#i was going through some of his lines in the stars of ingenuity quest and

[chouettecrivaine]

Love's the Only Medicine [Honkai: Star Rail]

Fandom: Honkai: Star Rail

Characters: Dr. Ratio

Notes: SO. First off, those of you waiting on Lyney fic, it is postponed for now because I'm stuck :( but for now I'm working on a Dr. Ratio fic and I'm having a little trouble so these are my headcanons for how a good/healthy relationship with him would actually work because I love to write fluff all the time <3

So, how does one go about romancing the Dr. Veritas Ratio?

∘∙⊱⋅•⋅Have independence. Dr. Ratio is a busy man, and while he'd of course value your relationship (why else would he be in a relationship in the first place?), he wouldn't fare well with someone who is the clingy type. A relationship that would work best for him is one where you share in each other's missions, victories, and defeats as best as you can without melding your lives into one singular identity. With the exception of certain instances where you worked with him prior to the relationship starting/getting serious (though even then, he might drop the idea of separating your work paths a little bit to ensure there is no space for rational, scientific endeavors to be tangled with personal emotions), Dr. Ratio is perfectly content to with a relationship where some aspects of your lives don't always cross. Of course he wants to spend time with you! He just appreciates his own ability to act independently and keep work and personal matters separate. (Plus I feel like he'd find independence kinda attractive anyway :P)

∘∙⊱⋅•⋅Keep him grounded. Dr. Ratio gets lost in his thoughts frequently. He understands that facts and calculations can only go so far in the real world (though they could go MUCH FURTHER in his opinion, hence his cosmic mission to eradicate foolishness) but he loves finding the rational, mathematical answer to things. It'll be up to you to navigate a little bit more expertly on this plane. If he's trying to piece together a solution to a planet's hunger crisis, well, maybe let him sort through his lofty thoughts then. But if he's simply ignoring the world and thinking for the sake of it, you'll be able to get away with poking him out of the stupor and getting him to actually communicate with the world around him.

∘∙⊱⋅•⋅Be the people person, but don't apologize for him. Veritas has a tendency to rub people the wrong way. He's rude, abrasive, and arrogant. When others say such things without realizing you're nearby, you AGREE with them. But these are all things he knows, too. In most cases, how the reception of information makes somebody feel doesn't particularly concern him. But sometimes, especially now that he's actively placing himself in the social situation of being in a relationship, talking with people in a constructive way is necessary. He's fine with defaulting to you in these instances if it makes you feel useful. However, it is simply a matter of leaving a task to the one who knows better. If you start apologizing for his silence or a prior brash attitude, though, then he gets a little prickly. He stands by his behavior! Don't make him out to be someone you should have to apologize for or ashamed of.

∘∙⊱⋅•⋅Have clear communication skills. Listen. Veritas is an eloquent speaker, and he says exactly what he means to. However...good communication is more than just saying words that mean exactly what you want them to. You have to present information in a way that others can receive, and that's where he falls flat. The onus will fall to you to exemplify that sort of skill. Now, you don't have to teach him step-by-step how to talk nicely, but being able to do so yourself and give him a gentle nudge when it really matters will go a long way in ensuring you're talking to each other and not at each other.

∘∙⊱⋅•⋅Argue with him. Like, not actually. Argue with him academically. Veritas has stated that he feels incorrect on a matter if people agree with him. So don't agree with him! Don't spark debate just for the sake of it, but you shouldn't be afraid to voice your opinion when it goes against his. Dissent is the forebear of accuracy, after all. He won't be gentle with his arguments, but he never means to condescending when you're sharing your scholarly ideas. (Plus, this will help you get accustomed to when he is actually trying to argue you in a less casual context)

∘∙⊱⋅•⋅His love language? Quality time. Wanted all across the galaxy to solve this crisis or that, Dr. Ratio is a busy, busy man. So when you come in at the top of his list of priorities, that's how you know he's in deep. If you receive a certain love language particularly well, he can adapt! But his default is both to give and receive quality time. Even just time together that isn't attentive and specifically for each other can mean a lot to him. If you're both busy with work, he can be placated by attending to your duties but staying in the same room as each other. Don't worry about distracting him, either - as of late, he finds himself distracted when you aren't around, and at ease when you are.

∘∙⊱⋅•⋅Have a hunger for knowledge. It can be intimidating to hear him denounce all fools of the universe when he doesn't give many specific answers as to what a fool is. Veritas doesn't care about a lack of knowledge; what he cares about is a lack of awareness and a lack of trying. He'd be a fool himself if he pretended as though everyone had the same access to the same level of education, or that there weren't people who gravitated towards certain skills. After all, he's widely regarded as a genius, but you don't exactly see him releasing academic journals on any musical studies, do you? (Now, could he write one? Probably. But that's not the point.) As tough of a teacher as he is, what he's after is undying tenacity; that you never falter in the face of obstacles, and that you never place your scholarship on a shelf so high it winds up collecting dust, unused. If you don't know something, that's fine - go figure it out! Don't just say 'I don't know' and leave the matter at that. Learning through experience is an incredibly strong way of gathering knowledge. Just...don't expect him to be any nicer about your lack of prior knowledge just because you are close to him or you are trying to remedy that. At the end of the day, you did fall in love with a guy who's just kind of an ass sometimes :/

∘∙⊱⋅•⋅Be honest. This is one that could go for anybody in any relationship, but it is a top priority for Dr. Ratio. He's based his entire life on searching and spreading absolute truth in every corner of the cosmos. Normally, this takes the form of objective, empirically provable fact. But he finds it frustrating if you won't be honest about your feelings or what you want, how is he to know what to do? You'll have him acting like a fool with your refusal to face your own truth! (This is, of course, a roundabout way of saying that he doesn't have it in him to be playing games. Be straightforward with him, please. It'll be much easier for the both of you that way.)

∘∙⊱⋅•⋅Don't be afraid to get a little poetic on him. Veritas is a scientific man. He understands artistic endeavors, of course, but that isn't how his brain is wired. He operates in verifiable conclusions and building hypotheses, not the more abstract patterns of intuition or leading by the heart. He can analyze and understand such things, but if you want him to be able to appreciate the aesthetic beauty of the world, you will probably have to lead by example. You won't change his way of thinking, but maybe if you see a rare bird one day, he'll appreciate the opportunity to see something so rare and beautiful instead of analyzing how far it has deviated from its normal breeding grounds.

∘∙⊱⋅•⋅Flirting is a game, but love isn't. Don't be so dull with him! Dr. Ratio would love an opportunity to subtly ash his wits about yours in a little flirtatious back-and-forth. Both in the early stages and a more established relationship, Dr. Ratio loves a good challenge and could spend all night just trying to out-flirt the other. Regardless of whether or not you're one to get flustered, he loves your reactions anyway. Sheepishness, frustration, no emotion whatsoever - whatever you feel,, he finds how you try to school your expressions into complete apathy amusing. He is hard to fluster himself, but if he continues the same line of teasing in the morning the next day, you can assume he's been thinking about you all night. However! Dr. Ratio often expects people, especially those precious few who he respects, to operate on his level. If he's truly buckling down for the long game, he'll make sure to make his feelings clear. Flirtation is always on the table, but "playing hard to get" or trying to "keep him guessing" as you near a truly established relationship is a turn off. Flirt for fun, not to manipulate his interest in you. Believe him, he would've left by now if he wanted to.

∘∙⊱⋅•⋅Look beyond his scientific approach to matters of the heart. In loving anybody, you'll have to learn how to read between certain lines. Even if you are a pure-blooded emotionally charged person, Veritas can only meet you halfway on the road to compromise. Take the time to study how he speaks and what he means- concise as he is, speaking so straightforwardly all the time often has an opposite affect on his words when he's trying to be romantic. Learn the ways he looks after you and tries to make your life easier without asking; notice how he spends a large portion of his available time with you, even if it means dragging you along to discussing things with people who he feels are completely beneath his IQ; realize that his tone may always be steadfast and dominating, but he never speaks out to shut you down or demean you the way he does to others. If you can translate all the little ways he uses to show you how much he values you, then you may just find yourself in a relationship far more enriching than you'd expect.

#honkai star rail #hsr #hsr x reader #hsr dr ratio #dr ratio #dr ratio x reader #☆ star rail #☆ dr ratio #🐚 capricorn ﾟ+..｡*ﾟ+{hcs} #🌠 pisces ﾟ+..｡*ﾟ+{all writing} #a note that didn't make the cut: HUMBLE HIM #i was going through some of his lines in the stars of ingenuity quest and #boy what is your PROBLEM #antagonizing the trailblazer just because you're a suspicious little freak #decided their vibes were bad based on nothing but ANECDOTAL EVIDENCE #i'm so serious. what is your deal. i'll kiss it out of you boy don't think i wont

[searchingforserendipity25]

Unhinged thought for a Canon Divergence: Finrod casts away his crown and only a few of his people dare to follow him on Beren's quest.

The door of the hidden kingdom of Nargothrond is nearly closed behind them when the last, thirteenth figure dashes out to join the line. It runs in the grey quiet of a colourless morning, casting a slender, shifting shadow against the great walls even as the engines move and mingle to form one unbreachable enchantment, the single face of a closed mountain.

Despair and frustration as much as the memory of devotion move her; for heroism is a thing she prizes highly, if not in herself, yet still the times are such that the clouds of foresight gather heavy upon her, lend her a mad courage to cut through the dark to some clear path.

Clarity there is none, but purpose at least her king can still offer. She goes as she is, ignoring the cries of mother and father, her friends and ladies - flashing silk and golden braids twinned with golden amber, clutching an untried dancing spear in one berringed hand and a spinning spindle in the other.

Finduilas of Arafinwë's line might not be the most conventional elven warriors, but she knows in her heart that her betrothed is alive still: deep in the bowels of Angband where Finrod intends to go is Gwindor, enslaved under the power of Gorthaur. This is a quest for subtlety and thievery, the secret workings that have kept Nargothrond safely hidden from the Enemy for centuries, the cunning and caution and ingenuity that have kept it alive and independent and living, as well as surviving.

A stifled scream surges behind her teeth, even as a fierce will warms the queer coldness of her limbs from inside, hammering with every heartbeat that takes her further away from her city - Morgoth himself should fear the rage of a weaving maid of the House of Finwë, stars damn it.

I will die badly and alone, abandoned by that which I most love, but not here, and not pinned to my destiny!

Finduilas runs.

(Lúthien is going to love her).

#finduilas #finrod #beren #gwindor #the silmarillion #au #the silm #orodreth #nargothrond #lúthien #i'm sure the curse of the unlucky company of thirteen won't have any consequences this time!

[coinelot]

Unfortunately we didn’t have time to actually collect fic recs from all guests during the convention, but a bunch of them sent in fic recs to us via email afterwards, and we’d like to share the results with everyone. All in one post, that’s going to be long, but you’ll have them all in one place :).

Angst & Hurt/Comfort

Home Like Here

by @pendragoff, 3,594 words, Teen+

Sometimes at night Arthur pretends Merlin's laying in the bed beside him, fast asleep.

Such Fractured Shadows

by i_claudia, 24,625 words, Explicit

Lionel is the first, approaching Merlin one late summer afternoon as the sun slants through the dust in the stables and turns the air into heavy fire.

Guard and Keep You

by youfeelallthat, 7,426 words, Explicit

A nasty storm rolls in and Merlin takes Arthur, his company's sweet, simple custodian, home with him. They end up finding much more than shelter.

Forming the Lines

by alcove-words, Teen+

Merlin takes ill and is conflicted over Arthur, Arthur is conflicted over Merlin and hates considerate replacement servants, and the knights are helpful, thoughtful fellows.

With podfic by alcove-words.

Saving Merlin

by @arthur-the-cute​, 22,794 words, Explicit

A prompt given to me via my ask box on Tumblr: Season one, The Poisoned Chalice. Arthur is in the room when he thinks Merlin has died and instead of Gwen kissing Merlin, Arthur does.

Challenge accepted.

Fluff

To Dance With the One You Love

by emrys_mk, 1,042 words, Teen+

Arthur asks his father why he made Merlin his manservant.

of blowjobs and candy rings

by coffeeandparchment, 6,221 words, Teen+

"No."

"What? I didn't even say anything yet."

"You didn't have to. It's all in your beady little eyes. You want me to give you a piggyback to the club." Arthur said.

"My feet hurt," Merlin said, as if that was a good enough reason for a piggy back. At Arthur's silence, Merlin pouted. Gods, maybe he was a little more than tipsy.

Arthur slowed down as Merlin walked past. "What are you doing now? For someone who is all about doing these quickly you sure ar—” Merlin cut off as he turned to see Arthur stopped and crouching down. "What are you doing?"

Arthur huffed in annoyance. "What does it look like, Merlin? Are you going to get on or just leave me crouching here like an idiot all night?"

Concert Air

by Saturning, 9,303 words

Arthur and Morgana were having the times of their lifes at this rock festival. Then a drunk Merlin almost ran Arthur over and his excuse took Arthur's breath away, quite literally.

Mint Editions (84 Charing Cross Road)

by @wanderlust48​, 10,049 words, Teen+

A London bookseller and an aspiring New York writer strike up an easy friendship over correspondences about books, and food parcels. Arthur and Merlin finally meet in person in London.

Screen control your mother(board)

by furloughday, 10,890 words, Gen

Arthur is Merlin's tech support at work.

With podfic by @momotastic27

Canon, Canon AU & Reincarnation

The Curse and the Coffee Shop

by merlinsivan, 21,860 words, Teen+, WIP

OUAT/ Coffee Shop AU. When Morgana casts a curse that will bring the gang back to our world with no recollection of who they are, will true love’s kiss be able to break the curse? Featuring dragons turned baristas, clueless warlocks and kings that may realise magic isn't such a bad thing after all.

Writers Block

by Kalee60sAlterEgo, 45,808 words, Mature

Merlin, a travel writer for a well-known paper went to his local bar to forget the worst day in history – he didn't expect to sit down at a table and free-write a story starring the god-like barman, Arthur. And he 'really' didn't expect to be drawn back there again and again to write – each story more outlandish than the next.

King for a Day

by @guessimaclotpole​, 26,592 words

King Uther has had a rough week, and so he drunkenly decides to take a 2 day holiday. Arthur is thrilled at his opportunity to temporarily become King. That is until Uther announces that Merlin will have to act as King too.

In which two idiots are in love, and learn about what it takes to be a noble and honest leader.

The Long Lost Prince of Camelot

by Phoenixfire513, 31,036 words, Teen+

What if Uther had not banned magic? What if Ygraine had given birth to twins and one had magic? What will the king and his twin brother Balinor do when the Prince who had magic is threatened?

Now I Will Unsettle the Ground Beneath You

by nu_breed, 42,323 words, Explicit

Merlin's dreams have always fuelled his art, but they've always been abstract and removed from reality. Soon after he meets Gwaine, he starts to see vivid images of a past full of death and magic and love for a King who was ripped from him. Things only escalate further when he spends a weekend in the country with Gwaine and meets his group of friends, which includes aristocrat and It Boy, Arthur Pendragon. Merlin soon realises that no matter how hard you try, one thing is certain, you can't fuck with destiny.

With podfic by fluffyllama

Three Castles

by @rageprufrock​, 4,538 words, Teen+

It’s a perfectly wretched day in Camelot when Uther Pendragon announces Arthur’s betrothal.

With podfic by EosRose

With podfic by paraka

With podfic by dodificus

The Knights Have a Thousand Eyes

by Stakeaclaim, 74,232 words, Teen

In which Arthur is teaching his knights and Merlin is about to get roped into a lesson.

With podfic by Beccaleelee

Route to Advancement

by magog_83, 30,350 words, Gen

New Knight hopeful, Percy, has been at Court four months, but it might be another four years before Prince Arthur stops calling him Perrin. That's where Merlin comes in.

With podfic by kalakirya

Fidelity

by @schweetheart, 70,249 words, Explicit

Arthur and Gwen have been married for a little under a year when Arthur discovers Merlin's magic, and suddenly everything changes. In a desperate attempt to regain the King's trust, Merlin offers to do the only thing he can think of: to voluntarily bind his power, and with it sacrifice all hope for a united Albion. But as with all things magical, such a concession comes with a price, and with an assassin in their midst and a vital political alliance hanging in the balance, Merlin is not the only one who will find his loyalty tested.

Awake

by Cori_Lannam, with art by @phoenix-acid​, 50,711 words, Explicit

King Arthur sleeps in Avalon, waiting to return at the hour of Albion's greatest need. But once a year he awakes and spends a single day with Merlin, who will never, ever leave him.

Crossovers & Fusions

In Front of the Whole World

by Trillsabells, 1,492 words, Gen

She was meant to be showering away the sweat, changing into her Team GB sweatsuit and sorting out her hair to look presentable at the presentation. Instead she was sat on the bench, staring at the wall and wondering what she was thinking and what the hell she was going to do now.

All because of one kiss.

Fast Girls crossover

Broken

by Clea2011, 2,697 words, Teen+

“I’m not Leo Elster,” Merlin snarled. “I don’t even know who he is.”

The synth, or whatever they had all become now, just shook his head sadly. “You don’t remember.”

Merlin remembered. Merlin remembered more than he ever wanted to.

Humans crossover

Note to Idiot

by @tinylilemrys​, 9,762 words, Teen+

Arthur and Merlin are members of the Accidental Magic Reversal Squad who work different shifts and share the same office. Arthur, who works the day shift, can't stand the rain. Merlin, who works the night shift, can't concentrate without it.

When they both get tired of changing the weather in the magical window in their underground office, is there a more British way to settle their differences than with a few passive-aggressive memos?

Harry Potter crossover

Two Weeks Notice

by ras_elased, 39,884 words, Explicit

Arthur is a prattish Executive VP of the Pendragon Corporation with a disturbingly non-ironic love of Demotivational posters. Merlin is a tree-hugging barista with a "magic" tongue. Morgana's a peeping Tom and her breasts have superpowers. Gwen and Lancelot get married. Owain is the company bicycle. Arthur attempts to steal Merlin's affections from Will through epic DDR combat. Merlin gets drunk a lot. There is a pillow fight, and a helicopter ride, and rooftop confessions, and Arthur decides Merlin really is his destiny, whether he likes it or not.

Two Weeks Notice fusion

With podfic by jennacorinth

The King of Mars

by @ivaleelovesmerlin​, 34,304 words, Teen+

As children, the Pendragon siblings were obsessed with the space program. They dreamt of becoming astronauts and one day walking on another planet. Their dream leads them to NASA where the revelation of magic suddenly brings Mars within our reach. The Camelot 1 crew, including both Pendragons and powerful sorcerer, Merlin Emrys, land on Mars, and the world celebrates -- until a Martian storm cuts the mission short and tragedy strikes. Arthur is killed, and Morgana makes the difficult decision to leave her brother's body behind on Mars. His crewmates and the world mourn his loss, until Gwen Smith, a clever engineer at NASA, makes a shocking discovery: Arthur is alive.

His ingenuity and determination will get him far, but will Arthur be able to survive alone on Mars until help arrives?

The Martian fusion

Arthur Pendragon and the Quest With a Capital Q

by rubberglue, based on art by @akikotree​, 8,164 words, Gen

There's a Holy Grail out there and Arthur Pendragon wants to find it, if only to prove to his father that he is a hero. He gathers his reluctant, suffering manservant and best knights (sort of - some of them are unavailable) and sets off on a quest for the Holy Grail. Gwen never wanted to go on any quest but her mistress, Morgana, thinks the young prince is in danger and requires their aid. And so, the two motley groups make their way through the wilds of Camelot in search of their trophy, encountering overly-stubborn knights, knights with bad dress sense and guards with an unusual interest in ornithology (to name a few) before their final encounter with the big bad - a very fluffy big bad.

As it turns out, the quest is less epic than this summary.

Monty Python fusion

With podfic by @akikotree​.

Winter & Christmas

Christmas Memories

by @ivaleelovesmerlin​, 4,337 words, Teen+

Merlin and Arthur spend a cozy Christmas Eve snuggled before the fire, reminiscing about past Christmases.

What Nonsense!

by @momotastic27, 8,735 words, Gen

In which Uther Pendragon is Ebenezer Scrooge.

It’s That Time of the Year

by @rotrude, 20,819 words, Explicit

Merlin is a personal shopper at a high-end department store. He's tasked with helping Arthur, who's helpless when it comes to gift ideas for his demanding friends and family. Arthur soon finds that going shopping isn't that tremendous an ordeal.

The Good Times Are Killing Me

by minor_hue, Explicit

In which the boys pretend to still be together for Christmas (and there is more than one kind of charade).

With podfic by @misssnowfoxx​

Merlin’s Yule Gift

by rotrude, 15,465 words, Explicit

It's the first Yule after Uther's death and in spite of some initial doubts as to the propriety of holding revels, Arthur decides to celebrate the festival all the same. The populace deserves a time for merry-making and so do his friends and loved ones. Now present exchanges are a Camelot Yuletide tradition, a long established convention. And that's where Arthur's plans falter just a little. While he knows what to give his friends and followers, he has no idea how to reward Merlin. Right, Merlin...

High School & University AU

Best You Ever Had

by neuroticnick (now orphaned), 36,305 words, Explicit

Arthur has been with just about every girl in the sixth form. Merlin pines from afar, knowing he doesn't have a chance. Then Merlin gets an invitation, and realises he has a chance after all. Apparently Arthur is bored and wants to try something new. Merlin knows it's meaningless sex, but he might just be okay with that. Even if the butterflies in his stomach say otherwise.

With podfic by @merlins-earmuffs​

The Pope, A Singing Nun, and Arthur Walk Into a Library

by @gigi-gigi, 4,210 words, Teen+

Merlin is a librarian, Arthur is in search of a book. Of course this entire transaction results in true love. There might also be a professor asleep in the Ancient Egypt section.

With podfic by striped_bowties

Best Friends & Flatmates

Little Hours

by orphan_account, 3,640 words, Teen+

Arthur is sleep deprived and Merlin just bought so many snacks.

Time Forward

by @kianspo, 23,180 words, Teen+

While still at uni, Arthur Pendragon meets two people who become his best friends. He falls in love with one of them... but marries the other. This isn't his story to tell; it's Merlin's. And Merlin will always remember that he met Arthur first.

With podfic by @sugaredwhimsey

Something Unpredictable

by alby_mangroves, with art by @softershadows, 38,957 words, Explicit

Arthur’s treehouse was the same as Merlin remembered it, all of it was. Maybe a little smaller, but then everything was, now.

And then there was Arthur himself; and it wasn't so much that a lot had changed about him, not really, it was only that everything had lengthened and broadened and become more.

Enemies to Lovers & Friends to Lovers

When You're Busy Making Other Plans

by helloearthlings, 3,339 words, Teen+

Merlin and The Plan were two irreconcilable parts of Arthur's life.

He wasn't ready to let go of either of them.

Rule Number Four

by orphan_account, 47,732 words, Explicit

Pendragon Enterprise is the world's leading computer security company and ruthless when it comes to taking down malicious programmers. It's the perfect place for a skilled hacker like Merlin Ambrosius (codename: Emrys) to work undercover and gain a tactical advantage. But being the personal assistant for vice-CEO Arthur Pendragon is more complicated than Merlin expects. The female Pendragon threatens castration, Arthur apparently sleeps with all his PAs, and it only gets more complicated when the Kilgharrah virus causes a panic. Merlin might just have a solution though, because Anonymous...Anonymous is legion.

In Spite of Everything, the Stars

by @thepolomonkey​ with art by @mushroomtale-fanart​, 82,243 words, Explicit

London. 2015. The government is set to vote on ending the microchipping of magic users, and Arthur Pendragon has been tasked with kidnapping prominent Magical activist Merlin Emrys to influence the outcome.

Locked away in a house on the North York Moors, tensions rise and confrontation ensues as Arthur is forced to re-evaluate everything he’s been taught about magic, and Merlin finds himself in a struggle for his life. And the fact that they’re falling for each other doesn’t help…

With Podfic by @momotastic27

Love, Toast, and Post-It Notes

by themadlurker, 6,704 words, Teen+

It was love at first sight, and Merlin knew it — when it came to the flat, that was. Merlin wasn't anything like as clear about the man he was going to have to live with.

With podfic by @tipsyxkitty

But It’s a Good Refrain

by @theladyragnell​, 23,090 words, Teen

Arthur doesn't care much about the popular radio program Dragon's Lonely Hearts until his ex-girlfriend calls in to slag him off and get advice. When he calls in and has an on-air argument with the host, it starts off more than he expected, including meddling friends, overinvolved fans, and maybe love.

With podfic by striped_bowties

At Our Best When It’s From the Hips

by @derryere​, 12,781 words, Explicit

Merlin goes to a brothel to get rid of that virginity thing and runs into Arthur. From there on, it's all madness.

Fake Dating & Fake Marriage

A Date for Dinner

by the5leggedcricket, 10,002 words, Mature

This time Uther has gone too far. With the help of Morgana and a ridiculous advertisement, Arthur finds the perfect revenge: a pretend boyfriend.

#weddingweekend

by sweetiejelly, 5,335 words, Mature

Being with Arthur has never been a chore. Being with Arthur is a breeze, a real breeze, especially in the convertible with the top down.

(Or, Arthur pretends to be Merlin's boyfriend for a wedding weekend. Kilgharrah 'Killy' possibly ships Merlin with Arthur or possibly just wants some chicken.)

An Exchange of Favours (aka The One Where Arthur Gets his Dick Stuck in a Door)

by SPowell, 9,030 words, Explicit

When Merlin gets a stranger out of a jam, he asks him to pretend to be his boyfriend for the night in order to make his ex jealous.

Maybe We Were Coming All Along

by @sassafrasx​, 22,181 words, Explicit

In retrospect, the "Prince on the Lam in Wales" Christmas headline was not what Arthur had intended.

Of Coffee Shops and Terrifying Sisters

by Ellenoel117, 4,626 words, Gen

In a sleepy haze Arthur stumbles into a random coffee shop, not expecting much, just coffee. Enter Merlin, shy, dorky and impossibly cute. Add in a rushed explanation, Morgana being Morgana and you've got something cooking.

The Practice Boyfriend

by giselleslash, 24,495 words, Mature

Merlin’s been in love with Lance for years, but he hasn’t had much experience dating and he wants to figure out the ins and outs of dating before Lance comes back into his life. Cue Arthur and his manwhoring ways, ready and willing to show Merlin the ropes.

A Prophecy of Dragons

by Skitz_phenom, 65,185 words, Explicit

Named the Last Dragonlord as his birthright, Merlin knows he must be responsible to his fellow druids and honor the tenets of the prophecy. That doesn't mean he's entirely happy about it and of course, trudging through yet another year of ritual with yet another potential consort, Merlin's perhaps grown a bit too blasé about the whole thing. So when Arthur Pendragon shows up in the Valley of the Fallen Kings, and they're both swept up in the auspices of said prophecy, he's not entirely sure how to feel about it all (or about the handsome, arrogant prince).

Domesticity (in est. relationship) & Parent AU

Oh Baby!

by ReneeLaRoux, 7,862 words, Gen

A witch's hex turns Arthur and Merlin into infants. The Knights of the Round Table are tasked with babysitting the miniature King and his Warlock.

The mysterious creature that struck at the heart of Camelot in the wake of the Festival of Ostara

by @prue84, 5,341 words, Gen

As the Festival of Ostara approaches, a mysterious creature threatens Camelot’s crown. Will King Arthur survive the attack or will the creature succeed in deposing the head of the Pendragon’s nest?

Pole Dancing AU

by Bevinkathryn, 47,916 words, Explicit

Arthur's secretary is hell bent on getting him a life. He never expected that life to involve her pole dancing friend, Merlin.

With podfic by @momotastic27

One Day at a Time

by @sara-bocchan​

Arthur had returned a couple of weeks ago and Merlin and him are slowly but surely settling into their new routine of adjusting Arthur to the modern world, preparing for the impending threat to Albion, and making the best out of this second chance. This is a story about one of these normal, calm days in their new lives.

Fostered

by @rageprufrock​, 6,511 words, Teen+

Obviously, it was not just any sort of egg.

With podfic by dodificus

Keep the Magic Secret

by orphan_account, 73,580 words, Explicit

For the prompt: Someone tells Arthur about the legends of Emrys, an all-powerful warlock whose destiny is to protect Arthur and his kingdom and help bring about an age of peace. He is told that Emrys is someone close to him, and has hidden his identity and trials over the years to protect himself and make sure he can continue on at Arthur's side. When Arthur asks who it is, the person turns to Arthur and shrewdly asks: "Arthur, who do you want it to be?" ... Arthur's mind automatically goes to Merlin.

Cis Swap, Genderbending & Sexuality and Gender Minorities 

Dude Looks Like a Lady

by Uniquely_Queer67, 4,941 words, Teen+

In this au, Arthur returned from Avalon a few weeks before he reunites with Merlin in this fic, and had to figure out the world by himself during that time (once he found Google he was pretty much set). But apparently he doesn't know enough when he falls for a gorgeous young woman performing in a club; or so he thinks...

Here and Nowhere Else

by @pendragoff, with art by @eviko, 41,882 words, Explicit

"We've grown into what our fathers had planned for us to be and that makes it even more impossible."

Forced into friendship for publicity at a young age, Merlin finds herself drawn to Arthur despite the fear of dishonoring her own father's memory. Arthur, the daughter of an unkind ruler, has her own issues to work through; seeing as the object of her affections has magic, the one thing her father hates above all else.

Remember, Remember, the Fift of November

by @angelqueen04, 3,351 words, Mature

Secrets destroy, one way or another.

With podfic by Hebecious

Smut

Someone Special

by teprometo, 3,882 words, Explicit

Merlin’s best mate’s older brother is really hot. It’s sort of a problem.

With podfic by sophinisba

Moments Like This

by dreamdustmama, 3,078 words, Explicit

In which Arthur is definitely not drunk, Merlin's secret is no longer a secret (at least from Arthur) and so-not-the-first-time sex happens.

 Favourite Epic Length (100k+)

Evil Overlord, Inc.

by @insanewordcount​, with art by @mushroomtale-fanart​, 137,922 words, Mature

Merlin is a recent graduate with a double doctorate in metaphysics and physics. Arthur is a low-level paper pusher with a desk in the sub-basement of MI5. They live in a world with ridiculous laws and restrictions against anyone who might be supernatural in any way, shape, or design.

Merlin has huge debts looming over this head, a few quid left in his bank account, and no job prospects. Arthur is pushing thirty, in a dead-end job with no chances of promotion to fieldwork agent, and is thoroughly bored with his life.

One ill-advised Craigslist advert, five pushy mates, one nosy all-knowing sister, and a hacked email account later, Merlin and Arthur take the world by storm.

(Or, more precisely, they take over the world.)

Favourite Short Story (under 5k)

Play Me Something

by Caledonia, 2,100 words

Merlin is a classical pianist who habitually gets notes of complaint from his neighbours, and habitually gets evicted by landlords unwilling to keep the peace. Until one note turns out quite differently than the others.

The Tulip Thief

by @thepolomonkey​, 3,182 words, Gen

'Sometimes I steal flowers from your garden on my way to the cemetery, but today you’ve caught me and have demanded to come with me to make sure the “girl is pretty enough to warrant flower theft” and I’m trying to figure out how to break it to you that we’re on our way to a graveyard'

Damsel in a Phone Booth

by @blackwidina​ 3,053 words, Teen+

I was on Tumbler and found this AU prompt:

“it’s the middle of the night and i’m walking home alone in the dark and there’s this guy following me and he’s starting to gain on me and i found this phone booth with a lock on the door and i tried to call my best friend but my hands were shaking so badly i accidentally dialed the wrong number and i don’t even know you but help me” au

And this was born. Enjoy!

Stranger Things Than Strangers

@fractionallyfoxtrot​, 995 words, Gen

Arthur calls Leon to complain about a horrible meeting with his father. At least, he thought he called Leon.

One Day

by @thepolomonkey​, 2,018 words, Teen+

Arthur meets Merlin outside a support group.

how not to propose

by @merlinwyllt​, 100 words, Gen

“What would you do if I put a crown on your head?”

Favourite Fic

Ace of Hearts

by beccadearie, 32,285 words, Mature

One night when out with friends, Merlin meets Arthur and quickly realizes that they have something in common: they are both asexual and trying to make their way through life and love in a sexual world without going crazy. What starts as hanging out between friends evolves into something more, and Merlin and Arthur decide to plunge headfirst into this tenuous relationship of give and take between the two of them.

Missed Connections (Glory, Glory Holelelujah)

by tourdefierce, 51,218 words, Explicit

Glory-Hole Romantic Comedy. 'NUFF SAID PEOPLE.

You bring the music to my silent world

by Balthamos, 49,818 words, Mature

Arthur and Merlin are thrown together as children when Merlin’s mother moves into the Pendragon Manor as the new housekeeper, bringing her deaf son Merlin with her. Arthur is a loud and obnoxious child, whereas Merlin is quiet but not as shy as everyone thinks. The two children become fast friends, but as they grow up together things begin to change, due to the pressure of wanting to be normal, and the growing lack of communication between the pair. Growing up is never easy and the graceful friendship they had as children gets lost as they reach their teenage years, but through their difficulties they develop a deeper, stronger relationship, one far more permanent.

Sitter!verse

by orphan_account, 32,476 words, Teen+

In which Mordred is Morgana’s 7 year-old son, Merlin is her (terribly cute) housekeeper/babysitter, and Arthur is over all the time because he’s hopelessly in love with him.

Jerusalem

by Magnolia822, 28,859 words, Explicit

Prince Arthur has spent his eighteenth year in a drunken haze of public debauchery, and after the latest round of incriminating photographs, King Uther is fed up. Though magic is outlawed and Magic Users are generally distrusted, Uther secretly hires a young sorcerer to keep Arthur in line, much to Arthur's chagrin. But what starts out as an antagonistic relationship becomes much more as Arthur, increasingly drawn to his secretive young warden, begins to suspect there is something rotten in the state of Great Britain.

And like the cycle of the year, we begin again

by katherynfromphilly, 209,983 words, Mature

For many long years Merlin waited.

For the other part of his soul, for the other half of his life. He was born to serve Arthur. So that meant he was also born to wait. Even if it took a thousand years. Even if the wait seemed never to end.

Until one day, suddenly, it did.

--------------

Set after the Merlin Series 5 Finale "Diamond of the Day". Canon Compliant. In Character. Arthur Pendragon Returns

When Arthur stumbles from the Lake of Avalon 1,500 years after his death, he finds a world unlike the one he knew. Faced with the loss of everyone he loved, and the threat of impending prophecy, Arthur must quickly learn what it means to be not just a king, but the Once and Future King. Merlin does all he can to guide him in this journey, even as he struggles to hide his love for his king, and to conquer his fear of losing him again.

Story includes sass, banter, horseplay, and True Love.

Creators of COiNELOT

Distant Echoes

by @sara-bocchan​, with art by @lao-pendragon​, 33,678 words, Teen+

Arthur grows up in a small town and into an overall great and normal life. Except, he keeps having these strange, recurring dreams. Once a year he dreams of a man, watches whatever he is up to at the moment, and sees places he could have never imagined. Arthur was sure he had never met him, so why did he seem so familiar?

Getting older, Arthur becomes determined to find out more about his dreams and the mysterious man. He starts to travel to places he had seen in his dreams and does all the research he can possibly do – but to no avail. Over the years he almost gives up, when suddenly he starts to remember a lifetime many centuries ago – the man from his dreams always at his side...

You Swiped Right

by @momotastic27​, 22,038 words, Explicit

Pendragon Books is to London's bookselling industry what Sauron is to Middle-Earth: Bad fucking news.

Merlin could also compare them to Voldemort and the magical world in Britain, or maybe the White Witch and Narnia, but no matter what analogy he picks, the point remains the same: Wherever Pendragon Books pops up with a new shop, existing businesses die a painful death, robbing their city of more and more personality and character. Therefore it comes as a bit of a shock when they're settling in right across the street from Merlin's bookshop, and Merlin finds out that Arthur Pendragon himself is gorgeous and unreasonably easy to talk to, and - worst of all - a bit of a nerd.

However, not only is Merlin most definitely not fraternising with the enemy, he's also already sort of dating someone. So what if it started on Grindr, and is only through text messages?

Bad Behaviour (gets you the Pendragon Treatment)

by @tayathestrange, 24,258 words, Explicit, WIP

After his attack on the Pendragon Inc. servers backfired Merlin finds himself in some unpleasent situation. Maybe he shouldn't have taken the job after all...

My Once and Future Love

by @tracionn, manip, Mature

Naked cuddling :)

Choices and Tourneys

by @elveatas, 13,879 words, Explicit

Every year, right before mating season, Camelot holds a great tournament in which the alphas will compete with each other in order to show their strength to the omegas who’ll be looking to choose the perfect mate. After all, it’s not the alpha who chooses the omega, but the omega who chooses the alpha, and Arthur really, really wants Merlin to choose him.

Perfectly Imperfect

by @little-dhampir-1508, 4,867 words, Teen+

Arthur takes care of Merlin after some bullies got to him.

Times Change

by @elirwen, 7,427 words, Explicit

After witnessing Uther's breakdown and finding out some of the horrible things he did during the Purge, Arthur's general stance on magic shifts radically much to Morgana and Merlin's surprise.

What’s a Soulmate?

by @misssnowfoxx, 2:26 min, fanvid

I've been wanting to vid this quote for way too long! And I'm sure you'll all agree no couple in the history of the world has every deserved this quote more than these two stupid assholes in love. I had a very emotional time making this video and I hope I got across what I wanted to.

Creswell Crags

by @gwylliondream, 5,747 words, Teen+

When Arthur takes ill, he finds himself in a strange environment that echoes his past and gives him hope for the future.

What were you the god of again?

by @brolinskeep, manips, on tumblr

a reluctant heir to the throne who's rather out on quests to keep his people and others save than sitting at home in his palace, an army of the dead, a very special sword, golden eyes of magic and a dragon, a prophecy that needs to be defied and 'oh yeah by the way, you have an older sister i never told you about who's pretty powerful and wants your throne. you got this son. dad out.'

sound familiar?

Diplomatic Immunity

by @archaeologistd, 86,952 words, Explicit

Merlin has come to Camelot to act as an envoy between the magic users and the new High King, Arthur Pendragon. Four years ago, Nimueh had twisted the truth, making Arthur think Merlin was in league with her. That Arthur is unhappy to see him again is an understatement.

My Magical Manservant

by @lao-pendragon, art, Gen

The »My magical Manservant Series« is a collection of many little stories about Arthur Pendragon who is deeply in love with his very magical manservant Merlin. While several secrets, whether magic or love, are no secrets anymore, they have to deal with disobedient dragons, cheeky knights, a whole kingdom and their own feelings for each other. Keep their magic secret!

#bbc merlin #merthur #merthur fanfic #merthur fanfiction #merlin fanfiction #coinelot reincarnated #c2: activities

[mana-burns]

You Can’t Go Home Again: An Analysis of Resident Evil VII

I'm comin' home, I've done my time Now I've got to know what is and isn't mine If you received my letter telling you I'd soon be free Then you'll know just what to do If you still want me

Introduction

Resident Evil VII is deceptive. Resident Evil, as a series, is deceptive. Numerous spinoffs and unnumbered entries turned the franchise into a tangled mess of intersecting characters, monsters, and conspiracies.

From the original trek through the Spencer mansion to the bombastic high-stakes setpiece-fest that is RE6, Resident Evil, after three console generations, had descended into itself, becoming bloated and seemingly incorrigible, impossible to nail down and define.

REVII was positioned as a return to form. Like the original Resident Evil, it is a straightforward story set in a spooky house, starring an inexperienced protagonist, Ethan, there with a simple but sympathetic and relatable mission: Rescue his girlfriend and get out. But REVII can’t help but dip into massive conspiracy as it navigates through what should be a relatively easy-to-digest story.

As Ethan searches for the missing Mia, who was away on a, get this, babysitting job, he encounters the deranged and inhuman Baker family, who have been granted a twisted immortality. There’s a pervasive black goo simply referred to as the Mold that seems to be infecting the family and their estate, spawning undead creatures and giving the Bakers supernatural powers. It’s not long before Ethan himself is infected, too.

The game then becomes a series of fetch-quests and races to various Macguffins as Ethan hurries to assemble a cure for himself, Mia, and their newfound ally, the Bakers’ daughter Zoe.

Resident Evil VII is a game running from its own past. As a linear narrative, it works fine, but it works better as a mood piece, a love letter to American horror films. It is meant to emulate a series of tropes and conventions. It's the product of two cultures—East and West— colliding head-on, and as a result it feels disjointed, dissonant, and yet wholly unique, fascinating, and, ultimately, compelling.

Resident Evil VII is an allegory for itself. It is a battle for the series’ soul.

Aesthetics

Let’s get one thing out of the way first: Resident Evil 7 is not concerned with realism. It’s about simulating a horror movie; recreating their grit, visuals, and mood. In this way, it is a simulation of a simulation, and it leans heavily on the history and conventions of the American horror film without ever fully understanding them. You see this in direct, 1-for-1 tributes, such as the chainsaw fight with Jack that evokes Evil Dead 2, or the Saw-like machinations of Lucas Baker’s deathtraps, or the body found in the basement corner in the Derelict House Footage tape, positioned just like the victim in Blair Witch Project. And practically the entire front-half of Resident Evil 7 is pulled straight from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

This is par for the course for the Resident Evil series. The first game was a pretty standard take on haunted mansion horror, with some limited ventures into ‘80s action films, casting STARS as the badass special forces team in way over their heads a la Predator or even Aliens.

Resident Evil has always been about taking American horror and action tropes and sort of sifting them through Japanese culture. It is a imitation of American conventions, and it works precisely because it is so imperfect. Its dissonance happens to work perfectly for the mood of the genre. There’s something unsettling about how the details are just off; Louisiana looks like a still frame from an episode of True Detective, but it’s still evocative of how Americans perceive the swampland. Little mistakes regarding the area’s history and culture—the strange references to football, the inaccurate Civil War uniform—make things uncomfortable and strange. It’s like taking an English sentence, running it through Google translate into Japanese, and then translating it back into English again. Some general meanings are there and you may even be able to gleam some sense out of it, but it has lost all context and syntax and turned into something that isn’t quite English and isn’t quite Japanese—something that occupies the space between, something that has become a totally unique method of communication, with its own new signifiers and meaning. That’s Resident Evil. And that may explain a bit of the franchise’s ongoing identity crisis, too.

On a more surface-level reading, the aesthetics of REVII are vastly different from those of its predecessors, an approach to horror that’s a bit brighter but no less terrifying than previous entries. Remember, VII tells us, sunlight casts deeper shadows than darkness. This approach to horror is largely possible due to the wonderful lighting and particle effects at Capcom’s disposal, and though their tech struggles with faces, the uncanny valley works in their favor for this particular title, elevating that otherworldly feeling of imperfect simulation.

The Baker mansion and its surrounding area are dirty, grimy, grotesque. It’s southern gothic. The word “squalor” comes to mind. They choose to live in filth. Is there something ableist and maybe even contempful towards poverty about this dehumanizing of the Bakers? Maybe, but any sort of prejudice that the designers might be preying on here comes from a degree of separation, in that their only knowledge of that context, as mentioned before, is through American horror films, through simulacra. It is seperated by multiple layers, and so I find it hard to condemn their visions of the impoverished American South as anything but pulpy horror. Whatever the case, the true antagonists of the story betray any idea of prejudice against the lower class.  

Perspective

Resident Evil 7’s protagonist is a camera. The series shifts to a first-person perspective for the first time, placing the player behind the eyes and within the mind of the game’s lead, Ethan. Despite this, the game has no qualms separating the avatar from the controller; there’s a sense that Ethan is his own character, with his own motivations not necessarily in line with the player’s.

I’ve heard the argument that what Ethan sees within the first half hour of the game would be enough to make anyone turn back. Why does he choose to go in alone? Why doesn’t he get help, or at least arm himself before he starts literally wading through corpses? No justifiable motivation could explain that.

Ethan is ostensibly motivated to look for his lost love, Mia. We’ll talk more about Mia later, but first I want to challenge the idea that this surface motivation is all that is propelling Ethan forward. Of course, you and I, and the developers, know that Ethan’s true motivation has nothing to do with Mia, and in fact nothing to do with Ethan himself, as he has no autonomy in the story. No, the motivating action propelling Resident Evil VII forward lies in the hands of the player. In a horror movie, the sort of films REVII is explicitly invoking, we can feel smarter than the protagonists. We know not to take a shower, we know not to look behind the curtain. In a horror game, we must specifically put ourselves in dangerous situations, and we do it because it’s fun. Without doing that, we can’t participate in the game. In REVII, since there is a degree of separation between player and avatar, our attention is specifically brought to Ethan’s flimsy-seeming motivation. In fact he moves forward because we push him forward, we keep him fighting. There’s a sadistic, manipulative relationship between Ethan and the player, but it’s also more complicated than that.

We sympathize with Ethan because of his love for Mia. Still, in some of Ethan’s barks and challenges to the Bakers, he expresses confusion, true ingenuity, sincerity, and a surprising and inspiring amount of courage and mettle. These motivations are enough for us to bind with Ethan, more so than in any other game in the series. Ethan is dumb, and we love him for that.

Mechanically speaking, first-person allows for some admittedly cheap but still fun jump scares, but it more importantly creates room for and necessitates an extreme amount of detail. Players can inspect drawers, cabinets, and cracks in the floorboards, unlike ever before. Monsters have a more threatening sense of scale, and so Resident Evil VII frequently plays with perspective and height, making its signature footsoldiers, the Molded, lumbering, giant masses of black knots, while also making its primary villain surprisingly pint-sized.

The first-person perspective also gives way to an effective new move, the block, crucial on the higher difficulties. The block gives Ethan a defensive verb and sort of grants the player a satisfying “cower” button. It doesn’t always make sense (how could an arm block a chainsaw?) but it paces out the game quite well against melee enemies, and it lends a visceral clutter to an already elegantly messy game screen.

Speaking of visceral—the new perspective’s greatest strength is probably the way it facilitates body horror. In RE7, you’ll have limbs chopped off, knives driven into your ribcage, and horrible masses of crawling grubs shoved down your throat. It’s a very personal, intimate horror, one that wants to gross you out while it makes your controller shudder and vibrate in resistance. It brings the player deeper into the shell of Ethan, and it creates a atmosphere of trapped, hopeless dread.

In a way, Resident Evil has been grasping at this perspective since its inception; think of the first encounter with a zombie in the first title, how the game shifts to Jill or Chris’s eyes, how the undead slowly turns to face you, its rotted mouth stuffed with human brain. This moment of body horror was essentially our introduction to Resident Evil’s mood. The perspective in Resident Evil VII, and our mouth being stuffed full of rotten flesh as we watch on, helplessly, brings the whole thing to a complete circle.

Kinetics

The movement in Resident Evil VII is deliberately slow, almost plodding. There’s a sense of weight to Ethan and his actions, necessitating such things as the aforementioned block button as well as a dedicated turn, a verb that is becoming more and more common in triple-A games, it seems. There is a sprint button, but there’s no real way to get Ethan to break out into an actual full-on run, ironic considering the urgency of the situation he’s in.

You could hand-wave away his plodding speed by saying it has something to do with his recent infection, but the Resident Evil series has always inhibited its protagonists in order to simulate the physical ramifications that fear has on the body. Despite arming the player to their proviberial teeth, early RE games aren’t about player empowerment; they still want to be a struggle to survive. So the series balances its arsenal of weapons by inhibiting the avatar’s movement. This is of course subverted in Resident Evil 4, further dismantled in 5, and completely out the window by the time 6 rolls around, but 7 is, again, intended as a return to form, and so we see a slower pace to all of Ethan’s movement. It makes up for the increased precision in aiming that the first person perspective allows.

REVII’s movement and control schemes are nowhere near as innovative and revolutionary as RE4’s over-the-shoulder controls or even RE1’s tank controls. But they still work remarkably well, and this is largely due to how the environments are designed to accommodate them. RE7 is filled with little nooks and crannies that demand careful consideration. Most of the time, they’re empty, but they are so discomforting they feel like intrusive negative space. A quick-turn button means that you always have a way to quickly glance over your shoulder. It creates a paralyzing set of blindspots to the player’s immediate left and immediate right.

Some of the guns in RE7 feel flimsy to fire, unsatisfying and cardboard-thin. The pistol has little weight or feedback, and despite the fact that the submachine gun is one of the most effective weapon in the game, it never really feels great to pull the trigger. It’s all just a bit too high-tech and light, and it clashes with the game’s mood. The shotgun, on the other hand, is incredibly satisfying, with a wonderful kick and a beautiful cascade of gore and blood to compliment each round. Meanwhile, swipes with the knife feel weak and desperate, appropriate as the knife will be little more than a box-breaker or last-ditch effort for the player.  

I want to note how well the sound design compliments the movement in Resi 7. Each creek of the floorboard that comes with each step enhances the mood. Everything works harmoniously towards a feeling and an atmosphere, even if it isn’t, by the strictest definition, realistic. Remember, Resident Evil VII doesn’t strive for realism. It strives for a different sort of immersion, one that engulfs the player in familiar iconography rather than relatable and recognizable situations.

The puzzles in Resident Evil VII include the lock-key affairs that are synonymous with the series, though some of them work in interesting or subversive ways. Take the shadow puppet puzzles, that ask the player to rotate a certain key until it casts a shadow that fits into a mold or image. It’s clever to ask the player to think about the game’s lighting; it weaves together the environment and the objective. It draws attention to light and shadow, it takes time and manipulation. What it doesn’t quite take is the lateral thinking necessary for most of what you’d call puzzles. No, the puzzles in REVII are slave to the game’s pace, not its challenge. They give you tasks to do, things to fetch, and moments of quiet discomfort to break up the sometimes bombastic noise of gameplay.

Doors

Doors play a significant role in the Resident Evil series. In the first title, they masked loading screens and acted as gateways for player progression—a lot of that game’s pacing is defined by finding and using keys. In REmake, some doors will shake and slam as you walk past them, implying that enemies are waiting for you on the other side.

But doors are also important tools for survival; each door in Resident Evil is a barrier to keep enemies at bay, because each room is treated as its own discrete environment. Zombies (mostly) can’t get through doors. If you can’t deal with an enemy or enemies, you flee towards the door and use it to place a divide between you and them. Doors are powerful mechanically and thematically in Resident Evil and REmake.

In RE7, they work in a different way. You press a button to initially crack them open, but the game makes you physically push them open as a separate action. In this way you must commit actual movement to the action of entering a room to open a door. You need to make a serious mental and physical investment in order to progress.

This is nothing short of brilliant. You can’t back away from a room after opening the door and survey it for safety before plunging in. You have to go in headfirst, and this gives the game control over moment-to-moment player progression. The doors in Resident Evil VII area synecdoche for the game’s entire design; a mindfulness in mood, movement and control that services a feeling rather than a sense of realism or accuracy.

Videotapes

Resident Evil 7’s obsession with horror films extends beyond the game’s aesthetics and into its mechanics. It is fascinated with the concept of video tapes, beyond simply using these tapes as a way to evoke the mood of found footage horror. Rather, it finds a mechanical purpose for the tapes, turning them into puzzle pieces that help Ethan escape.

When we are first introduced to the videotape mechanic, it’s in the initial shack area, part of the demo that was released before the full game. The tape belongs to an unlucky film crew, working for some imaginary (but wholly believable) reality show about plumbing the depths of abandoned houses. In what is RE7’s most obvious expression of its main purpose—placing the player in a horror movie—the player takes control of the cameraman, and indeed the camera itself, and by proxy—through the method by which Ethan diegetically experiences this scene—the tape. We are the footage, and though it supposedly happened in the past, we are now controlling it in real time.

Disturbingly, the crew goes through almost exactly the same paces that Ethan went through just moments ago, and since we see how it ended up for them, it suggests that he is probably in a great deal of danger.

But the tape shows that there is a secret passage in the fireplace, one that the player could have totally missed without its aid. This establishes a pattern; the player will encounter three more tapes during their journey, and each one will convey a little more information and context to not only the player, but to their avatar, Ethan, as well. Not all of the tapes are mandatory for progression, but they are a wonderful way to present missing pieces of the puzzle to the player, through methods that are thematically appropriate and never wrestle control away from the protagonist. The tapes are essentially keys, but they are infinitely more interesting than a simple progression lock.

The most effective and interesting tape is perhaps the most well-hidden one. “Happy Birthday” is buried in a cupboard in the attic, and it is disturbing footage kept safe and secret by the Bakers’ son, Lucas.

The footage is of an elaborate deathtrap set up by Lucas, who’s positioned as a sort of genius psychopath as an in-universe explanation for some of the game’s puzzles. Lucas has captured one of the poor erstwhile documentarians, and the player takes on this victim’s perspective. Interestingly, all semblance of artifice—a camera recording the footage—drips away in favor of this perspective. Through the magic of movies, we become this character, one-step removed from our hero Ethan, yet still somehow viewing it through his eyes. If the intro tape had us jump back in time to where Ethan has been, this tape foreshadows where he will go.

Since we already know that the victim of the trap doesn’t survive, it’s not a failure to participate in Lucas’s machinations. Instead, it’s presented as the scripted, linear path that we must follow. The lethal puzzle culminates with a task that requires the victim to uncork a barrel of oil, leading to the explosion that ultimately kills the victim in the tape. But the action that springs this trap just yields a password. If one were to go into the trap with some prior knowledge of that password, one would be fine. And that’s exactly the position the tape leaves Ethan in. Since he, by way of the player and the tape, already knows the password, he’s able to escape Lucas’s trap unharmed.

This means the tape isn’t necessary for success. If the player somehow fails to find the tape, they just have to play the death trap twice. Once they continue the game and run through the puzzle a second time, they’ll realize they can just skip over the deathtrap, since they already know the password. It’s a puzzle that is proofed against stumping a stumbling player.

It also extends the horror movie motif pulsing at the heart of Resident Evil VII. It’s an attempt at creating something that the series has sometimes dabbled with, but never fully explored–the idea of elaborate, claustrophobic death traps. You’ll see spiked walls and bottomless pits in other Resi games, but never something quite so sinister and unique, not to mention devoid of enemies or threats beyond the traps themselves. It is a quiet, challenging horror, one that pits the player against themselves, and I think it’s more than strong enough to stand on its own as a full game.

The video tapes in Resident Evil VII stand hand-in-hand with the tape recorder save points and evoke a certain era of technology, a halted progress that crystallizes the Baker mansion at a moment in time, and suggests that they’ve paused their evolution. It also subtly reminds players of a time and a place, the same crucible of factors that led to the creation of the horror films that inspired Resident Evil VII. It’s a horror born out of grime and dust rather than shadows and moonlight.

Jack

Jack is the first member of the family you encounter; you catch a glimpse of his form plodding through the woods, and he eventually kidnaps you and brings you to the centerpiece of REVII’s introduction, the family dinner, where he makes himself known as an intimidating and controlling presence.

After Jack’s pulled away by the arrival of a deputy, you escape from your binds and start to move through the mansion, but of course he quickly catches on to your plan. What follows is the most compelling, proof-of-concept sequence in all of RE7; a game of cat-and-mouse through a tightly wound series of narrow corridors, with the slow-moving but ultra-powerful Jack following you close behind.

The wing of the house that Jack chases you through is a well-thought out arena, with a few hidden escape hatches and multiple ways to double-back. It makes movement and navigation feel clever and fun, while still keeping a sense of looming dread. You’ll double-back multiple times, and you’ll always have the plan b of escaping back into the safe room on the opposite end of the hallway, as far from your objective as possible.

This scene is marked, most notably, by a few scripted scenarios designed to catch the player off-guard; one, Jack can burst through a wall and surprise the player, but only if both characters are positioned just right—some players will never even see this sequence.

It takes courage to develop entire sequences that some players will never see. It’s difficult and resource-intensive to design and place such moments in a game. But it pays off in REVII; these moments are some of the most memorable in the entire game, and you can tell a lot of care and time went into making Jack’s sequence pitch-perfect. It’s truly the highlight of the game and a Capcom more willing to take a huge gamble might have used it as the entire framework for the game. As it is, it’s the stand-out chapter in the game.

After a bit of exploration and a few confrontations, you’ll encounter the now most certainly undead Jack Baker, during an otherwise slow-paced hunt for a few statues. He catches you off-guard and the game challenges you to once again play cat-and-mouse. As a result, the entire Jack encounter sort of plays like a three-act structure in its own right; you encounter him once, run away, quiet exploration, encounter him again, more puzzles and exploration, and a final, bombastic, Evil-Dead-as-hell encounter in an enclosed space.

The fight challenges how well players have learned to navigate tight corners and small spaces while evading a slow-moving Jack. Perhaps it would have been more appropriate to present them with a cat-and-mouse challenge, one that added new wrinkles in order to act as a sort of final exam for the Jack chapter. But it’s hard to argue that this fight isn’t a trippy power fantasy for the player, and the way it flips the player’s relationship with Jack works.

Ethan has now escaped the mansion, but finds himself in the Baker grounds writ-large. The game doesn’t open up or become less linear, but it does explore some novel new locations. Unfortunately, that variance comes at the cost of some consistency. Before moving on to the next location, the player encounters a trailer belonging to Zoe, who ostensibly sets herself up as a mysterious ally. We first encountered Zoe through a phone call in the Baker house, where she warned us we were in grave danger. Zoe is not that interesting as a character, and mainly serves to complicate the game’s narrative, which starts out simply and becomes more and more complicated, to its weakness. Zoe is an element of that. She’s not well fleshed-out in the main game, and she’ll later be part of an arbitrary and superfluous player choice that feels tacked on. Here, however, she’ll play the role of mysterious sherpa for a while.

After a short break to resupply and catch their bearings, the player will soon enter the second house, the old house, and the domain of Mrs. Marguerite Baker.

Marguerite

Pacing-wise, Marguerite’s domain is when RE7 really starts to slip in its footing. It’s not exactly bad gameplay, but it does sag a bit, and a few fetch-quests lead to the previously mentioned flamethrower and a pretty frightening if rhetorically uninteresting tape starring Mia.

Marguerite’s gimmick is insects, cockroach-like bugs that swarm Ethan, fly around the damp wooden shack, and build nests that the player must flush out using the burner. The bugs create some variance in the enemies that RE7 will throw at the player, but they aren’t terribly fun to fight. What’s more, the old house doesn’t feel quite as well-thought-out as the larger Baker Mansion, and though it also follows a somewhat circular layout, its hallways and doors are less distinct, and its rooms are less geometrically interesting.

Jack is horrifying because he feels threatening and powerful. Marguerite is horrifying because she’s unpleasant to see or hear. It’s a skin-deep horror that relies on physical reactions rather than mental ones. Marguerite is repulsive, not necessarily terrifying.

Perhaps most disappointingly, we don’t learn very much about Marguerite at all, before or after her infection. Jack gets a moment of redemption later in the game, and Lucas and Zoe are fleshed out in conversation and flavor text around the Baker estate. Marguerite, on the other hand, only gets bits and pieces of story—she’s really more about an image than a fleshed-out idea. The DLC supposedly characterizes her out a little better, and gives hints to what she was like pre-infection. There are glimpses here and there that suggest she had an affinity for religious iconography; she has a habit of creating small shrines to Eve’s “gift.” This was a potentially rich vein that Capcom could have explored in more detail to make Marguerite feel like more than just a wife and mother.

The highlight of Marguerite’s section, by far, is her boss encounter. Set in a small two-story greenhouse, the boss fight begins when she startles you by popping through a window and grabbing your legs. At this point, she has mutated into a Junji Ito-style horror, with long arms mimicking spider limbs.

Her boss arena is a work of art. While Jack’s pit is somewhat simplistic, Marguerite’s stage has a layout simple enough to grok but complicated enough to provide ambush points and blind spots. There are doors that are blocked from one side, but give the player a route to double-back. There are ceilings and walls and windows for Marguerite to crawl on and climb through. There’s ammo hidden in cabinets, but there’s a risk-reward of wasting burner ammo to open these cabinets—though the burner is the most effective weapon against the matriarch. And, echoing the gameplay in her larger domain, the boss fight is dampened by moments of quiet stalking, though here the line is blurred between cat and mouse; you’re fighting back, and if you can control the tempo of the fight you’re frequently on the offense.

There is some sexual imagery to Marguerite’s final transformation, as her weak point is a hive-womb, and she crawls around on all fours while stalking you. It’s RE taking a page out of Silent Hill’s book, and it might feel a little cheap and grotesque if it wasn’t executed with the grimy style of a western grindhouse horror flick. No, REVII has little reservations about what it is by this point; it fully accepts that it is campy gross-out horror, but never to the level of shtick. It still takes its scares seriously, and this level of sincerity lends it a lot of heart. It makes no apologies for being disgusting, and in that way it’s lovable, just like the shlock it’s based on.

After a grueling fight, Marguerite calcifies and crumbles to dust, leaving behind a lantern for Ethan, who is free to move on to the next chapter of the game.

Eveline (Part 1)

But before Ethan moves on, he makes a detour to the attic and the kid’s bedroom.. Demonic children are nothing new, horror-wise, but REVII sows the seeds of its main antagonist achingly slowly, placing her quite literally right under the player’s nose while still breadcrumbing morbid story details to keep the hook. It’s not a deep story, or even all that unpredictable, but it is compelling enough to push Ethan forward.

You’ll notice I’m not paying much mind to the grand details of the plot, and that’s precisely because the story is secondary to a mood. This is why so many of its characters are so tropey. They don’t need to be real people, they need to serve a purpose.

If this is all sounding a bit harsh, let me assure you; I fully believe anything other than REVII’s broad strokes narrative would probably feel a little too fiddly and intrusive to serve what the game is trying to be. There’s just enough dressings of a compelling story to keep players interested in what’s going on, and that’s exactly the way it should be.

The Baker’s son, Lucas, plans to make you work hard to reach his lair, and as a result there’s a quick and gruesome return to the main mansion to fetch a key out of a corpse and battle some extra molded. This largely feels like filler and fluff, but it goes a long way to building Lucas up as a bit different from his parents. He’s more sinister, more cunning, more self-aware and human. You’ll also encounter Grandma a few more times, placed within the critical path, always watching and always silent.

RE has always been noteworthy for its clockwork puzzles, and the series has frequently lampshaded these puzzles in cute if unbelievable and ultimately unnecessary ways. The police station in RE2, for example, was supposedly a decommissioned art museum, as if that makes any sense.

In REVII, though, it’s the machinations of a character, the inventive, sociopathic Lucas, who, as it turns out, is a major antagonistic force behind the game’s entire plot. His reveal as the true antagonist of the game is brought on with little fanfare. It’s mostly revealed in DLC and notes. But it’s similar to Wesker’s heel-turn in RE1. It doesn’t purporte him to be the main villain of the game, but it sets him up as a possible series-wide antagonist.

Your mileage may vary out of this twist. Some might like having a face to the horror, and the stories of Lucas as a child, spying on his sister and setting traps for neighborhood bullies, are chilling in a lasting way. But the game doesn’t do a great job of selling Lucas as a planner, and the whole thing feels a bit contrived in the face of REVII’s greater narrative.

Lucas

In the Videotape section, I discussed the happy birthday tape and how it uses the conventions and structure of a video game to set up REVII’s most interesting puzzle. I briefly glossed over how the tape and Lucas as a character invokes the found footage aesthetic so important to Resident Evil VII’s style, but in the Happy Birthday puzzle—and through the rest of Lucas’s death traps—we see another piece of horror movie inspiration come to life; the complicated, convoluted deathtraps of films like Saw and Cube.

  This sort of claustrophobic psycho-horror came about out of budget constraints. The first Saw was hugely influential because it allowed for an inexpensive yet wholly effective reworking of the slasher flick. It was successful commercially, and it was appealing to producers because it had the built-in simplicity of a few simple sets and some inexpensive practical effects. It was a streamlined reworking of the genre for the 21st century.

If Jack stands in for the ‘70s-era slash-fests like Texas Chainsaw, and Marguerite is a melding of ‘80s and ‘90s body horror from the West and the East, then it’s temporally appropriate that Lucas is the representative for 21st century gore flicks. In a way, REVII is a tour of the genre’s modern history, an exploration of its tropes as they evolved. It’s a love letter to three eras of horror.

Mechanically, Lucas challenges the player to stop, move slowly and deliberately, and fully assess the environment. There are tripwire bombs and spike traps littering the hallways of his home, and though you will still fight standard molded, they’re sort of a trivial threat by this point. No, Lucas demands that you think about the game’s environment as hostile and unforgiving. This is something of a change when compared to the circular, narrow hallways in the Baker Mansion and the Old house, where the game’s architecture and hidden pathways were one of your only weapons against your pursers. Here, Lucas isn’t following you, but he’s attempting to anticipate your movement. You’re not being chased, you’re being funneled.

Lucas leads you into the Baker barn, which he’s set up like a gladiatorial arena. If you needed any further evidence that the game is now fully banking on Saw homages, the hanging pig-corpses should be proof enough. This environment is incredibly quiet at first, but its architecture betrays its true nature; the intersecting, stacked hallways are layed out too perfectly for it to not be some sort of combat arena. In most games, this discord can be laughable; in Resi VII, it builds tension and suspense, and therefore works a little better than it might in, say, a pure action game or a shooter.

Depending on your difficulty, you’ll face some number of a new type of enemy, the fat Molded. These are bulky, powerful enemies who spew bile, one of the few projectile attacks in the game. Overall, they’re more intimidating than actually threatening. By this point, you’re armed to the teeth, and the barn’s layout gives you plenty of ways to obscure line of sight and take cover. But this boss encounter most vitally introduces the fat molded into the ranks of foes you’ll encounter. Resident Evil has a history of introducing powerful minions with such fanfare; they bring around a new, tough enemy type, build them up as an intimidating, powerful force, and then later seed them into the ranks once the player is more capable. It’s a way of ramping up combat challenges and creating an interesting endgame.

Next up is the happy birthday puzzle. Once you beat Lucas’s escape room, he gets angry and tosses a bomb into the room, which you can use to blast the wall and escape. By the time you make it to his control room, Lucas has already fled. There’s a short trek to the boathouse, and a fully-loaded safe room is a pretty good indicator that a big fight is about to go down. There’s a sense of finality to the proceedings, considering that you’ve now worked your way through the main Baker family. Still, there’s something like a quarter of the game left, and it’s when most people say REVII really goes off the rails. The pace and mood of the game is about to undergo a major shift. But first, it’s the final battle with Jack.

Jack’s Return

Ethan’s final encounter in the Baker residence brings his time with the family full-circle. Jack has come back from the dead yet again, and he’s mutated beyond any recognition. This is the beginning of REVII’s slide fully into the conventions of the series, away from the new-age slasher flick pastiche and into the gamey, japanese bio-horror that defines the series.

The fight with Jack is a fairly standard boss battle that asks you to shoot the glowy parts when they start getting glowy. There’s a smart sense of player-enemy placement and blocking and a clever use of levels that keep the fight from feeling dull.

The barn burns over the course of the fight, and eventually it’s all but completely destroyed. Once the fight wraps up, Jack will grab you as a final deathrattle, and you’ll be forced to inject him with one of the two cures you’ve cooked up. This means you only have enough serum to cure one other person, and the game is going to make you choose—do you fulfill your promise to Zoe, or do you stay loyal to your original mission, and rescue Mia? It’s a dull, binary, choice that simply determines the ending of the game, as well as what amounts to an optional boss fight. It’s set up to either reward or punish the player, rather than challenging their conceptions of the game’s world and Ethan’s place in it. Put simply, there’s a right answer and a wrong answer, which makes it fundamentally uninteresting.

Whoever the player chooses, the pair will then make their escape down the river.

Mia and the Tanker

The boat crashes, and REVII plays its final third-act twist; a shift in perspective, moving the action behind the eyes of Mia, who is all-too-familiar with the washed-up tanker. The twist is that Mia is much more than she seemed and was hiding a few secrets from Ethan. She’s a mercenary, hired to escort a bioweapon on a commercial tanker in a covert operation. That weapon is Eveline, the main antagonist and the driving force behind the sentient Molded force that both corrupted the Bakers and created the monsters the player has battled this entire game.

This twist is nothing short of baffling. It is unexpected, but it is not a subversion of any player expectations; it’s a twist that devalues the previous rising action rather than usurping it, and it inflates the scale of the game’s conflict beyond ‘creepy house’ and into ‘international high-stakes bioterrorism.’ It’s disingenuous and exhausting, as Ethan is now relegated to a bit player in a bigger conspiracy.

All that being said—it’s Resident Evil sinking back into its traditional mold. Wesker’s heel-turn and the Umbrella conspiracy elevated the first game’s spooky mansion into a secret megascience lab. That twist set the pace for the series as a whole; a convoluted narrative rooted in a distinctly Japanese anxiety over superweapons.

Here’s the thing; I don’t think the twist is all bad, actually. I think there’s something charming about how RE feels it is so vital to create a wide, entangling conspiracy to tell such a tight and quick narrative. It’s an impulse that the series truly cannot escape, for whatever reason. It is never content to tell a story about horror on a small-scale. It needs to dip into some kind of worldwide threat in order to tie all its narrative strings together. Would REVII be stronger without the tanker chapters and the larger ramifications of its effect on the narrative? Probably. Would it really be Resident Evil without such a grand mega-conspiracy at its heart? I’m not so sure.

It’s a complicated issue, because it begs the question; how much can you mess with a series’ DNA before you have an entirely new product? Is a mood enough to connect a series, or does there need to be an underlying thread that connects all the titles to its past? Is there simply too much baggage attached to such a massive beast of a franchise for it to ever escape its own legacy?

Ostensibly, the theme of Resident Evil VII is family. It’s the driving force that causes Eveline to throw off her controllers and drive the game’s plot forward. It’s the bond that causes Ethan to go after Mia, and it's the question that Zoe struggles with as she turns against her mutated clan.

Conversely, then, it is appropriate that Resident Evil VII struggles against its predecessors and the legacy they have created. Like Zoe, it is fighting for its own identity while still maintaining a certain loyalty to its origins.

Eveline (Part 2)

The last location in the game is the salt mines, which act as a sort of final combat dungeon, overrun with Molded. Unlike the tanker, however, the salt mines afford the player a ton of firepower and ammunition. It’s all about player empowerment now, as the scales have been tipped in Ethan’s favor. Fighting the molded is now trivial.

The mine is also set up as a sort of ground zero for the Molded. There are secret labs and documents filled with research on the molded dotting offshoots and chambers.

There’s a thrilling race up a spiraling column and a few more fights with the fat Molded between Ethan and Eveline. She’s in the guest house, and this final confrontation acts as more of a cathartic emotional highpoint than a final gameplay challenge. The mines were the real final test, and though there are some small challenges to the encounter with Eveline, it’s more in position to wrap up REVII’s mood and story.

The player is now up against Eveline’s psychic powers, and it’s about as hokey as it sounds. However, the audiovisual presentation is strong enough to suck the player in, and it still feels emotionally resonant and threatening, even when dipping into the absurd.

After the player figures out how to guard against Eve’s blasts, they reach her decaying body. Like Lisa trevor in REmake, Eve is positioned as a victim of larger, sinister forces, a capitalist war machine that took a little girl and turned her into a weapon. This sympathy for the devil ultimately induces genuine pity for Eveline, and it, again, shifts the focus of the story onto a more worldwide conspiracy and less on its play actors.

Eve’s final form is massive and grotesque, but most poignantly, it is part of the house itself. The Baker estate has been Ethan’s sometimes-ally, sometimes-enemy, and it’s only appropriate that it takes a leading role for the final moments of REVII. The final set piece is one of a massive scale, and it brings attention to the sky above, where dawn is beginning to break through what has been a seemingly endless night. Evenline mutilates Ethan one more time as choppers begin to fly in overhead, and finally, a deus ex machina in the form of a massive handcannon lands next to Ethan’s head. He fires a few rounds and Eve crumbles to dust with a final deathknell.

Ethan is rescued by a man introducing himself as Redfield and working for the series’ signature villians, the Umbrella corporation, and REVII, despite itself, insists on teasing its place in the series’ overarching, complicated mythology. A brief epilogue showcases some more lovely, True detective-esque air shots of Louisiana over narration from an exhausted Ethan, before fading to credits.

Resident Evil 7 is a revisioning of the series that coined the term survival horror. It’s an invocation of a mood and aesthetic, brought into interactivity. It is a product of its technology and time, as such a detailed and intimate horror wasn’t possible even in the last console generation.

At the same time, it’s also a troubling return to form. Resident Evil can’t seem to escape the baggage of its prequels or the conventions of massive conspiracy that provides the framework for its otherwise small-scale horror. It is an antithesis to itself, as it attempts to invoke personal intimate horror through large-scale conflicts between massive capitalistic and militaristic conglomerates. A Resident Evil game will inevitably go off the rails at some point, but its mood and method determines if the player will be along for the ride. RE4 went from moody creepout to action-packed campfest, and it never missed a step. REVII stumbles a bit more, but it promises a strong return to what made RE great, especially after a few strange forays into action in RE5 and 6.

Yet REVII didn’t enjoy the commercial success of those two titles, though it did see a fair bit more critical acclaim. It’s a bold move to shift a tentpole franchise as dramatically as capcom did between RE6 and REVII, but the game is clearly a love letter to its inspirations. REVII is a celebration of Western conventions seen through a Japanese lens, It is a product of dissonance, and that’s what makes it so compelling.

Despite its flaws, Resident Evil VII is one of the best horror games of the latest generation. It provides genuine moments of horror and a piercing, inescapable atmosphere of tension and horror. It is cathartic and wild, moody and visionary, and awe-inspiring in its execution.

Maybe the next entry will lean further into the horror aspect of survival horror, and will have the courage to shake off a messy legacy of legions of the undead.

#resident evil #resident evil vii #criticism #games writing #games criticism #capcom #horror #horror games #survival horror

[recentanimenews]

Why Luffy vs Enel Is The Peak Of An Early One Piece Trend

  Throughout many early One Piece arcs, a running theme is that Luffy is punching a little bit above his weight class. The attitude of so many early, established villains is basically: "Who does this little backwater, rubber hick think he is standing up to me?" And sometimes, Luffy really might be. And so he often wins fights not through pure power but because he's able to neutralize a villain's specific advantage in a cool way.

  He beats Buggy when Nami ties up the clown's torso and limbs, effectively reducing Buggy's attack power by whatever percentage of body he's missing. Captain Kuro is super fast and his Freddy Krueger hands are super sharp, so Luffy curls around him like a loud python, ensuring that Kuro can't really swipe at him and also can't evade him. Later, in Alabasta, Luffy gets whooped by Crocodile in their first fight. In their second fight, he uses water for a bit to actually land a punch. And finally, in their last battle, Luffy is bleeding so much that his hits are finally Super Effective. 

    Then, we have Skypiea, in which Luffy takes on Enel, a character that seems like an absurd leap in strength from anything we've seen before. All of the East Blue tyrants and wannabe Warlord conquerers pale in comparison to a man who considers himself a god, can control lightning, and can tell what move you're gonna make before you make it. I've used this comparison before, but it's like when you're playing The Witcher III and you decide to veer from your quest to go check out some treasure on the map and you run into a monster that just instantly decapitates you. The Straw Hats should've done some grinding on the Grand Line before challenging Enel. But now they're there, facing him down, and realizing, oh no, they haven't saved their game since Jaya.

  However, I remember the first time I watched the Skypiea arc and in the back of my head the whole time, I thought, "Well, Luffy's rubber, and if I recall correctly from where I learned most of my science from (a scene from the Academy Award-winning 1999 film Deep Blue Sea starring LL Cool J and LL Cool J's bird), rubber doesn't conduct electricity." But there's no way that Eiichiro Oda would do that, right? That would be so funny and silly and awesome and ... "

    Oh.

  The moment that Enel realizes that his attack didn't work on Luffy is legendary, and probably the most memorable reaction in the entire series. The fight would last for a little while longer, with Luffy punching a wall and allowing his arms to bounce back randomly so that Enel can't predict where the fists are coming from. This is the peak of early One Piece showing that, yes, to survive on the Grand Line, you will need some brute force. But luck and ingenuity play a part in it, too. 

  The next big saga (Water 7/Enies Lobby) would introduce Luffy's escalating Gear techniques, and later, he'd gain the ability to use Armament Haki and be able to simply punch his way through anyone not currently made of person flesh. And while Luffy would often remain the underdog, these achievements would even the playing field a bit. That's a very different kind of combat storytelling, but this change does reflect the story of the Straw Hats slowly growing notoriety and becoming well known (and even feared) in the pirating world.

    So the fight against Enel kind of represents the end of a particular brand of One Piece, a wonderful and cartoonish conclusion to Luffy consistently winning fights that many could argue he should've lost. After this, he'd come to invent ways to actively increase his strength during fights and charge himself up to the caliber of his opponents. But in Skypiea and before, he was just Monkey D. Luffy, an unknown kid that wanted to be King of the Pirates.

  And that's this week's Fight Scene Friday! Vote for next week's installment with this poll:

    What is your favorite One Piece fight? What is your favorite part of early One Piece? Let me know in the comments!

      Daniel Dockery is a Senior Staff Writer for Crunchyroll. Follow him on Twitter!

  Do you love writing? Do you love anime? If you have an idea for a features story, pitch it to Crunchyroll Features!

  By: [email protected]

#Anime #News #Latest in Anime News by Crunchyroll!

[arcadeidea]

The Oregon Trail [1971]

(Content Warning: Cannibalism, Genocide.)

In these early days of gaming, it's hard to walk in a straight line without tripping over "firsts." Looking for the first this or the first that is a hook, it's exciting to uncover, you feel like something recognizable of our present-day condition is emerging from the strange, foreign world of the past. It's almost a lie, though. Most firsts are mere trivia that can stand in the way of actually seeing the work. Most firsts are not self-consciously experimental ideas that caught on, but humble clear outgrowths of a prior tendency almost anachronistic to think of as a first, or are purpose-built innovations to serve a specific need (and sometimes you can point at The First and say that it understood what it was doing better than its successors because it knew best why it existed and then was mindlessly copied... but only sometimes.) If you're looking for some kind of great rupture to hang your hat on, the closer you look the less you see.

The Oregon Trail isn't actually first at much, besides. It's predated in most respects by The Sumerian Game [1964], lost to time, in which You are immersed in a narrative role within an existing historical gameworld and asked to manage resources, for purposes of educating children. It's plausible that our 1971 developers were totally ignorant of it, and thus the "first" as far as they're concerned, and instead drawing on, say, Milton-Bradley's The Game Of Life [1960], seeing as the original design was as a board game. The Sumerian Game is probably even more influential and important than The Oregon Trail, as it inspired Hamurabi [1968] [sic], which was then widely distributed in "learn to code BASIC games" books from 1973 on and from there inspired the whole strategy game genre. We, in the 21st century, recognize The Oregon Trail more though, because of the American Gen X ubiquity of The Oregon Trail [1985], which is as Doom [2016] is to Doom [1993], bringing us 2-for-2 on Id references for the geeks and gamers in the crowd.

It tops Wikipedia's list of the longest-running game franchises, and it's gonna stay there. Hamurabi isn't recognized as The Sumerian Game 2, but a bootleg with its own identity, and similarly you taking the reins of a hypothetical Spacewar 2 or a do-over with spiffy graphics would be a fangame or port or its own thing, not a sequel or remake. They wouldn't carry the imprint of legitimacy that comes from the all-important ownership of the intellectual property. It's the way Oregon Trail's original designer, Don Rawitsch, could take his source code offline in 1971, and then port it from paper as the 1975 version I played with only minor tweaks (one of which we'll address later.) It's the way one of its programmers, Bill Heinemann, can deny even his own son from taking stewardship of the code. It's in the way the Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium can make the 1985 Oregon Trail with none of the original three creators, become a private entity with the money the property made them, then sell their legitimizing rights to The Learning Company, who can sell it to Mattel, who can sell it to Ubisoft, who can then bestow the power to make legitimate Oregon Trail successors to third parties. It's copyright, or even more broadly the conceptual scaffolding of ownership, that franchises can not live without, and it's not ridiculous at all.

The franchise all started with only the noblest of intentions, though, characteristic of that 20th Century digital optimism that necessarily colors early video games. They were going to use computers to educate children. A game is a spicy way to approach this, but not unprecedented; one could say most games are already educational, even if in a given instance all you learn is about the game. So what's its pedagogical approach to history, and how does it fare?

Well, it's unusually gamey for an "edutainment" title. There's no room for those "read some facts" sections divorced from the gameplay we're familiar with from later titles like the Carmen Sandiego series. Instead, like reportedly The Sumerian Game before it, it relies heavily on now-lost paratext (which ultimately functions much the same as the Carmen Sandiego model) for the delivery of historical fact: the 1971 Western Expansion unit curriculum The Oregon Trail game was originally only a small part of. It could have reasonably been implemented within the tight space constraints of a 1970s BASIC mainframe program as, say, a fact- and text-heavy quiz, but instead we got something very gameplay-heavy that was shortly thereafter shorn of that original contextualizing information. As-is, you can hardly poke at the game's factual inaccuracies, because what little is there is accurate. (For instance, the 1985 edition would make the prevalence of dysentery infamous, but on the real Trail, the #1 killer was cholera.) The game we have is a supplement... but if not hard facts, then what does it teach you? Reading, typing?

The game is turn-based, and at the top of every turn it displays your five resources: Food, Ammunition, Clothing, Cash, and Miscelaneous [sic] Supplies, which are things like axles and medicine. Your cash reserves (which always start at the same place) can be used at the nondescript forts you have the chance to stop at on some turns. Food, clothing, and supplies correspond not to any real values like pounds of food but one-to-one with the cash you spent on them. You just have "30 Clothes," which somehow depletes rapidly. It might be meant as the abstract monetary value, but since there's no selling, it's unclear. Run out of clothes or supplies, and you could die at any moment. Run out of food, and you die instantly. Like in The Sumerian Game, you're managing resources through the proxy of numerical abstraction, but unlike it, this is not a game meant to educate you on economics, this is the First Survival Game. In all this, we see the inverse of the priority motivation of Spacewar: managing finite, dwindling resource scarcity instead of pushing hard on the limits of the infinite.

Ammunition, on the other hand, is not directly vital but ridiculously cheap. Pun intended, it's the best bang for your buck. You're thus incentivized to play into the rugged outdoorsy individualist role (unlike later games, there's no indication that you are anything but alone) by hunting for your food, without the fiddly business of coding something like food that goes bad if you just let it sit. When you go to shoot something, be it animals on the hunt or hunting yourself, or hostile "riders," you are dropped from the methodical turn-based world into a real-time action-reflex one, which delivers a jolt of energy to the whole experience. In a stroke of ingenuity within the text-only limitations, you are tasked with typing the word "BANG" quickly and accurately. In the 1978 version, it also changes the word up on you (like it could be "POW") which makes the mechanic even more reminiscent of The Typing Of The Dead [1999]. The metaphor stands clear: your typing skill, quick and accurate, enacts corresponding quick and accurate violence on the computer. The computer will have its revenge, though.

No matter how skilled you are at hunting for your food and managing your resources, you are at the complete mercy of the gameworld. The random events at the end of every turn are perhaps the real star of the show here — definitely an evolution of Spacewar's star, anyway. The wrong random events can bring you from fine to dead in just one turn. It's not fair!

That's the point. The Oregon Trail is not about getting to Oregon. Sure, that's the goal that keeps you going both in and out of character, but really The Oregon Trail is about the losing. The death message is rendered with great ceremony, three separate command prompts on your funeral, just for flavor. Even when you make it to the promised land, you're haunted by the ghosts of your own failure, and the entire time you're on the journey is low-level tension and dread at the imagined fatality lurking under every rock. That's the pedagogical utility of the game that a book or a lecture just doesn't give you: by placing you in the middle of a world model and an unimportant role, it communicates an impression, a feeling of what it was like to live as an ordinary person in the time and place depicted, and that impression is one of a dangerous world, arbitrary enough that you can do everything right and still eat curb. There's a straight line from here to Cart Life [2011]. Why, Oregon Trail is the First Empathy Game! The terminology of the "Empathy Game," if you're unfamiliar or have forgotten, was a bit of a fad genre in mid-2010s among a handful of thinkpiece writers and social scientists, and notably not many actual game designers. It was a genre that post-hoc lumped together titles like the aforementioned Cart Life, Depression Quest [2013], That Dragon, Cancer [2016], and even Spec Ops: The Line [2012]! With the exception of the latter, the sales pitch of the genre was basically that in snubbing traditional concepts like "fun" and "violence" in favor of depicting a minimal-gameplay sad world drawn from the author's deeply personal (and often enough, marginalized) experience, these games would make you a better person; they were good for you, like eating your vegetables. Game designer Anna Anthropy was particularly enraged by cis allies patting themselves on the back in this way for playing her short title Dys4ia [2012], and in response to all this she exhibited The Road To Empathy [2015], which was a pair of her size 13 high heel boots with a pedometer attached, so that people could literally walk a mile in her shoes and try to get the high score. (A scathing Cinderella story.)

I myself am a cis white male living in Oregon's Willamette Valley, cause to worry that when I telnetted in to play the game it would instantly award me victory. I grew up here. I was born too late for Apple IIs preloaded with Oregon Trail in the classrom, but one year in elementary school the teacher put together her own longform, paper-based, team-play Oregon Trail game. My team died trapped by snow in the mountains, and then once I was checked-out and scorched about the loss, the whole class got to learn about the Donner Party, a group of settlers who went into the mountains, got snowed in, and ate each other. That's a harrowing, tragic situation about people at the furthest extremities of humanity, and we didn't get too deep into it, but it wasn't sanitized. Years later, don't know how many, I wondered: why? Not why did it happen, but why was I taught about that as history? Not even that it was gruesome, but it didn't square with my understanding of capital-h History at that time, that it was just such a small story that had immediate effect on nobody outside of the Donner Party themselves. It was just some fucked-up shit that happened once. Trivia. What was I meant to learn? Not to go through the mountains in a covered wagon during winter? No, no, it had to be one of those abstract moral Life Lessons... Was it solemn respect for the dead? The terror of nature, and the weakness of man and our society in the face of it? I've seen it used to make exactly the opposite point, that adversity builds morality and character, which is incredibly stupid but that doesn't mean that wasn't meant as the takeaway.

Writing this now, I think I have figured out that I was being taught about my heritage. It's odd to think of it that way, but it's not out of the ordinary in many cultures to pass down illustrative tales of suffering to the young so they and their example are not forgotten, though. I believe I was meant to associate myself in some continuity with The Donner Party, their inheritors as an Oregonian, as an American, as — to put it sharply — a white person, and truly, I am. The subtext is that the past of hardscrabble living and suffering we underwent to get here (in this case, a literal location, Oregon,) legitimizes our comfortable place now. Likewise, the intention of The Oregon Trail is to get us to identify and empathize with the settler. Both are virtual memory, simulated aggrievement.

Our second game has taken as its subject and theme perhaps one of the few darker and more harrowing subject matters than war: colonialism. Identifying colonialism in games is in vogue right now, but it's currently most commonly leveled as a criticism at let's-call-them-post-Minecraft games in which you are actively engaged in both extracting resources from and changing the environment to suit you, even where there is no colonization on the narrative end. The Oregon Trail is just the opposite, using its resource management purely to emphasize that we are at the whims of our environment, while its narrative framing is colonization. It flinches from the larger truth of what it is depicting in favor of an attempt at systematized monetary verisimilitude that absorbs us.

The Oregon Trail [c. 1847-1869] can be considered a mirror for its rough contemporary, The Trail Of Tears [c. 1830-1850]. Nobody wanted to be on The Trail Of Tears. People were being forcibly relocated from what prosperity they had managed to carve out for themselves into conditions of deliberate impovershment. The mass suffering and death they experienced on the way was, when not maliciously engineered, fully intended, and it did nothing to legitimize their claims to the land they now had. Conversely, the settlers moving far west were doing so entirely voluntarily.(The game starts you in St. Louis, 1847, coincidentally the exact time and place a legally-enforced Mormon exodus began, but this game isn't The Utah Trail.) There's a phrase for that hopeful dream that fundamentally motivated every last Oregonian settler to embark on their painful journey: Manifest Destiny. The land out west is already metaphysically yours, you just have to go out and take it in fact. In period records, what is done to the indigenous people across the continent is described in jarringly passive voice (such as "dying off",) as what are clearly active campaigns of hostility are waged with full intent to exterminate. The suffocating, violent racism of the 1800s United States can not be understated, and yet it is full-on swept under the rug, not just here, but almost everywhere you turn that's not the niche of a serious history for adults. This was an era when even some white slavery abolitionists were only that way because the thought of sharing a nation with any black people, even slaves, so offended their sensibilities.

The Oregon Trail game is, point blank and very straightforwardly, white nationalist propaganda. Now, it's not hate speech! It doesn't come out of the damp basement printing press of a Neo-Nazi, but the cleanliness of the omissions and assumptions and unwarranted romanticism of a standard grade school American History curriculum, and from the noblest of intentions. It's not Custer's Revenge [1982] or The Birth Of A Nation [1915]. In fact, the most major & germane difference (possibly) between the 1971 teletype version and the 1975 one I played is a modulation towards greater racial sensitivity: The random event of hostile "Indians" is scrubbed to "riders." This leaves only friendly Native Americans, which is actually, so I read, broadly historically accurate for what a trail-goer would encounter. The Cayuse War, for example, did start with an attack on a white civilian, but most of the engagement was between military forces. Not to form a bad habit of relying too heavily on author quotes, but here's what programmer Bill Heinemann had to say about it:

I heard from Paul [Dillenberger, fellow Oregon Trail coder] that we needed to eliminate any negative references to Native Americans. Since my generation had grown up on TV cowboy shows, my first reaction was that we were denying a piece of our own history.

Get a load of this honky. He instinctively thought the heritage he needed to pass on to Minnesota schoolchildren was the pulpy good-guy-bad-guy myth of the unrevised Western, masquerading as fact. The Oregon Trail is, in the end, just as much the flippant pop culture fantasia as Spacewar, despite the pretense of fact and education. Thankfully, Mr. Heinemann thoughtfully backtracked on that count, thinking of potential Native American children playing the game. In 2017, lead designer Don Rawitsch even said that he'd like to see a version of The Oregon Trail from the Native American perspective. In 2019, we got exactly that.

When Rivers Were Trails [2019] is the product of almost 50 more years in development in ludic story delivery and edutainment. It's marketed as the Native American response to The Oregon Trail, though it too takes place about 50 years later, in the 1890s. This places it after the end of most direct warfare, save with the Apaches, although Geronimo had already surrendered and you do not visit the American Southwest. Instead, when you are given the choice to resist, it takes the form not of, say, mass armed rebellion, but in community spiritualism and helping negotiate the crooked legal system.

In the story, you wander aimlessly west, away from the traditional lands in Minnesota you can now never return to. Along the way, you meet many Native Americans, who aren't typically so much characters as they are the medium by which facts about the land and history are summarized, ala the Carmen Sandiego model of edutainment referred to earlier. When Rivers Were Trails hews closer to something like a visual novel with minigames, and is nowhere near as interested in systematizing misery as The Oregon Trail. The worst things that directly happen to the player are rare harassment by the Indian Patrol, and there are resources as a nod to The Oregon Trail, here Willpower, Food, and Medicine, and, fittingly enough considering the direct equation of resource-to-cash in the 1970s game, they're used mostly as forms of currency for trading. Other than that, they don't "matter," in that they're super easy to come by living off the land and running out of food or medicine won't kill you. Only running out of spiritual Willpower will, which suggests to me that you're on some metaphoric level a ghost animated by your journey, bearing witness to vignettes of not so much the suffering itself, but the almost-post-apocalyptic aftershocks of great misfortunes and displacements and how various people are holding on or moving on. Don't mistake it for an Empathy Game — it's strictly educational.

[toddrogersfl]

Contemporary fragrance houses flying the flag

Who can lay claim to being ‘the birthplace of perfumery’? France and Italy regularly duke it out for the title, but British scents have been going strong since 1730 – with whispers of Yardley London‘s heritage in fact going all the way back to the reign of King Charles I, supplying royalty with lavender-scented soaps. Sadly, these records were lost in 1666’s Great Fire of London, but many British houses have archives bursting not only with records of their fragrant wares, but the customers who bought them – including royalty, film stars and prime ministers along with the many millions who flocked to their historic doors.

We decided to dedicate the latest issue of our award-winning magazine, The Scented Letter, to these Best of British. The emphasis being on heritage houses who have made our name and are still some of our favourites to this very day, and with a selection of newer houses mentioned – inluding Miller Harris, Angela Flanders, Ormonde Jayne and Floral Street – all of whom have their own boutiques you can visit to stock-up on those perfumes, both historic and ground-breakingly new. The streets of London may not be paved in gold, but perhaps they are with perfume…

To be frank, the feature was practically an entire book’s worth of material, and we still didn’t have room for every single one we’d have like to mention, which goes to show how many we have to be proud of. Also, we are thrilled that so many contemporary houses are continuing to fly that fragrant flag, being sold online and stocked in independent perfumeries that stretch the entire globe.

What better time, then, to continue our celebration of the diversity, ingenuity and creativity British fragrance houses display, and share with you a list of some contemporary houses your nose should definitely get to know…?

Ruth Mastenbroek

Born in England, graduating with a Chemistry degree from Oxford University, Ruth trained and worked as a perfumer in the 70s – both in the UK and Netherlands with Naarden International (which later became Quest and is now Givaudan – one of the largest perfume suppliers in the world…) Ruth then went to work in Japan and the perfume capital Grasse before returning to England to work for a small company, where she created fragrances for up-and-coming brands like Kenneth Turner and Jo Malone – including her Grapefruit candle. Setting up her own perfumery company, Fragosmic Ltd., in 2003 – the year she became president of The British Society of Perfumers, it was in 2010 that Ruth launched a capsule collection of scented products featuring her signature fragrance – RM – the first to use advanced micro-encapsulation technology in a scented bathrobe…! Still creating bespoke fragrances for brands, Ruth’s own fragrances allow her to bottle memories, she says, ‘…of childhood in England and America – chocolate cookies, fresh earth, blackberries… Of Holland – lilies, narcissus, hyacinth and salty sea air… Of France – orchids, roses and wild herbs… Of Japan – cherry blossom, lotus and green tea…’ Believing that fragrance can uniquely move us, and with a wealth of knowledge at her fingertips; Ruth distills olfactory flash-backs into perfumes that everyone can enjoy and form their own, highly personal connections with. And with her latest, the sulty, smoking rose of Firedance, shortlisted for Global Pure Beauty and Fragrance Foundation Awards this year, we suggest you allow yourself the pleasure of connecting with them, too…

Quintessential Scents: Launching tomorrow (Friday) on our site, we’re giving you a sneak-peek of how you can indulge in a whole box of emotionally uplifting scents. From the sparkling secret-garden fruitiness of Signature, through the romantic, rolling landscape of Umbria captured in Amorosa. A furtively-smoked Sobranie with notes of jasmine and cashmere evoke the dreaming spires of Oxford, while a classic rose is transformed with hot leather in Firedance, to become quite swaggeringly swoon-worthy. Have a chaise-lounge at the ready…

Ruth Mastenbroek Discovery Set £17.95 for 4 x 2ml eau de parfum

4160 Tuesdays

Founded: If we live till we’re 80, we have 4,160 tuesdays to fill, and so the philosophy of copywriter-turned-perfumer Sarah McCartney is: better make the most of every single one of them. Having spent years writing copy for other people’s products, and writing for LUSH for 14 years, Sarah wrote a novel about imagined perfumes that make people happy, with such evocative descriptions that readers began asking her to make them. Ever the type to roll up her sleeves and take on a new challenge, Sarah explains she’d ‘…tried to find perfumes that matched what I was describing, and they still weren’t right, so I set off on my quest to make them myself. I became a perfumer!’ Proudly extolling British eccentricity, the ever-increasing fragrances include Sunshine & Pancakes, which Sarah made to evoke a typical 1970s British seaside family vacation, opening with a burst of sunny citrus, with jasmine to represent sun-warmed skin – alongside honey and vanilla (the pancakes element). The Dark Heart of Old Havana is based on a 1998 trip to Cuba: brown sugar, tobacco, rich coffee, fruit, warm bodies, ‘alcohol, exuberance and recklessness,’ as she puts it. Maxed Out and Midnight in the Palace Garden were both shortlisted for the coveted Fragrance Foundation Awards 2016 in the ‘Best Indie Scent’ category, and an army of devotees now relish every day, scented suitably eccentrically.

Quintessential Scent:  Named for a comment made by a Tatler beauty editor who smelled it, a dash of bergamot, a soft hint of creamy vanilla, velvety smooth woods, musk and ambergris make for a dreamily decadent ‘your skin but oh, so much better’ affair. Like wearing a magical potion made of lemon meringue pie and fancy pants, if they don’t fall at your feet after a whiff of this, they aren’t worth knowing.

4160 Tuesdays The Sexiest Scent on the Planet Ever (IMHO) £40 for 30ml Buy it at 4160tuesdays.com

  Nancy Meiland Parfums

Founded: Nancy’s background as a bespoke perfumer began with her apprenticeship to one of the UK’s experts in custom perfumery, creating signature scents for those coveting ‘something highly individual and special…’ Before launching Nancy Meiland Parfums, her decade-long journey through fragrance had already included co-running the former School of Perfumery, acting as a consultant for independent perfume houses, working on collaborations with Miller Harris, and speaking on the subject of fragrance at events nationwide. Now dividing her time between town and country (Nancy’s based in East Sussex), she explains that ‘the creative process of gathering sensory impressions and honing them into a formula is a vital one. Once a blank canvas, the formula sheet acts as a metaphor – and gradually emerges essentially as a kind of poem, with body, light and shade and a life of its own.’ It amuses Nancy, looking back, that she often had school essays returned to her emblazoned in red pen for being “too flowery”. ‘It figures!,’ she says. Thank goodness, say her extensive base of fragrance fans, in love with these portrayals of often traditional ingredients, composed with elegant modernity and beautiful harmony.

Quintessential Scent: Definitely not your grandma’s drawer-liner, this is a rose in all its glory, with the entire plant evoked – pink pepper, for the thorns, stalky green galbanum for the leaves; geranium, jasmine, white pear and violet delicately sketching the tender bud. As Nancy observes: ‘I wanted to depict both the light and the dark shades of it, as opposed to this pretty, twee and girly rose that’s become slightly old-fashioned.” Rambling roses entwined with brambles, if this scent surrounded Sleeping Beauty, she’d never forgive that meddlesome prince for cutting it down…

Nancy Meiland Parfums Rosier £62.50 for 50ml eau de parfum Buy it at nancymeiland.com

  Tom Daxon

Recalling his childhood and growing up ‘in fragrant surroundings,’ Tom Daxon rather understates how perfume practically ran in his blood. Lucky enough to have a mother who was creative director at Molton Brown for over 30 years, and therefore ‘would often give me new shower gels to try, fragrances to sniff’ his scented destiny was sealed by frequently accompanying his mother on her business trips to Grasse. There he met the father-daughter duo of Jacques and Carla Chabert, who worked for Chanel, Guerlain and L’Oréal, with Jacques the nose behind Molton Brown’s ground-breaking Black Pepper and Carla creating the hit follow-up, Pink Peppercorn. Having esteemed perfumers in his life from such an early age was a connection that would bravely – still in his twenties – lead Tom to launch a brand new British fragrance house. Clearly a chap who doesn’t like to hang around when he’s got a bee in his bonnet, by the end of that same year, he was already being stocked in Liberty’s. Not a bad start, all things considered, and describing the impetus behind him starting his own line of fragrances, Tom says ‘I wouldn’t have bothered if I thought I couldn’t offer something a bit different.’ Uniquely intriguing, the entire range celebrates a luxurious kind of British modernity in their pared back, clean lines, the oils being macerated and matured in England for at least six weeks before they’re bottled here. Harnessing Tom’s Grasse connections but remaining resolutely British in their spirit, it’s just the beginning for this exciting house.

Quintessential Scent: Lushly narcotic, it’s a hyper-realistic big-hitter – like sticking your entire face in a buxom bouquet, the better to get another dose of its lascivious charms. Using traditional, headily feminine notes like lily of the valley, carnation, rose and oakmoss might have become ‘vintage’ or even a bit old-fashioned smelling in the wrong hands, but the Chaberts and Tom vividly evoke just-bruised, silky petals with a futuristic drama that never fails to shake you out of the doldrums.

Tom Daxon Crushing Bloom £105 for 50ml eau de parfum Buy it at tomdaxon.com

  Marina Barcenilla Parfums

A rising star of perfumery, Marina Barcenilla is one of the talented ‘noses’ driving the strong trend towards natural perfumery. As the name may suggest, her birthplace may not have been in the UK – in fact she was born in Spain – but it’s where Marina chose to make her home, and to set up her now thriving perfume business. Marina recalls being intrigued by the aromatic notes in the Herbíssimo fragrances and in her grandmother’s lavender water. Having always been fascinated and inspired by scent – when the chance came to branch out from her aromatherapy roots into the world of perfume, Marina rose beautifully to the challenge. In 2016 Marina won the coveted Fragrance Foundation (FiFi) Award for Best New Independent Fragrance with India. Against incredibly stiff competition, judged blind by Jasmine Award-winning journalists and bloggers, this prompted her to take the next step on her journey – what had formerly been called The Perfume Garden became Marina Barcenilla Parfums. But although the name had changed, the ethos remained the same – ‘to create the finest fragrances, using what nature has to offer.’ More awards followed, including a Beauty Shortlist Award for Patchouli Clouds, an International Natural Beauty Award for The Perfume Garden, and the Eluxe Award for Best Natural Perfume Brand. In 2017, for the second consecutive year, Marina won Best New Independent Fragrance for the opulent Black Osmanthus – which truly put her on the radar of journalists and perfumistas. From sourcing rare and precious aromatic essences from around the world to blending fragrances by hand in her own perfume studio, after years of study, Marina’s long-awaited olfactory journey to ‘rediscover the soul of perfume’ is off to a rousing start – and all from the suitably mystical base of Glastonbury. More than simply reaching for the stars, parallel to her perfumery career she’s also studying to become a Planetary Scientist and Astrobiologist, at the University of London; recently combining her twin passions by creating AromAtom – creating the imagined scents of space as a way to make space science more engaging for children – which Marina regularly tours through schools. What else can we say for this exciting house, but “up, up and away…!”

Quintessential Scent: Silky smooth sandalwood is enticingly laced with flecks of fragrant cardamom, dotted with coriander, huge armfulls of rose and woven with incense for an all-natural scent that’s soothingly spiced, earthily grounding and yet erotically tempting; so you’ll be wanting to dance barefoot (perhaps comletely bare) and wrap yourself around a Maypole, have no doubt…

Marina Barcenilla Parfums India £130 for 30ml eau de parfum Buy it at mbparfums.com

  St Giles

Rarely do founders of fragrance houses come with such experience, passion and dedication to the industry as Michael Donnovan. With a career thus far helping stock the shelves of such cult fragrance-shopping destinations as Roullier White, running his own PR company, representing such luminaries as Fréderic Malle – every time we’ve met Michael, he’s been bubbling with enthusiasm about a perfume we ‘…absolutely must smell!’ or a nose who’s ‘a complete genius!’ And you know what? He’s always been right. He’d been badgered for years by fragrance experts and enthusiasts alike to launch his own range, but the idea had tickled his brain for some decades before being fully explored as a reality. As Michael explains, the concept he just couldn’t let go of was to have a collection that truly represented ‘scents as complex as you are.’ And so, the St Giles fragrances have ‘…been created to stimulate and amplify the many different aspects of our character. This wardrobe of fragrances celebrates the parts that make us who we are, fusing the reality and the fantasy.’ And the nose he sought out to compose them just happens to be one of the greatest of our time. ‘The perfumes are made in collaboration with Master Perfumer Bertrand Duchaufour, whose vision I have long admired and whose friendship I cherish.’ Having spent many years working alongside Bertrand, but always in regard to his work for other houses, Michael admits he was ‘…extremely nervous’ about approaching him, but it turns out Bertrand was more than enthusiastic in his acceptance. The only question you need ask, now, is which fragrant character you want to embody, today…

Quintessential Scent: Rosemary absolute – now proven to stimulate memory performance – adds an aromatic, drily green note while fresh ginger warmly fizzes alongside Champagne-like aldehydes, herbaceous clary sage and the uplifting, fruity zing of rhubarb. There’s a sigh of soft leather and frankincense at the heart, slowly sinking to the inky-tinged base of castoreum absolute, sandalwood, Atlas cedarwood and a salty tang of driftwood. Absolutely unique, you’ll want to cover yourself in it while seeking your muse, perhaps while enjoying a sip or three of something refreshing, wearing nothing else but a velvet smoking jacket and an enigmatic smile…

St Giles The Writer £130 for 100ml eau de parfum Buy it at stgilesfragrance.com

With a strong heritage behind us, and many of those houses still not only surviving but thriving, it seems British perfumery is once again blooming with a fresh crop of forward-thinking (and often self-taught) perfumers shaking up the scent scene. No fuddy-duddy fragrances, these, they’re flying the flag not only for British niche perfumery, but for the art of fragrance itself. Hoist the bunting!

For further reading, we suggest getting your hands on a copy of British Perfumery: A Fragrant History by The British Society of Perfumers, £30 including UK delivery.

Written by Suzy Nightingale

The post Contemporary fragrance houses flying the flag appeared first on The Perfume Society.

from The Perfume Society https://perfumesociety.org/contemporary-british-fragrance-houses-flying-the-flag/