#karen traviss critical

[roseaesynstylae]

Star Wars: Republic Commando: Hard Contact, Chapter 2

"Clone personnel have free will, even if they do follow orders. If they couldn't think for themselves, we'd be better off with droids -- and they're a lot cheaper, too. They have to be able to respond to situations we can't imagine. Will that change them in ways we can't predict? Perhaps. But they have to be mentally equipped to win wars. Now thaw these men out. They have a job to do.

-- Jedi Master Arligan Zey, intelligence officer"

I'm going to add any of these...I'm not sure what these extracts at the beginning of the chapters are properly called, but I'll add them whenever they're interesting.

Zey's comment about the clones reminds me of the line from Andor. "We're cheaper than droids, and easier to replace." The difference here is that while clones are more expensive and harder to replace than droids, they're superior.

And yes, Master Zey, it did change them in unexpected ways.

"It didn't feel so bad to be revived after stasis. He was still a commando. They hadn't reconditioned. That meant -- that meant he'd performed to expected standards at Geonosis. He'd done well. He felt positive."

The implication that "under-performing" clones are brainwashed, at best, is one of the Traviss's additions that I genuinely like, emphasizing the cold detachment of the Kaminoans before they become prominent in the series. It's also just a terrifying idea.

"Darman was careful not to stare -- even though any eye movement was disguised by his helmet -- because Jedi knew things without having to see. His instructors had told him so. Jedi were omniscient, omnipotent, and to be obeyed at all times."

And here we see the official beginning of the Jedi-Bashing count. It's subtler here, but it keeps popping up in ways that are unmistakable in the context of the series' attitude toward the Jedi Order. In multiple cases, such as this one, lines that wouldn't make me bat an eye in a different book, (or more accurately, a different author), but make me grit my teeth here.

The way this specific paragraph is written is very similar to how I'd write a passage from the POV of a character who thinks the antagonist is a good person, or is brainwashed, but I want to make it clear what's really going on. Only in this case, it isn't portraying, say, a Sith cult, but the Jedi Order, which is devoted to helping others, enforcing justice, and studying the Force.

Jedi-Bashing: 1

"'This is your unit of four, then? A squad?' He seemed to be recalling a hurried lesson. 'Almost like a family?'"

This might be a stretch, but I'm not cutting this series an iota of slack when it comes to the Jedi Order. The implication here seems to be "Oh look, the Jedi have no idea what a family is! It's so unnatural and wrong, not like the good, wholesome Mandalorians!" Am I being petty? Maybe. Does Kal Skirata ranting about baby-stealers get really fucking old really fucking fast? Definitely.

Jedi-Bashing: 2

"'My squad called me Atin," the wounded commando said.

Niner glanced at Fi but said nothing. Atin was Mandalorian for 'stubborn.'"

Okay, this bit is just funny.

"Darman -- a soldier able to withstand every privation in the field, and whose greatest fear was to whither from age rather than die in combat -- felt inexplicably uncomfortable at the idea of a Jedi having failings."

Jedi-Bashing: 3

"Etain was neither a natural warrior nor a great charmer, but she was aware of her talent for spotting opportunities. It made up for a lot."

In this book, at least, I really like Etain. She's a good audience surrogate and her headspace is easier to get into than the other three narrators.

Jedi-Bashing: 3

Di'kut Count: 1

Main Post

#star wars #star wars: republic commando #star wars republic commando #repcomm #republic commando #fi skirata #darman skirata #niner skirata #atin skirata #etain tur mukan #arligan zey #bardan jusik #omega squad #pro jedi #karen traviss critical

[bylightofdawn]

“I feel like Tor Vizsla, and I would disagree on many of the finer points of Mandalorian culture, including the abuse of those under his power.”

I JUST, WITHOUT A SHRED OF IRONY IN MY SOUL, WROTE THIS DIALOGUE LINE FOR WALON-FUCKING-VAU.

Where's my clown shoes and wig. I have legitimately completely thrown myself out of writing heasdspace because I am screaming with laughter every time I read this line.

For thus unfamiliar with the context here, I have a LEGENDARY sized hateboner for Walon Vau because he was one of the most abusive trainers for the clones in old Legends canon. Like outright abuse of those under his power. Traviss tried to put a spin on it in a more positive light in later books but nu-uh. Fuck that shit.

But this fic is set in the past before Vau theoretically turns into a child-terrorizing monster but still. The irony of him saying this... I can't even.

#el writes #it's amazing I can see the screen beyond the clown nose I'm wearing here #in case it's not been made abundantly clear I am not a Walon Vau fan #Same for Kal Skirata...or honestly 3/4's of the Cuy'val Dar #Or at the very least I am very critical of them #okay I'm gonna top spamming my poor TL but I just had to share the absolute bullshit shenanigans I'm up to tonight. #I might need to scrap that line just for my own sanity's sake #also here's your daily reminder #fuck karen traviss

[david-talks-sw]

When a Star Wars writer engages with the material but not the narrative.

I'm writing a long post about the Jedi and the clone troopers and there's a whole section that I had to remove because it was too long:

Karen Traviss' take on the Jedi and the clones.

I already wrote about why Karen Traviss' take on the Jedi and Yoda doesn't track with what George Lucas had established in his narrative of the Prequels. Since then, I've been able to do more research.

It's no secret that one of the reasons Traviss listed for criticizing the Jedi in the Expanded Universe books she wrote is their treatment of the clones (or at least what she understood it to be).

In 2008, she wrote a now-deleted blog post about it (it was really long, so I'm only including the part relevant to my point, if you want the full context you can look it up, this is old stuff).

So if you ask me, in the above quote, Traviss is essentially doing the equivalent of saying:

"Batman is a psycho elitist who beats up the mentally ill and indoctrinates kids, turning them into child soldiers for his unending crazy vigilante war on crime, and if you can't recognize that then you scare the living crap out of me."

Like... you can argue that, and a couple of comics have argued that.

But by and large, the general consensus is that Batman is a superhero, the Robins are his sons and daughter, and the "mentally ill" are in fact the Joker and Two-Face aka mass murderers.

So if you make that argument, that's you applying your real-life values and conclusions to a narrative that deliberately doesn't acknowledge those points, in-universe, in order to tell the story it wants to tell.

It's counting on your suspension of disbelief, defined as "the avoidance—often described as willing—of critical thinking and logic in understanding something that is unreal or impossible in reality, such as something in a work of speculative fiction, in order to believe it for the sake of enjoying its narrative."

The Jedi accepting the clones and the clones being slaves isn't a "delicate point". It's barely a point at all!

It's never addressed in the film (because of course it isn't, the Prequels are about Anakin and the Republic, not the clones).

It's only addressed once by Slick, an unreliable narrator, in The Clone Wars.

That's it. Hell, in 2008, when The Clone Wars writer Henry Gilroy was asked to comment on the relationship between clones and Jedi, he explicitly said he'd "rather not get into" that particular point.

I recently got Mythmaking: Behind the Scenes of 'Attack of the Clones' and nowhere is that detail touched on by Lucas at any point.

Nobody wants to touch on that point with a 10ft pole, because it's not relevant to the story.

So while Traviss acknowledges the Jedi are fictional characters, she doesn't follow that thread through to the end by acknowledging that fictional characters don't have free will, they must abide by the story and the whim of the writer.

She's engaging with the material, but refusing to engage with the narrative. She's having her cake and eating it too.

My reason for saying all this is that in the book Star Wars on Trial, she elaborates on her thought process upon discovering this detail.

Shortly before to this, she acknowledges twice that she knew nothing about Star Wars, beside seeing the original films in her youth.

Another writer who saw the new films and saw Mace Windu argue against there being a war...

... the worry on his face at the prospect of the Jedi being thrown at the Separatists...

... and the sheer melancholy on Yoda's face upon announcing the Clone War had begun...

... might have instead wondered how the Jedi, so opposed to war, could've ended up being generals.

Because while we don't see the Jedi openly protest the use of the clones in the film... they're not exactly giddy about it, either. All they can do is watch powerlessly as it gets voted by the Senate.

"The Jedi are there. But the Jedi aren't really allowed to be involved in the political process. They're there, but they can't suddenly step up and say, "No, no. You can't do that." They have to let the political process go." - George Lucas, Attack of the Clones, Commentary #2, 2002

We also don't see them take on the role of generals, either.

We only see them begrudgingly lead troops on Geonosis, specifically.

But they're not referred to as "generals" yet.

Another writer might have imagined a scene where after Geonosis, Mace Windu talks to Palpatine thinking the Jedi will go back to their roles as diplomats, and that what we saw in Attack of the Clones was a one-time thing to save Obi-Wan, but Palpatine politely goes:

"Ha! No. Didn't you hear? The Senate was so impressed by your performance on Geonosis that they voted to make you all generals in the GAR. Now, get back to the front."

Another writer might've elected to write them having that "big moral debate" she mentions.

Instead, Traviss immediately jumps on the "Jedi are elitists" train.

Because her personal experience with the military makes her sympathize with the clones and her personal belief is that - while the story may frame the Jedi as "the good guys" - nobody is that good a guy, real life people aren't that pure and selfless. There's gotta be something off about them and aHA! That's what it is!

That's her choosing to take that line of thought instead of one more in-line with the story, because she perceives it as unrealistic. But like... Star Wars isn't real life, it's a fairy tale.

That's like saying:

"The hunter in Little Red Riding Hood commits animal cruelty by cutting the Wolf open. He should've let nature take its course, the wolf earned that meal fair and square. If you think the hunter should've saved Red Riding Hood and her Grandma, then clearly you're the kind of monster who thinks one life is worth more than others."

... no?

The story's narrative clearly portrays the wolf as the villain of the tale and frames the Hunter saving Red Riding Hood as a good thing.

Disagreeing with that narrative is absolutely fine, but anybody who acknowledges the wolf is the bad guy in the story isn't automatically an animal hater and/or a bad person. Just because you say "the wolf is the villain" doesn't mean that you think that, in real life, killing wolves for shits and giggles is good.

Conversely, the narrative of the Prequels asks you to suspend your disbelief and not consider the implications that having a clone army entails. Because the use of clones doesn't have a direct impact on either Anakin or the Senate's stories.

Edit: I finished the post this one here originally spun out of!

You can find it here:

#Karen Traviss #clone troopers #jedi order #in defense of the jedi

[techs-goggles9902]

Two Souls Entwined

part 3 eventual Captain Rex x oc

A/N: sorry for the wait! life's been... life. Open to criticism, as always! LMK if you wanna join/be taken off the tag list. And sorry if it feels rushed 😭

The second to last paragraph of italics is directly from Triple Zero by Karen Traviss and I don’t take credit for it I just thought it would be a cool addition and help set the mood

word count: 812 (apparently? I thought I wrote more)

The Mandalorian Medics helped Niva the best they could, physically. Nothing could help her recover from what happened; watching her father, her buir, die right in front of her, and she could do nothing. 

Kal shifted his weight from his right foot onto his left, his shattered ankle screaming at him. His sand colored beskar’gam reflects the sun just right that there appears to be a halo encircling his body, the light at the end of the tunnel for Niva. He waited outside the medical tent for a while with his arms crossed, pacing back and forth every once in a while. 

Poor girl…

The medic - Gale? - pushes aside the tent flap and walks out onto the firm ground of Central Mandalore’s terrain. Gale looks at Kal, giving him a small reassuring smile and nod. “Did my best, Skirata. She’ll make it.” 

“That…That’s great. Any permanent damage?” Kal asks, his brow furrowing. 

“None that I can see… You know, she has a lot of Cabur in her. Just like her buir, eh?” Gale grins, patting Kal’s shoulder, and walks over to the center of the camp, talking with his vode.  

Kal’s footfalls are nearly silent as he slips through the tent flaps. The tent is dim, a small lantern illuminates a small area by Niva’s bedside. A thin, portable, wooden floor is all that separates Niva’s little sleeping bag from the dense clay soil. 

Thick gauze is wrapped around her sternum, cords and wires hang from tabs on her wrists and chest. The heavy, cloying scent of bacta fills the tent. Kal glances at Niva’s half open duffel bag, which she insisted Kal take with them. 

“Why is it so cold?” Niva’s quiet voice fills the tent. Kal laughs, coming over to sit on the floor beside her. 

“We’re in Central Mandalore. Up north, ad’ika,” Kal says, the nickname flowing off his tongue so naturally. He fixes the blanket lazily draped over Niva. 

“Can I ask you something?” 

“Of course.”

“How did Buir die? He always gets into fights… Why did this one kill him?”

Kal sighs, “Gale, the medic, told me that his rib punctured his heart. You know, ad’ika, even if you’re in the safest, toughest box in the entire galaxy and you’re hit tons of times, that doesn’t mean being rattled up in that box can’t hurt you.” 

Niva looks away, blinking back tears; her long lashes clumping together from the wetness. 

“And why am I alive?” She asks. 

“That little necklace, made of pure beskar. The blast hit you between the collarbones, but that little scrap of iron saved your life, ad’ika.” That does it for Niva. Her eyes brim with tears, her throat begins to tighten. The heavy feeling of grief, loneliness, survivors guilt, all coming back to her. 

“Buir g-gave me that…” 

“I… I’m sorry, ad’ika. You know… I lost my dad, too. Before becoming a mando, that is,” Kal whispers, carefully adjusting one of Niva’s many curls. 

“I’m sorry.”

“Nah, don’t worry about it.” The two quietly talk together, Kal telling Niva about the origin of his three sided knife in exchange for Niva telling him about her necklace, the metal tree now bent at an awkward angle. 

“Do you have any other family?” Kal asks after a while. 

Niva doesn’t respond right away, only looking to a corner of the tent instead. She says softly, “No.” That’s the biggest lie she’s ever told, but she can’t go back to that village. An already unstable woman, now grieving the loss of her husband… Not a good mix. 

“Alright… You can stay with me, if you-”

“Please, can I, Kal?” Niva cuts him off, her wide green eyes staring intensely into Kal’s.

“‘Course, ad’ika. Anything,” 

Two years later. 

Kamino was damp. No, it was more than damp: it was nothing but storm-whipped sea from pole to pole. The air smelled more like a hospital than a military base. 

Niva, now 16, steps close to the window separating the corridor she and Kal’buir are currently waiting in and the vast chamber of what looked to be large toroids stacked on wide pillars. 

In the past two years, Kal became Niva’s surrogate father, showing his love by telling her to call him Kal’buir - Papa Kal. He could never replace Cabur as her father, they both knew that. Yet the empty, painful hole left in Niva’s heart was slowly filled in by the presence of her Papa Kal. 

This was a mistake. Taking Niva, of all people, here. We might not leave for… For years! Jango’s gonna owe me s-

“Kal’buir… Look at the towers,” Niva says, interrupting Kal’s thoughts. 

“I don’t see anything, ad’ika.”  

“No, k’olar. Closer.” 

Kal sighs and steps beside Niva, who’s nearly as tall as him, although that isn’t saying much since he’s shorter than the average man. 

“There’s… There’s babies in those tubes, Kal…” 

Glossary & Pronunciation

Beskar'gam - Mandalorian armor [bes-car-gum] (I think). Buir - dad/mom [boo-ear] Vode - brothers/sisters/comrades [vod-ay]. (I think) Ad'ika - little one, son, daughter of any age [ah-dee-kah] Beskar - Mandalorian iron [bes-car] Kal'buir - Papa Kal [Kal-boo-ear] K'olar - come here [ko-lar]

Taglist: @fionajames @sevdidntdie @will-is-silly @hellhound5925 @skellymom @dangraccoon @the-rain-on-kamino(<- maybe you're interested?)

dividers by @saradika

#sha speaks #star wars #clone troopers #tcw #the clone wars #captain rex #Niva Veen oc by Sha #republic commando #kal skirata #kal’buir #kamino #baby clones!!!! #two souls entwined

[otnesse]

@allronix Replying here since it's impossible to reblog for reasons I'm not too sure about:

"

@asocial-skye This. Very much THIS.

I honestly put little stock in Word of Lucas because he is a seat of the pants writer and changes his mind like he changes underwear (Did Han shoot first or not? If he intended Luke and Leia as siblings, then why the weird ship tease?) What he intended back in 1976 when writing the OT was probably forgotten by 1998 when he was cooking the PT.

To be blunt, Disney also has a big stake in filing off all the uncomfortable edges to their fairy tales. Need I point out the original versions of Little Mermaid and Hunchback of Notre Dame or what happened to the REAL Pocahontas?!

What I go with is what I see. And I knew very little Legends going into the Prequels (just enough to play the party's medic in the West End table top). Now, what I saw with the PT left a very bad taste in my mouth, especially given my niece was the same age as young!Anakin when TPM was launched and the situation of my niece and her ma was uncomfortably close to Shmi and Anakin's (so @writerbuddha called that one right in that personal, RL circumstances certainly did color my view).

By the time the alleged good guys were shoving deadly weapons into the hands of small children and cheerfully leading a group of enslaved ten year olds into a bloodbath at the end of ATOC, I didn't CARE what Lucas had to say. I was about ready to walk out! Usually, the faction that uses child conscripts cut off from all love except love of the organization (despite some rather insincere sounding stuff about "universal love" that sounded like Anakin was reading from an HR manual), training kids to kill, and taking charge of an army of slaves is the faction you root for getting their asses kicked. (Hell, even in universe, the First Order is all over this, so why do the Jedi get a pass when it's rightly treated as an atrocity with muggles do it?!)

Mind you, even though the Jedi had few redeeming qualities at this point, the Empire always did have NONE. So instead of the white and black morality Lucas aimed for, we have some gray and black at best.

Now, at this point, I wanted nothing to do with Star Wars at all. But it was Legends that brought me back to it. Namely, KOTOR and Karen Traviss, who leaned fully into the fucked up. (Yes, Traviss is not the sanest of writers with more enthusiasm than talent, and the Jedi jammed her personal berserk button. Still love what she did with the Mandos and I share that berserk button.) By saying "Yup, it is every bit as terrible as it looks like, but this is the kind of callousness, paranoia, and hyper militancy you would get with a universe that's always on fire," they didn't waste time trying to convince me that my own damn eyes were wrong.

Like, take the argument about Jedi children. A Jedi-Positive person would argue that all the children are all given up with consent from their parents; this is what I am sure Lucas was intending to portray. A Jedi-Critical person will look at this and go "wait. how much 'consent' was in this encounter? the government can legally take these kids and have a representative show up to a farmer's house and tell the farmer they can technically say no? that is some bullshit." And there is real-life evidence for this. It's more on the execution. Did you read some of my rants? Because that's definitely the biggest red flag. Okay, if you are of age to know what you are signing on for and read the fine print, and you still want to dedicate your life to being a servant of the Republic with no love other than that of the Order and duty, then you do you. You made that choice knowing the full picture. Luke, Rey, Juhani, Nomi…they all knew what they were signing on for and I can admire "Jedi" as a choice they made.

A nine year old? Laser sword goes buzz. So of course they aren't thinking of big picture. A two year old? They can't even say a full sentence, much less give full consent! Add how the Jedi conscription looks an awful lot like RL cases of exploitation and abuse on the behalf of state and religious authorities (Janissary "son taxes", Catholic "residential schools" and "foundling orphanages"), with the power imbalance between the Jedi and the common person, and it looks lousy.

And again, in universe, the First Order uses child conscription. How do we know Finn's parents weren't good patriots happy to give their son for the cause of imposing order to a chaotic galaxy? And the one "Jedi adoption" we see on screen was arguably exploitive and unethical, the Jedi taking advantage of the mother's poverty and enslavement so they can get a boy they will shape into a living weapon for THEIR benefit."

Yeah, fully agreed with that bit. Well, save for MAYBE the bit about Disney (personally, I felt that Disney's take on The Little Mermaid and Hunchback if anything were a lot DARKER than the originals despite the main characters surviving the story. Let's not forget a major theme of the Disney versions was racism, with Triton coming across as being VERY close to going all genocidal on humanity with some of his talk when confronting Ariel over saving a human, not to mention how the racism was even MORE apparent in the Disney version of Hunchback to such an extent that an explicit genocide plot was added to the Disney version. Oh yeah, and Ariel was basically manipulated by Ursula in a manner that if anything was EXTREMELY similar to what Palpatine did to Anakin, nearly ended up damned as a result and had to REALLY clean up her mess big time to save the day alongside Eric [something that's REALLY underappreciated about the film and if you ask me a definite improvement over the original tale where the mermaid up and out committed suicide and made no attempt at actually FIXING the hell she subjected everyone to, even AFTER saving the Prince and effectively was rewarded with an opportunity to go to Heaven after everything]. They actually ADDED uncomfortable edges to those movies in other words. As far as Pocahontas, I'd argue that's less filing off uncomfortable edges and more Katzenberg trying to push Howard Zinn's bogus teaching material into the movie, especially with his rather insulting depiction of John Ratcliffe as basically a greedy racist miser when that's actually the exact opposite of his character in real life [if anything, like Anakin, his actual fault is that he was WAY too generous for his own good, and if anything Powahatan took advantage of his kindness and then killed him brutally when he had nothing left to give them like a mobster.], not to mention adding the search for a gold mine in the plot that had absolutely NO basis in reality [my cousin is on the liberal side of things, and she genuinely HATED that movie for a variety of reasons, INCLUDING having the title character be far older than in reality in a manner similar to Abigail Williams in The Crucible]. Besides, the guys who did the Sequel Trilogy and the stuff you alluded to are also the same guys who tried to turn a definite Complete Monster like Maleficent into a woobified rape victim and outright demonized King Stefan by turning him into a cartoonish supervillain the crassest manner possible, so it definitely wasn't an attempt at black and white morality in Disney's case.). That's one reason I actually intensely DISLIKED George Lucas's handling of the Jedi, since it's clear he had a very bad moral compass with how he painted the Jedi as good despite them doing stuff that is more in common with villains than heroes. And as much as I want to blame the Prequels for this, the problem is that even the Original Trilogy had been guilty of this as well, like Return of the Jedi where Obi-Wan justified his manipulating Luke into committing patricide by effectively claiming truth and by extension morality itself was completely relative. Usually, the ones making such talk are the VILLAINS of the story, NOT the heroes. It's actually quite sad when the VILLAINOUS faction of Force Users had more in common with classical comic book super heroes than the ACTUAL heroic faction in the same franchise.

[poisonheadcrabsalesman]

While the Karen Traviss Halo books are really politically sus, I think it's amazing how much she made us (or at least me) sympathize with the Insurrectionists. Like, these are normal people whose lives and families have been stolen away from them by the UNSC, and want someone to answer for what they did. They're not even necessarily angry at the UNSC for being the government, but for what they've done as such.

Debated on how to answer this because other people have said it better than me but yeah. Karen Traviss sucks - as an author, and more importantly, as a person. I have skimmed some of her writing and I don't like that she got to introduce some admittedly cool ideas into another sci-fi universe she was paid to write for that she put her gross beliefs in while not giving a shit about the work of the people before her.

I honestly thought we were supposed to side with the insurrectionists a lot earlier but also I have to remember that people are usually pro-military when they engage with this franchise. I got culture shock recently hearing "officer down" in a game trailer and that was treated as a bad thing. I hear officer down and the grunt birthday party noise plays in my brain.

But back to halo. I don't really know what to say other than like my experience was feeling bad for folks since Reach, a game I did not enjoy as much as others, but Jorge going "they're farmers" with that strong empathy got me. I wasn't a halo book nerd until recently and even then I've read only a few. Halo wasn't political to me in middle school because I was in middle school. I played CE in third grade. It was a game.

Now as an adult with a brain I can go wow, the parallels. Wow, that's awful, but yet the message is the evil is necessary to maintain the status quo? hmmmmmmmmmmm

In my opinion it's less "not mad at the government but mad at their actions" and more "this is a system of corrupt institutions upholding each others' power as a hegemony". Halo is aliens and zombies and pink needle guns but its also black bags, child soldiers, and anything for the greater good. It's stolen lives and stolen corpses. It's the idea that the future society has further militarization, globalization, imperialism, and constant resource consumption at the cost of human lives and happiness.

It's these games being made in the 90s, 00s, 10s, and 20s now and reflecting and promoting certain sets of values from whoever is providing the investments.

This is a lot of words to say nothing exists in a vacuum and I think about video games as an art form, a story telling vehicle, and a medium to be both critiqued and criticized sometimes.

#crab text #asks #godmybackhurts #gonna turn off reblogs bc i do not want drama

[engagemythrusters]

I hate that even when I assume the worst in people, I still end up assuming the best case scenario.

Someone defended Repcomm on one of my posts, and I just assumed they weren’t smart enough to catch Karen Traviss’ thickly layered sexism and racism and ableism and all of that. I assumed they lacked critical thinking.

But then I opened their profile to see “LGBA against groomers” or whatever, and no. They’re not dumb. They just also are extremely sexist. They just also subscribe to Karen Traviss’ brand of sexism and racism and what-have-you.

And I’m mad because I just thought there was one more uneducated person in the world. Not that there was another bigot in the world. When will I learn my lesson? No matter how many times this happens to me, I never change my stance.

[hellhound5925]

I'm going to post my fanfic here because I want people to read it and give me feed back 😊 I'm not a great writer bit I figured I'd give it a shot. All of you who have written have inspired me.

Masterlist

Cyare Verd *Beloved Warrior*

This is going to be a female oc x the good captain rex (CT-7567). I am not going to follow the clone wars tv show but make it my own. Criticism is welcome. Anything written in italics are going to be thoughts. I am currently undecided if I will go with a view point at any time other than the reader/my OC, but if that changes I will make a note. Also there will be lots of Mando'a thrown into there but I will provide a translation (I can't stand reading it when you have no clue what it means, so I promise I will not do that to you). The website I will be using I will link under this description. Also anything in italics is a thought.

Also I highly recommend the republic commando books by Karen Traviss. Some of the characters I slide in here are from her books (Ordo, Mereel, Kal Skirata).

I do not own the right to them or any of the Starwars characters.

Mandoa.org

#clone captain rex #may the force be with you #rex star wars #star wars clone wars #star wars the clone wars #the clones #rex x you #rex x reader #may the 4th be with you #captain rex x you #dogma #ct7567 #arc trooper echo #arc trooper fives #clone medic kix #tup #hardcase #jesse #mandalorianreader #star wars

[cienie-isengardu]

Woah. I know you did not post a comic in a fandom tag framing an issue that's suffered by actual real people in a fictional world with little to no basis in the canon just to angst about how much you hate a fictional character. Does someone really need to point out to you how that's poor taste? and making a mockery of the suffering of actual people? Karen Traviss wrote the fist gay couple in Star Wars who were Mandalorians. They don't care about sexualities. Get a clue.

Hello Anon,

I did not create and post the comics with ill intention to mock real people or their struggles, just used this certain scenario to show how narrow-minded Kal’s views may be hurting other vulnerable people under his care. If this comic offended anyone, then I sincerely apologized. 

However I do not agree that being critical (or even satirical) toward fictional character means I must hate them the same as I do not agree my latest arts are baseless commentary of Skirata’s behavior as the book series made a lot points about his, at best, casual misogyny and how he framed normality for himself and clones (or in general, men) as to have a wife and kids that, for from my perspective and experience, seems to be the ground for Fi’s depression in True Colors, going so far as expressing the willingness to be in potentially abusive relationship just to have any girlfriend (double highlighted by the fact that non-Skirata trained clones like Deltas, Maze, Corr or even Atin did not have much second thought about the need of romantic and sexual relationship with women to feel “normal”).

I’m really glad you mentioned the gay Mandalorians* brought by the same author because their existence is what makes Republic Commando’s narrowed narrative stands even more. The two book series were written almost at the same time - RepCom from 2004 to 2009, LotF from 2006 to 2008 and since characters like Jusik, Jaing & Venku/Kad could migrate to the “bigger galactic” picture of LotF while sadly, the gender and sexual neutrality of LotF!Mandalorians did not bring anything to RepCom, then coming to the conclusion that Skirata - and presented by him ideals or in general, book narrative - does not represent the typical mandalorian social norms is not that far-stretched concept (and again, comics and previous arts of mine has never made fun of mandalorian culture as a whole, only Skirata’s narrow mindset and was never “Kal would hate his sons for not being straight" but rather "Kal is not really prepared to confront the possibility that clones may not want this kind of life").

To not keep the text too long, I again sincerely apologize to those who may feel offended by my art but I can’t apologize for my interpretation of Kal Skirata’s characterization as it is coming straight from the books. I do acknowledge though that everyone is free to interpret the source material according to personal experiences and understanding of the presented situations the characters were put.

 (*and anyone old enough to be already in star wars fandom during Legacy of the Force book series release may remember how a certain group of fans lashed out because of openly homosexual Mandalorians but like always, fandom can easily become a toxic place , so nothing new here, sadly). 

#my replies

[forcesung]

“Critical mass, ner vod.” Purple Man ignored the howls of laughter. His voice had the tone of someone who’d argued this many times before. “We have a population of fewer than three million here, and maybe as many as three times that in diaspora. We lost a lot of our best troops, our farmland’s been poisoned, and our industrial infrastructure is still shot to haran after ten years. So maybe this is the ideal time to bring some people home. Gather in the exiles while the rest of the galaxy is busy.”

—Legacy of the Force: Sacrifice, Karen Traviss

#mandalorians #Legacy of the Force #legacy of the force sacrifice #karen traviss #excerpt

[roseaesynstylae]

Star Wars: Republic Commando: Hard Contact, Chapter 4

"This is the art of genetic selection and manipulation. A human is naturally a learning creature, but it is also violent, selfish, lustful, and undisciplined. So we must walk the knife-edge between suppressing the factors that lead to disobedience and destroying that prized capacity for applying intelligence and aggression.

-- Hali Ke, senior research geneticist of Kamino"

If this is how Kaminoans regard humans, then a lot of their behavior makes sense.

"All but one of the gdans gave him up as inedible within a minute and disappeared into the waist-high crop. The remaining creature worried away at his left boot, a tribute to its tenacity, if not its intelligence. Those boots were specced to withstand every assault from hard vacuum to acid and molten metal. The little animal clearly believed in aiming high."

This unnamed gdan is one of my favorite characters in the book.

If Traviss had included more scenes like this, she would have a few more brownie points with me. A few.

"If you stab someone in the heart, they can still run. I once saw a man run a hundred meters like that, screaming as well. Go for the neck, like this. Sergeant Skirata had taught them a lot about knives. Put a bit of weight behind it, son."

Our first mention of Kal Skirata, to the best of my knowledge. I'm going to have a lot to say about him once he appears in the flesh.

"But this was different. It wasn't distant, and the debris of the kill wasn't metal. The Weequay's blood had dried in a stream down his glove and right forearm plate. And he hadn't managed a clean kill. It was wrong.

They had drilled him to kill, and kill, and kill, but nobody had thought to teach him what he was supposed to feel afterward. He did feel something, and he wasn't certain what it was."

In subsequent books, I am definitely going to have some things to say about the protagonists' attitudes toward violence and killing, but this book gets something of a pass. The feelings the characters have about it is less "casual murder" and more "I don't have time to process this right now," which is considerably more sympathetic.

No one taught him what to do, psychologically speaking, after killing someone? I have two things to say about that. Firstly, Kamino really doesn't need to hammer home how little it cares about clone troopers, but it does so anyway. Secondly, Kal Skirata didn't teach you? The galaxy's greatest dad didn't talk about it once? I'm sure he had his reasons~

Maybe that's overly spiteful, but I just finished reading Triple Zero and I am not happy with that man right now.

Jedi-Bashing: 6

Di'kut Count: 3

Main Post

#star wars #star wars: republic commando #republic commando #star wars republic commando #repcomm #niner skirata #darman skirata #kal skirata #karen traviss critical

[lizajane2]

I'm not sure something written by Karen Traviss is what you want to use to emphasize an honest point about the Jedi.

My honest point was just written in the most simplest of terms and the only time when I actually agreed with Karen. She makes it very clear throughout the series that she has a strong view point about the Jedi. That they’re all bad. Do I agree? No. I don’t. And yet I see that the Jedi Order, during this time, was flawed. There’s no getting around that. As much as I love the Jedi, I’m also their biggest criticizer.

[ixcaliber]

Video Games In March

This month I’m writing these mini-review things whatever they are as I finish each game instead of waiting till the end of the month to try to remember everything.

1. Solo: Islands of the Heart

Solo is an interesting little puzzle game. Its central conceit is that it wants you to answer questions about love. About your feelings about the concept and your relationship with your partner (i presume you get maybe a different selection of questions or at least a different phrasing on many of the questions if you select at the beginning that you don’t have a partner). And yeah this isn’t exploring the psyche of a character this game is intended as an introspective look at your own feelings on the topic.

The game never comes out and delivers judgement on how good it has decided your relationship is, even at the very end it just asks you to consider what you have maybe learned about yourself. After many questions you encounter like a ghostly version of ‘your partner’ and they always seem to find some way to try and twist whatever your response was into a different light. It can feel a little judgy, especially if you are playing along and being honest. I do think it is an attempt to provide a different perspective though.

It’s an interesting little idea but the puzzle side kind of lets it down. The basic gist is moving blocks around to climb on them and reach other areas. It does do some interesting things with a couple of new types of block added as you progress. It’s not a bad set of puzzles, though a little repetitious. The main criticism I’d have is that it feels entirely disconnected from the love questionnaire that is the main thrust of the game. It could have stood to be more thematically relevant.

I’m not here to pitch ideas but for this concept it really feels like you should be playing one of those games where you have to control two characters and make use of their different abilities or whatever. Then you could offer a two player mode where you’re explicitly expected to play alongside your partner and encouraged to talk about the topics as they come up. Though, that said that could create an atmosphere where you’re not being honest with yourself because you just want to pick the most in love no problems here answers in front of your partner. Also it couldn’t really be called Solo any more then I guess.

Maybe thats a bad idea. It just seems weird that this concept comes attached to some fairly generic puzzles.

2. Gears of War 3

Me and Forgie have been slowly picking our way through Gears 3 over the last couple of months. It’s been a fun experience. We have vastly different levels of experience with the series. Forgie has played all of the main series of games and also will swear that the Karen Traviss Gears novels are really good actually. I haven’t touched the series since I finished Gears 2 back in 2009. Not because of any particular distaste for the series I just got distracted... for... um... a length of time.

The big thoughts I have about the game are 1) the game really should let me (as player two) pick who I want to play as from the selection of whoever is around at the time. What good is it having Sam and Anya be here if I can’t opt to play as them at every opportunity.

2) the girls should be more gay. Sam doesn’t get to do anything except have a crush on Dom (for some reason?). Anya being Marcus’ designated love interest is predictable but still comes out of nowhere somehow.

3) Forgie pointed my attention to this minor character she loves, a cool older lady called Bernie and I should have been allowed to play as her as well.

4) I cannot believe they actually played Mad World as Dom did his self sacrifice. It was an extremely funny experience. The preceding chapter is called something like ‘Brothers To The End’ or something, and is just full of huge red flags that Dom is about to die. And then the exact circumstances that lead to the self sacrifice. The chapter ends, the cutscene starts and up pops the ‘Brothers to the End’ achievement just to further hammer home just in case you forgot dom is about to die.

They’re pinned down by a bunch of lambent (explody zombie thingies essentially). Dom jumps down from where he is, yells at everyone to get back, gets in a truck, drives it away for like thirty full seconds and then turns around and drives it back into a fuel truck. It feels like 1) it doesn’t feel super necessary. yeah it’s quite a lot of lambent but it doesn’t feel like an absolutely unmanageable number. 2) it takes so long to execute. if the situation was so dire as to warrant this kind of self sacrifice everyone would have been dead before dom could have pulled this off. 3) it doesn’t even look like it does all that much. It really feels like dom was just fed up of being in the video game and desperately looking for the first opportunity to write himself out.

and yeah it plays Mad World and as I’m reacting to this overdramatized situation with possibly the most cliche song that could be soundtracking it, Forgie tells me that sometimes Mad World would play in multiplayer matches if someone is playing as Dom.

So yeah.

5) The final boss fight is kind of awful. As like a capstone to this trilogy of shooters heavily focused around cover and tactical combat, it’s just a free for all, with infinitely respawning enemies coming from every direction, and enough shit going on that actually taking cover is pretty much a waste of time, you’re just going to have to sprint behind another different big pole in a minute.

Overall it was a fun experience with some rough spots. Definitely helped by playing with a friend. We’re going to see about playing through 4 and 5 together at some point though she doesn’t have as positive an opinion on them as she does 3.

3. Powerwash Simulator - Midgar Special Pack

I’ve talked about how low my standards are for Powerwash Simulator. As long as I have a good podcast to listen to (hey Dice Funk just started a new season. It’s Star Trek themed, with two concurrent groups with different DMs serving as a home team and an away team. It’s a great time to jump in) I’m happy with whatever you put in front of me.

And I was to a certain extent. But I am sort of disappointed. I feel like the first half of the pack is really strong. First you clean the motorbike and the van for Reeve. You’re working in the shinra building and reeve isn’t the most exciting character to be recieving messages from but the bike is pretty iconic and it works.

Cleaning the guard scorpion is an inspired choice. I’d rather not be hired by Heidegger but it makes sense for the thing I’m doing. And then you get hired to clean The Seventh Heaven and get messages from Tifa. She does her best to radicalize you and it’s fun and great.

Then you just go back to Shinra to clean their big map of midgar. It’s a little disappointing from a narrative perspective after Tifa does her best to make me sympathetic to AVALANCHE’s cause. And also the map of midgar isn’t exactly what I would have called iconic.

Then you get hired to clean the air buster by heidegger again, and then it’s over. the air buster is pretty cool but its essentially the same as cleaning the guard scorpion, at least conceptually. I was really hoping to clean that one playground that Cloud and Aeris go to on the way to Wall Market. That one slide with a face is more iconic than the midgar map room.

I guess it probably comes down to time/budgeting. These are free dlcs... i think? So it would be harder to justify making Aeris’ church or one of the rooms in the Honeybee Inn or a mako reactor or something. It is still a little disappointing though. Like compared to Tomb Raider where there were essentially four different locations to clean here you have one location and four objects essentially.

All that said I still enjoyed it and I’ll happily play whatever other crossover dlc they have for us. Oh god please give us Powerwash Simulator: Kingdom Hearts. You’d have to have Traverse Town, and that one clocktower where everyone eats weird blue ice cream, oh and the twelve stupid thrones of various heights. OH and the gummi ship is your requisite vehicle level. and final level would be either mickey’s castle so you’re leaning into the disney side as well... or maybe the keyblade graveyard... or maybe you have to wash riku and get out all the bugs that they put in him. i don’t know. I’d want a full paid expansion for kingdom hearts now that i think about it.

Anyway so um what was I doing?

4. Biomutant

Biomutant is a game about being a weird little creature (sort of reminscent of Stitch the weird little alien from Lilo and Stitch) in a big open world and making moral choices and doing looter shooter shit.

The most important thing to understand about this game is that it’s Open World Fable (with an entire cast of Stitches). It’s a bold statement but I think I can back it up. Some specifics:

1) there’s moral choices and they work very much in the vein of when moral choices became briefly popular. By which I mean like say for example you come to what looks like a little soup kitchen set up in the world, if you stand behind the counter and press the interact button you serve the other little critters some soup and earn one Light point, but if you stand near the barrels of soup and press interact you burn the entire fucking stand to the ground and all the critters cry and you earn one Dark point. That disparity between the two different acts is so reminscent of that era of video games for me.

Also worth noting that the way I describe it, pressing interact at different parts of the object, is how the game presents it. If you pause for a moment before pressing interact your little Light Conscience or Dark Conscience will appear and float near the prompt to indicate whether you’ll be doing a light or dark option but they take a second to show up and yes I’ve burned down a soup kitchen entirely by accident.

And yeah you have little Consciences that appear and have conversations and arguments with each other. Less and less as time goes by thank god but early in the game you’ll see these two fuckers so much and they don’t ever stop being irritating.

Before I move away from the topic of moral choices I should note that one of the open world objectives you’ll find are captives stuck in cages. Whenever you find one you can press interact outside the cage, it will open up and they will get out and you’ll get this narration about how they don’t seem to have been too unhappy despite being in the cage and that they hope you’ll do the right thing and help them. And... they’re already out of the cage. If you say you’ll help them it’s the Light choice and you get a Light point but they’re already out of the cage. This is a moral choice that should be happening before you free them right? I have no idea what happens if you decide to say that you won’t help them. Do you just put them back in the cage? Do you kill them dead?

2) tonally it seems very Fable to me. By that I mean that all dialogue is carried out through a narrator who is doing this very affable bordering on twee performance. ANd like, okay this game is set in the ruins of a destroyed world and so everywhere you go there are like remains of various places and objects. The narrator will call a guitar a twing twang, a microwave a fry sparker, the past is the days gone, train stations are chugdepots and so on and so on.

The amount of twee made up vocabulary this game has is fucking staggering. You do have the option of turning down the amount of idle comments from the narrator (which I made use of very quickly) but he will still take part in every conversation in the game, “translating” between whatever language the little Stitch aliens use for you the player.

None of this is one for one with Fable exactly but that heavy narration, that use of language to try to be quirky and endearing is extremely Fable to me.

3) Your appearance is dictated by your choices. Sort of. This is definitely more true in Fable where your moral choices change your appearance as you move through the game. In Biomutant your appearance is determined by the stats you pick at the start of the game. Pick more strong your Stitch gets big and buff, pick more agility your Stitch gets thin and wiry, pick more intelligence your Stitch gets a huge fucking head.

Every level you get to increase your stats a little bit and as you’d expect by changing the overall distribution of your points the appearance of your Stitch changes. I mean. That would be what I’d expect given the game’s clear inspirations and the starting point your given. As far as I could tell there was no aesthetic consequence to the distribution of your stats after character creation. I mention it here because it feels like it was probably an intended part of the game and then maybe someone pointed out that they’d just like to make a cute Stitch and not have to worry about ruining them with stat distribution. Later you do get access to a way to alter your characters appearance as much as you want which makes the initial tying together of appearance and stats even more baffling and pointless.

4) Though you start the game as an adult there is a quest that you need to do where you are shown a vision of the past, of yourself as an innocent kid given the opportunity to do minor disobedience as you go around your peaceful town before oh no a bad man comes and kills all your town and your parents and the game is always going ‘one day you’re going to have to deal with this bad man and oh will you choose to get revenge or forgiveness?’

After the bad man destroys your life you essentially wander in the wastes for however long it takes Stitches to grow to adulthood and the game is like ‘oh nothing happened to you out there really and anyway you have no memory of any of that time because of some intrinsic property of being in the wastes or something’. 

It feels like the game wants to do that Fable ‘childhood through adulthood’ kind of structure whilst also having a game structure that gives you the five main quests within like half an hour of playing the game and lets you complete them in any order. And so it has to abbreiviate the growing up narrative down to its barest of bones to fit this structure.

5) You choose whether to kill or spare your enemies and everyone around you alludes to the eventual consequences of your actions. As far as I can tell the only consequence of any of your actions is to raise your Light or Dark score and thus determine which of the endings you get - no wait nevermind I just looked it up and the endings are only affected by the one last choice at the end of the game so literally nothing else you do in this game has any consequence. Just like Fable!

So other thoughts disconnected from the very important question of whether or not this is Fable:

There is this mechanic called the Tribe War. You side with one of six different tribes who have different goals regarding whether they want to save the world and whether they want to unite the tribes or vanquish them. At the beginning you can pick between ‘we want to unite everyone and save the world’ and ‘we want to destroy everyone and then the world’ and before every mission the narrator will be like ‘oh but isn’t uniting everyone through conquest a bit bad actually?’ and i’m just like oh now you’ve got time for nuance huh? i’m fighting the wants the world to be actively ended tribe and you’re trying to lecture me about my decisions?

Anyway you do like three seperate missions at different outposts to take them over and then do an assault on the fortress of your rival tribe. That’s when you get the spare or kill choice that means nothing. Do this for your first rival tribe and you are assigned a new tribe to go after and like a lot of this game its very repetitious busywork. After taking down the second tribe I am fully ready to hear which tribe I’m being sent after next and the sifu of my tribe just says “well you’ve kind of gotten the idea at this point right? want to just skip doing the rest of the tribe war and we’ll just declare it done” and was so jarring. I mean yes. I mean absolutely but the game having enough self-awareness to recognize this is fucking wild to me.

And speaking of repetition there are like 16 or so named NPCs in the world and every time you meet one of them the conversation will be like ‘hey i know you from the past’ then ‘wow are you going to kill or forgive the bad man?’ then some question about fate phrased awkwardly to fit whatever one character trait has been assigned to this character then ‘you sure are friendly with [insert name of tribe]’ with a hint of approval or disapproval dependant on whether this npc skews Light or Dark then they’ll ask you to do a sidequest for you. Do that sidequest and then maybe one more and they’ll give you their unique item and then they’ll ask you to invite them onto your spaceship (don’t worry about it) and then you’ll have an annoying conversation with your Light and Dark consciences about whether it’s good to let people onto your spaceship (don’t worry about it) and then if you invited them and their Light/Dark is the same skew as your own then they’ll accept and then you can buy shit from them. (They will still ask to go on your spaceship even if their Light/Dark would preclude them from accepting your invitation which is just kind of rude if you ask me.) Every NPC conversation is like this. The only real variation are a couple of NPCs who in between the comment on your tribe and the sidequest will explain how they got their nickname. That’s it.

ANd um yeah the gameplay of the video game. It’s fine. You can do dodges and parries and you have a gun and a melee weapon and you can go into a special super mode by doing any three special attacks. I started playing on normal difficulty and eventually turned it down to easy because I got bored of how bullet spongey the enemies were. Like almost every group of enemies has one big enemy that will get a top of screen health bar like its an actual boss fight.

At some point I found The World’s Most Powerful Gun and then everything was extremely easy for a while. But because I was being a horrible completionist and trying to complete the area objectives for all the areas in the game (something i stopped after like 80% of the way through a couple of areas were just bugged to not have the thing i needed to complete their objectives so it was like fuck it i guess) I gained so so so many levels. And its one of those games where all the enemies level up with you (except for weirdly like one kind of enemy that is always level 35 no matter how early or late in the game you encounter them). Importantly though there’s no stat that raises the damage of guns and there seemed to be a cap on just how much armor you can get from the items that you find. Eventually my Godkiller Electrogun became just a pea shooter and I started taking Big Damage when I was hit and it felt exactly like the gameplay I’d swapped down to easy to avoid.

Oh and, and I think this is my final point, there’s like three kinds of puzzles in the world. There’s so many kinds of collectibles. Like For hours and hours every time I’d go to a new place the game would be telling me about a new kind of thing I can pick up or do or something.

But okay there’s three kinds of puzzles. The most common is some dials which have a yellow and white line on them and you line them up so that they match the non-moveable elements of the puzzle and the other dials. It’s extremely simple. Then you have that one where you have to turn on all the lights but pressing one changes the state of all adjacent lights (I tried to 100% completion the game and I swear to god there were exactly three of this kind of puzzle as compared to what felt like hundreds of the basic dial puzzles). Then there’s one where you have a number of sockets which have the letters x y z on them and you have to form the shown code by using the right sockets (maybe ten to fifteen of this puzzle in the game).

So the thing about it is that it tells you your inteligence stat is used to determine how many moves you get in these puzzles, and after I raised it a couple of times I started to see slightly more complicated dial puzzles. I don’t know if that was unrelated though and it generates the puzzle based on your level. All I know is that it seems to generate the starting position of the dials at random because there were times where there was literally no solution. The number of turns required to correctly position everything was just more than the moves you have, and that number never increased for me despite me pumping quite a bit into my intelligence for increased stamina (don’t ask).

Anyway yeah don’t bother with this one.

It’ll be pretty apparent but from here I stopped writing these review things immediately after playing. I’m sorry. I had a lot of thoughts about Biomutant okay.

5. Don’t Say Yes

A very short and simple visual novel made with a game boy style aesthetic. Playable in browser if you’d like to experience this one for yourself. Surprisingly effective for such a brief story. Add this to the enormous list of games that made me cry.

6. The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword HD

I love Fi. I wanted to love this one more than I did.

The problem for me is that the motion controls are inextricably a part of this game. This version gives you the option to play button only but you can’t remove the motion control mechanics.

The boss fight at the end of the first temple where you fight Ghirahim for the first time. Was rough. It’s very dependant on the motion control mechanics, requiring you to bluff what direction you’re about to attack from and then quickly attack from a different one and I just am not quick enough to do this really. I think that it does get better from there, I don’t think any of the other bosses (save for the imprisoned, fuck the imprisoned) are quite as demanding as this initial encounter with Ghirahim.

Which isn’t even to mention the fact that when you do use button only mode if you want to adjust the camera you have to hold one of the shoulder buttons in order to do so. I understand why but I wish there’d been the option to make the shoulder button toggle the right stick between sword swinging mode and camera moving mode.

There were things I loved about the game. I love the idea of having a big explorable sky area where you fly around with your bird (shame there’s not really much to do here). I love pretty much any time I’m messing with timestones in the Lanryu Desert. I love the aesthetic of many of the characters (Fi obviously, Ghirahim, Impa and Zelda herself). I really enjoyed Groose’s arc and by the end actually liked him as a character. Some of the dungeon designs, especially the Sandship but also the ancient cistern and sky keep.

Overall the game felt fiddly and not just in the way the game controls. Maybe fiddly isn’t the correct word exactly but its the one that I kept thinking. To me it sort of encompasses the way that the game is paced (and in some places padded) like the way it makes you backtrack through a previously completed temple to collect some water, or how you need to gather materials to repair the robot to spin the windmills to activate the tower to access the thunderhead. Or the sequence where you need to escort the scrapper robot through the entirety of the fire zone to open the fire shrine. Or the sequence where you lose all your weapons and have to renavigate the entirety of the fire zone to get them back.

Or having to fight the Imprisoned twice in quick succession and yeah just fighting the Imprisoned in general. For the second fight I failed multiple times until I finally stopped trying to fight it in what felt like the intended way and just jumped on its head as it was moving.

Good game in some respects, couldn’t possibly ever recommend to anyone. Hey at least it doesn’t have weapon durability though. I intend to be playing Tears of the Kingdom when it launches and even so I’ve not fully braced myself to mentally relitigate my issues with Breath of the Wild...

7. Adventure Time: Secret of the Nameless Kingdom

I’ve always had a fondness for the adventure time games, even if the only one that I would say was good was Hey Ice King Why’d You Steal Our Garbage. Or whatever the 3ds one was called.

This one is very 2d Zelda in some good ways and bad ways. 2d Zelda suits adventure time as a mode of interaction. It just fits so well that its difficult to take umbridge with how blatantly it is copying the formula.

The lack of any kind of direction and the inflexibility of the game is kind of its downfall for me. The worst part is after you’ve beat the first dungeon. You can see the location of the second dungeon on your map but if you go there you can’t do anything to open it or enter it and there’s nobody to give you a hint where to go to gain the ability to enter it.

What you have to do is go to a big rock shaped like a butt on the west side of the map, grab one of the farts from the big rock butt, take it all the way to the east of the map where cinnamon bun is blocking a bridge, show him the fart to make him fall off the bridge, continue in this direction to find and capture a tiny manticore, take this back over to the southwest of the map and give this to magic man in his house and then flambo will appear and join you and then you can use him to unlock the dungeon (northwest of the map).

And actually that might not be the worst part because there is an entire circle of trades thing you need to do to get the Enchiridion which might actually be necessary for opening the final dungeon of the game, and one of the early steps is hidden in a secret room underneath a random patch of grass.

Obtuseness aside this is one of the better Adventure Time games. None of them are perfect but this is engaging enough, and has some fun original characters. The Nameless Kingdom is a newly formed kingdom contested between three princesses (Lullaby Princess, Slumber Princess and Nightmare Princess) and you’re here to officiate the ceremony to decide who this kingdom should belong to. When I think about it its kind of shame it didn’t lean into its theming a little more. The enemies and overall aesthetic of the world are extremely generic, when they could have given everything a much more dreamlike aesthetic and been fully justified in doing so.

The more I talk about this game the more I’m sort of talking myself out of liking it. I do think it is a fine experience for a licensed game at least. At least its not Explore The Dungeon Because I Don’t Know, though that one did let me play as Marceline... but we’re getting sidetracked here.

Nameless Kingdom is Fine. Next game.

8. Kirby’s Dream Land

I was thinking about how I hadn’t really felt I’d gotten a Kirby platformer experience out of Kirby Star Allies earlier this year and Forgie has Nintendo Switch Online so I decided to play some of the earlier Kirby games.

I think that for games of a certain era you have to kind of keep a lid on your expectations. Of course by todays standards its very simple and very short. I liked it okay as like a little dip into the past but I don’t know how representative it is. Kirby doesn’t even have their copy ability yet in this one. And I was struggling with the fact that jump and fly are different abilities bound to different buttons.

I did start playing Kirby’s Dream Land 2 and had a lot more fun with that (I love the big hamster friend), but I got distracted and haven’t finished it yet. I’ll get back to you with my thoughts on that one next month I guess. What a cliffhanger. I bet you can hardly wait.

Hi. Welcome to the part of the post where firefox died and deleted about an hours worth of writing and I’m mad so these reviews are probably going to be worse now.

9. Coquette Dragoon

A really neat ongoing visual novel which I’d describe essentially as melancholy gundam with furries. Forgie has been quietly suggesting that I play this game for a while now.

I’m sort of conflicted when it comes to this one because it’s really good. It’s really well written. And as such the sadness that it evokes I felt it very strongly. Even in the lighter moments there’s this sense of melancholy that underpins everything.

Having finished and taken a step back I can appreciate how good the girls are, how fun their dynamics are. I love Xio, Bell and Honey and I see myself in all of them in various ways.

I’d definitely recommend reading the list of content warnings at the bottom of the itch page before giving it a try but if you want slightly sad gay girls in space this is a really good experience.

10. I Commissioned Some Bees 2

I don’t have anything new to say about the bees games. They are very consistent in their quality. They continue to have nice mellow music and fun artwork of a variety of styles. They are a chill time. Play them if you like.

11. Quadrata

A very simple puzzle game where you simultaneously move a pair of squares across a pair of grids to try to guide them to their objectives. As you go new mechanics are introduced to ratchet up the complexity. You know how puzzle games are designed.

I enjoyed it but you can probably tell whether it would be for you or not with just a glance.

12. How To Say Goodbye

The first draft of this post had me talking in a very real way about how this game affected me with a couple of its choices and ways it framed things. This time I’ll cut to the chase of what I figured out.

This is a game about loss, death and grief. It aims to try to tackle those topics in a kind and gentle way and I think it succeeds. That said there was a little discomfort during as I am very sensitive to this topic. I think what sets this apart from most of the other ‘deals with grief’ games that I’ve played is that the narrative is about grief and letting go of people, but also about acceptance of death and the regrets that someone might have. That second half is something more unusual and a little more trying for someone who has as much of a difficulty as I do.

The puzzle mechanics are all about moving your characters through the world by pulling the tiles they stand on in a strip. It’s a very simple mechanic but complexity comes through in the small minutae as well as added elements.

It is a fun experience.

13. Final Fantasy XIV - Hatchingtide 2023

I include this because I included holiday events for Genshin back when I was playing that. It’s been so long since I played Final Fantasy XIV. I played and enjoyed all the way through to the end of 2.0 and it was a fun time. And then I was like okay time to go to Heavensward and the game was like no you have hours and hours of running around and learning about Alphinaud’s Secret Police before we will allow you to go anywhere new. Also enjoy this mandatory raid.

When I did finally get to Heavensward I was kind of burned out a little bit, put it down and hadn’t picked it up since.

However this year for Easter everyone gets a tonberry costume and I wanted to have the tonberry costume.

As always its difficult to return to an MMO you haven’t played for a while. My bags are full of god only knows what. My UI is a disaster (especially since my main monitor is actually a tv screen and as such it has a bad resolution but it’s too late for me to go back to regular sized monitors). My skills have been rearranged and shuffled randomly across my action bar. My everything is a mess and it took like a good couple of sessions with Forgie taking a look at everything for me to feel confident enough to play the video game again. (Maybe coming soon I’ll be talking about Heavensward... I mean not that soon because I expect it’s a pretty big expansion and I’m fucking slow but who knows. I would like to actually play this game at some point. I really want to get the little foxie kit from Stormblood. As ever foxies are a major source of motivation for me.)

But all of that is irrelevant. You don’t need to do any real combat or anything for this event. It’s a very short couple of quests. Talk to someone in Gridania, frighten a couple of sylphs, go and complete a fate that is rendered incomprehensible by the sheer number of people’s names filling the screen, and then head back. I have done Hatchingtide before. I did whatever year it was that you get the big floaty egg mount. Maybe it’s my poor memory but I thought the quests around that version of the event were a little more substantial.

It’s fine. I got the costume I wanted. The only thing I wanted that I didn’t get was to learn that the man in the tonberry costume who is directing you through the seasonal quests was actually three tonberries stacked on top of one another or something ridiculous like that.

14. Lil’ Gator Game

Lil Gator Game is a cute little 3d exploration game heavily inspired by Zelda. In it you play the little gator whose sister has for years been providing them with like a LARP experience, but with whom you’ve recently grown apart from as she has gone to university and she doesn’t have the time to play the game with you any more. You try to impress her and get her to play the game again with you by running around this island and solving quests (provided by other kids), fighting baddies (cardboard cutouts) and collecting loot (confetti).

It’s a lot of fun. Like both in the narrative and the dialogue you can have with the other kids and also in just the moment to moment gameplay. It’s a fun world to run and jump around in and Lil’ Gator’s animations are so fun and expressive.

The whole setup of the game and the game within the game that all the kids are in on provides a really good framework for some fun meta fourth wall jokes. One of my favourite parts was a group of kids who all wanted to be playing in different genres, none of which play comfortably with the generic hero kind of thing you have going on, and playing through their quests where you indulge in their genres and then everyone comes together to do something they can all enjoy.

It’s a wonderful wholesome game and I found the ending to be very moving and a great closing/examination of the game as a whole.

#ix plays games #ix has a minor meltdown #ix talks about biomutant for just too long

[tanadrin]

You say commercialization is a shallow analysis, and then your next few sentences are all about commercialization. At the end, well, Karen Traviss started an original scifi series the same year she started writing for star wars. I wonder why one is more popular than the other? (In fact the other got several critical awards so, I’m being more than a bit facetious here)

To be clear, I’m not disagreeing with anything you said per se, I’m just trying to psychoanalyze your dismissal of commercialization as an explanatory tool

well, that's stupid, because i explicitly said in the same paragraph that attributing the phenomenon purely to commercialization is flawed because that is only one specific instance of a more general phenomenon.

[mid-nighttiger]

Legit i don’t understand how ppl who think they’re leftist are like ‘this warrior culture is good diversity. no you cant divorce the violence from the culture. conquering is good :)’ like hello did you not take racism 101, how white ppl stereotyped brown ppl?? hint: it starts with v and ends with iolent

additionally i don’t wanna think about how karen traviss’ thought process must’ve been something like: looks at temuera morrison, maori man ah yes there must be something in his genes that makes him inherently obedient and good at war

#midtalks #critical #karen traviss critical #fandom critical #mandalorians #star wars #i am Begging fandom to just choose one #like.. you KNOW you dont have to follow in kt's footsteps right?? #the way kt writes about the clones is absolutely disgusting pls remove them from her influence #the way kt writes about anything tbh

[lavampira]

the venn diagram of people who think mandalorian society is patriarchal and sustainable by predominantly mercenary work or that jango isn’t a Real Mandalorian a là satine kryze propaganda consists of karen traviss, dave filoni, and people who bought into their respective authorial mouthpieces

and then there’s me, consistently forced to witness the coldest of takes

#vagueblogging #star wars #oya manda #karen traviss critical #dave filoni critical #satine kryze hate