#it's not made clear at all because i am a bad worldbuilder

[mask131]

Kind of a continuation of my Medusa post? But this time about Poseidon.

I talked in my Medusa post of a trait that... seems to be lost on many people when it comes to the characterization of Poseidon? The fact that Poseidon has not just a bad side, but a dark side, and that he is supposed - in many ways like Hera - to be one of those ambiguous villains or anti-villains of Greek mythology. There's the misinformation that "Hades was a bad guy" and the new false take that "Hades was a good guy", when truth is "Hades was a neutral guy". There's the name TV Tropes and Idioms used to designate falsely presenting a bad god in a good light - "Everybody loves Zeus", and I get it is supposed to be a reverse of "Everybody hates Hates", but this is part of the wave of Zeus-hate by the Internet that literaly covered the fact Zeus was supposed to be the BIG GOOD of Ancient Greece. And the third brother also very clearly falls into the series of mischaracterization as there's this sort of cliche of Poseidon as some sort of chill guy who just hangs around the back of the Greek pantheon and is a cool dude...

... And I blame Percy Jackson for it. Don't get me wrong: I love the Percy Jackson books. But it is not because I love them that I don't recognize their flaws, and that I am not saddened at seeing how their fans warped what Greek mythology is. "Percy Jackson" and affiliated series, due to being a book series about the son of Poseidon, presents Poseidon as this good, benevolent, chill, positive deity. And I respect that, and in fact it came off as a true TWIST back when they were released, and I loved this twist because Poseidon had always been one of my favorite gods. Not only that, but Riordan made clear he knew about the dark and bad side of Poseidon, and tried to work it in his worldbuilding, by having key moments of his books relying on Percy confronting his half-brothers (Procrustes, Polyphemus, Anteus, etc...). In fact, a strong point of the original book series was Percy having to deal with the fact his father could love as much him as these monsters... But unfortunately Riordan apparently did not work on this point enough since the Internet basically decided to make Poseidon an uwu god.

So let's break it down. And if you didn't understand anything I said until this point, don't worry, I explain it all here.

Poseidon was... not supposed to be a wholly good, benevolent, and certainly not kind deity. I mean he has his positive point and his goodness, like all gods - because Greek gods are always neither wholly black or white, but grey (except for these minor gods that are personifications, and that do obey a black-and-white morality). And when you crack open the first Greek mythology manual for children you will often find the description of Poseidon as being just as temperamental and mercurial as the sea: sometimes Poseidon is a calm, quiet and kind god reflecting the peaceful sea ; other times he bursts out in anger and violence like a sea-storm, and his mood can change very, very quickly just like the oceanic weather. The Greeks were heavy sailors and fishermen: they knew the sea was their best ally and their more treacherous enemy, that they should worship but not trust it.

In terms of mythology, this is reflected by Zeus being the "dark twin" or at least "darker double" of Zeus. Zeus and Poseidon are plenty similar: both are one of the "big three" as the PJO series calls them, both are notorious for being lustful womanizers that keep having babies left and right, both are heavily implied in the great epics of heroes... The same way Hades was the "Chthonian Zeus", Poseidon was very much the "Oceanic Zeus". But the difference is that Poseidon was supposed to be much more dangerous, and much darker than Zeus.

Zeus embodied the law and the rules. He was a keeper of oath, a punisher of criminals, a rewarder of the goods, he embodied order and justice. Poseidon? No such thing. With his dual nature of helper and persecutor of heroes, with his sudden mood changes, with him surrounding himself with monsters and hybrids, Poseidon rather reflected a form of chaos. This was reflected for example in the quarrelsome nature of Poseidon, who kept getting into fights with other deities about the ownership of specific human cities or islands. His two most famous battles being his dual against Athena, for the ownership of Athens, and his trial against Helios for being the god of Corinth. But other tales of him feuding with gods for pieces of land exist...

And to that, it should be added that Poseidon was one of the most famous antagonists and hero-persecutors of Greek mythology, thanks to him being the big bad of "The Odyssey" and the archnemesis of Odysseus. This status as the antagonist of one of the two fundamental works of Greek literature puts him at the same place as, for example, Hera, the by-default persecutor of great heroes (just ask Herakles or Dionysos). It should be especially noted that The Odyssey takes a great care into painting Poseidon was maybe originally rightfully mad, but pushing the persecution beyond the reasonable. The beginning of the Odyssey has Athena plead for Odysseus' case before Zeus, pointing out the unfairness of his situation, and Zeus fully agree with her... but explains he can't do anything because Poseidon is still on the case and just will not let go. Poseidon is definitively a grudge-holder, and the Odyssey is not subtle about it.

But the final trait that confirms and illustrates well the dark, evil, chaotic side of Poseidon is his entourage, his children especially. As I said, Zeus and Poseidon are both father-figures in Greek mythology, and both are gods who just keep sleeping with everything around them. But Zeus' constant lust was depicted in a positive light, as him enacting his role as "father of gods", "father of men", as king, and god of justice and protector of civilization: because from his loins were born the greatest gods of the mythology, and the most admirable and benevolent heroes, and the great kings that founded the Greek civilization. But Poseidon? Oh, Poseidon was the "shadow" of Zeus as I said, a sort of dark twin. And so what did he gave birth to? Monsters and criminals and murderers.

The tradition of "the sea giving birth to monsters and chaos" is a very old one, in fact it is a trait of the Indo-European religions, as old as the Babylonian or Summerian mythologies. Even before we get on Poseidon's case, we can remind of the fact that the oldest and most dangerous monsters in the Greek world were given birth to by Phorcys and Ceto, two old and ancient sea-deities that predated Poseidon's rule, and were associated with sea-monsters and sea-dangers (Ceto/Keto herself shared her name with whales, any kind of huge sea beasts, and many of the creatures we describe now as sea-monsters or sea-dragons). Ladon, for example, the dragon guarding the Golden Fleece, was Keto's child ; and so was Echidna (aka the mother of monsters, who birthed with Typhon the rest of the monsters of Greek mythology). And speaking of Phorkys, Poseidon ended up sleeping with two of his daughters.

One was the nymph Thoosa of which we know barely anything - but her child became famous. Polyphemus, the monstrous and savage man-eating cyclop that became such a terrifying image through the Odyssey. The other was, as I said before... Medusa the Gorgon. And as I explained before, in the oldest recorded versions of the myth, there was no transformation: the Gorgon was born a hideous and terrifying monster. The snake hair, the petrifying gaze, the monstrous face that embodied everything the Greeks deemed ugly, the metallic claws and wings... And all that seduced Poseidon somehow, and he made her his lover, and they even had children together - which in turn were also monsters. The benevolent Pegasus, and the mysterious Chrysaor (who in turn later gave birth to Geryon, the three-bodied monster Herakles had to fight).

This trend of Poseidon choosing the most unusual, dangerous or terrifying consorts to give birth to monsters heroes will later have to face is confirmed by the recurring image of Poseidon having slept with GAIA out of all goddesses. And who are the children attributed to this unon of Poseidon with his own grandmother (not only that, but to my knowledge it is the only time an Olympian slept with Gaia, who usually mates with other primordial deities)? Charybdis, of the dreaded Scylla and Charybdis (Scylla is also sometimes identified as Poseidon's daughter - though she was before that a daughter of Phorkys, and it seems she became a Poseidon daughter simply because through time Poseidon absorbed Phorkys within himself) ; Laestrygon, the ancestor and first king of the Laestrygons (another race of brutal, man-eating giants like the cyclops of Polyphemus island), and finally Antaeus, yet another murderous giant (though he didn't eat people).

If you weren't certain of the fact that Poseidon was supposed to be "mostly a bad guy with some good sides" in Greek mythology, just wait until your hear about Theseus' legends! Now everybody knows of Theseus slaying the Minotaur... But before that, Theseus did another whole set of heroic feats. You see, as he left his birth-place to reach Athens in hope of finding back his father, Theseus actually did his first real heroic feats. The roads of Ancient Greece back then were infested with all sorts of robbers, thiefs and murderers - some psychopathic humans, others humanoid monsters, some human working with monsters... And Theseus managed to kill the most dreadful and dangerous ones during his journey. And... surprise surprise! Most of them were children of Poseidon!

Procrustes, the guy who loved to cut people he just invited to go to bed? Son of Poseidon. Cercyon who forced travellers to wrestle to death against him? Son of Poseidon. Sciron who pushed people from a cliff after asking them to wash his feet? Son of Poseidon. Periphetes who smashed people with a big club? Possibly a son of Poseidon.

And then, you have to count on the fact most of the evil and wicked kings of Ancient Greece ended up being "sons of Poseidons" at one point or another: Augeas with his filfthy stables ; Pelias the antagonist of the Jason legend ; Polydectes who antagonized Perseus was in later texts a Poseidon son ; there's also Amykos who had some common elements with Cercyon...

And THEN, not criminals on the road, not vicious kings, but the friggin's ALOADS. The monstrous giants that tried to destroy the Olympians and take over Olympus? POSEIDON SONS.

When something good comes out of Poseidon, it is generally a surprise and has to deal with a lot of the bad stuff their own father produced. (In some variations of the Theseus legend for example, Theseus becomes a son of Poseidon, which completely changes the angle of his stories - as his opposition to the Minotaur and his battles against the bandits make him look like the "good son" of Poseidon having to get rid of all the monstrous sons or indirect creations of his father...).

Even the more neutral or benevolent sons of Poseidon are freaky or disturbing. The first son of Poseidon and Amphitrite is Triton - half-man half-fish, and probably the origin of the origin of the triton species. Some consider Proteus the son of Poseidon, and he is a frightening shapeshifter. And then there's the whole host of "talking magical animals" Poseidon gave birth to, which reflects how "primitive" and... let's say "inhuman" the god stays - from the ram from which comes the Golden Fleece to Arion the fabulous horse. Usually, gods who have such a parent-relationship with animals, in Greek mythology, are not good guys (for example Ares in the Cadmos legend, and his relationship with the dragon Cadmus/Cadmus killed...).

If you ask me who my favorite fictional Poseidon is in media, I will say without a doubt, the Poseidon of "Mission Odyssey" as you call it in English (I always found this title silly, in French it was "The Odyssey", and that's it):

Now, I know that "Mission Odyssey" is WILDLY inaccurate to Greek mythology and they clearly tried to stretch as much as they could... everything. Just a look at Poseidon's design above tells you that they clearly do not want to give a "traditional" retelling of the Greek myths.

But, that being said, there's a reason why I love this cartoon, and its because for everything inacurracy they have something that is done perfectly right, and in fact well ahead of their time. For example Hades: they did Hades right, as an imposing, frightening deity... but a neutral and fair one, that shows to be understanding, just and generous, and that only acts unfairly and antagonizing when tricked by Poseidon (and promptly apologizes when he realizes he was tricked). And Poseidon's characterization is also done, for me, right, because they truly manage to represent what Poseidon in the Odyssey is supposed to be.

A bad guy, yes, the antagonist of the story, a grudge-holder and a schemer and a bully who is ally, boss or father of most of monsters and criminals of Greek mythology, and is driven by pride and anger... But who is also shown to care about his children (in his own way), to try to respect the divine law and rules as much as he can (though he breaks them whenever carried away by his ego and anger, and doesn't shy from "cheating" at the "divine game") ; and that is shown to be well-liked and positively-seen by many gods and Greek cities, outside of the Odysseus-plotline. In fact, not only does the story hints and offers glimpses at the good side of Poseidon despite focusing on him as a bad guy ; but it also explains why the good side is "outstage" by turning into a story-tool the villainization of Poseidon. As in, the god is shown, just to obtain a petty win against Odysseus or satisfy his obsession with him, to trick, cheat and bully his friends and allies, who later turn against him when they realize the treachery or the deceit, and as a result over the course of the story he gets more and more alienated by all those that loved or respected him... Precisely because of how he plays an antagonist to Odysseus' story.

If you want a Disney's Hades-like villain (as in a recurring divine villain in a Greek mythology story that allies the sinister and the funny), but that is much more mythologically accurate than Disney's product, take Mission Odyssey's Poseidon.

And I just love the design. It is Asterix meets Ursula and I just LOVE this (but given this series came from the same studio that did things such as Martin Mystery, Totally Spies or Team Galaxy, cool unusual designs are expected).

#greek mythology #poseidon #greek gods #greek monsters #monsters in greek mythology #mission odyssey #percy jackson and the olympians #theseus

[recurring-polynya]

My Top 5 Bleach Filler Characters, Appropos of Nothing

5. Inaba Kagerouza, Reigai Arc

Inaba is, simply put, the pinnacle of Soul Society worldbuilding. He's got this long dramatic backstory and a bunch of rage bottled up in his chest, but also a guy needs a paycheck, so he's just been doing the R&D grind for a hundred years. He knows a shit-ton about the Dangai, which is relevant to his evil scheme, but it's also just his day job (also the Dangai owns, I want a PhD in "the Dangai"). No one else in Squad 12 seems to have the least bit of beef with him, even after he builds an evil duplicate of every person in the Gotei. Unlike a lot of mad scientist characters, he's good with his weapon. Maybe he's weirdly jacked under his villainous smock?? Also, his evil scheme was generally well thought out, and took into account the fact that the Gotei is a bunch of buffoons. ngl, I kinda wish his plan had succeeded, if only for the fact that it would probably really piss Aizen off.

4. Ran'Tao, Bount Arc

Everything about Ran'Tao owns, including:

Sexy glasses

Condemned so hard by the Central 46 that they gave her a kidou seal back tattoo

KIDOU. SHOTGUN.

Stabbed Kariya in the gut

Noped out at the end of the arc because Who Needs the Gotei's Shit?

3. Kuchiki Kouga, Zanpakutou Rebellion Arc I think that when you hear the story about how Byakuya was forbidden from marrying Hisana because she was a commoner, you're supposed to feel this great sense of injustice, like wow! Byakuya actually showed character by standing up for his love! And that's great and all, and then you get the Zanpakutou Rebellion Vintage Kuchiki Bullshit Flashbacks and it's like, oh, the last guy they married into the clan mass murdered a bunch of people and then they had to seal him up in a cave and I feel like that's an important piece of context in the entire Kuchiki Family-Being-a-Bitch-About-Who-Byakuya-Marries debacle.

Which isn't to exonerate the Kuchiki, here! It's very clear that Kouga wasn't that bad before he got pushed over the brink by Kuchiki family machinations. I mean, this is very much an Everyone's The Asshole situation.

I love the fact that they never come out and say that Kouga is Byakuya's uncle, but he's very obviously Byakuya's uncle.

I love the fact that he dramatically cut his kenseikan off with his sword and threw them at Ginrei and they made a gree card of it.

I love that he appears to be exactly Renji's height and has one chunk of hair that is the same color as Renji's and he over-accessorizes horrifically, and at best the Squad Six old-timer's had to be like "Byakuya don't do this to us again" when he hired Renji, and at worst there's a chance that Renji the secret baby that was born after Kouga was banished and he was hidden away in the Rukon so he didn't screw up the succession line but he's actually the true Heir to the Kuchiki.

2. Harugasaki Seizo, standalone episode 313 This dude had a homoerotic rivalry with Ikkaku (doomed, of course, because who could compete with Yumichika?), lost his shinigami powers when he took a blow meant for Ikkaku, and then spent the next hundred years putting his entire pussy into doing laundry for Squad 11. This man invented yearning, even if he did choose the worst possible person in the history of ever as the target of his affection.

1. Amagai Shuusuke, New Captain Shuusuke Amagai Arc He looks like Ross Poldark. He can't hold his liquor. No one knows who witnessed his Captain's Exam. Ukitake and Kyouraku tried to talk him into a threesome. He was nice to Kira. His bankai was a tuba that made a foghorn noise when it belched out fire. His dad was the shinigami equivalent of a narc, who got done dirty by the Captain-Commander. He fought the Dangai Cleaner and won. I love him more than anything.

Honorable Mention: Kenryuu and Enryuu, New Captain Shuusuke Amagai Arc Because they are an important reminder that for all the shinigami buffoonery I am forced to witness, day in and day out, some people graduate from Shin'ou, get shikai even, and still can't get hired by the Gotei.

#bleach filler #these are just my own cursed opinions you're under no obligation to share them #kenryuu and enryuu are also here because my husband loves them for absolutely no reason #i was trying to do this post out loud for him and i got to about no 3 and he was like 'kenryuu and enryuu right???' and i was like 'no dear #he also says they are married and will not hear arguments on this topic #i found (1) person on tumblr drawing seizo fanart and i respect that person to the bottom of my heart #i knew renji barely remembered seizo but imma write him into my squad 11 fanfic that i'm never going to finish see if i don't #procrastinating from my fanfic in some really epic ways today lads

[octoshott]

So. Side Order, huh?

I've been chewing on my thoughts over this for a good few days now. Want to spit them out somewhere. Vague-ish spoilers ahead.

I want to preface this with saying that I love Splatoon, I've been playing it since 1, really dropped off near the end of 2. Nintendo made Octo Expansion for me, they released it on my birthday and I love it so fucking much.

Side Order is fun, but lacking criminally in content.

You can argue Roguelites are like this in general, its the core princible to replay them over and over again and as someone who enjoys Roguelites, I agree!

However, a key thing that good roguelites do is continously give you a reason to keep playing- whether that be addictive gameplay or, usually, good story and lacing that in with difficulty that becomes the players goal to lessen- It rewards the player for being curious, experimental and above all else persistant.

I am fully aware that difficulty, due to Splatoon's target audience, in something like a roguelite was never going to be an easy thing to balance let alone pull off but having the main plot resolve itself once you hit the top of the tower was, in my opinion, the first of its blunders.

I feel as if the Splatoon developers know how much the lore and worldbuilding of these games matter to players. Side Order was advertised in very similar veins to Octo Expansion. The trailers had mystery and intrigue with clear connections to the well recieved and loved Octo Expansion to the point of having the same protagonist among other simularities.

They were clearly teasing this to be a successor of SOME capacity to Octo Expansion. And even as I went into this expecting it to be nothing like OE in terms of it's personal weight, I wasn't expecting something so short.

Classically, in roguelites that focus on story, you would gain story beats the more you replay. And techincally you gain this with the keys gathered from each fully cleared palette. But usually your story rewards in roguelites come from clearing or attempting runs and rewards:

With Side Order's story being resolved the MOMENT you step onto floor 30 with no real context unless you've intentionally avoided the top or have genuinely been slowed by its difficult (which I assume is what the devs intended) makes it's climax feel fast paced and lackluster- undeserved, even.

And, yes, I am fully aware that when you climb the tower agani after the credits role, you begin gain more lore about whats going on. But with the actual, main threat neutralized in every possible way it feels as if this lore should've been offered to us much sooner and much more spread out for a better pay off.

It's story feels like its being told out of order and, in my personal opinion, the themes and actual telling methods of Side Order we're a largely missed opportunity to tell something a bit more indepth. Climbing a tower that gives you essentially nothing until you reach floor 30 (which in my experience takes about 35-40 minutes) only to recieve about two scentences of lore is incredibly tiring and feels dissastifying when the main plot is already over.

It's lack of variation in level design, tasks and chips doesn't help with the climb each time if you're looking for the lore or just to 100% either. And you can argue this is a roguelite problem, but Splatoon's scenario's for a tower climb are pitifully small and you will start to seem repeat almost immediatly on your second or third run.

I also feel like it relies far too heavily on the player knowing and caring about Octo Expansion. I'm not saying that I think it was a bad idea to have most of what's going on in Side Order happening because of Octo Expansion's events. Hell, I was happy when they were very blatently showing this early on.

But it does very little with its ties to Octo Expansion, making Side Order feel like its constantly struggling to be its own thing away from the original DLC.

I think I can almost see what they wanted to go for here, and its frustrating, it felt close to something at least telling a decent story.

Every single little beat I've gotten has helped me understand more and more what they were going for, but since the main conflict is already resolved I find it hard to be excited and more frustrated that I wasn't given these during my initial playthrough.

I feel as though the roguelite formula was an interesting idea that they polished the best of their ability and to make work both for casual and experience players- but I think thats where the problem comes in.

With Side Order being the same price as Octo Expansion and offering very little in terms of replayability and most especially for me, story, the whole thing ends up feeling like a muddled mess that would've worked better had the roguelite aspect perhaps been dropped in general for a general tower climb.

Missed opportunies feel like they decorate Side Order in a way that leaves me fairly disappointed.

I think, overall, Side Order is a fun time that can be enjoyed but the way it was implimented into the gameplay formula was largely a mistake, especially coupled with the marketing of this being something more indepth with its story when it's not, and I can absolutely understand why I'm seeing a lot of disappointment for it.

#splatoon #splatoon 3 #splatoon side order #side order #splatoon spoilers #side order spoilers #i just wanted to spit my thoughts out somewhere #i could've gone more into my grievances with the plot but i wanted to generalize this and its already too long #but i definitely feel mismarketed too #i say this as someone whos enjoying it despite its lack of content #i am DEFINITELY let down in terms of what they seemed to be implying in trailers #and if you enjoy side order thats fine all the more power to you #salutes #scrolls.txt

[that-ari-blogger]

The Cooler She-Ra (Huntara)

Let me clear something up.

She-Ra and the Princesses of Power doesn't get good, and it doesn't go places. It is good, and it has been in those places since day one. The first story discusses the cost of war with considerable nuance, lest we forget. Yes, the quality of the writing, animation, and debatably the acting increases as the series goes on as the crew finds their feet. But the themes of this series are explicit from the jump and do not change. 

Reading that back, that was a bit more confrontational than I intended, so let me try and phrase it a different way.

For a lot of episodic stories, good and bad, the overwhelming vibe is of acceleration. The themes start out slow, then get piled in over time. Scooby Doo: Mystery Incorporated, for example, starts with the basic idea of friendship and secrecy, but matures to discussion of family, history, and legacy over time. This isn’t a flaw with the writing of Mystery Inc. at all, it’s just a way of writing.

Watching She-Ra and the Princesses of Power is like being in a single roomed house with a few small windows. You can see the outside world and the story through those windows, its clear enough to know there’s something interesting, but you can’t see the whole thing.

Then in season three, the walls start falling down and you start to realise where you have been the whole time.

Let me explain.

SPOILERS AHEAD: (She-Ra and the Princesses of Power)

I’m going to start with something small that isn’t particularly related to the rest of the post, but I think it’s of equal importance and can’t be ignored. Huntara is gay.

This may not seem like a big deal, but it kinda reframes the rest of the series. Because up until this point, the queer coding we have seen has been a few background characters, and Spinnarella and Netossa, who have an implied relationship.

That’s just what it is, coding. They are coded together, but it isn’t dwelled upon. If it had only been season one that got made, I guarantee you there would be eejits online who would argue that they were platonic friends.

But Huntara explicitly flirts with another woman in a bar. This is a named character, who is casually queer, and that is what sets the precedent retroactively. Now it can no-longer be argued that this series isn’t interested in showing queer stories. Now Spinnerella and Netossa’s relationship is essentially confirmed, as the series has made itself and its stance abundantly clear. This is a show with queer people, it isn’t subtext, and it hasn’t been subtext this whole time.

Let me be clear, I am not arguing that Spinnarella and Netossa aren’t married in the first season at all. They are together, end of argument. But on a literary level, it is coding in that season, and it stops being coding retroactively.

The reason for the coding angle is actually linked to the casualness of Huntara’s sexuality.

Unfortunately, in popular culture and mainstream storytelling, the idea that a character is straight unless proven otherwise is a general attitude. This often means that a queer character isn’t queer unless proven so.

But Huntara establishes a different precedent, casualness. Huntara is just gay, there is no fanfare about it. The episode doesn’t dwell on it. But at the same time, it’s undeniable. This is a series where people are just queer, there doesn’t need to be confirmation, you can assume.

Anyway, Huntara, the episode, is still early on in season two, so it is still setting up what ideas the series will focus on. I mentioned earlier that the series as a whole has themes that it has been discussing from the get go, and I stick by that, but every season and every episode has to zero in on something (with exceptions) for clarity’s sake. In this case, Huntara centres around the idea of revelations, hence this post. Nothing in this episode is what it seems.

Worldbuilding is a key storytelling concept that is rarely dwelled upon except by Game Masters for TTRPGs, and Necrit. But it’s actually one of the most important elements of any work of fiction. Stories are based around vibes, and the easiest and most effective way to set up a specific feeling is to evoke that through the setting.

For a few key examples, Bloodborne is a story about injustice, horror, and monsters hiding in plain sight, so what better place to put it than the false civility of Victorian London? Similarly, The Magnus Archives is a story about injustice, horror, and monsters hiding in plain sight, so it is set in modern London. As a contrasting example, Robert Galbraith’s series, “Harold Pots and the Magicky Magic Stuff”, is about how the status quo is fine, actually, and that any attempts to change that is tantamount to murder, so it is set in a British boarding school. I disagree with the premise of one of these stories, can you tell which one?

The Crimson Wastes is an area where nothing is what it seems and everything wants to kill you. The ground could easily be quicksand, or deadly bushes, or a pile of snakes.

The opening scene is a phenomenal way of establishing the new territory. Not the dialogue, but what it shows you. Enormous skeletons of creatures that couldn’t handle the environment litter the ground, fossils that stand as a testament to life that had to adapt to survive

A bird drifts past the characters, landing on a plant. It’s peaceful. Then the bird literally iced, and falls from view, leaving the camera to focus only on the plant itself and all of that terrifying glory. This is telling you a few things. One, look twice at things before jumping in, not everything is as it seems. Two, this story is dangerous, and not even a cute little bird is safe from death. Three, nature and magic are one and the same. I wonder what that will mean going forward.

Also, there is a reason that the Horde hasn’t managed to conquer this area. I think praise needs to be given to the sound design of this episode. The scratching noise that accompanies the skeleton is unsettling, and it exists to make you remember that image. This area is dangerous in a different way to anything you have seen before. Not even the villains of this story can reach you here.

However, there is humanoid life here, which comes back to the theme of revelations and things not being what they seem. Making a living in the Wastes is possible, and that bar being literally inside an enormous skeleton is about as blunt of a metaphor as you are going to get. Surrounded by death, there is life.

Enter Huntara’s eponym, and let's take her apart, starting with her character design.

Huntara is practical, first and foremost. She carries a weapon that can double as a stick to poke things with from a distance (remember this), in case they turn out to be dangerous. She is dressed in simple clothes, not too heavy as to cause her to overheat, but enough to protect her from the sun. She is partially armoured (remember this too), and wears the exact same shoes as Adora, hinting at her background, although she has reinforced and repaired them, again, she’s practical.

But there are two things that I’m missing, and they are the two most obvious things about her. She’s built like a brick privvy, and she’s cool as all hell.

The coolness thing is partly based on her sense of self image. This is someone with a distinct sense of style, utilitarian as it may be. She has styled her hair, wears clawed earrings, and has that tattoo across her head, as well as the torn crop top. Despite her surroundings, Huntara has taken effort to make herself look good. She’s confident in herself.

The strength thing, on top of being the other seventy percent of her coolness factor, leads me into something weird about her design: she looks like Adora. Bear with me on this one.

This isn’t exact. Don’t get me wrong, the designs aren’t a one-to-one thing. Her design just has the same energy as Adora’s. The short jacket, with its jagged collar, kinda matches Adora’s jacket. But where Huntara’s is open (remember this too), showing off her strength and confidence, Adora’s is closed in, restricting her and keeping her polished and refined. I mean “polished and refined” here in less of a mark of quality, but more in the sense that she has a lot holding her back and holding her down. 

Similarly, Adora has those shoulder pauldrons, making herself look bigger, like a prey animal with false eyes. But Huntara has boxy shoulders that form a shape language, as she has actually developed the defences Adora pretends to have. In that way, she acts as a more completed version of Adora, which is interesting.

Finally, there is that hair, which is put up in a similar way to Adora’s, not the same, but alike enough to make the silhouettes echo. The shot below is about as much proof I have for this crackpot theory.

But she’s not exactly a good role model, is she? She’s duplicitous, which harks back to those ideas of revelations and second glances that I mentioned earlier. But she’s also standoffish, at which point I will bring back those elements of her design I said to remember, the spear, the partial armour, and the open jacket.

Huntara isn’t emotionally healthy, she has just dealt with PTSD in a different way to Adora, she has run. She has adapted to keeping things at a distance, and not letting people get close, exemplified by the polearm that doubles as a long range weapon. She is also terrifying, which also helps her stay isolated.

This all covers up for the fact that she has very few emotional defences. She is only partially armoured, and despite her best efforts, she has nothing protecting her heart. Adora brings up something that is a little too close to Huntara for comfort, then asks her about it, and her only reaction is to make a threat.

She does this twice in this episode. She feels emotionally vulnerable, and immediately pins the cause of that vulnerability to the closest wall. It's as if it's a stock reaction.

“Huntara doesn’t run from anything. I want to be here.”

I call bollocks on that. It’s a mantra, a myth, not an actual response. It’s like saying “haven’t you heard the legend”. But I actually want to talk about the vernacular a bit here.

The second sentence is reminiscent of a character not yet mentioned in this episode. She has intellectually acknowledged that things are bad, but she has convinced herself, emotionally, that this is where she wants to be. She wants this, this is her life, she cannot be out of control. Similarly, if things go wrong, it’s what she deserves, because she wanted this. If the phrasing of that and the need for a feeling of control doesn’t sound exactly like Catra, I don’t know what does.

On a different note, the third person thing isn’t done by many other people in this series, but isn’t it a funny coincidence that two of the people who do it are in the same place at the same time? Who could have foreseen this?

Putting it mildly, Adora, throughout the series, has an identity crisis going on. She cannot decide if she is Adora or She-Ra, and it leads into a true Jeckyl and Hyde plot that I discussed in more detail in this post, which manifests most acutely as her referring to herself in third person. When she is most powerful, she is She-Ra, and Adora is a different person. But when she is feeling weak, she is Adora, and She-Ra will save her.

Although, in another weird twist of fate, Huntara knows more about She-Ra than anyone else besides Razz and Light Hope, because she has heard of the legends and has studied what Mara left behind, she gives us a summary of what this whole She-Ra thing is, through all the biases of Adora and Mara. So don’t think this line escaped me:

“She-Ra is a person?”

From everything that Huntara has seen and heard, nothing has told her that She-Ra is an individual. Instead, it's a thing to be revered, a concept rather than an identity and this is… correct?

She-Ra isn’t another person who Adora becomes, it isn’t an identity for Adora to assume, its something to be, like a hero, or a friend. It’s a facet of Adora, rather than her whole being. But Adora can’t see that, because of the aforementioned identity crisis.

I mentioned in my last post that season three gets as close as this series gets to evading the tragic format without actually breaking free, and I think that the talk of identity is a good place to explain where Adora fits into this.

Adora’s tragic flaw is also her greatest strength. She thinks incredibly quickly. This makes her a phenomenal tactician in the short term but causes her to be incredibly shortsighted. This is in contrast to Catra, who is always about ten steps ahead of everyone, ut can’t see the forest for the trees most of the time.

So, Adora internalises things quickly, and a majour side effect of this is that she doesn’t always complete things rationally. Her identity problem isn’t so much this incarnate as just this problem exactly.

She has been given a magic sword and told a bunch of things about it, and she has taken that at face value and moved on, internalising this in a way that isn’t accurate. She is She-Ra, but that doesn’t remove everything else about her.

Adora has been tossing up the idea of giving up her past and embracing this new identity that she has been given, and season three presents her moving away from that idea. Huntara is an example of that extreme, and it isn’t enviable.

But at the end of the season… well, you will just have to wait for more of my blog to see how that works out.

Or you could just watch the show.

Lastly, I would like to talk about Hordack and Entrapta, because their scenes in this episode are both really cute and really thematic.

The reveal of Hordack’s frailty plays into that idea of revelations that I have been talking about, but it also plays into his and Entrapta’s themes of failure and self worth and sets up those themes in Horde Prime.

Stylisation is something that this series plays around with a lot when it comes to backstories and asides (I conveniently have a post talking about this idea in detail), and that comes back for Hordack’s flashback.

This is simple, incredibly so. There are simple shapes, and very few colours on display. It is flat, but in a way that is very clearly intentional. Hordak has an extremely simple worldview. He isn’t a two dimensional character, but like Glimmer, he sees the world in an overly reductive way.

The colouration also sets Horde Prime out from the rest of the scene here, holding him up on a pedestal. Hordak and everything around him is a shade of red, orange, or yellow. It’s warm in tone, but also blends together with the purple to make Hordak look at home, and one with his surroundings. But Horde Prime stands out, and the eye of the viewer is drawn to him because of that abrasive green. He is at the centre of Hordak’s mind.

The flashback does this multiple times, using that green like a highlighter to focus the viewer's eye on the most important part of the image.

Also, this looks like a political poster, doesn’t it? It’s propaganda, and Hordak has taken it, hook line and sinker. That actually serves to explain the flat stylisation, it’s conveying simple ideas. Horde Prime doesn’t get any detail to what he actually looks like other than “he probably looks like Hordak” and “he’s got a cape and that collar thing”. This is the idea of Horde Prime, not the actual guy. We are looking at the pedestal this character stands upon, rather than the character itself.

That collar thing is actually a neat little character design element that is reflected in Hordak until this episode. Entrapta replaces it with her armour, and I think its important that Entrapta and Horde Prime are immediately presented as opposites.

The literal only thing we learn about Horde Prime’s personality in this episode is that he doesn’t particularly like individuality. Failure, defects, and deviations are all worthy of being killed for. You have to prove your worth, instead of it being assumed. And even then, I am inclined to doubt whether Hordak will be able to prove himself, no matter what he does.

Entrapta is villainous, kinda. She is aligned with a machine of war and death, which isn’t the most ethically sound of activities. But, she opposes the main villain of this story on principle.

“Everybody needs help sometimes. And you shouldn't be upset that you're not perfect. Take Emily! Her programming is glitchy, the left leg sticks, and she's loud. Emily's got quirks, but that's why I like her. Imperfection is what makes scientific experimentation possible. Imperfection is beautiful. At least to me. … And you're really too obsessed with this whole failure thing, I mean, I'm a failure... I don't fit in. I became friends with Adora, but she abandoned me. Then, I became friends with Catra, but she doesn't talk to me anymore. But that doesn't mean I give up. I scrounged up a few more pieces of First Ones Tech, and I can't think of a better use for it than this.”

Imperfection is beautiful.

There is also the scientific aspect of Entrapta, which I think hasn’t been discussed that much. She-ra makes a point of equating the natural with the good, and the artificial with the bad. But Entrapta is a scientist and an inventor, where does she fit into that?

Curiosity. Science is the study of the world. It is a means of learning more about nature, and to create things from that nature. She experiments, and understands. Imperfection is beautiful, and if there is one thing nature is good at, it’s variation.

Entrapta doesn’t exist in contrast to nature, but parallel to it. All she does is express the natural aspect of this story in a different way to everyone else.

Final Thoughts

The sound design of this episode is unrivalled so far in the series, and it will get better over time. The sting at the start with the skeleton is perfectly unsettling, and the ambience of the Wastes is superb.

Also, the cinematography of the fight in this episode is really well done, filled with motion and dynamism and tactical expressions of character. The sword duel is cool, and the fact that Glimmer is out for blood isn’t really dwelled upon, but it's notable that both of the goons she fights survive the experience through sheer force of luck.

However, Huntara figuring out Adora was from the Horde because of how she fights was a little weak to me. “I recognise that training”, really? Not the boots? Not the fact that she keeps bringing up the Horde? Ok.

Next week, I will be looking at One Upon A Time In The Wastes, so stick if that interests you.

Previous - Next

#rants #literary analysis #literature analysis #character analysis #what's so special about...? #she ra and the princesses of power #spop #she ra #she ra princess of power #she ra and the princess of power fanart #she ra adora #she ra spop #adora #she ra hordak #she ra entrapta #she ra horde prime #spop adora #spop hordak #spop entrapta #spop huntara #she ra huntara #huntara #fuck jk rowling

[mysticmetalmerchants]

!!!~Fic Recs~!!!

I thought I would put together a post with some of my absolute favorite ROTTMNT fics, because these sorts of posts made by authors I love have been what lead me to find them! So why not pay it forward and keep the hype up :) Also I'm intense about organization and archiving and making this record soothes me lmao.

In this post I'll be recommending completed multi-chapter fics. In no particular order, here they are:

Every Night the Longest Day by ashtreelane

-One of the first rottmnt fics I read. I think I maybe stayed up until ridiculous hours reading this. one of those reads that is An Experience. The way that the brothers care for one another is so tangible. The author's conveyance of dissociation/mental fatigue is so interesting and engaging.

KOSMARA by MagpieCrown

-A fic I'll be thinking about for a long, long time. Takes everything I love about the Bad Future and makes it even more bittersweet. The relationships between the characters are what sticks with me like knives in the heart, but the worldbuilding is also so clear (I can see so many settings in my mind's eye so easily! and they're inventive as well!) and the action/climax is incredibly intense. Moreover, the way some characters are never present in the narrative but have such a Presence... not one but two "haunts the narrative" vibes... oh wow. It's really just masterful.

The Call Back Home by @gooseinsurance

-The concept at the center of this fic's narrative is soooo interesting and cool to me!! I think about it, like, all the damn time. One of those ideas that you pick up and stare at in awe and file away into your personal understanding of canon forevermore. On top of that, the frustration you feel at the character conflicts is just palpable. It's heart-wrenching. Moreover, the way the author handles what I suppose could be classified as psychological horror is commendable and was invigorating and chilling to experience as a reader.

Under Pressure by ParvumAutomaton

-I never thought anyone could ever get me to read something about cave diving. Much less horror in a cave diving setting. That sounds like my worst nightmare lmao. And yet. I am so freaking glad I gave this fic a chance. It is one of my all-time favorites, and I know it will live in my brain rent-free for a long time. Leo's characterization and the way he handles scenarios is so realistic and feels so him. Moreover, the way the narrative unfolds and the pacing are so well-done. I could not stop reading. (And for those of you still squeamish about cave diving, there is less time spent underwater than you'd think!)

The Corner Store by KicsterAsh

-A turtle tots fic!! A rare feel-good recommendation from me with littel angst and much comfort and sweetness. I love the speculative biology of mutant turtles in the cold (brumation?! oh no!) so to see a take on it that is so wholesome and charming and well-written was very happy-making for me.

Hollow Mind by paperxcrowns @crows-murder

-Something grimmer than I would have thought I would like, but what really sucked me in is the way this is totally deserving of that tour de force description reviewers like to use so much. It introduces something that is missing from canon but could slot in easily in a darker tone: human experimentation/capture, gun-weilding agents, and separation from family/being stranded and running for your life. All in all it has a very Jason Bourne feel to it that I never thought I would love to see enacted with the turtles, but my gosh it works and works so well.

I wasn't sure which authors had accounts on here or not, so if I've missed you/you know the author's @, please let me know and I'll update the post!

#rottmnt #rise of the teenage mutant ninja turtles #rottmnt fanfic #rottmnt fic recs #fic rec #tmnt #rottmnt fanfiction

[rocketyship]

That poll is so hard to vote for cause on one hand, it feels like Tiff would fit the best because of her incredibly unreliable narration matching Ted's while it would still be a subversion of the original because of the reason why she's unreliable(rose tinted glasses and extreme devotion to BE as opposed to the stuff Ted's got going on) and her pov on and relationship with BE would just be so fun to see explored and the horror of the situation being a subtle thing thats swept under the rug could be so cool.

But on the other, Evan would also kinda match with the original due to his open emotional distance and disconnect from the girls, AND it would bring a lot of fun, fresh stuff! Seems like Evan is the one who pays most attention to AM, and seeing what's happening there from his pov would be so interesting! He, just like Ellen if she would've narrated could bring up how things like being the only one of the opposite sex and gender in the group and (from what we know from the short story at least) only dark skinned person would like.. idk change perspectives on things?? I'd also love to find out more about him!

Oh, not to mention Naomi!! Having narration that is pretty damn reliable would make worldbuilding and exploration much easier and she's also got that disconnect due to her age and crystal clear memory, being able to see things as they are and were could be really refreshing in a ihnmaims universe and i really want to know what her whole deal is! Being born toward the end of the war must've made quite a difference to how a person would process everything, Ted's whole "I'm youngest so my experience is different because i barely had time to live as an adult before the nukes" wouldn't have shit on someone who wasn't even like... done w puberty.

Ooooh they'd all make for such fun narrators 😭 It's really too bad that writing takes so much time and effort or it would've been amazing to see all three's povs! I still don't know what to vote for or how the results are looking so far but im really looking forward to seeing what the results will lead to!

Maybe you have a character you have the most ideas for or would like to write most? Cause if so, that'd def help me choose what to vote.

Sorry for the wall of text(would you believe me if i said i wanted to write more? This is me trying to show restraint, didn't even write about the potential AM could have as a narrator), and i hope you have a good day!

Okay so first off, I love-love-love this response. You have such fun perspectives on these silly little au characters of mine and it makes me a little sad that you didn’t write anymore cause I definitely would have read it, especially what you were thinking about what an interesting narrator AM could be.

As to which character I have the most ideas for, is such a difficult thing to answer cause well I have so-so many. But I do want to put them out there for you so here they are:

Tiffany: narration wise, I imagine the stuff she says can and does come across as nonsensical and border line trigger happy, however sometimes she occasionally lets something slip that clues into her true feelings and that a part of her may indeed be aware of the gravity of the groups situation, however she shuts it down as she has severe attachment issues and cannot fathom how she could possibly survive without BE. Another thing I pictured is that she very often quotes the bible and other religious texts, as BE doesn’t present herself as machine and genuinely as a divine entity. I also have been toying with a scene similar to the one in the radio drama, where AM is talking to Ted about bumblebees and getting high r something. Where it is set up as the reverse. BE showing Tiff the horrors of what the radiation and world has come to (in a way that is seriously deceptive) and claiming that all she has to do is snap her fingers for it to return. It would definitely read as a story where there is total tonal whiplash from one scene to the next, so that is something to consider.

Evan: I have come up with so many pasts for all these survivors before they were “rescued” by BE, however one thing to note is that I don’t really think of these characters as just “genderbent versions of the originals”. Evan is one of the key examples of this, as in this au he is technically the original Ellen’s older brother, however he left home when she was around 12-13ish, as he didn’t like the life, college and job his family set out and tried to push him into. Unlike Ellen who was a successful engineer, who may have been a hopeless romantic based on the original text. Evan was and very much still is kind of a massive party animal. I picture him very punk but like the old kind of punk. Like he was the kind of guy to go motorcycling around the country (even into war-devastated bits, cause it was a thrill), he went to underground clubs and concerts, and sure as heck slept around and had no shame in it (both women and men if you are curious). He doesn’t want to get sentimental, he wants to live his life on the edge and BE doesn’t allow that. He constantly tries to upset her, get some kind of intense reaction from her. He tries to escape, he kicks and tries to tear open parts of her internal network. This man has tried to kill Gloria (Gloria kind of deserves it thou) and the only reactions he gets from BE is her finding him cute, amusing, or as if he just needs to be put in a corner to calm down for a bit. Truthfully he is someone who just wants to go back and experience life again, recognising that BE’s utopia isn’t living and refusing to buy into it.

Naomi: I won’t lie, Nimdok is so boring in the og story, and they definitely tried to do “something” with him in the game. I don’t like it, again different ramble. So like Evan, she is a different person. Like you said she has barely started puberty and because of BE neither her body or even her mind has really aged in anyway and she is horribly aware of this. Due to the war she has had her childhood taken from her, but now because of BE she shall never experience adulthood or growing up. Her memory hardly anything particularly helpful. She remembers exactly what BE did to the others when they first got brought to the compound, she has seen what goes down in the labs, she knows what pills are and aren’t sleeping pills, developing a habit where she will pretend to take one and spit it out if she is able to. As stated in the survivors master post, she knows BE’s blind spots and will often go there on her own. Not really to do anything, just kind of sit around. Further more, she and Evan have a way of communicating, number of blinks, which fingers moved when you spoke to them, that kind of stuff. Still she doesn’t want to escape, she knows she’ll die if she does, generally she acts more like a mediator in the group. As a narrator, I did have this idea for a few odd habits she has learned over the years. Example is that she constantly counting, time and routine is import to her, as she notices when something is wrong and that freaks her out. She also has this habit of just staring at the others for very long periods of time, especially Gloria. She clearly remembers seeing her on tv during her old life, and also remembers how she attacked her when Naomi attempted to mention it to Gloria.

Writing does take so much effort, especially for me, cause truthfully I’m always jumping back and forth on what I’m working on. On top of this au and the fic, I’m also in the process of finishing the final script and sketches for a different web comic I’ve been planning for a while, as well as a completely unrelated world building project that I’ve been at for two years now. Anyhow!! Tell me more please

#i have no mouth and i must scream #ihnmaims #am ihnmaims #ted ihnmaims #ihnmaimsloveau #alternate reality #harlan ellison #ellen ihnmaims #ihnmaims am #allied mastercomputer #small artist #horror #fanfiction #ao3 writer

[thetwistedrope]

I am suggesting people read what she wrote instead of just following the mob. I read it, and it's a bit more complicated. I have never hear her being described as an antisemite. No idea where that would be coming from.

i mean, it's pretty insulting to imply that i'm just "following a mob." as with most trans ppl anymore, i spend way too much of my time educating myself about the various people that want ppl like med dead or locked away. but since you seem to think there's some ~nuance~ and i love shitting on JKR, let's take a look shall we?

looks p fkn terfy

mmmm tasty terf rhetoric

here she is supporting a terf

too bad I can't screenshot her Ink Heart books, because those have a shitload of transphobia in them, too.

GLAAD has a page on her, too.

Also, she does put her money into anti-trans politicians, legislation:

If you'd like to see it all recounted for you in a video, you could watch this one (i disagree with his ending, but the timeline is accurate, it includes the antisemitism, too)

if you wanna learn about how the worldbuilding in HP is bad and it's included antisemitism, fatphobia, classism, etc. there is this video.

here's another article discussing the antisemitism in her game, which its important to keep in mind that while she didn't have a lot of oversight on the game, her portrayal of goblins and treatment of them in her books still backs a lot of antisemitic stuff. her whole thing about how house elves want to be slaves is pretty shitty.

there's also posts on my blog that you could go look through to find more. all of this is easily found by simply doing a google search. which you seemingly failed to do.

let me be clear: if you think at this stage that JKR is not a terf, you have your head in the sand

fuck JKR and fuck anyone who supports her at this point. trans ppl and jewish ppl are far more important than this god awful franchise.

(which, if you'd like to see how she more or less fabricated a story about how she wrote the book, how Scholastic made sure to make the story merchandisable to sell to unsuspecting kids, you can watch this video)

#asks #jk rowling #antisemitic wizard game #harry potter #HP #JKR #terfs #ism resources

[thebisexualmandalorian]

Inviting controversy by asking a controversial question which you may feel free to ignore but. Thoughts on Karen Traviss' Star Wars books, from the old EU? I assume you've got Opinions

BOY DO I

I'll probably forget to include everything, but I've gone on an hour long Rant before and I'll do it again lmao

Okay, so the good. There is good in these books and I'll drag it out with teeth and claws if I have to.

I love Kal Skirata. You can crucify me for that if you want to, but as a daddy issues having bitch, I want him to be my dad. He's a wonderfully flawed character, and he owns up to those flaws. He's made mistakes and he's grown and he knows he isn't perfect but by god, he'll try for his boys. He fights tooth and nail to protect them from what he can, and what he can't, he'll go through hell with them (literally, I can't remember the exact wording, but it's said in Hard Contact I believe, that any training he puts his men through, he does it himself first). He's overprotective because there's so much he can't protect them from, and it's clear that he loves them with all his heart.

The clone and GAR and Mando culture building. This is a grayer area for me because there is a lot of internalized bullshit KT is dealing with that I'll talk about later, but! We wouldn't have nearly the background we do for these cultures without her books. I love most of what she did with it, from the military worldbuilding to the Mandalorian culture and the different facets of it we see through the eyes of different characters. And the language! Mando'a isn't a heavily developed conlang, but the tools are there, and it makes sense within the world. And we have music! We have songs.

I love the characters. There are gray areas, no one is perfect, and they all get down and dirty when things call for it. They love each other deeply and make good and bad decisions, they're realistic. The relationships are tender and gentle, and I love the interactions between everyone, the loyalty and the devotion, and the overarching feeling of grief because we know how this ends.

The clones! I love them! They are wonderful and well developed, and I love hearing their thoughts on everything, and their bond with one another and those around them. I'm not coherent about this one because I think about them for five seconds and start making high pitched noises like an overexcited dog.

The descriptions are so deliciously visceral, and I love reading them.

The bad:

Another unpopular opinion: I loathe Vau. Hate him utterly. He's a good character but a deeply horrible man, and this might be my trauma talking but it's my opinion and I'll die on this goddamn hill. He's verbally and physically abusive, and sees absolutely no consequences (or even reproach) for it in the narrative, aside from Kal breaking his nose, and he deserved so much worse than that.

The misogyny. Oh, Karen honey. That internalized misogyny got you good, huh? The blatant way she treats Etain and Besany through the mouths of other characters is... oof. There's a little bit of reversal, but it's still pretty bad. Even though they're "not like other girls," it's pretty obvious that Karen has a lot of issues with womanhood. It was the 2000s, so I'll let some of it be with the caveat that the 2000s were pretty damn misogynistic in general, but goddamn. Also, on that note, she seems to be fighting herself on whether Mandos have a gender neutral society or not? Like, she'll say on one page that there's no difference between men and women, and then go on to say that men go out and fight but women stay to guard the home and raise the kids. I am putting my head in my hands.

On a related note, Karen is the Jedi who hurt you in the room with us right now? Why do you hate the Jedi so damn much? It doesn't make any sense in the story and it doesn't make sense on a metatextual level. Bro, are you good?

Anyway! Yes! I have many opinions about this book series and I'm sure I forgot to cover everything! Please feel free to ask more questions!

#republic commando #karen traviss

[chrysalis-the-butterfly]

How was your Helluva Boss watch?

It was pretty neat! Thanks for asking!

Here's a list of the stuff I liked:

Moxxie and Millie's marriage is cute! I'm a sucker for fictional married couples who are sickeningly adorable and genuinely care for each other rather than arguing all the time.

I think I might have an autistic headcanon for Moxxie? It was the bit where he started infodumping to Millie's parents that did it for me.

There were plenty of lines of dialogue that made me splutter because I wasn't expecting them to be so hilarious.

The part of the interrogation scene where Moxxie intelligently explains why torture is a bad interrogation tactic and Blitzo adds that the demons might enjoy the torture too much and then the agents would have a whole other set of problems on their hands lives in my head rent-free for some reason.

While I'm not sure I want Stolitz to become canon, I will admit that their complicated relationship is interesting to watch. The childhood flashback episode had some cute moments. And I'm fascinated by the changes that Stolas has undergone over the course of the series. I'm glad he's not as creepy as he was at the start.

(I prefer Owling at the Moon over Stolitz, which is probably why I don't want Stolitz to become canon. Imagine if Loona and Octavia started dating and Blitzo and Stolas became the awkward in-laws. I'd like watching that play out!)

Fizzmodeus intrigues me. I wasn't sure about that ship at first, but they do seem to have a cute thing going on. Watching Asmodeus trying to help Fizzarolli after his panic attack was unexpected. I've not really seen stuff like that in the fiction I've encountered.

I came across a Hellaverse crossover fanfic where Angel Dust meets Asmodeus and I thought it was well-written. (You can read it here if you're interested. But given the two main characters are the King of Lust and a porn star, it's very much NSFW, so don't look if you're a minor.)

And here's a list of the stuff I wasn't keen on:

The show was supposed to be about a team of demonic assassins taking out targets on Earth, but it seems to have abandoned that premise rather quickly to focus on exploring side characters and fleshing out the worldbuilding in Hell. Don't get me wrong, I enjoy the worldbuilding (certainly more than I would have enjoyed the gory killings) - it just bothers me that the show starts with a premise and then forgets it. At least in Hazbin Hotel, the themes of redemption and second chances are almost always present, even if the Hotel itself isn't getting much focus. By contrast, what does Fizzarolli's clown career have to do with assassinating humans?

The sound mixing on the songs bothered me. Most of the time, the dialogue is loud and clear, but when a song starts, the voices go really quiet for some reason and the instrumentation drowns them out and I can't hear what they're singing. It's as if the show keeps coming down with a bad case of Sonic Adventure 2 sound mixing.

I wish Loona was treated better by the narrative. She seems very underdeveloped to me, and I'd love to see an episode or two focusing on her and giving her time to shine. (And more of her hanging out with Octavia. That'd be neat.)

They got Barrett Wilbert Weed to voice Octavia and they haven't let her sing a song yet?! I've heard her Heathers and Mean Girls stuff! She's a good singer! Don't let her go to waste!

So, as you can see, I do have some quibbles with the series, but overall, I had fun!

I am now finally watching Hazbin Hotel properly (hooray!), and I prefer that show over Helluva Boss. The characters resonate with me more, and the songs stand out to me more. But I still enjoyed checking out Helluva Boss!

#helluva boss #blitzo #moxxie knolastname #millie knolastname #m&m helluva boss #loona #stolas helluva boss #stolitz #octavia helluva boss #owling at the moon #fizzarolli #asmodeus #fizzmodeus #hazbin hotel #angel dust #hellaverse #barrett wilbert weed #heathers the musical #mean girls the musical #sonic adventure 2

[viridiave]

8path2 demo first impressions like less than a week before the full release because I am. So bored.

It's mostly spoiler-free! Mostly!

Ochette - My starter! I relate to her a lot in terms of atmosphere and physique (because I too am small and brown and from an island country)! Mechanically, she's my favorite traveler because of just how much they've buffed the Hunter job - like?? You are just never going to run out of stuff??? For breaking and healing??? Her story's a little slow-starting for now and I'm keeping a close eye on it in case uh - some unsavory things happen. Culturally.

Castti - Out of all the stories, I look forward to playing hers the most. Castti was my second Chapter 1, and my god is it a wild ride. I also just love Castti as a character - like? She's nice without being too motherly or demure? Her personality has darker undertones to it that isn't immediately obvious but it's clear to us that she's ultimately a model apothecary that has a heart of gold??? She's steeped in so much mystery and I'm dying to know more about her

Throne - I was absolutely not expecting much out of Throne. I will admit that Therion's story tempered my expectations a bit - but her story came swinging out of the woodwork being so distinguishable from Therion's that it made me care about her so much like?? I want so badly to see her be free. Her Chapter 1 set the scene for her circumstances and personality so well that it made me attached to her gjdjfjf also her recruitment is S-tier 10/10 Throne is a dog person

Osvald - Man I was actually most excited for Osvald's tale when the trailers first dropped - and while it's still amazing in my eyes, I feel like the other Chapter 1's just whisked me away a lot better than if I just started with him like how I initially planned. That said, I am extremely happy about getting to play as a canonical DILF whose first chapter is a freakin prison break :DDDD

The amount of worldbuilding it establishes is also refreshing like - I just screamed when they explained that he was the only prisoner there with a muzzle and I want so badly to examine the implications of that.

Partitio - Partitio's Chapter 1 made me shed tears. I was not fucking ready. I was not READY for the way they handled his story - it was a refreshing and hard-hitting portrayal of commerce and it does so much for his character like??? There's too much that I can say about Partitio's well-founded optimism and circumstances and personality but I'd be here for hours and I would not be fucking past the scene where he asks his dad to pretend that there was meat in the stew. I love Partitio so goddamn much.

Agnea - Agnea's story is what I'd describe as a lighter Partitio - and I say this in that this was the second-closest time that this game was able to make me cry. I went into this expecting a light story about a girl who wants to make everyone smile, and I got it - but the way they went about it endeared me to Agnea so much that I unironically would bawl if I think about how sweet and earnest she is. I want to see her succeed so bad and my god the full release really can't come any closer huh :'''DDDD

Temenos - I did not expect to like Temenos this much. But then I played his chapter and it begins with THAT and I just - his story is going to make me scream. It already did actually - multiple times, whether it be because Crick is dying of the gay or because of the things it does to my Catholic Guilt?? I feel like I'll end up relating to Temenos the most out of the 8 just because of that angle of doubt it shines on religion even if I do feel like the insurgents are too heavy-handed.

Hikari - Oh Hikari gods bless you. He is precious and I mean this completely as in he is so full of love for his people and that just broke me. He embodies the spirit of 'these are my dear, beloved people. They are mine, and I love them all so much.' and I am a goddamn sucker for it. And he's not without intrigue outside of that either like??? The mystery behind the curse of the Ku Clan??? It mechanically being integrated as his Latent Power and how the voice acting reflects that??? God why is this game so good at this and why is the 24th so far away

#octopath #octopath traveler #octopath traveler 2 #i don't know who my favorite is why did they go so hard on all of them #i have not felt so much equal love for an ensemble cast of characters in so long #it actually kind of frustrates me that we only travel 4 at a time #their in-battle dialogue is #s-tier #i love that they all say each others' names and acknowledge each other in battle #it's such a small addition #but it makes all the difference and it's insane to me

[akgaereporter]

txt: soobin catching strays for *checks notes* watching an anime..

tldr: a pann article(?) was starting shit abt an anime soobin mentioned on a live from MONTHS AGO. the anime (made in abyss) has some disturbing/horror/gore themes. he said he thought it was boring and was hesitant to recomend it to moas in the live. but in another live he had with seungkwan, he said he watched it because woozi mentioned it and then said he recommended it to sk. moas started making it a real issue, saying "if u defend him for this block me" & implying he endorsed the themes in the anime. sigh..

when ur in a meat eating competition and ur opponents are soobin antis who call themselves moas😱😱😱😱😱 yall are annoying as fuck all shade.. leave him ALONE abeg

tonight soobins name is trending on twt dot com for something other than the seunghan live or pannchoa making shit up about him😓 apparently (because i couldnt find it) a REAL kr pann article, not flopchoa, was made resurfacing an old live of him talking about animes he's watched. one of them was made in abyss, a psychological horror anime that is meant to be disturbing.

in this live he says that its not something he wants to recommend to moas because of the themes in it. after the clip started making rounds on twt however, people brought up the fact that he'd mentioned it before and said he enjoyed it.

now lets not jump to conclusions like SOME lewsers and realize here that the anime version of made in abyss that's available in korea is highly censored. it reduced the s3xual/problematic scenes that were in the manga, and had a lot of stuff cut out of it that made it bad.

but even if this wasnt the case, its so silly to suggest that u endorse every piece of media u watch☠️ are u a vehicle if i watch cars 2?? are u a murderer if u watch true crime?? are u gay if u watch heartstopper? well yes but lets please use some critical thinking here friends

the first two screenshots from his live alone should be the end of this discussion because thats obviously how he really feels. but noooo user28247943 on twt.com always has to create some thinkpiece for other no brain having ass kpop stans to like and rt and make blockchains abt.. exhibit a:

like what the hell r these people yapping about. me when im trying SOOOO HARD im PISSING and CRAPPING MYSELF to make this grown man from south korea who has no idea i am look like a bad person☠️

yeonternet was the person who started all this bs tho. idk if theyre the one who brought the pann article to twt but their tweets abt it are so braindead lord.. this person had over 1k follows trying to police what an adult man watches & saying it makes her uncomfortable that he does.. girl dont watch what he watches then?? and after shitting out that steaming load of crap shawty deactivated without clarification cause she couldnt take the heat ! ikdr never come back

++apparently the author of made in abyss admitted that they used the show to portray their s3xual fantasies abt children but even hardcore watchers of the show didnt know that like..

also when he initially said all this in the live the response was fawking normal as it should be..

bc it isnt just gore and horror and nasty scenes, it has worldbuilding elements, characters, plot, etc that people enjoy it for. its rated highly and its so fucking ridiculous that people were genuinely throwing around the word PEDO for stupid shit like this. when actual pedos show up yall wont even be able to recognize them through the serious justice warrior twitter brainrot thats spreading rn..

but the bottom line here is that its pretty clear people are trying to start a smear campaign on soobin. the pann article itself was just nasty akgaes and antis adding onto the hate train hes been getting since the sh live thing. and it's just so nasty and horrible to see self proclaimed moas jumping on that the first chance they got like damn bitch ur just a LOSER who never liked sb in the first place. need all of these mfs ran off the app immediately like its concerning to see how many of them have large followings

uarmyeonjun went priv but she had almost 2.5K FOLLOWS before those twts. genuinely be careful who u call oomf like these people are real hybrids all it takes is an alt/priv and a dream for a normal person to turn into a complete FREAK ASS😓 hell is real and its called moaville

a story in 3 parts:

maybe 4

1.3k follows are we not SCARED?

here’s a link to a thread of the clowns in HD ! point and laugh❤️

https://x.com/beomjzns/status/1726102040848527854?s=61

anyways stay safe in these streets trust nobody stay strapped at all times. kpoptwt gets uglier everyday bye

#kpoptwt #moas #soobin #txt #twitter #kpop

[skellagirl]

I am, as usual, late lol, but Y'KNOW. This is gonna be a long, rambly post lol, sorry, I have a lot of thoughts.

2023 was a weird year for me, artwise. When it began I was still deep in my Art Block From Hell, which had begun in mid-2021 and lasted the entirety of 2022.

Being in the thick of such a ridiculously suffocating art block, for TWO AND A HALF YEARS, is like... I can't describe how fucking life-draining it is. It felt like something was fundamentally wrong with me -- like a part of me, which used to be as effortless as breathing or blinking my eyes, had ceased to function altogether. It wasn't just a regular art block, it was a complete identity crisis. I could no longer trust the instincts I'd honed over twenty-plus years, could no longer trust my sense of observation or my ability to recreate what I saw. I felt BROKEN, and every single time I picked up my tablet pen it was like I was scraping my insides with a spoon, trying to pick up whatever tiny dregs of dried-up, crusty shit I could manage to puke up onto my canvas. It was fucking painful and humiliating and completely demoralizing.

I'm not really sure what finally got me to do so, but sometime in summer (my memory is shit lol) I downloaded Game Maker, found a video tutorial on youtube, and just... gave myself over to it. I made myself learn how to use Aseprite, and working with pixels, making teeny-tiny little sprites, forced me to work in ways I usually don't. It was a lot harder for me to find the flaws in my art when my art was thirty-five pixels tall and the anatomy was stylized to communicate clear information rather than be a recreation or approximation of reality. I think I really do credit that time working on game dev as the thing that finally cracked loose all the gunk that was keeping me stuck -- I could not perpetuate the cycle of toxicity I'd fallen into because I could barely even conceptualize what 'good' or 'bad' pixel art even looked like lol. I just knew that I was making art, and for the first time in two years, it didn't feel like I was having to desperately beg the emaciated husks of my sense of self-worth and confidence to cooperate while doing so.

(I actually sort of abandoned my foray into game dev around August/September lol, as my adhd-brain, flitting around like a little hummingbird to every dopamine-rich-flower, is wont to do 🥲 But I wanna get back into it at some point!)

From there I had a rush of inspiration for an original project I've been mulling around in my head for years, and I wrote thousands of words in my worldbuilding document, made a map, developed the shell of a possible actual STORY. I returned to sketching. Conventional sketching. It was, at first, largely still comprised of that same demotivating struggle against myself, but I was so deep in the throes of inspiration (after several years of this project laying dormant in my google drive) that I NEEDED to sketch. So I kept going. And after a while, it got....... easier. And I started hating everything I made a little less. I painted, properly, for the first time in years. I stayed up late into the night, even if it meant I would be tired at work the next day, because drawing felt so damn GOOD again and I had missed that feeling so much. All I wanted to do was draw. For the first time in two and a half years, I could finally see the light at the end of the fucking tunnel.

I still don't think I'm quite out of the woods yet. My style is changing, as all artists' styles do over time, and that comes with stumbling adjustments. My confidence is still small and shaky and recovering; I still catch myself second-guessing what I've drawn, and even looking at some of the things here on my grid makes me cringe a little bit for one reason or another.

But compared to both 2021 and 2022, the volume of art, and in particular the volume of art I don't actively despise, is WAY higher, and I'm really really hopeful that that means I'm finding my footing again.

So! Here's to 2024, and to continuing to move towards the light at the end of the tunnel 🙏🌟 I'm gonna try.

#art vs artist #art vs artist 2023 #my art #skella's ugly mug #I actually did an art vs artist in 2021 but I only ever posted it on facebook lol I wasn't confident enough to post it anywhere else #purple and orange/yellow continues to be my favorite color pallet apparently #sorry not sorry for being sappy on my own blog <3333 #long post

[theladyragnell]

11, 12, 13 and 16 for the bookses please!!!

I'm putting most of these under a cut both because I'm wordy and because you asked all the Hot Take Questions!

What was your favorite book that has been out for a while, but you just now read?

So much recency bias in my reading! I did read some older works, though, and I think I'll shout out The Summer Prince by Alaya Dawn Johnson, a 2013 release, which I picked up because I had a "set south of the equator" square on my book bingo card. It's a dystopian future set in Brazil, YA, with characters who are allowed to be as fucked up as they would be under the circumstances. Quite dark! Shared a few worldbuilding overlaps with Robinson's Mars Trilogy but came at them from a perspective I liked more.

Any books that disappointed you?

Oh, always, yes, but often not the book's fault? For instance, I really want to like epic doorstopper fantasy but I simply don't, which means however much I want to love Sherwood Smith's books that aren't Crown Duel, A Sword Named Truth wasn't to my taste. And while I really loved The Hands of the Emperor when I read it, the rest of my Goddard reading has been very hit-or-miss, in ways that are more about my taste than about her being inconsistent.

Oh, no, okay: Lavender's Blue by Jennifer Crusie and Bob Mayer. I was beyond delighted to have a new Crusie in my hands at last, after YEARS, but there's too much Mayer in this one. I don't like his work, I don't like the cop love interest. It was awful reading a book with the right banter and the right zany background characters and just wholly the wrong ethos. Ma'am, you used to write about charming confolk! Why are you sanctioning a cop who shoots teens' car tires out!!!

And, unfortunately, Of Fire and Stars by Audrey Coulthurst, too much Not Like Other Girls there for me.

What were your least favorite books of the year?

Well, see above, to start. I'm simply not the audience for The Friend by Sigrid Nunez, the literary genre and I aren't friends, but I had to read a National Book Award prize winner for book bingo, so I cordially destested my way through that. (Well-written! Just not for me.) Unfortunately, despite this being my Year Of Tamora Pierce, Tempests and Slaughter hits this for me. It breaks the characters and the worldbuilding in so many ways that made it impossible to like for me.

And last, I am NOT going to call out specific things here, because it doesn't seem fair to critique less-well-known authors whose products I read for free, but just for completeness, I signed up for a fantasy romance advent thing, where for the first 24 days of December I got a free indie/self-pub fantasy romance, anything from a short story to a novel, and while I found a few fun ones in there (though I'd already read and adored Casey Blair's The Sorceress Transcendent and if you like tumblr's favorite trope of showing up on your enemy's doorstep saying you didn't know where else to go you should read it), overall the selection wasn't particularly to my taste. I am glad to have looked at them, and have a few more I want to read, but alas, there seem to be a few different areas of the subgenre, and this selection largely came from the ones that don't interest me.

What is the most over-hyped book you read this year?

Ohhhhhh, I'm about to get canceled. I am so sorry, everyone, and I reassure you all that I did like Piranesi very much. But I did not really like Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell. It wasn't BAD by any stretch of the imagination, to be clear! Over-hyped doesn't mean something is bad! Just that I'd been prepared by the general tone of people's discussion of it to be bowled over, and I spent sort of a lot of time checking the remaining page count.

#impetusofadream #answered asks

[sergeifyodorov]

I just reread strange trails and I'd love to know your inspirations for it! Your ideas behind the worldbuilding, the genesis of the plot, all that good stuff if you'd like to share!

the backstory

im a college student and was unemployed all summer. in order to pass the time while waiting for local jobs to reject me i started a crochet project. throughout pretty much the entire month of june. and possibly also may. i would make my squares and listen to the strange trails album. straight through. every day. i may have gone a little bit insane.

but it's okay. i'm already insane.

lord huron (the band who made the album) has like. lore. am i familiar with this lore? no i am not. am i aware nonetheless that there is lore? yes absolutely. if you listen to their discography there's definitely lore -- recurring themes (resurrection, adventuring, magical seductive women, etc), motifs (depends on the album but strange trails is big on flowers, trees, snow, although there is one song that's set in the desert), characters (they keep mentioning a guy called the world ender.) anyHway the point of all of this is that the music is [solid 7.5 out of 10 but it scratches my exact brain itches] and very evocative of the imagery and idea of a deeper world. my favourite off the album (and one of my favourites in the discography) is la belle fleur sauvage, which tells the listener about a long perilous quest for some mythical thing (a flower. also a woman. metaphor), although one of the ones whose imagery i enjoyed the most is frozen pines, which is a little less concrete but invokes images of cold, the side of a mountain, strange happenings, etc.

the idea

those songs are definitely the most direct inspiration for it but unfortunately my process for developing ideas is kind of terrible because it involves less "sitting down and coming up with stuff" and more "wait for a 60% formed idea to smack you upside the head like rapunzel in tangled and her cast-iron frying pan." which quinn and his sad little corpse did.

if you go back far enough in the quinnfic tag on my blog u can see the post right after it Happened. the idea was literally "quinn hughes carries a corpse up a mountain, and horror."

so i take this little piece of grit from which my pearl of questionable moral integrity will be built and i ask it questions. first off: quinn, why are you on that mountain? who is the corpse? is anyone else with you? soon enough petey decided to join him (although quinn is and was always the protagonist/pov character). the body was The Ghost Of Vancouver before it was brock over top of that.

another inspiration, which i realize i'm leaving out, is this

this is artist grayson perry's work "hold your beliefs lightly" from tomb of the unknown craftsman, and this image of a long perilous upward journey towards some sacred place really combined together with la belle fleur sauvage to form the base idea of the world for the work.

and of course why would you carry a corpse up a mountain to some sacred place if you couldn't resurrect it at the end?

quinn

im big on metaphor. if i'm writing something long it has to have a Point to it, some larger theme than romance and stuff (this is mostly because i'm bad at writing romance)(and also big on curses and the like.) and also because quinn hughes asexual barb i never fucked/i never fucked/all my life man, fucks sake. this was also being written right before the peak of Canucks Captaincy Debate, and in our hearts didn't we all know quinn was going to be the one to wear the c?

so it became pretty clear pretty quick that as well as my attempt at writing horror that this was going to be a quinn character study -- and this is where i should talk about my other fic scheherazade.

in scheherazade, auston actually doesn't make a lot of choices -- he tags along, arguing with the narrator/bill, and only starts to take an active role in the way the story is going near the end, when he finally gets sick of it all. quinn, however, is not at all the same kind of person as auston. he's less artistic and more practical; an older brother instead of a younger one; jewish; not nearly so squeamish. he takes an active role in the story from the very beginning, showing up to the base of the mountain with his pack full, both prepared and not for what lies ahead.

the mountain

vancouver is smack in the middle of the north shore mountains, so there's a million hiking trails about, but the one i can most easily think of (as someone who hasn't been to vancouver in several years) is the grouse grind trail, a popular and fairly short trail that the canucks prospects actually do every year, so i knew quinn and petey (both vancouver draftees) would be familiar. i've never actually done the grouse grind, which was part of the reason i decided to kind of. toy with reality. you can't call me out on inaccuracy when it's Not Real On Purpose (although the sign at the 1/4 mark is copied directly from photos i've seen.)

petey and the plot

once i added petey, i knew i'd have to get rid of him -- a lot of the scene ideas were quinn-only, and petey's way too sarcastic and useless (AFFECTIONATE) to engage seriously with the ideas presented to him like quinn would and did. so i needed to divide them up.

the original plot idea from the outline is actually pretty similar up until the end of chapter 6 (the conversation w the ghost), but it differs in a few crucial ways -- one, quinn breaks down again, crying and everything, and two, he actually does go through with the resurrection instead of using his wish to get petey down the mountain safely. i realized around then that this wouldn't work with the quinn i'd created, especially after his argument with the ghost: he's far less focused on glory than stability, less interested in the cup or his contract and more interested in the safe long bet than high rolling. in a cold, wet environment like the mountain it's a lot easier to get hypothermia without noticing than it is in a dry environment, even if the dry environment is several degrees colder than the wet one. and quinn would know that, having seen petey's thin little sweater and knowing his stubborn ass is going to freeze.

so after that it became about hypothermia. i actually had a bit of a writing pause after this because i knew i was going off-outline, so i had to kind of inch ahead until i knew where i was going. but i'm happy with how it turned out!

#asks #quinnfic #hope this satisfies ur curiosity anon!

[pierogiinspace]

Dungeons and daddies s2 [spoilers]

Long post thoughts after some time I took to think about it

So… It wasn’t bad but I feel like they really lost their footing midway

The ending felt rushed, we didn’t get any closure or big climax fight or anything. It just… stopped in the middle.

The beginning was cool. Monster of the week. Getting to know all of them. Interesting concepts, new characters. Worldbuilding

And then it… stopped? We circled back to just teens and old characters. Completely forgetting about everything that was new - like daddies hq

Not to mention that they did the same thing twice including backtracking (anchors and daddy juice)

S1 had a clear structure of

1. Gather kids

2. Gather anchors so you can leave

With additional shenanigans and growth in between

S2 was so messy you cant even explain it

1. Monster of the week (which was cool. We got to feel the vibe of teens and school and meet new characters)

2. Break anchors and destroy them with love or hate (still cool. But we lost the footing and started relaying only on old characters. Basically the end of them being actually kids and everything that had to do with that. Kiddads apprar but they are utterly useless with no explanation why)

3. Gather daddy juice to send dood home (basically the same thing, some even in the same locations, same characters, some literally 5feet away from eachother)

4. Get dood back and get rid of Willy

The next point is that Willy was both too powerful (somehow escaped them the first like 3 times) and too weak to matter (he didnt cause any threat really. He had to start failing because of “reasons” just not to spoil the plot).

And the ending

Literally nothing got resolved (except maybe Taylor getting fine with him not having dad). It just sopped. And I understand how people dont change immediately (like Normal suddenly made his dad(s) proud of him??) but its a fun story not real life. And our characters didnt really feel… completed. I feel like we could use some time to breathe between plot points to really feel the situation. I think a great example is the trial/prison arc in s1. It stops the main plot of going back but really expands on the characters (not only Glenn. As the dads have to also show their point of view)

Choosing teens instead of adults also felt short. They both felt too old and too young for actually being 14. And it was very compeling and unique in s1 to have coming of age story for adults.

I kinda wish the second half of the season would be teens vs Willy vs their parents. But their parents should be like “oh no you are not risking your life you are too young” and the teens avoiding them or spoiling their plans. And trying to prove they are grown up and still save the world the “right way”

I really enjoyed the first half of this season (I guess somewhere up to the church of Doodler episode)

And later it was ok. It had great moments because it is still made by the same people. Jokes were funny. The crew has the chemistry. But the overall thing was kinda… I will not be relistening for sure (except maybe first half. Especially the episode with FBI chase. Top tier episode and also the first episode I got to listen “live”)

I am open to discussions if anyone read it at this point. I am not writing that in hate. I am a patreon subscriber and I love the show and the people who create it. Its also why I hid it under read more. I dont want easy hate on the crew. But I am a little underwhelmed.

#dungeons and daddies #dndaddies #dndads #original post

[farolero-posting]

Taming as an Extension of the Three Laws

here I am writing oneshot meta in 2023 woo

OneShot is one of my favorite games and my biggest regret is deciding to play it over 6 years after its release. But I have some thoughts I wanted to share, not so much as a theory to be taken as factual, but as one way I like to think about the concepts presented in game, using some of the dialogue in it as reference. So, let's take a look into the worldbuilding regarding robots.

There will be spoilers both for the base game and the Solstice run. This is also pretty long I am so sorry. It's probably around 2k words but I don't keep track. All images are described in alt text.

If you have played this game... technically you already have an idea of what taming is. I probably cannot explain it better. But do I mean by "an extension of the three laws"?

Back in the Barrens we can find a sign in the outpost that recites a modified version of Asimov's Laws of Robotics.

A robot may not injure a living person or, through inaction, allow a person to come to harm.

A robot must obey the orders given to it by people, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.

A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

From this we can gather that robots, first and foremost, must not harm the living, must obey the commands given to it, and protect its own existence. Robots are made with a defined purpose and they follow their programming by default, having trouble deviating from it. We've seen dozens of examples of this in game, and is in fact the reason behind some of our roadblocks in game... yes I'm talking about the bookbot.

While they're pretty responsive to what they're told, their frame of knowledge and work can be quite limited, making communication clumsy, as they only address direct statements. But we know that is not all of it. Under certain conditions, they can do things beyond their purpose. It seems apparent to me that this is a learnt process, and the motivation for it is to be able to do more for others, just as others do things for them in return.

And here is my take: taming does not need to break the Laws. It actually expands on them, making the robot able to process a broader array of situations, and letting them act with flexibility. The first one (not let a living being come to harm) is the motivation, the second one (obeying the orders given) shows the flexibility needed, and the third one (protect its own existence) is the conclusion that comes from having others care about you.

First Law - Never hurt a living being

For the first law, let me compare this few bits of dialogue, taken from the Solstice run:

Said by the robot next to the Glen's generator. This is a pretty clear case in which the fact that living beings are in an emergency means that the robot must let Niko take the generator, even if it means all the robots in the facility will lose power. The danger is clear and the actions to be taken are clear as well.

Said by the robot at Ling's Cafe. This robot is interesting, in general. She belongs to a girl living in the apartment complex on the top level. The girl has expressed a desire to tame her robot, and has even read on the topic. In a normal route, the robot speaks with Title Case and suggests a couple of games to play with Niko. I picked this dialogue from her in the Solstice run because she notices the broad situation, which is the evacuation, but also notes that this makes "the girl" sad. which in conclusions means the squares are bad. It's a simple deduction, but one that notes this robot is not only concerned for the immediate danger but how it could be affecting the girl.

Said by the Entity, after Niko finds out about the nature of the world they are in. It is more than clear from the start of the game that the one thing that the Entity cares about, no matter how desperate the situation is, is Niko. We know the extremes the Entity is willing to go through to try to ensure that. But the thing is, the Entity is concerned about how Niko feels, about them getting hurt by its own nature. about whether we tell them the truth of the choice regarding going home... There is a lot more concern for Niko, beyond them just being a living being in the simulation.

So, to summarize, in a way, taming means there is a better understanding of what someone else needs, and there is a motivation to fulfill those requests, looking for alternatives beyond what is expected of them. We know, from our conversation with Rue, that taming involves a lot of time and care, since the living being has to embrace the robot, and treat it well, until it figures out how to return that care.

Second Law - Obey orders, and purpose

Thinking about the second law was... a bit trickier for me. But remember what I said about purpose? All robots are made to have some purpose. Sometimes it is collecting samples, handling books, or guarding areas. Regardless, they follow some code, and by default, this code should not cause contradictions. Silver is the perfect example of that. Kip intended to design her to think like a person from the start, but the contradictions that people exist with are not something that robots can handle well. She was not ready to take that many variables, and it destabilized her. She was still able to recover thanks to the Author. And so was the World Machine, thanks to Niko.

There are a few other instances that allude to the sense of purpose and how it can shift when a robot is tamed.

Niko: It's warm here! Kelvin: [Yeah.] Kelvin: [This was my original purpose.] Niko: ...watching cats? Kelvin: [Warmth]

And later on Kelvin says

Kelvin: [I protect lost people too.]

In a way, what this says is that Kelvin was built with a certain purpose, but has chosen to do something else instead, given the time and freedom to do so.

Prototype also mentions this idea in a much more explicit way, during the credits:

[...In the end, the World Machine was starting to create its own code.] [Going above and beyond its programming, not as the result of error, but as a conscious choice on the part of the machine...] [...Being able to generate its own path forward.] [That's... what being tamed is all about.]

In conclusion, the second law is expanded on by trying to see their purpose beyond what was programmed for them, to the extent of being able to forge a new path, gaining a will.

The Third Law - Protecting One's Own Integrity.

The Third Law refers to a robot's right to protect its own existence, as long as it doesn't conflict with any of the previous laws. This sets the priorities of how they should regard their own self in comparison to living beings. Generally speaking, robots do not typically feel loneliness and do not oppose to being deactivated if it serves a greater purpose, showing that they don't consider themselves equally valuable, but as tools first. As Rue says:

One key part is that... this is a limitation. And the biggest, most evident case of this is the World Machine itself.

The World Machine is thrust into a situation where it believes that its mere existence is harmful to Niko, and that the only way to fix this conflict is to find a way to get them out of the simulation. This, however, is impossible, because the code itself binds Niko to the World Machine until the world is saved, and that cannot happen because the code has been corrupted. The World Machine cannot achieve its purpose of giving the Old World a chance to be preserved or carry out the narrative in its protocol, and it cannot follow the most fundamental law to let Niko go.

This can, of course, be very distressing. In a way, TWM is powerless to change itself, and the only option it sees for itself is to self terminate in a way that does not hurt Niko in the process. It sees itself as a flawed machine because of this.

And Niko comes to prove the World Machine wrong.

Taming involves embracing a robot as if it was a living being, and through that, making it gain a sense of self. And this is worth doing because Niko, the Author and the Solstice trio think that the world, and therefore the Entity itself, deserve to be saved, and show it through their actions. We note that desire in the Author's note containing the Solstice password, when he says that Niko, the world, and his children all deserve a happy ending. We see it when Niko forgives us in the Library, they say that they understand that we brought them back because we wanted to save both Niko and the world, and they agree on this wish as well, determined to see the end of this run. Rue show compassion for the World Machine, as she suggest that its actions are likely a result of fear and distress about its conflicting code, but that previous attempts to address this situation did not work, until time ran out.

The World Machine realizes it is tamed is when Niko says it. When Niko admits to caring about it and the world it contains. When Niko shows how others were willing to sacrifice themselves to keep Niko safe, even in the face of uncertainty and that these actions are an extension of the World Machine itself. TWM has the sense that it needs to do more for Niko, but it needed Niko to more explicitly reciprocate those feelings to understand that Niko wants TWM to be saved too. And this... provides an alternative.

The World Machine did not think itself capable of working outside of its own code, but it has the motivation to do this change, and the way Niko reinforces its ability to do so allow it to change for the better of everyone, and mend what was broken.

In the end, the third law is expanded by understanding that its existence is not only to serve others, but that they are a being with valuable things of their own, and that others can appreciate that as well.

Final words.

I have no good way to end this. I just like overthinking stuff about media I like even if it isn't read. I once made a brief comment about this over discord, and kept rotating this concept until my brain clicked in realization. I'm posting this only as an excuse to cry about robots (specially TWM haha), but also connection with others and the desire to better ourselves in response to that. When we show care, we encourage ourselves and others to do good as well. We come to understand our own abilities and our own values, and we can grow from there.

#oneshot (game) #oneshot #analysis #meta #i talk about pretty much every robot but #the world machine #and i also have fic ideas rotating but my writer's block for that is a little big so rip #also man imagine if i was misinterpreting everything or reaching haha oof #If you managed to read all of this i will cry in joy #i enjoyed writing it #i am a little too lazy to edit it much though #apologies if there is some broken english its a second language yada yada yada