of the house. The situation that you start with won’t be the situation you end with and the only rules are that you can’t undo what was already said and you can only add one sentence. And this is what I felt was going on.

Rampaging gorillas became long-lost loves in animal suits. Graves dug for the main characters ended up being skeletons for pumpkin people. Ferry rides for frog people turned out being a migration for hibernation. The things that you expected would turn on their heads very suddenly and what seemed terrible and fraught with dangers, would end rather cheerfully and full of hope. I felt like it was such an important lesson for young and old alike and I’m very happy this ended up being such a staple theme of the series.

As a sibling myself, I thought that the brother interactions were pretty accurate enough. Wirt likes to blame his brother for all his woes and get rather annoyed with his upbeat attitude; it was funny how much of my younger self I saw in Wirt and there were so many times I had to laugh and cringe at the true renditions of being a Freshman in high school. Greg never dumb, or naive which is something many, many cartoons like to paint younger siblings. I will easy admit that my brother is a whole lot smarter than I was at his age. (Doesn’t make him less of a brat but still!) So having Greg be that rock for Wirt and to help stabilize him when he starts overthinking things and panicking underneath the responsibility of taking care of him was such a refreshing thing to see in cartoons. It felt oddly real.

Some of the shining jewels in this series’s crown is how heartwarming and touching some of the more serious moments of the series is. In the last episode, I found myself fighting back tears despite the fact that I already knew what type of end was coming. (Of course, things were turned on their head as they always were but regardless.) These heart-to-heart discussions and these moments of #realtalk really tugged at my heartstrings and made me feel about ten years younger. But even the whimsical moments were always fun and weird. Did some of the humor fall flat? Yeah, but that’s also because it wasn’t meant for me. Other instances of humor however had me snickering at the realism of such an absurd situation. It was simply a pleasure to watch.

It’s darker tones and moments of horror is such an interesting thing to see in a children’s medium that it almost becomes a rare thing to pull off well. For those of you who grew up with Courage the Cowardly Dog, I’m sure you remember at least a portion of the fear you used to have watching a couple of these episodes. But one of the interesting things about Courage is that there was never any threat of death in the series. Courage’s family might be turned into battle robots, or turned into grotesque creatures, or some unknown horrific happenstance occur, but never really any threat of death. In this series however, that’s the main threat that prevails throughout the course of events. By the end of the series, we know why this is the case, but that still doesn’t make it any less of a gutsy move by its creators. On top of this, it’s so cool and interesting to see all of the little Easter eggs that plant in each episode that point to the twist at the end of the series. Although the series may be a bit too scary for younger kids, you can easily see that this series was intended for as many audiences as they could fit into such a short run.

I think the little things in this series is what shines through the most. The soundtrack was stellar, oh my word!! The voice acting, although at first seemed pretty generic, really fit the tone of the series and breathed life into these quirky characters. Even though the animation itself is pretty cheap (Flash animation isn’t the greatest ya’ll), the backgrounds are stunning to look at and the character designs were very creative and interesting to watch. Each part of this animation played well into the other to the point that the entire piece felt like a wonderful, cohesive whole. Not many cartoons can say that. Not many pieces of art can say that. For that, I salute the entire team of Over The Garden Wall for creating something so wonderful to indulge in. Although part of me wishes that this could have been a full series, I realize that to do so would ruin the good of what I have, so I am content to leave things as they are. However, if anyone has a suggestion for any similar series, send them to my inbox because I will definitely check it out.

For many people, The Nightmare Before Christmas is a Halloween/Christmas tradition. For others, many like to watch Soul Eater for its spooky themes. Still others will watch classic scary movies like Psycho, or The Shining, or Nightmare on Elmstreet for their scares.

For me, this’ll be my new Halloween tradition. The harvest-time aesthetic. The Halloween-like themes. All of it screams everything Halloween was for me growing up and man, did I love enjoy this piece of media.

Overall, this series easily rates a 9 out of 10 on my scale.

It has very few flaws in it (even now I’m having a hard time picking them out) but they’re still there. Perfection is such a hard thing to achieve so I doubt there will ever be a series that reaches a 10/10 on my scale but the fact that it got a 9? It speaks volumes to this series.

I’ll gladly watch this every Halloween. I wouldn’t even mind watching this even more than once a year. I heartily recommend this series to everyone who hasn’t watch it before, even if you don’t like the more bizarre series of Flapjack and Adventure Time. I do adore this series. And it will forever hang in my Hall of Fame for being such a beautiful and fantastic series.

If there are any corrections you’d like to make in regards to this post, please feel free to send me a message with your corrections and I’ll get back to it as soon as I can!

Do you remember a cartoon your friends have never heard of? Got a scene from an animated film that you’re dying to know the name to? Send your questions to The Cartoon Archivist and I’ll see what I’ve got in the vault!

#over the garden wall #otgw #Cartoon network #2010~2015 #miniseries #weekly spotlight #halloween traditions #god I want to watch again already #I literally binged this series yesterday but I still wanna watch it again #i have a problem

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pickyperkypenguin · 6 years

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So. You finished NiF. Who is your favorite character? Favorite 'arc'?

Ihave liked Nirvana in Fire a little bit differently than I usually dowhen I fall for a book/movie/show. I tend to focus on characters andthey are what makes me like something and stick with it. Here itwas the storytelling that has grabbed me by the ankle and chained metomy laptop for several days, as I’ve binge-watched the whole thing.I have been immensely satisfied with the outcomes and theconsequences of the initial setup, and with the fact that it was allso cleanly done – the goals and the circumstances set, executionconsequent and the actions actually having a follow up. I’m notsaying it was devoid of loose ends or always completely believablesometimes – videXiao Jingyan’s complete inability to see through all the slip upsmade not only by Lin Shu – but those disbelieves were a consequenceof creating an additional tension between characters, so I didn’tmind at all.

What I think Ienjoyed most was the machinations coming true and seeing theorchestration of them. It was full of suspense, but not for theviewer, which I think is a great choice to make by the creators,because the viewer is often credited with less comprehension skillsthey have, and we end up with big reveals that we’ve seen throughdecades ago. I didn’t feel like it was the case here – we couldinstead watch the reactions of the characters, which was much moreinteresting for me.

Sayingall this, I wasn’t as deeply connected emotionally with thecharacters as I usually am, when liking a thing (book, show, etc.)this much. The uniqueness of liking NiF for me was this: I’vestayed engaged throughout fifty four episodes despite not zeroing onthe characters. The plot was actuallyinteresting enoughfor me, for once. That’s like, my private major kudos for NiF.

It wasn’tabout any plot twists, and not even about rooting for any particularoption to win – I could have easily watch with equal interest andsatisfaction the demise of prince Jingyan and Mei Changsu’s plans.Which doesn’t mean I didn’t have personal faves and dislikes.Ugh, consort Yue. Ugh, the first Crown Prince. I found them a bit toocaricatural, and was relieved when their arc has ended and they wereremoved from action. Though, I must admit, Jingxuan was a very goodcontrast for Jinghuan, and consort Yue for consort Jing. So, as I’vesaid, even when I didn’t like someone, their presence have madesense as they accentuated well all the others around. Oh, and Xie Yu?Nightmare, a complete nightmare – but what a wonderful villain!

Oh, andanother thing that was very interesting for me – this was a Chinesedrama made with the Chinese audience in mind, and therefore used sometropes, visual shortcuts that for a European were not always clear, Isuspect also sometimes not even visible. It was very interesting forme to try and understand things I were presented – like the factthat nobody had ever kissed on screen. When Mu Nihuang and Lin Shuhugged, were they actually hugging? Were they kissing passionately?Were they kissing reverently? Or when the Emperor was holding a handof one of his consorts – was that the equivalent of a kiss on thecheek or was he actually drawing moral support from hand holding? Isimply don’t know, because I don’t have enough required knowledge– a state very in line with my education, and I found that alsostrangely satisfying. It was a lot of fun for me to try and piecethose things and try to find an explanation for them.

Followingthe trope of the satisfaction and touch – the lack of touching! Iswear, it was so interesting to observe all the ways emotionalcloseness could be expressed either by reverence when following theetiquette protocol or verbally, without ever being overt with it.Coming from the perspective of creating and sustainingtension? Awesome.

Diving intothe characters more deeply – my favourite thing about Mei Changsuwas that he was actually the Left Hand, not just some stand-in withgood morals. He was committing morally questionable choices for thegreater cause, and he was not always apologetic about it. I felt likeperhaps the storytelling was trying to suggest to me as a viewer atthose points that because he had good morals (or Xiao Jingyan as amoral compass that he believed in) and was working for the prosperityof the Empire and its moral rejuvenation, then he should be absolved– but I read it as mere suggestion, and so I didn’t feel it asobnoxious attempts of the narrative to convince me. I could make myown observations about his choices and morality, and in the end tojudge if he was a ‘good’ or ‘bad’ character. He was neitherand it was the best thing about it.

Mei Changsuwas also an excellent counterpart and a parallel to the princeJinghuan. Ah, Xiao Jinghuan – his was my favourite arc of them all.His and Changsu’s choices were actually quite the same – theywere trying to scheme mercilessly to get what they wanted: power. Thefact that they had different principles and goals (Changsu: devoidthe court of corruption, make the rule of the Empire just and goodfor people; Jinghuan: gain the prestigious title of the Emperor andall that follows it) doesn’t change much, when you look at it fromthe perspective of what they have sacrificed to get it (and aside ofthe results and whether they succeeded). Also my favourite part ofJinghuan is that he is actually not a villain. He is a product of hisupbringing, provenience, life circumstances and environment he livedin. Not once he does something that would have a root in this. Hiswant of power? Coming from his ambition, of course. But his ambition?Where does that come from? Oh, here it is, look, expectances ofothers (especially his mother and father the Emperor) and the role ofprince he had, and there were not many variants of it he could choosefrom, if he wanted to have respect and prestige.

The morebeautiful and delightfully satisfying to watch is his fall. My mostfavourite scene of all the show was that one, from the episode 41:

“Ban Ruo,were I not a Noble Prince, would you still come to see me today?”

“Iwould.”

“What ifI was exiled and made a commoner. Would you still come see me?”

“YourHighness, those are all imaginary scenarios, why worry about them?”

“Youwon’t come, right? That’s logical, you are a strategist and alsoa descendant of the Hua people. You have an unfinished mission. So,naturally, you need to find someone worth supporting. Now, that Ihave fallen, you will obviously not come to see me again.”

“It isn’tlike that, your Highness.”

“I’mtired. I really don’t want to fight any more.”

Inthis very moment we see Jinghuan completely and irrevocably crushed.Here also manifests a second extremely important thing – theacting. Victor Huang has delivered,is what I’m saying. I feel like a lot of this show could fall flatand the narrative choices could just not make sense (not thisparticular one, but others), if not for amazing acting skills of mostof the cast. Victor Huang or Hu Ge made like 60% of their characterswith just a frown, a smirk, a tip of a head. And they made thembelievable. Lin Shu still deeply in love with Mu Nihuang afterthirteen years? Absolutely obvious. Jinghuan at the end of his ropein this scene? Guys, I have honestly believed for a second that thisperhaps is how they are going to deal with him. Of course, Ban Ruomade that obvious later that it won’t be the case, but if itdepended solely on Jinghuan, I was convinced he would just stop andlive out his days as a melancholic version of prince Ji. Which, Ithink, would be not such a bad thing for him.

Thatscene though, ah – Jinghuan stripped completely bare, finallyrealising he doesn’t have anythingin his life. No power, no respect, no love of his people. Everythinghe has is superficial and coming from his lifestyle, the faithfulnessof his subordinates coming from their own ethos rather than fromgenuine feeling of being treated well. And that is what I thinkreally defeats him, his failure and the awareness of not havinganything sincerely meaningful in his life. Ban Ruo he still trusts,because he knows her (even better now, when he’s aware what sheactually wants from him) and doesn’t care as much as he did for theconsequences. His goals, I think, shift from gaining the status toavenging the fact that he can’t have it. I think at this point hedoesn’t believe in possible success, maybe leaves like 10% ofstupid hope, but most of all he wants to sing his swan song, to showthat he still can execute things, even if they won’t have all thedesigned results.

I wasn’tvery satisfied with that swan song, to be honest, from the emotionalpoint of view. I thought it could have such a great outcome if theywould let him live defeated as he was – but the emotional tormentswould be a good material for a different type of show, not asplot-reliant as this one. I would love a fix-it fic where this wouldbe explored, ahhhh. He could be depressed and trying to improvehimself, so he could finally gain something emotionally meaningful inhis life and also perhaps he would be using all the perks of hisnoble-and-rich life as he liked them very much, he could be an artpatron or something like that. Oh yes, gimme that goodness.

I really likedMei Changsu’s arc, even though it felt a bit artificial, buildingthat tension between him and prince Jingyan. When they were togetheron screen, though, it worked so well, because the actors had a greatchemistry between them. I mean, Hu Ge has excellent chemistry withjust about everyone, is what I’m saying. To be honest, I liked toothat his story with Mu Nihuang was tragic in the end. It feltappropriate, having all those ends cut abruptly – it was aphenomenal choice to actually let him die instead of finding somemagic cure in the last minute, as it often is and as I have expectedsubconsciously. Him dying was what tied this story as it should betied, leaving people grieving but remembering his impact on the fatesof the Empire, exactly the way he wanted.

A great touchwas also this moment when Lin Chen says that he doesn’t know thiswhole Lin Shu, that Changsu is his friend. It is him, not some shadowfrom the past he is helping. He saw something worthy in Changsu andhe isn’t founding his opinions about him on the past – and that’sso different from most of the people that surround Mei Changsu (ofthose that he can confide in).

Theemotional distance between the characters I found a thing of marvel.The loneliness of those who wield power was very well executed –and not the obvious one, as in case of prince Jingyan (can you noticehe was not my favourite? Like, you know, lovely but in a mashedpotatoes way) – but the less obvious, with those who had a supportsystem at first glance. Lin Shu is willingly depriving himself fromthe people who would love to co-carry his burden and is trying tofind a balance when they try to hero-worship him. Prince Jinghuan hasvery obedient subordinates that he half doesn’t pay attention, halfconvinces himself they love him as they should because of his naturalbirthright and innate nobleness (a beautiful example of the effectsof classism in praxis)and in fact has no one to lean on except his mother (which comes withits own set of expectations). The Emperor has a court full of peoplehe has to keep carefully divided and even those who are technicallysupposed to fulfil the role of emotional support (his consorts) areexploiting him, because he exploits them. Yum, yum, yum.

On the otherhand there are friendships – the other strongest point of thisshow. I haven’t been shipping any pair here, because thefriendships were so engaging. Like Yan Yujin and Xiao Jingrui forexample? Another arc I loved, including the cruelty of Mei Changsu’schoice to go through with his plan that would affect his friend. Alsowhat amused me endlessly was the fact that the general atmosphere ofNirvana in Fire was so loaded and serious, that whenever one of thesetwo precious boys, Yujin or Jingrui, appeared on the screen, it waslike an automatic comic/tension relieve. Their dynamics was adorable,light-hearted and young, and their choice to stay friends despite thefallout and the distance, and to treat each other exactly the same asthey were before, with kindness and care, was what warmed my heart.

So, ahem,finishing this dramatically long answer to your question – this waswhat I liked about Nirvana in Fire :>. And probably many more things, but I feel like I have already said too much for one post :D.

#nirvana in fire #lang ya bang #meta #xiao jinghuan #mei changsu #Anonymous #nirvana in fire meta

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