original thief series basso & garrett :)
ngl, it's about quality over quantity for me. an npc can have a total of three minutes of screen time, but if they have a cool name, they can live rent free in my head and I'll spend several hours trying to decipher drawable features from a blurry screenshot of pixels
there is a vague hint of a story here, and that's because every time I try to play thi4f, I get incredibly frustrated with how Not Fun the game play is. like, is the story good? well. but it has a PLAGUE. that should've given it instant 'I'll replay this once a year' status in my heart, but the game play sucks so bad that I've never finished it. I can't believe Not Fun gameplay beat out my obsession with narrative plagues.
anyway, the idea is basically if the original era had a game with a plague centric narrative and some other stuff I liked out of thi4f thrown into a narrative blender, with a heavy dash of horror thrown in because some parts of the thief games were scarier to me than entire dedicated horror genre games.
⭐ places I’m at! bsky / pixiv / pillowfort /cohost / cara.app
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i am just so occam's razor about why hannibal is asleep by abigail's hospital bed at the end of aperitif holding her hand in his hand with her blood still staining the cuff of his shirt. you can believe he has no honest regard for anyone and never has and every time he says or does something that implies he cares if she lives or dies it's a deliberate lie to make himself seem more like a good person so he took the time to carefully stage this little scene by her bedside for the benefit of no one purely on the prediction that will would stop by hours later and see it and trust him more. or, uh,
you could just sort of buy in to it. listen. hannibal lies a lot but usually he does it by saying things that are true in a way that disguises his meanings and intentions. personally i don't think committing this hard to something that is completely false and without a true emotional core makes any sense or brings him any benefit. i think maybe he just likes her.
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The thing about nimbus that makes them such an interesting character to me is that they are earnest and unapologetic and excitable and they put 110% into everything they do at all times and all of it comes from a place of “pay no attention to what’s behind the curtain lighthearted funnyman persona”
Not to say that nimbus is Actually just full of angst and sadness and tragedy behind the scenes all the time. they aren’t, not even with the death of their mentor. nor is it all that different from what they are feeling at any given moment. it’s not. But being neomuni, being a cloud strider, a protector of their people (and an incredibly competent one at that), it gives them a certain presence to their self-image in their own mind that probably wouldn’t be there if they were just another digital citizen, if they were still Dara Danu instead of Nimbus. The augmentations they put themself through to become a cloud strider aren’t something eating away at their lifespan every waking moment, it was a conscious choice and noble sacrifice. Rohan’s death wasn’t something to mourn, it’s something to inspire and propel them to fight and work harder and preserve his memory. Their jokes and commentary aren’t ways to put distance between Nimbus the Cloud Strider and Nimbus the Person, it’s just their brand of humor that some people find annoying. But that’s fine by them, they wouldn’t be bothered by that. Their core is still protected, and that’s all that really matters in the end. This way nothing can reach them, hurt them, pull them in any direction other than where they want to go. This way nimbus as a whole is friendly and open and protected and untouchable, paradoxically in thanks to how ridiculously, unabashedly comfortable they are in their own skin, so much so that it becomes a caricature of itself without anyone even trying to make it that way, least of all nimbus themself
And they are themself, fully, during the entirety of lightfall and post-campaign. They’re silly and fun-loving and goofy and joking and reckless and overconfident and compassionate and intelligent and caring and emotional and dedicated to the safety of their people above all, and it’s all over-the-top and in-your-face and probably a little bit too forceful thanks to them going from one in a team of two with someone to watch their back and cover for them so they can goof off on the job to The lone cloud strider responsible for the survival of their entire civilization more than ever now with their presence being known to the rest of the solar system and also dealing with shadow legion and vex incursions on the side. It’s their nonchalant “I’m full of fury” line that made me think “oh you are absolutely blorbo material” but it was the mission in the black garden for deterministic chaos that really made my third eye open and my brain say “oh. oh there is so much more going on with your character than we realize. ok then” *becomes my new favorite*
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this is more of a ramble then an ask but I was wondering how u felt about how it’s set up in atla that the world is intristically all connected together and that the ideas of bending aren’t political in nature and they’re taught by the animals in the world but even tho the show talks about how they’re all the same and stuff it never seems to really expand on his ideas and the perfect world seems to just be the four nations living together in harmony without really questioning the systems of having specific elements to nations?
this is a really good question because i've discussed how much i appreciate the way atla illustrates how nationalism is heightened and borders are reified during wartime (perhaps almost paradoxically, considering how colonialism reshapes and removes previous borders) and how resisting that ideology through uniting the nations and dispelling the myth that they are ontologically discrete is crucial to ending the war.... but then lok kind of drops the ball on exploring how that would restructure a postwar world.
i will say that i like how the novels, which explore the world of avatars past, explore geopolitics in a way that challenges the claim that "long ago, the four nations lived together in harmony." we see that in yangchen's time, there is more cross cultural exchange in terms of (im)migration, but there are also sanctions placed on the water tribes and fire nation by the earth king as punishment for supporting an ultimately failed coup. we later see in kyoshi's time how despite there being an alliance across the four nations, there is political unrest within each nation, further problematizing the notion that if the four dominant cultures are internationally allied, intranational peace must also follow.
with lok, they had the chance to imagine a world in which the dominant imperialist power is successfully dismantled, and what that kind of world would look like 70 years after the fact, but the liberal imagination is, by definition, extremely limited, so we ended up with. well. you know. intermingling families without exploring the ramifications of how various politicized traits (in this world, bending even more so than physical appearance) would affect different members (firebending being celebrated as a tool for imperialist supremacy vs earthbending being stigmatized, for example)... a city built on colonial violence, expected to be a melting pot but its oppressive origins are only ever addressed by the fascist villain... even the red lotus, an anarchist terrorist organization, dress according to the international color code.
and don't get me started on the red lotus lmao. they basically have the same ideology as atla's heroes except we're expected to believe that they're unhinged and irrational because they randomly decided that it was in their best interest to kill a teenage girl and held the fragile remnants of a genocided people hostage to do so. zaheer's philosophy is an extremely warped and reductive view of anarchism, but it's also the closest viewpoint anyone holds to the central ideological conceit of atla, which is actually crazy if you think about it.
atla establishes that despite ostensibly insurmountable cultural differences, the world is fundamentally interconnected, and understanding that relationality across humanity as well as the nonhuman world is crucial to achieving balance. lok explores what a world without borders and unjust hierarchies would mean, but comes to some flawed and downright bizarre conclusions. national borders are rearranged but nonetheless affirmed, however the border between the spirit and material realms is dissolved. but also lok declares that actually the best way to fix an unjust hierarchy is just to put "good people" at the top of them and hope that they continue to be nice even once they're given absolute power.
i do personally think that if lok had better explored the conflict between the red lotus (anarchy) and the white lotus (liberalism) as the central ideological clash across the entire show, instead of merely presenting an extremely problematic and illogical liberal value system as, somehow, the only viable method, despite its myriad noticeable flaws from the very first episode, with the smug yet blatantly fallacious assumption that any other framework is inherently inferior, the setting being a neocolonial neoliberal "melting pot" would have made much more sense and worked far better overall. i would still have issues with how they handled the water tribes, the air nomads, the (lack of) fire nation, the characterization, etc etc. but it would have made for a far stronger central plot, instead of what ultimately appears to be a set of scattered, unthorough explorations of various status-quo-challenging ideologies that korra must fight with her liberal arsenal of cops and capitalists. (but i'm realizing now that a scathing critique of the ideological underpinnings of lok may not actually have been what you were looking for in my response. so i'll stop, for now.)
ultimately, i think it's impossible to truly critique atla's approach to this philosophical quandary as a standalone work, since the show ends with the war, and thus the postwar decolonial imagination cannot be truly explored. that is why i am obligated to turn to lok if i want to criticize this idea, but i also feel like critiquing lok is pretty futile at this point, considering i've done so so many times on this blog by this point that i don't think i have anything more to add on to my already expansive laundry list of complaints. but one day i'll write a thorough outline for my vision of a postwar atla. at which point i will explore the secretly radical ideas presented in atla with far more care and nuance than those spineless libs ever could.
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