#i have no thematic analysis this is purely based on vibes

[aihoshiino]

In Viewpoint B (thank you for that TL of it, by the way!), Ai says to Kyun that she was a liar even before becoming an idol. Ai also describes herself as a liar in her inner monologue in the flashback to when she was scouted in Chapter 8/Episode 1. Do you have any ideas about what lies/"lies" she could be referring to, or how her self-hatred generates this specific self-perception?

You're very welcome – glad you enjoyed! Viewpoint B is my favourite of the sidestories so I'm really happy I was able to make it more available to everyone else, too.

Talking about 'lies' in OnK is kind of messy sometimes, honestly! I think this is where a lot of the weirder/more off base interpretations of Ai in the fandom come from because people get tripped up by how the story uses the word and assume that it begins and ends with the very literal dictionary definition of like, "an intentionally false directly expressed statement". And while this isn't not part of what OnK means when it talks about lies, there's a lot more going on than that.

'Lies' in OnK are essentially an umbrella term being used to cover a whole shitload of thematic ground via abstraction. When Oshi no Ko talks about lies, it's talking about falsehoods, inauthenticity, the sanitized and manufactured versions of ourselves we wear for social approval, the idea of persona, celebrity culture, idol culture, parasocial relationships, abuse, purity culture, misogyny, art, fiction, mental illness, love, hate and all manner of other things.

"Holy shit, Claire" you may presumably say "That's a whole lot of things for just one word to cover???"

And I would say... yep it is! But that's why just one word is used — because the story has so much ground it wants to cover, some of it needs to be abstracted just to not exhaust the audience. To quote Dan Olson's weirdly relevant video on the NC's The Wall review:

"Abstraction is, counter-intuitively, really efficient. It allows a movie to be about a lot of things simultaneously by letting symbols bleed into each other. [...] Symbols shift and merge and break apart, juxtaposed and contrasted in order to create an impression of their interconnected relationship in a way that is difficult to do with mere words."

Accordingly, it's a little hard to express this idea without just vaguely waving my hands and going "oooo the vibes" but I think it is something you end up just kind of vibing with when you have spent enough time chewing on the characters and why they do and say the things they do.

In Ai's case, when she talks about 'lies', she is generally referring to the performance of a sanitized and idealized self by omitting the parts of herself that do not line up with her public image. I've previously noodled on this topic in an older post that I still stand by and this basic idea still forms the foundation of most of my Ai analysis: "Really, the biggest “lie” Ai is telling is the one people have demanded she tell: the illusion of an eternally pure and cheerful idol. But being an idol has become so forcibly entangled in Ai’s personhood at the expense of allowing her to just be a human that of course she thinks of herself as a liar for being unable to live up to that image."

To Ai, any failure to disclose her true, ugly self is a lie. Her performance of a self that other people find lovable is the thing she thinks of as lying. It's also worth noting that in both Viewpoint B and her flashback, she's describing her younger self in hindsight and attributing the label of 'liar' to her rather than this being something Ai called herself before meeting Saitou, who went on to completely rewire her brain by teaching her that this performance for social approval was lying and that it was okay and even necessary for her to do it.

I also think Ai's history of abuse at her mom's hands also contributed to this a great deal. I, uh, don't want to go too deep into this in my silly Oshi no Ko meta tag but speaking from experience: growing up with a parent like Ayumi, you get really good at lying. You get really good at saying "I'm sorry", "I forgive you" and whatever the fuck else they want to hear from you just to calm them down and make them happy. You get really, really good at performing the most perfectly sanitized version of yourself possible just to keep the peace. Knowing just how long and how violently Ai was being abused by Ayumi, it's really hard for me to not project that survival tactic onto her.

#oshi no ko #oshi no posting #ai hoshino #abuse cw

[crepes-suzette-373]

I want to vent out this crazy craaaaaazy total utter reach that have been haunting in my brain for weeks.

Unlike my previous analysis posts this is not really a logical theory with strong basis, and I absolutely don't think Oda-sensei is actually doing this on purpose. It's just an observation of "this has the same vibes" that has been bothering me for a while.

In my Germa theory post, sangerie mentioned "what if they used to be good, but is now evil + WG propaganda nonsense made it worse", which is relevant to my crazy thought, so I decided I might as well just let it out.

There... there is actually someone like that in Japanese history and pop culture. A very famous someone who even little 4 year old kids (in Japan) would know who that is.

As in. In his lifetime this person was maybe not as bad (I'm no historian so I'm in no position to say), but over time he gained terrible reputation and decades of fiction just outright turned him into a demon.

His name is Oda Nobunaga.

(different kanji from Oda-sensei's name, but I wouldn't be surprised if he feels conscious about the name sounding the same even with the different kanji spelling)

Nobunaga is evil/demonic in anime and games like Sengoku Basara and a ton of other media (movies, novels, other manga and anime, etc) too numerous to name. Sometimes literally not human at all, not just him using evil demon powers ("demon powers").

He was called Dairokuten Maou, or translated as "demon king of the sixth heaven" (hey look, number 6!!!!!), and this name stuck so strongly to the point that if you try to search just what is a Dairokuten Maou in Japanese you will just get pictures of Nobunaga all over.

But that's all just fiction. Not necessarily done out of malice, but maybe the original creators just thought "wouldn't it be cool if I do this", but the audience didn't know that and thought the fiction embellishments are real.

The true historical accounts supposedly says that he was, in history, someone who wanted to "conquer" the nation for the sake of bringing peace to the war torn nation (the Warring States/Sengoku period). His methods were extreme, even cruel, but the goal is "noble".

The story just gets distorted over time because of poor transmission of accounts, propaganda and fiction. Only recently do all these random ancient ancestral documents with more trustworthy accounts start popping up because now even the general public are helping to look out for them.

Again, I don't say Germa is consciously designed based on this, but gah, this is just driving me insane.

The reason why I started having this wild thought was that Judge's birthday is the date celebrated in Japan as "Nobunaga's birthday". Supposedly this came from a fan submission, but this is the one that sensei greenlit. Surely there must be others he could've picked? I just keep thinking, is someone just trying to be funny here or is this really purely coincidence?

Other vaguely thematic similarity is that Nobunaga's army was famous (in pop culture) for being the only professional soldiers of the time, when his rivals regularly have to conscript peasants for the wars (probably not actually historically true).

It's also (very erroneously) commonly thought that Nobunaga was more advanced-minded than his rivals, the first to utilise guns in mass scale in wars (this is also not true, but that's what a lot of people thought).

Compare this to Germa's advanced science and renowned military forces.

Judge hating Sanji's weakness/uselessness is also somewhat similar to the stories of Nobunaga also detesting worthless vassals. There were stories about how he mercilessly threw out vassals who have served him for decades because he thought they aren't useful anymore.

Like I said the connection is very flimsy, that's why I doubt there's relevance. Just thought I'd still mention it since I'm just throwing everything at the wall and hoping something sticks.

Also, the one vaguely relevant image I might be able to point to. Reiju's butterfly wings is the swallowtail butterfly. A rather iconic symbol related to Oda Nobunaga.

The butterfly could mean other things, though, that's why this is just wild flailing.

#conspiracy theory #germa 66

[jeremy-ken-anderson]

Technically Varied

But not technically varied.

One of the biggest critiques leveled at No Man's Sky back when it came out was that all the "infinite variety" stuff was meaningless. If you never played it, and never watched a let's-play, here's the gist:

When you scan a planet, it's got some amount of plant life, animal life, and inorganic matter on it. These get rolled for. The shape of each also gets rolled for - for instance some planets have worms, or hopping eyeball-pile mushroom entities, or ungulant quadrapeds. Some of the rock formations are craggy, others almost vine-like arches. The plant life varies from towering mushrooms to short glowing ferns to evergreens that look like plain-ol' pine or fir.

Mechanically, how does this tie back in?

This is where the player's investment in the variety kind of breaks down. Because realistically what happens is you have these things get rolled for but the player wants resources to repair or craft ships, base parts, rovers, mining stations, and so on.

I appreciate the nudge toward using analysis: When you analyze a mineral it sometimes unlocks an extra material. So if you never learned what it was you'd be throwing the non-ferrite part of the rock away as useless but if you've analyzed it you're getting ferrite dust AND some sodium. This is especially important on hostile planets where you're using sodium constantly just to maintain your suit's climate control in 160-degree (or -160 degree) weather. Sometimes one of these secret materials will be on the second tier. (First tier has five materials: oxygen, dihydrogen, carbon, ferrite dust, and sodium - each of which is a basic fuel; ferrite for your terrain manipulator, sodium for climate control, carbon for your mining laser itself, oxygen for life support in your suit, and dihydrogen for your ship's takeoff rocket) Chromatic Ore is made from a couple different minerals (such as copper) you have to mine specially with a separate attachment for your multitool. I've found minerals that have Chromatic Ore built into them. Others have Pure Ferrite, which you'd normally have to refine from the ferrite dust.

The trouble is it's difficult if not impossible to generate real moments of interest that feel fair. If you introduce challenge in a sandbox you don't know how much trouble the player had naturally fallen into prior to your scripted challenging event. You might be kicking them while they're down. Or you might be sending a team of angry worm-boys against a minmaxer who's crafted a submachine gun. That's the nature of the beast.

Oddly, the rolled-on-an-encounter-table nature of the creatures of No Man's Sky feels more visible than, say, the random behaviors of Sims. Or even the mildly-randomized tilesets of Diablo 3 or Path of Exile. I think what's happening there is that the bounded randomness lets the developer tie the random result back into a known vibe and have it relate thematically to something recognizable. PoE's tileset doesn't go on forever to the west, eventually hitting a wall or ocean point. The Sim will pick its behavior based on its current needs and personality (which is just an extra set of "needs" as far as it understands things) and this limited pool will result in something coherent.

No Man's Sky's planets are more coherent than I think some people give them credit for, but not enough of that ties back into what the player thinks of all of it. It's not like you hit certain planets that are reliable sources of materials for stuff you'd normally have to buy at space stations, like Wiring Looms. I'm pretty sure those just can't be crafted, so you'd have to find them at random or buy them. There's a sense that the materials of an acrid planet or a volcanic planet are consistent with what you'd expect, and the animal and plant life has a look that feels plausible for such a thing. But it's still just, plants are mined for oxygen and carbon, rocks for the other three, animals are best left alone unless you're a jerk and/or need poop or necrotic material. That's it.

I think some kind of system of analysis injection would have been a wiser route for this kind of thing. That is, you start off with the ability to analyze your basic five to increase yield. Then your analysis device improves and you start finding better stuff in them. Then it improves again and you have a different use for them. Maybe they start dropping traces of rare material like platinum or tritium. You'd have reason to go back to earlier planets and reexamine your "known" resources to see whether those banana plants were actually a good source of potassium or something.

Programming-wise this would actually work in reverse of how it would feel; The "analyzer" would be rolling a new result for what the bonus material is and adding it to the existing material results for mining that plant or mineral.

I also think there was some aspect of the animals that they just weren't able to get into motion; some x-factor that would have tied their behavior back in and made it worth following one of these funky little dudes around for a minute and seeing what their life cycle looked like. Hell, even if they just left the equivalent of Plorts from Slime Rancher and you could use that shit as a resource because you'd been paying attention to the animal behaviors, that'd be a step up from what we have.

All in all it's very much the "what you use it for is all the same" that makes every planet feel the same.

#no man's sky #review #game design