#that can very easily be changed in the parts of the narrative its used

[saintsenara]

What parts of canon do you find the most frustrating/that you are dissatisfied with/wished that was handled better/explored more? Mine is the inconsistency of Voldemort as a character. How he is described as being perhaps the most talented student that Hogwarts has ever seen and so powerful and intelligent but regularly made such dumb decisions e.g. in the final battle where he still uses Avada Kedavra despite seeing it not work before. I like the explanation that Horcruxes rotted his brain

thank you very much for the ask, @sarafina-sincerity!

the parts of canon which i find the least satisfying all have the same thing in common: their morality is individualist.

the harry potter series has - at its core - a really profound and very black-and-white belief that good and evil not only exist but are rooted in the individual. and while i understand why this is the case - the later books in the series are governed by the genre conventions of folkloric epic and, especially, of christian folkloric epic, which means that the whole seven-book narrative arc ending in a battle between christ and satan after which all is well is only to be expected - i don't like it.

so here we are... ten things i hate about canon, for fanfic writers to win my heart by interrogating in their work...

i hate the series' insistence that everything is fine once voldemort is dead

the middle books in the series - especially goblet of fire - do a really interesting job at hinting at the endemic rot in the ministry of magic, and the ways that the state and its enforcers perpetuated harm during the first war that was indistinct from that perpetuated by the death eaters - above all the use of internment without trial for suspected death eaters [which is a reference to something the british state actually did in the 1970s!].

they show how widespread blood-supremacy and magic-supremacy is, even among people who don't openly support voldemort; how the wizarding population is kept deliberately ignorant by what appears to be state-controlled media; and how no serious efforts have been made to eradicate the conditions which enabled voldemort to attain such power.

this is then forgotten completely in deathly hallows, where the fact that almost the entire civil service keeps working for a government which is committing genocide is hand-waved away with "oh, people are scared", and both the epilogue and jkr's post-series writing take the view that kingsley manages, as minister, to preside over a government which easily sheds all its old prejudices and starts working properly.

i don't like this! i think it's just much more interesting for corruption to be impossible to fully eradicate from the government, for blood-supremacy to have long-standing causes which actually take a lot of very hard work to untangled [especially the fact that the wizarding world not appearing to have a welfare state means that those whose lives are poor or unstable are prime targets for radicalisation], and for kingsley to have the same capacity for leaning on the prophet and worrying about his polling numbers as any other politician...

i hate that the series changes how the death eaters are written between half-blood prince and deathly hallows

connected to this shift from the series hinting at the broader issues in the wizarding world to a flat battle between good and evil is that the death eaters, their aims, and their modus operandi are written very different between half-blood prince and deathly hallows. in the former, the death eaters can be situated very easily as anti-state sectarian terrorists who have all sorts of complex analogies within british history and politics. in the latter, they're just caricatures of pure evil - which is why the death eaters introduced from the latter stages of half-blood prince onwards, especially the carrows, are considerably less interesting as characters than those, such as lucius malfoy, barty crouch jr. and bellatrix lestrange, who are introduced earlier.

it's also why the voldemort of deathly hallows feels so uninteresting. i don't like the fanon that the horcruxes render him insane at all - when he's shown outside of the epic battle between good and evil in that book, he's shown to be as lucid and cunning as always - but he ends up having to flop because his only purpose in the overarching narrative is to be killed. in the earlier books, in which he's a paramilitary kingpin poisoning and corrupting a society which was designed to exclude him because of the fact of his birth in revenge for its treatment of him, rather than satan and hitler's lovechild, he is so much more interesting.

i hate the series' belief that slavery is fine

obviously, one of the biggest examples of state malevolence in the series is that wizards own slaves. like many readers, i loathe that the house elf plotline ends up being reduced from its potential for radicalism in chamber of secrets - in which dobby mentions whisper-networks of elves who decry their treatment at wizards' hands - to what we see from goblet of fire onwards - in which elves love being enslaved and think that any attempts to free them from their subjugation is cruel.

i also hate that elves' freedom is then hand-waved away as part of the general race towards "all was well" with the implication that hermione found it easy to undo what appears to be centuries of state-sanctioned oppression without any pushback at all.

the house elf plotline is one of the clearest distillations of the series' individualistic morality. harry abhors the treatment of dobby at the malfoys' hands entirely and only because he doesn't like the malfoys. he abhors voldemort's treatment of kreacher, but sees absolutely no issue with sirius' because he likes sirius - and he clearly sees no issue at all with his own legal mastery of kreacher, seeing as, literally minutes after the end of a war in which the good guys fought for the rights of muggles and muggleborns to be seen as fully human... he is considering ordering his slave to make him a sandwich.

i hate that the series doesn't show the realities of resistance

the reason i think the whole "why does voldemort keep using avada kedavra, isn't he supposed to be clever?" question arises is because the series is incredibly resistant to the idea that the good guys must have to kill as well, which makes it look like it's only the death eaters using it while the order use lots of clever magic that the stupid terrorists are too thick to think of.

this is idiotic - not only because the killing curse is canonically flawless unless the thing you're blasting is your own horcrux and so the order would use it for efficiency's sake alone, but because the reality of being a resistance fighter is that, even if you're on the "right" side, you are going to have kill people or they will kill you.

lupin is completely right in deathly hallows that harry is breathtakingly naive to avoid shooting to kill and that - without the protection of genre conventions allowing him to be preternaturally merciful - his resistance to killing is going to result in him being destroyed by the enemy. it is inconceivable that the rest of the order don't using the killing curse - and the question of what this does to their souls [is it murder if you believe yourself to be justified in your actions?] and their senses of self post-war is so interesting to think about - and i wish we were shown this in the text.

especially because molly absolutely blasted bellatrix with it.

but i also hate that the series thinks that violence is fine when the good guys do it

this is primarily another example of the black-and-white "this is fine because harry's good" theme which runs through the series, which we see in things like harry using sectumsempra on draco malfoy in half-blood prince or the cruciatus curse on amycus carrow in deathly hallows. harry's overarching response to committing attempted murder is to sulk that the incredibly minor punishment he receives is reducing the time he could spend hitting on ginny, and his response to torturing amycus is "lol. lmao."

the series thinks - again and again - that cruelty and violence are completely fine when the person they are perpetuated against "deserves" it, and it does not bang.

and that the series allows the good guys more complexity in characterisation

the role played by the house system in the story - and, above all, the fact that our heroes are all connected to one particular house with straightforwardly admirable associated characteristics - means that the villains receive less opportunity to also have positive traits intermingled with their negative ones - and, therefore, complex and interesting personalities.

i also dislike that when non-gryffindor characters - especially slytherins - do reveal themselves to be brave and loyal etc., instead of recognising that this is because bravery can be multi-faceted the series suggests that they should be recategorised as "belonging" to a "good" house.

or, in other words, me and dumbledore's "i think we sort too soon" line in deathly hallows are enemies for life.

i hate that the series blames merope gaunt for dying

and - of course - the main way a villain isn't allowed as much complexity as a hero is that the series never examines the impact of voldemort's childhood on his adult self. while we see hints throughout canon of just how profoundly affected he is by his institutionalised childhood and the weight of his grief over his parents [his mother especially] - such as him learning as a baby never to cry for attention because it's futile - this is hand-waved away throughout the series by dumbledore-as-the-voice-of-god as irrelevant. the eleven-year-old tom riddle is straightforwardly evil, that he grows up in an orphanage is used as nothing more than narrative colour to underline how creepy he is, and dumbledore's spectacular mishandling of their relationship is viewed by the series as undeniably correct right up to the very last moment [when harry imitates dumbledore by - and we should call it what it is - deadnaming voldemort in their final confrontation].

but the most egregious thing that dumbledore does when discussing the course voldemort's life takes is blame merope gaunt for her own death in childbirth, by implying that witches are immune to one of the most common causes of death throughout human history if they just try hard enough and then saying that a nineteen-year-old girl whose life appears to have been nothing more than unrelenting abuse and misery [perpetuated both against her and by her] lacked the moral fibre to try hard enough.

and this infuriates me.

i hate how the series treats female characters who don't fit its narrow spectrum of "correct" womanhood

merope is but one victim of the series' general issues with treating women who aren't its heroes - all of whom are exactly feminine and beautiful and clever and talented enough that we know they're good people, but not any of these things in an extreme which could make them vapid or arrogant or defiant of social norms or so on.

the series takes a very low view of women who exist outside of narrow boxes - whether they are interested in a hyper-feminine aesthetic [lavender brown, rita skeeter] or a more masculine one [marge dursley]; conform to stereotypes about being bitchy, flighty, or vapid [pansy parkinson, romilda vane] or refuse to adhere to social expectations to be polite, meek, and demure [fleur delacour]; are unmarried, are not inherently maternal, and/or are cruel to children [bellatrix lestrange; petunia dursley; dolores umbridge]; are unrestrained emotionally [cho chang; moaning myrtle] and so on. and i don't like it.

and i also hate that - connected to this - the series uses physical appearance - especially weight - as a shorthand for [female] characters we're supposed to dislike.

what it says on the tin, really - if the series doesn't like a character, especially if the character is a woman, you can almost guarantee that they will either be fat or be unusually thin.

and finally...

i hate that the series prioritises one form of love - love as suffering and as sacrifice - over all others

part of the series' march towards the epic two-person showdown between good and evil is that harry is made to endure trial after trial - including his death for the salvation of mankind - in the name of love. obviously this is because he becomes, by the end of deathly hallows an allegory for christ, but it also fits into the series' view - articulated most frequently by dumbledore - that love, suffering, and sacrifice are all synonyms.

the acts of love the series foregrounds - snape's willingness to endure anything because of his love for lily; sirius' willingness to rot in azkaban and caves and grimmauld place because of his love for james and harry; harry giving up a love that's like "someone else's life" with ginny so he can go die - are all sacrificial, and the series generally takes a dull view of love that is fluffy, silly, carnal, selfish, soothing, transformational and so on. lavender and bellatrix's open adoration of their lovers is mocked; dumbledore's sexual desire for grindelwald is punished by his sister's death; tonks and lupin's uncomplicated happiness in the birth of their son is not to last.

but happy endings and silly jokes and forehead kisses are love too. and the hill i will die on is that they have even more potential to bring about the salvation of the world than constant suffering and abiding.

#asks answered #asenora on canon

[notaplaceofhonour]

One of the experiences that really highlighted to me how willing the left can be to turn a blind eye to and gaslight Jews about antisemitism was trying to talk about Michael Jackson’s antisemitism, such as in the song “They Don’t Care About Us”, which was released with the lyrics:

“Jew me, sue me, everybody do me / Kick me, kike me, don't you black or white me.”

I feel like that is shockingly straightforward with how antisemitic it is, both in its specific language (the K-slur & Jew-as-a-verb) and its conspiratorial bent in the context of the whole song. But when it came out and Jews were obviously appalled and spoke out about it, MJ made the standard “but have you considered that accusing me of bigotry offends me?” and “I was taken out of context!” statements that bigots make when they get called out on their bigotry.

As for MJ’s claim that he was taken out of context, here is some context: In 1993, MJ’s relationship with the press deteriorated when they began covering allegations of his child sex abuse. In the midst of this, tabloids ran a lot of scummy, sensationalized headlines—ruthlessly mocking his appearance and eccentricities and even running entirely false stories. This marked a drastic shift in MJ’s lyrics, which began to focus heavily on his victimhood (both real and perceived, often conflating both and tying them to broader social issues), with many of the songs on the next album HIStory (1995) being about this. “They Don’t Care About Us” is on this album. In 2003, there were revelations that Michael Jackson had grown close with members of Nation of Islam (a fringe and antisemitic hate group), and in 2005, Good Morning America aired a phone recording of Michael Jackson calling Jews “leeches”, claiming Jews had targeted him for his wealth, and saying “It’s a conspiracy. Jews do it on purpose”.

This is the context of Michael Jackson singing about being a stand-in for the victims of all kinds of real world oppression like racism and police brutality, and then saying he was being “Jewed” and “kiked”. It came out that he was molesting little kids, and rather than face the music, he tried to dodge responsibility by conflating those allegations with racism and the gross, sensationalist bullshit that tabloids were running on him; he wove all these things together in a narrative that he could use to wrap himself up in victimhood & conspiracy to position himself as not just a martyr, but the very archetype of martyrdom so that the world could, as he sang on the same album in his cover of John Lennon’s song, “Come together, over me.”

The lyrics were later changed to replace “Jew” & “kike” with abstract noise that drowned out the words or repetitions of “sue” & “strike”. But even so, this is still a song, not truly about inequality and injustice, but using inequality and injustice to shield a child molester from responsibility. And the fact that “Jew” can so easily be replaced with “sue”, not simply in sound but in meaning, without disrupting the narrative and tone of the song, belies the fact that Michael Jackson believed himself to be a victim of some sort of conspiracy between “(((The Media)))” and greedy Jewish lawyers.

And yet, trying to talk about this to this day, even with the benefit of hindsight, when it’s pretty well-accepted that MJ was in fact a child molester and knowing what he said about Jews after this song came out, it is next to impossible to get people to see the antisemitism in him tying together all oppression in the world as him being “Jewed” and “kiked” by (((The System)))—even when he literally says “Jew”, even when he says the K-slur, even when he refers to Jews as blood-suckers, even when he literally says Jews are conspiring against him. When people started using the song as part of the George Floyd protests, and I was like “hey, maybe that’s not a great idea” and gently tried to explain this context, I was ignored, told it didn’t matter because the song was about inequality, told Black people have every right to distrust Jews “because Jews are White” and stabbed Black people in the back by embracing Whiteness, etc. etc.

I think that is one of the times that really started to make it clear to me, “oh, yeah no, leftists can be staring straight at a K-slur in the mouth of a known sex offender and still say it’s fine”—something leftists generally would not do for any other vulnerable minority. It still astounds me.

#antisemitism #michael jackson #they don’t care about us #leftwing antisemitism #leftist antisemitism #k slur #jumblr #blm #mj #Leaving Neverland #blood libel

[celestialtarot11]

Pisces rising and their angular houses ♓️🧘‍♀️

Friends it’s been so long since I got back to this series 😫 but here we are! Enjoy! Please like comment and reblog 🤍☕️

Pisces Rising ♓️- A lot of pisces risings I know feel misunderstood, misinterpreted, and have dealt with taking on others projections at a young age. They feel like an old soul, yet treated like they are naive by others. Pisces risings are meant to tap into unconditional love (exaltation is Venus) by working through conditions placed on them. Lots of pisces have the ability to tap deeply into the subconscious when ready to heal, their shadows are essentially their guiders. Pisces risings are multi dimensional and as they grow older realize their peace is important, not the opinions and projections of others. Its why lots of pisces are seen spending time alone to sit in their energy, they love their independence, and their presence. Its also a great way to set boundaries so they don’t suck in unwanted energy. Pisces have the ability to rejuvenate themselves after trauma and attract new beginnings whilst closing out cycles. They can shift to their new reality with ease 💅🏻 once they set their mind to it, nothing can stop them! They have unwavering faith in what they desire which is what makes them successful.

Gemini 4th house ♊️- Pisces risings could have a big family or a lot of siblings, as Gemini is ruled by Mercury. Not all of them have a lot of siblings however. With gemini here the mother could have been manipulating with her words, and cunning. She is intelligent but uses it for her personal gain. A lot of pisces risings childhood contain narratives and ego based stories from others, rumor and gossip. Its why pisces risings are misunderstood, because people don’t see beyond the projections they put out. Pisces risings have the ability to get closer to their emotional side by healing their tumultuous past. The stories Pisces tells themselves is important to make sure they aren’t continuing past cycles of sabotage. Pisces risings are intellectuals, and harbor a lot of knowledge from their childhood. Specifically wisdom about what they went through and experienced. They can easily overthink the past, and over analyze themselves, which is why it’s important to have a balance. Their emotional + logical side is meant to work together in this lifetime. The possible education was a high standard in their childhood, one parent could have pushed for the native to be experienced. Curiosity, intelligence, and knowledge are core parts of Pisces risings childhood. Their inner child is always wanting knowledge and is curious about how the world works, including people and the spiritual realm. Lots of pisces risings have journals because their minds can overthink, so they need a place to dump their thoughts.

Virgo 7th house ♍️- With virgo in the 7th house it’s important for Pisces to meet the side of them that grounds their manifestation into reality. Pisces has the ability to create and ground manifestations. Pisces can struggle with anxiety in relationships and can be detail oriented in who they want to be with (friends, partner, etc) They can be picky because they have high standards and it may not be something people understand. They may criticize the native for simply having desires and needs just as much as anyone else. Pisces loves channeling their knowledge into connections and partnerships, so to them their relationships are important. It’s important for them to choose people who are health conscious, set boundaries, and are intellectuals. Pisces may struggle to set boundaries and find common ground in relationships, but eventually Pisces learns they can be a dreamer whilst being a realist. Developing healthy boundaries and relationships is very important in this lifetime! A reminder that Pisces also needs room to flow, change, adapt in relationships and it doesn’t have to be rigid or practical all of the time!

Sagittarius 10th house ♐️- Its possible Pisces risings father could have higher education, or knowledge. He is well knowledgeable and shares it with family. Or wants a legacy and may put pressure onto Pisces rising to fulfill that. It’s possible the father also could have used his knowledge in an arrogant way, being self righteous. The father’s temperament could have been an issue. The father could have also been a teacher for Pisces, constantly trying to guide the native in the right direction, but due to the tense relationship between the two, it could always come across forcefully and unwanted. Pisces is meant to explore their options in this lifetime with career. Self entrepreneurship especially and incorporating their talents into their job. They may into a musical career, or art of some kind because channeling their feelings and thoughts into their artwork is a way for them to be understood. Pisces may also find themselves feeling assertive in a career they build on their own, they feel free. They love their freedom and alone time! Anything that channels their inner expression Pisces will love. Fashion, music, art work, content creation, etc. Pisces have the ability to manifest money and success, and attract new opportunities in their career/job! When Pisces taps into their desires & creativity that is when they are the most happiest. When they follow their intuition and heart and show to themselves they are loveable, is when Pisces taps into Venusian energy.

Thank you everyone ❤️ I hope this resonated for you Pisces out there and I always appreciate your feedback! Please like comment and reblog to share the love 🌹🤍

Paid Readings 👀🌹

#devi post #astrology #astrology community #tarotcommunity #divination #tarot deck #tarot #witchcraft #tarot reading #astrology observations #astro posts #astrology notes #astro notes #pick a card #tarot community #pick a pile #pick a picture #tarotdaily #tarot readings #pick a card romance #pick one #witchblr

[jennamoran]

The Far Roofs

cover art by Isip Xin

Hi!

Today I'm going to talk a little bit more about my forthcoming RPG, the Far Roofs. I've previously talked about

general principles,

the rats,

and the campaign.

Today, I want to talk about the Mysteries.

Up on the distant roofs, you see, the rats hunt, and are hunted, by these ... things. These vast, impossible god-monsters.

The Mysteries.

These things that are as much experiences as beings.

I like to anchor them to real-world myths. That's mostly an authorial choice, rather than something intrinsic to their character---

I think if I named them all in some made-up language of my own, called them all things like, I dunno, Alolitha or Eidumir, then they'd come across as cooler ... but also harder to get a handle on.

You'd have to be immersed in the setting to really get what they're about.

So I give most of them a byname that's more accessible. Something like Harpy, Hoop Snake, Lennan-Shee---whatever---so that you can tap into your memories or impressions of real-world mythology and the work of fantasists and cultural tropes and monster manuals from other games and the stories of your childhood and all of that.

Even still, they are vast things.

You might be forgiven, if I just named them without that prelude, in thinking that they seem vast to the rats because the rats are small. Thinking, perhaps, that you could fight off a Mystery like Jackalope, say, or Hippocampus ... if you were lucky, or had a gun ... whereas a rat might have a harder time.

The thing is, to walk in the realm of myth is to lose your grounding in the world. On the Far Roofs you can't rely on your ability to frame a story or a conflict through a rationalistic lens. The Mysteries are not physical creatures of a certain size, but rather the animating spirits of dramatic, life-changing experiences. Like the starring monster of a horror movie, or divinity that visits you in dreams, it's loosely possible to pay them off, or punch them out, or argue with them about Naruto, or whatever, but you can't really extrapolate out from that to resolve whatever underlying problem they can be.

Jackalope isn't a thing you shoot, or whatever:

It's a thing you encounter on dark nights, sometimes, and can't ever really prove you've seen. Maybe you don't even encounter it, just ... find its tracks.

It's not a conflict you can easily rewrite.

As for something like Harpy ... she is dead, the rats have killed her ... and even dead and disembodied your fate is very likely in her hands.

.

This kind of thing is why the rats are valid protagonists in this world:

In the face of the Mysteries, there's not much difference between the standings of a human and a rat. We are all such small, imperiled things.

.

Each of the Mysteries is tied to some internal state. Some mood or emotion or whatever. It's not clear how much that's true, and how much that's a game convention, and how much that's how the rats, who you're going to be getting most of your basic information from, understand them.

... but it's at least a little bit "all three."

This is, fundamentally, an authorial choice. The Far Roofs is an expressionist game. It's a game about emotion bleeding out into reality, about moods and experiences taking on physical or quasi-physical form in the world or narrative around us. So that's part of why I made the Mysteries like this.

The other part is, if you want to make up your own Mysteries, it helps a lot that you can start with an internal state.

Deciding to make up "Centaur" as a Mystery is kind of boring. I think.

Deciding to make a Mystery named Centaur that is on some level "about" mind-body duality or immersion in the body, or wisdom, or the post-exercise endorphin mood, or having ADHD ("I'm stuck on a horse that's going where it wants"), or whatever ... that's a bit more interesting.

Starting with a mood you want to talk about, I think, like ... Sorrow ... and figuring out what mythical entity best matches that (I'd go with Banshee), and then figuring out how its stories work from there:

I think that's the most interesting option of them all.

.

I do give some of them fancy made-up names, to be clear. I'm not opposed to having an Alolitha or Eidumir or whatever around! But that's not the default or primary approach.

.

In theory, the game expects you to make up most of the Mysteries you encounter.

In practice, there's a built-in campaign that features a bunch of them, so there are enough worked examples in the book that you might never have to come up with one from scratch:

there's solid summaries of about three dozen, plus

in-depth writeups of Goblin, Harpy, Hoop Snake, Unicorn, and four other Mysteries that map a bit less precisely to established myths.

.

There's a lot in those in-depth writeups, but my favorite parts are the pages that are just questions the GM can ask the players when that Mystery is at hand.

(Questions, sometimes statements, sometimes actions or power uses, but ... it's the questions that I love.)

I have spent the better part of a decade working on power sets for spiritual, mystical, and divine entities, and you can find some cool rules toys for the more purely mechanically minded here. I like how their game-mechanical writeups all turned out.

... but in both practice and theory, none of that is as cool to me as the list of asides and questions the GM can crib from when the Mystery is involved. Simple stuff like "the wind is rising" or "speak to me of solitude." More nuanced stuff like GM-as-Death playing a spade suit card and saying, "tell me of a nasty accident, and how you avoided or survived it." In every case, a bunch of options.

As a reader, I love the detailed mechanics more. As a reader, I don't really care that much about the actual how of how the Mysteries do things but I love that there is a how. It tickles an important part of my brain, deep down.

... but when I'm actually GMing, I love the lists of phenomena and questions so very much.

I am admittedly usually in a constant state of panic when GMing, so perhaps I get more value out of both the cue card function and the ability to hand off responsibility to the player than others would.

Perhaps.

.

If you're curious about those examples:

The wind rises when you're dealing with Harpy because a lot of her story is the story about how being on the Far Roofs is like falling, like flying, like losing the stable influence of the ground. So naturally you feel the air. You feel the motion. It arises. Naturally you become isolated, or at least experience intermittent solitude, because the ground ultimately mediates almost every social connection and interaction.

Maybe not love or skydiving teams, I guess.

When Death's presence is weighty in your life ... well, it's in your life, so you're probably not dead yet, but stuff happens! You nearly died!

I like that you don't have to think through that theory when playing with this stuff, but it's still all right there, implicit, presented in a couple of different forms.

That's what I have to say tonight!

.

From the Cutting Room Floor for this Post:

... there is still a part of my brain that loves it when you write up the power that lets the Christian God be three species of hypostasis and a single ousia, or whatever, and loves it even more when you can use the same power to combine three mechs.

I have not written up that specific power, though, to be clear, as I rarely put either Christianity or mecha in my games (albeit, see Invisible Mecha) ...

#the far roofs #jenna moran #ttrpgs #invisible mecha

[zalia]

Experiencing Destiny 1 as a D2 player

I picked up Destiny 1 in a sale recently despite being told a lot about its problems, and honestly I'm really enjoying playing it! I feel a bit like a time traveller visiting important places and events from the past.

I also have friends who played Destiny nearly from the beginning and it's fun to go back and go 'ooooh that's what they were talking about!'. I am also very aware that if I had started playing it without already being invested, I would be having considerably less fun. (Also, being fair, much of the fun is doubtless novelty after playing *mumbletymumble* hours of D2 over the past couple of years).

But it's genuinely been really interesting from a design and narrative perspective going back to it and seeing where the story began and how things have changed and I wanted to ramble about it. Full disclosure, I have played up through the first couple of missions of The Taken King. There are also things I can't comment on such as Crucible (because getting enough players for a match has not happened yet), events (no longer happening) etc. Also haven't managed to run a raid yet but hopefully will eventually!

I will start with the bad, to get it over with. A lot of stuff here will be well known and honestly it's probably less interesting than the good/thinky stuff.

The Bad

Oh boy I have maligned D2's New Light introduction so badly since it is miles ahead of D1 just by merit of actually having one! D1 gives you the opening run through the Cosmodrome where they tell you what buttons to use and then refuses to explain anything ever again. (This very definitely ties into it being a game I enjoy now but would probably not have enjoyed if I wasn't already invested)

You don't realise how many QoL improvements D2 has until you have to go to orbit and select a new destination every single time. Also no fast travel points. And no you cannot just look at a map of the place you're traversing. Fashion is difficult too.

Up until Taken King, I am not sure why they bothered hiring voice actors for anyone except Ghost, Elsie Bray, and maybe the Speaker. And I have no idea why they hired Bill Nighy for that part (I mean I do, it's because they wanted to use Big Names for marketing but still...). The Vanguard could easily be replaced with cardboard cutouts because they are basically uninvolved in anything until Taken King begins. I know they aren't involved in every seasonal plot now, but they do appear and develop.

The story and writing is... well, it makes an attempt to exist. It does not succeed until The Taken King. I went in knowing what happens in the story and I'm still not actually sure what happens in the story because it is basically someone's pre-first draft bullet points of a narrative. The only reason I knew I was starting different storylines is because the mission popup tells you which storyline it is. 'I don't have time to explain why I don't have time to explain' is a meme for a reason, but another bit which I think illustrates the point well is from House of Wolves. Petra tells you that Skolas has entered the Vault of Glass and this is bad so you need to stop him. It is never explained before then what the Vault of Glass is, what it does, why it would be bad for Skolas to be in there, or... anything. While D2 can be obtuse, and sometimes leaves important info in easily overlooked lore tabs (or in vaulted content), it at least tries to tell you what the story is. I feel like D1 actively resents that players do not read the bullet points and fill in everything the writers had in their heads. Another example is the Devil's Lair strike. it's the first one you take on in D1, and after doing it in D2, I was expecting backstory and build up. Nope, you just get sent in with nothing to really explain what is going on, who the House of Devils are, what a Servitor is... I know it had troubled development and the story got torn apart and remade very close to launch, and it really shows in the early stuff. It's a series of missions that were made and then had to be strung together with the thinnest of threads. It gets better in Taken King, but at times is still not great. You first encounter the Taken on Phobos, I think Ghost asks about what they are. I was expecting more discussion about them and what they are and how horrifying it is. But nope, they just exist now and we're all fine with that.

So. Much. Grinding. The pinnacle grind was annoying in D2, the grind to just get your light up in D1 is so much worse. You will be doing bounties desperately to try to get your rep up with the various groups just so you can actually get fragments of story and quests. You will be grinding just to level up your subclass and it takes ages.

The places you visit are very expansive - even the Cosmodrome is significantly larger - which is great when they're used well, but a lot of the time they feel very empty, there to make you play for longer to get between areas than because there is anything to do.

The Good

The game is gorgeous! I'm loving getting to see Venus and Mars and the Dreadnaught. They're beautiful environments. Everything feels very expansive which can be very cool (as above, it can also be less good). When used well, it feels like there are so many mysteries and secrets hidden in this abandoned world. There are hidden bunkers and spaces, huge Vex structures and ruined cities, tunnels burrowed beneath the Cosmodrome and the Taken King's dreadnaught. It's genuinely fun to explore (up to a point).

It does an excellent job of making you genuinely feel like it's post-apocalyptic and the existence of humanity is precarious. And you, the Guardian, are brand new and everything is trying to kill you. You don't have multiple gods stored in your vault in the form of guns! Everything feels more dangerous. For example, I think if D2 is your intro, you look back at the Great Disaster and the first Crota fireteam and go 'but how did that happen when I go onto the moon and take out ogres with a single punch? The biggest threat in the Abyss in Crota's End is falling into a pit or getting hit by a pendulum! Yeah no I get it now. In D1 you are much less powerful and it makes swarming thralls and normal enemies much more of a threat. Things feel dangerous in a way that D2 rarely manages. I'll talk about this a bit more in depth later.

By making your supers and abilities less powerful, they have weirdly made them more useful. In D2 I usually save mine for bosses since it feels like a waste to use them on normal enemies. In D1, it makes absolute sense to use your abilities basically as soon as you have them. You should absolutely use your Golden Gun on a normal Hive Knight or Fallen Vandal!

There's some great atmospheric touches. I love hearing the snippets of distorted music when I'm near a Rasputin bunker. Going into some of the ruined buildings on Mars or Venus where it's dark and suddenly seeing so many red Vex eyes staring back at you is chilling.

The opening mission of Taken King is fantastic. Genuinely creepy and the Taken in general in D1 feel much scarier and threatening than in D2.

All the different enemy factions are different colours and designs! I love that!

Weapons still go brrrrr in a very pleasing way. And getting new gear feels genuinely satisfying in a way that it rarely does in D2. I junk 99% of the armour and guns I get in D2, in D1 I end up being much more considering of whether something is useful. Legendary weapons and armour feel precious!

I keep picking up random Warmind weapons to turn into Banshee that I know lead to an exotic quest and I am enjoying the feeling of that being another Secret Thing I am discovering.

Honestly, I really like Banshee's weapon bounties - you get given a prototype weapon to test out and gather data by doing certain things (killing X number of a certain enemy etc.) and that gains you rep. And you can then order a legendary version of the weapon from him to be delivered the next Wednesday.

Thoughts/Observations

Knowing that the 'original' story was seemingly going to focus more on Rasputin, and an exo version of him getting stolen by the Hive makes the appearance of some of the Hive areas on the Moon make more sense. There's some bits that are high tech in a way that feels very at-odds with what we see of the Dreadnaught and, other Hive locations which lean much more towards the organic and magical.

Similarly, Rise of Iron feels a lot more hard sci-fi than much of what Destiny has become, and has such a huge Rasputin focus. I believe it was partially developed by an outside studio, so I do wonder if it was based, at least in part, on the 'original' story of Destiny, and was either too far into development, or the other studio just never got the memo about the change in tone.

Vaguely related to the above, but way more speculative, I wonder if Banshee was originally meant to be a Rasputin exo, then that story got shifted to Felwinter, but the seeds were used for the story of Banshee having been Clovis Bray.

Honestly while it's fun to think about, in general I find the obsession parts of the Destiny community have with 'the original story' (of the 'maybe they're finally going back to the original story!' type where the unspoken idea is that this was the perfect undiluted pure story that was 100% planned and set in stone) to be fundamentally misunderstanding how creating stories work. I can guarantee that even if that first story had been used, after 10 years of multiple writers etc. it would still be in a very different place than where the people who came up with it initially thought it would go. It would have evolved and changed and shifted, even if it was following the same vague plan. That's just what stories do.

Oh wow, suddenly all the Nightmare Hunts in Shadowkeep make way more sense! I get it now!

Actually I get a lot of references now XD

Oh wow Shaxx sounds so depressed. I guess this was before he started therapy.

So many identical caves...

Thoughts on Power Creep

D1 leans much more into the post-apocalyptic setting and it does an excellent job of making the existence of the Last City, humanity, and Guardians feel precarious. Everything seems more dangerous, more of a threat. You really are part of the last bastion of humanity. And there's a few ways this is done.

First, you are much less powerful. Yes, you have supers and grenades, but they do much less damage (and are much less flashy) than in D1. There has been a huge amount of power creep! You won't be one-shotting bosses, even normal Vanguard Strike bosses with golden gun easily.

Legendary weapons feel rare and special, and I am still using Blue weapons at times because sometimes I have to just to get the higher light level. I have reached level 40 and have only just got my first exotic armour pieces which I bought from Xur! They are FR0ST-EE5, an exotic I have never bothered with in D2, but in D1 the recharge for abilities when sprinting is genuinely handy. I don't have any exotic weapons at all yet!

It leads to a very different playstyle - I play much more carefully because I cannot just charge in with something like Osteo Striga and wipe out a room with a few shots. In D2 we have killed multiple gods, taken down an Empire, and forged alliances. In D1, we're just some random Guardian and the gameplay reflects this.

And I hate to say this, but I also kind of get the YouTube/Stream BNFs who complain about things not being hard enough. It's just... they're completely wrong about the reasons and the solutions.

They seem to think that what is needed is more enemies with higher health, and nerf Divinity because it makes it too easy, and everything should be designed to stop normal players being able to do it. And it... it doesn't work? Ghosts of the Deep was fun, but holy fuck the health bars on the enemies make it feel grindy and dragged out. Legend Avalon was a slog because there's Too Much - too many elements at the same time so it's just overwhelming instead of fun. (Starcrossed on legend is tough, but feels more enjoyable and managable. I'm looking forward to doing it again instead of dreading it).

More difficulty isn't what makes D1 feel harder, being weaker is what does this. I have no doubt that if I could put my D2 stuff against D1 enemies I would decimate them. But in D1 I am a lone Guardian with scavenged gear and yes, I have the Light and can be resurrected, and it gives me an edge vs normal humans, but not a crazy amount.

In D2 I have so many exotics and weapons that I can just throw them away. I can have intricately crafted builds to take on any enemies! I am basically one of the most powerful entities in the solar system.

And that's not something you can really scale back. They did it with Red War at the start of D2. Maybe they could do it as a result of Final Shape and do smaller stories focused on Earth and recovery and what you even do after your purpose for fighting for so long is gone (and I think there is value in those stories! I would love it personally). But uh... I don't think most people would actually be happy having everything nerfed on such a scale. Give up your 999,999 Celestial Nighthawk boss damage, for a Golden Gun that with a bit of luck might one-shot a yellowbar?

Give up a lot of creativity in terms of what you use and how you play, in exchange for a tougher game with way less choice for builds, but one that is potentially more atmospheric and in-keeping with the post-apocalypse and the dangers of the solar system?

I don't have an answer for that! And it's not even the most important thing. Gamer BNFs gonna always want to prove that they're better than everyone at pressing buttons, and forget that the majority of players are casuals. But it's been interesting playing a different type of difficulty, rather than the forced difficulty of insanely high HP and Too Many Things.

Power creep is a real issue in a lot of long-running media (just look at superhero movies, or many many monster of the week TV shows). You're in a position of feeling like you need to one-up yourself every time. Every new villain has to be the biggest and baddest, and so you have to become more and more powerful to combat that, which means the next villain has to be even bigger and badder.

With Destiny we've gone from a scrappy underdog, to a god-killer.

I'm reminded of Osiris talking about Saint in The Sundial lore.

'I watched him grow from neophyte to demi-god'.

King of fitting for us to have done the same as Saint's inspiration.

#destiny 2 #destiny 1 #destiny the game #meta #gaming #video games #my thoughts

[terranoctis]

I played Hades II a fair bit yesterday during my breaks and free time for Supergiant Games' technical test of the game. Part of me wants to keep playing today, but I got stuff to do and I do want to keep up the excitement for the early access. I wrote a rough, kind of unedited essay about it before I went to sleep last night though below, mostly for me to have record of my memories in written form. Some spoiler-y screenshots and random thoughts/analyses below if you want to read more. I mean it--there are spoilers and the most random long tangents because I like to analyze. (I do recommend playing first if you have a chance to)

First thing I'll say is that the game is pretty phenomenal and so damn fun. The experience reminds me of when I played Hades for the first time in their initial Early Access of the game years ago. Longtime Supergiant Games fan here (since Transistor release)! I remember running into a bug then and reporting it when I froze in-game, but I have not run into any noticeable bugs at all yet for Hades II. I've done some reports for minor bugs, but extremely minor ones that I actually feel bad for even reporting and adding to their list of messages to go through. Supergiant has their QA down, truly. I have so much respect for them and how they've developed the game. Darren Korb did an amazing job on the music again. It has that iconic Hades sound with the strings (that is not a guitar, I forget what it's called) while also being its own distinct soundtrack.

The 4th wall banter moments between Melinoë and Homer (who is revealed as narrator!) have been one of my favorite things about the story/narration execution. Her being cognizant of Homer does make it so there are rather funny moments, but also brings up the question of how that might shape the narrative later on. I'm so curious!

When I first started the game, I had a funny moment where I died almost instantly in the second room because I was testing out Melinoe's skillset and ran out of MP (?) and then got slapped because I wasn't actually doing damage when trying to use her bigger skills, heh. It did take me some time to get used to it, but Mel's skills and cast abilities are so much fun to use when utilized well. Her cast and its ability to hold your enemies for a time is one of the best upgrades to combat, in my opinion. For all I love the first Hades, I remember having to dash like crazy to escape exploding carts coming after me if I didn't have a good boon to mitigate or avoid that. With the cast for Melinoë, it'll change that to placing strategically some casts that can hold quick enemies or enemies that are very dangerous if they get close to you (wailers in this game are one such enemy). In terms of boons, Demeter's, Hestia's, and Apollo's have been some of my favorites. Aphrodite also has a phenomenal one for casts that will gather your enemies into your cast, making it an ideal combination with some devastating other boons that can easily damage groups of enemies all at once. Hephaestus also has a pretty fun one where I think he can explode in a certain proximity with your special or attack, I forget. I do wonder if they'll have to rebalance some of these boons because there are certain ones I can annihilate enemies with--but then again, maybe that is needed for later sections of the game.

The numerous references to the moon in the game are a nice nod to Melinoë's lore in Greek mythology and poetry too. Though she's more associated with being a goddess of ghosts (I find it a nice touch you can salute shades you meet in the Crossroads because of this) and nightmares (I don't think it's a coincidence Hypnos is the only other survivor of Hades' inner sanctum), Melinoë has at some point been referenced as a moon goddess as well of the underworld. Selene is the moon goddess and Artemis has also become known as a goddess of the moon in mythology in addition to being the goddess of the hunt. So that connection between the three and the friendship they share in the game is pretty cool in that regard (Selene calls you the "Silver Sisters.")

Having Artemis become your friend in Hades II, something akin to a friendly rivalry like Thanatos was to Zagreus, is such a fun story--and then you have Selene added into that mix as well. From the few runs I've done, I've gathered that Artemis and Hermes are the first of the Olympus gods who knew of Melinoë's existence in her youth as Hecate's pupil. She helped Hecate hide the truth of Melinoës survival (at least from the Olympus gods)--and when Melinoë was ready, it was only then that Artemis leaked through Apollo that Hades' daughter was coming to fight Chronos and had survived the fall of Hades. So the boons you get are because the twins, Artemis and Apollo, played a role in connecting you to Olympus for the fight against Chronos. There seems to be more in this background that I'm curious to learn about. Just from their banter, it's clear Artemis has spent much time with Melinoë and Selene in some form. I don't know if they have duo boons in this game (or boon-hex? Selene gives you a hex), but I'm curious to see what these two's duo boon(s) would be if they have them.

The game also does that thing the first game did so well of shifting the world as you progress and have changes in the relationships about you. Nemesis is one of the new characters in Hades II who doesn't seem to like you very much initially, but with your dialogue with Odysseus nearby, you get the sense that it wasn't always this way. When you gift her a nectar, Melinoë subtly starts calling her "Nem," and you can tell the two of them are very slowly mending whatever it is they have (Odysseus chuckles nearby probably seeing the progress). You also meet Doom Incarnate (Moros) and have to unlock having him at the Crossroads by invoking him, which is also pretty fun in terms of letting you slowly do more runs and experience the world more in order to gather enough "resources" to call him. It allows a natural progression of characterization and getting to know the people around Melinoë, in my opinion.

Dora's also one of my favorite character already. There's something so funny about Melinoë encouraging Dora as she tries to scare and haunt her as a proper ghost, but then also rather touching that she just accepts that Dora just likes to hang out in her room and not go out much. I love Arachne too, and how she's just chillin' like, I'm bored and alone and just spinning webs, so here Melinoë, have some clothes I made.

This game makes me love it as much as I loved the first one. In some ways, in terms of how they executed establishing background and connections between Melinoë and her companions (Odysseus' calls her a "little goddess" as a child! Hecate plays hide-and-go-seek with her!), I think they've started out much stronger than they did in the first game. And this one already starts with a sort of high-stakes situation from the get-go. Melinoë's entire family has been taken by Chronos and she grew up apart from them. The game does well of letting you step into the world even if you haven't played the first one--and playing on your affection for Hades, Persephone, and Zagreus if you did. After all, considering how hard you worked as Zagreus to bring back together that family in the first game, the second game logically comes back with a vengeance with Melinoë at the loss of such a family and a need for vengeance against Chronos for ruining it. The world feels familiar, yet the cast of characters are so different.

And the designs of all the new gods! And the new designs for the old gods! They're all extremely well-done. I've been a longtime fan of the artists for the characters and the environments. They've done stellar jobs on it again for this one, and there's more touches to icons and designs of the UI I like too. The dialogue log is one of my favorite things too, as someone who might miss a piece of dialogue here and there when I take off my headphones. The voice acting in this game is also a whole notch up from the previous game. Not to knock anyone from the first Hades, since I think they did a great job, but I do feel like the voices have been more professionally recorded this time around. Or something about it is a little more polished. Kudos to Supergiant for another game that's an A+ in my book thus far. Ahh!

I could keep going, but honestly, I think it's best to have people experience the game in Early Access. I mostly just wanted a record for myself to look back on for being a small part of Hades II's journey and share some of my excitement and the random analyses I had. It'll be fun for me to look back on how I read some things and how I felt when the finished version of the game comes out eventually.

#personal #hades 2 #hades ii #hades ii spoilers #readings and ramblings

[familyabolisher]

Hi! I just wanted to say your deep readings of TLT are so smart! I've been thinking about all the genderfuckery in Nona the Ninth for ages trying to peel apart the layers behind it (the tower princes especially) and I was wondering if you have any thoughts on it?

I do! I did a post that kind of gestured towards my broad thoughts on what Nona does with gender/how it develops the groundwork around gendered relations that Gideon and Harrow lay out a couple of weeks or so ago, but I doubt I’ll be able to find it so this is a good excuse for going into more detail with the sorts of ideas I’m bouncing around.

What I was trying to get at in my earlier post about sexual violence in Nona is that Nona represents a sea change in the narrative terms; that is, the ‘rules’ determining which parts of the whole we are allowed to see at any given time are very rapidly altered such that we're pulled away from this wholly internal imperial perspective into a space which carries its consequences. Where Gideon is about crafting a narrative around a set of sociocultural paradigms, and Harrow is about digging further into both the purpose and internal consequence of those paradigms, Nona is about absconding from the limitations that those paradigms impose. Something of an autopsy of the inner world of the imperial core has taken place in the previous two books; we are presented with the dictates, expectations, and purpose of the necromancer/cavalier subject positions, and the bedrock upon which those positions are built (ie. the particular logics of power and imperialist consolidation and sexual violence), such that (almost) everything we meet with in the first two books ultimately circles back to asserting a particular form of internal/diegetic normativity. The difference in Nona is that, outside of the space where this normativity is the governing social currency and also necessarily socially enforced, the way in which social modes are articulated now begins to fall away from the anchoring of internal imperial logics. 

What this has to do with gender is that the kind of centrifugal force determining how gender & sexuality alike are received within the empire is one of what we might term homonationalism in contemporary parlance, wherein queerness becomes reconstituted within a nationalist imaginary such that queer people willing to meet with the state on the state’s terms can be incorporated into the fold of such a national articulation. As a result, we see eg. butchness (or broader strokes of masculinity expressed by women) as something legible to us as readers who bring our contemporary understanding of lesbian gender formations as counter-hegemonic (or at least, non-normative) to the table (and are expected to do so – the text v much expects us to read Gideon as a butch or functionally equivalent, Cytherea as a femme, etc etc, and proceeds from the assumption that we have picked up on such a signification), but diegetically that masculinity is hegemonically articulable. In other words, the reason we never get a sense of Gideon registering an internal conflict between her traditionally masculine gender markers (name, appearance, relationships, just about everything that’s used in-text to signal her as a butch to the audience) and her being a (presumably cisgender) woman is because those two things are not textually in-conflict, as there exists a normative articulation of womanhood that easily accounts for them. She reads to us as ‘gender nonconforming’ (imperfect term but you get the idea), but in-universe very much does ‘conform’ to the articulation(s) of gender available to her; to call her diegetically gender nonconforming (or even diegetically butch) would be meaningless. This is largely down to the “no-homophobia” premise (which is, ofc, a deliberately homonationalist premise in itself), but gets interesting when we start to see that masculinity articulated through the paradigms of cavalierhood, a subject position constituted around the conditions necessary to sustain imperialism.

My point is—across Gideon and Harrow, everything we receive in relation to gender, contemporary gender nonconformity, allusions to transness (as with eg. the androgynous Canaan House priest, the they/them in Doctor Sex, quiet suggestions that transness is an extant concept at some level), etc., has been presented to us in a format that circles back to the normative state of gender in the Nine Houses, specifically to the purpose of demonstrating the relationship that the subject holds to the imperial body. Gideon as a butch/as a woman/as a cavalier are three states that each make sense of one another and are able to exist harmoniously, and that harmonious existence is designed to tell us something about the internal imperial condition. That Nona is the text which divests from that wholly internal perspective and takes us into the social world of the imperial periphery + operates on a logic external to that of the imperial core is, I think, the reason that gender felt a lot more … like it was being played around with, or like it held less of a cohesive loyalty to particular background strictures that were shaping how it appeared on the page. Even with characters whose gender bears a relationship to that same imperial logic (Tower Princes, ofc; also Paul, Pyrrha, Palamedes), their presence in the text is altered somewhat by the fact that the text is no longer putting itself to the purpose of, like, demonstrating those internal strictures. 

And like, this narrative slippage—from something tightly delineated from which deviation is restricted into something more animate and buoyant and malleable—isn't limited to gender at all, but is happening all over. I flagged in the linked post how part of Nona hinges on the breakdown of John's constructed 'utopia' (his word!) such that things which worked to sustain it in the past no longer hold water in the present. You could even look at, like, the shift in presentation of the Dramatis Personae between the three; from Gideon, which offered this very … precise account of names, titles, ranks, with little diegetic narrative bearing, to Harrow, which mimics the style of its predecessor but manages a level of storytelling and diegetic presence in eg. the substitution of Gideon for Ortus, the establishing of Anastasia/Samael as outliers, and Gideon's name being entirely crossed out, to Nona, where it's … a birthday party invite list being transcribed in-universe. Like, even these minute changes are demonstrative of a shift away from a hierarchy that must be dissected into something of a far more humane texture. These aren't articulations of new gendered hierarchies, they're just … particular gendered modes, playing out with relative reference to a multiplicity of active norms. 

It’s interesting that a lot of the characters who we meet as, like, hotspots of textual gender-weirdness in Nona are failstates for genders that are made legible through the condition of empire as John arranges it. I think it’s fair to read Pyrrha as a trans woman in the same way it’s fair to read Gideon as a butch (in that these are not terms/subjectivities which would make diegetic sense to either, but they are subjectivities that are signaled for the sake of the audience, with the expectation that each will be read with that subjectivity in mind), but Pyrrha is also at once both a ‘failed’ cavalier and a ‘failed’ Lyctor. (A secret third thing, if you will.) So where Gideon’s butchness as we received it in the first two books has an anchor in empire, Pyrrha’s is more like the failure of an imperial gender configuration to fully realise itself, and where her gender becomes interesting & textured is through the production of dissonance (diegetically, her as an incomplete/failed Lyctor and by extension a failed cavalier; to us, as a woman inhabiting a body that we know to have belonged to a man but which is v clearly now being considered hers.) Similarly, the Camilla-Palamedes bodyshare (and then Paul, though I really don’t have a confident reading of Paul yet considering how little time they’ve had in the narrative so I’m going to gloss over them for now) is simultaneously a reversal of the Lyctorhood process (in that the disembodied necromancer inhabits the living body of the cavalier) and its reification (in that it relies on a portion of the process of the Eightfold Word, and you might even make a case for its being another form of instrumentalising and potentially exploiting the body of the cavalier); on either end, it’s definitely not what’s supposed to have happened, and it reflects something oppositional to the ethos with which the original construction was imbued. 

Past that, like, on Lemuria itself we see a multiplicity of gendered/familial arrangements that we can presume emerge as a result of the multiplicity of colonised cultures living in close quarters with one another; like, that multiplicity makes for a narrative expansiveness that I don’t think the tightness and discursive constriction of the previous two books would have allowed for. 

& the Tower Princes, similarly, are like … articulations of gender within empire, yes, but they’re specifically an articulation that can only take place once the old order (ie. Lyctors) is near enough gone, and we receive them through an external observer (ie. Nona) such that moments like Ianthe’s first introduction when we slowly realise that we’re seeing her possessing Babs’ corpse become a lot more fun. There’s a layer of ambiguity going into how Nona receives gender—from her switching between they/he/she pronouns for Ianthe-in-Babs to her they/themming a lot of characters before their gender is made explicit in-narrative, ie. not having a heavy reliance on visual cues to determine gender at a glance to the application of traditionally masculine descriptors to women (Cam, Pash, and Corona each get described as ‘handsome’ at some point)—that was nowhere near as present in the other two (as I explained above: there’s no dissonance in Gideon’s gender, there’s no sense that she’s anything other than a woman and no sense that her form of womanhood has ever been anything other than completely normal and legible in the social world she occupies). I think the Tower Princes would have made sense in any of the three so far, but they just feel a lot more fun in Nona thrown in amidst a book where gender is, in general, being treated somewhat playfully—with a lot of plasticity and malleability that I appreciated & that feels incredibly close to contemporary lesbian gender articulations.

(I keep returning, for example, to the implication that Pyrrha is passing herself off as a man in at least some contexts on Lemuria and the circles of identification and shared experience that that manages to draw between trans women closeting themselves in particular contexts and so-termed ‘passing women’ ie. butches who passed(/continue to pass) themselves off as men for safety. Like, I think it’s fair to say we can read Pyrrha as a butch or similar, and that we can read her as a trans woman, and that particular dimension is subtle but v compelling to me.)

(It’s also interesting how much we see the fixities of the imperial core echoed in the periphery in new contexts that kind of seem to extricate those behaviours from the violence they denote. John playing with Barbies as a child becomes the basis for the creation of Alecto, which of course is the inciting action towards the establishment of his empire & the social paradigms that sustain it; Kevin, too, is a boy who plays with dolls. Ianthe & Kiriona are women referred to with masculinised titles—ie. the Tower Princes—and both Pash and the Angel are women referred to as ‘sir,’ or like, Corona takes on a similarly masculinised title in BOE; you could even add an extra layer here about Kiriona and Pash and Corona and Ianthe each being related as cousins/sisters respectively, idk. EVEN something about Kiriona and Pash as, like, nepo babies to John/Wake respectively, except that the nepotism in question garnered them like vastly different levels of social rank/social currency. I don’t know that I can develop this take all that far, but like—interesting? The sense that like, queerness, gendered ambiguities, whatever else, can and should have a presence outside of an allegiance to imperialism, maybe?)

Anyway, like! These are very scattered thoughts, but hopefully they're of some use. I don’t know that I have an overarching argument besides just like, the changes present in Nona have a lot to do with how Nona moves our perspective out of the imperial core for the first time in the series and that includes how gender functions in the narrative, but hopefully you can see the arguments I’m gesturing towards at least lmao

#ask #nona the ninth spoilers #also god sorry for how long i left this lmao scrolling back through my inbox to find this ask was so mortifying

[harrowharks-iliac-crest]

Lyctorhood

Worldbuilding/Lore

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You become a Lyctor by utilising the "Eightfold Word" and absorbing the soul of your cavalier. At least, that's what all the current and hopeful Lyctors thought before the revealing chapter at the end of Harrow the Ninth. There appears to be a way that you can gain Lyctoral power without killing cav or necro. Though so far, only John did this with Alecto, who is a special case. Anastasia almost managed, according to John, who admits to killing her cavalier. John is probably lying about some or all of this - maybe Anastasia got too close to doing it right, and he couldn't risk all his secrets being unveiled, so he killed Samael in order to save face. Maybe if he'd let Samael live, they would have attained perfect Lyctorhood.

I'm reasonably certain that you can also attain Lyctorhood by fusing souls in the body of the cavalier. A current example of this is Gideon the First, and Pyrrha, who mentioned Gideon "took more", and he is described as unusually buff for a necromancer. Could it be that they attained Lyctorhood "in reverse", using Pyrrha's body? Or is their body an unholy fusion of the two bodies? It's not made entirely clear - Pyrrha refers to it as "his body", which leans towards the second option, but her eyes are described as suiting the face more, which favours the first.

It's said that the cavalier part of the Lyctors have no sense of self, only fighting muscle memory. I highly doubt that this is even a little bit true. It's at least partially untrue - Pyrrha is an example, as is Gideon the Ninth. What about Naberius, then? Alfred and Cristabel? What about Alecto?

(Alecto is a special case, again, we'll get to her.)

I'm fully not ruling out the possibility that the cavs are all still in there, and while the necro parts are dipping into the river to hunt revenants and make wards against Resurrection Beasts, the cavaliers in the bodies could easily be plotting. The cavaliers could all be on Eden's side, for all we know - we don't know where Pyrrha's allegiance lies. And we Know that all Lyctors have had dealings with them at some point. (I'm still very much expecting that to include Ianthe and Harrow, btw.)

I think all those times when the souls of the necromancers were in the River, the cavaliers were busy plotting with each other in their necromancers bodies.

All that aside - in what we see as "normal" Lyctorhood, the only visible part of the cavalier inside the necromancer's body are the eyes. This leads me to believe that Lyctorhood isn't just a fusing of souls, but a fusing of brains.

Anatomically, the eyes are a part of the brain. We've seen people with golden yellow and with lilac eyes, unusual colours for eyes to be. Could be a result of genetic altering? But in Lyctors, the eyes change, and in Ianthe's case, keep fluidly changing - in Harrow and Gideon's case, and evidently in Gideon and Pyrrha's, the eyes are an indicator of which soul is "present", awake.

Narratively, souls and brains are inherently linked. Brains and minds are basically interchangeable. In order to kill something - a planet; a revenant - you have to kill its body, and you have to destroy the brain in the river. You can go into the River as a mind only, or take your body with you. Oh, speaking of...

>> Next: The River

#tlt liveblog #the locked tomb liveblog #tlt spoilers #the locked tomb #tlt #gideon the ninth #harrow the ninth #no nona the ninth spoilers please #tlt theories

[thydungeongal]

D&D is actually pretty good at what it does

So what can be done to make it better?

This is part five of my series of big silly posts about D&D, its mechanics, and how D&D best supports a style of play I like to call "Challenge Mode," and how it resists using it as a means to tell conventional narratives, i.e. "Story Mode."

Now, before I get to today's discussion: a lot of people already use D&D as simply a loose framework around which they tell stories and then ignore or bend the rules into the shape of the narrative they want. Those people are not the target audience for this post. The target audience of these posts are those people who already enjoy rules-mediated play and who wish to either hack D&D into a form where it better supports conventional narratives or to find games that already support conventional narratives.

Once again, I will be tagging this post as #the big damn post and you can find the previous four instalments below.

1. Terminologie

2. What is it that D&D actually do?

3. Misaligned Expectations

4. Challenge Mode isn't that scary really

Once again, let's go:

5. Hacking D&D into Shape

Another caveat before I start: I do think D&D is fine as is and that as written it does support challenge-based gameplay better than trying to use it to produce a conventional narrative. What I will be doing today is not presenting to you ready-made fixes to those structural issues of D&D that make it resist conventional narratives, but providing other games as examples for how these issues could be approached. If you like what you hear about these games consider these as either soft recommendations to maybe check out those games or as inspiration for your own hacks and house rules.

D&D's rules are concerned with soft simulation over narrative convention. I don't mean this in the Forge simulationist vs. narrativist sense because I don't find that model useful. Suffice to say that while D&D's systems are not realistic they at least try to gamify things as they are present in a real environment. A wet rock is harder to climb than a dry surface with plenty of handholds, because that's how it is. This emphasis combined with a famously swingy d20-based resolution system can often produce narratives that do not follow the pattern of rising action towards a climax.

What makes QuestWorlds principles easily adaptable to D&D is that it is also a d20-based system that uses target numbers that are expressed in increments of 5. What makes it somewhat alien to the way D&D's rules work is that QuestWorlds assumes that a single check may be used to overcome an entire obstacle, and that it is very much a let-it-ride system: there are no retries on failed checks, as a contest represents all of your attempts at overcoming a story obstacle. Hence, you probably wouldn't even roll to climb a sheer cliff: you might roll to see if you manage to climb the sheer cliff quickly enough to prevent the enemy guards from raising the alarm. A combat in QuestWorlds would be handled as an extended contest and would not necessarily result in death, but will potentially result in permanent consequences for the characters regardless of whether they win or lose (also: losing in a contest in QuestWorlds would not mean death necessarily). Resolving that with D&D's blow-by-blow combat system would obviously require hacking.

Enter QuestWorlds. Originally released under the name Hero Wars, later changed to HeroQuest to tie it better to the world of Glorantha and the RuneQuest RPG, and later changed once more to QuestWorlds as the copyright holders sold the HeroQuest trademark to Hasbro who were in the process of rereleasing the classic board game named HeroQuest (which kicks ass). QuestWorlds is a role-playing game designed by Robin D. Laws, and while it was originally tied very closely to Glorantha, the amazing fantasy world that kicks ass, QuestWorlds is these days billed as a universal system. However, whereas most universal systems like GURPS are very interested in some kind of simulation, QuestWorlds' system runs very much on story convention. In QuestWorlds, the GM first sets the difficulty of a given check or contest based on what would make the most narrative sense at the moment (if the heroes have been breezing through encounters and obstacles it might be time to introduce a truly difficult obstacle: if the heroes have been struggling it might be time to introduce an easy obstacle to release tension and get the story momentum going) and then describes the situation.

If any of that sounds interesting to you, the game has a free SRD that presents many of its basic principles, but I heartily recommend checking it out in full. I am not a 100% certain on QuestWorlds, but I know for a fact that all of the older versions released under the name HeroQuest include a method for altering resistance (or assigning DCs) on the fly based on the number of successes and failures in previous contests the group has accumulated, thus mechanically enforcing the ideas of rising action/tension, and release, which is what I think would be most adaptable to D&D. The main takeaway from QuestWorlds is thinking about obstacles in terms of what the story demands right now, and letting the story branch out from both failures and successes.

While QuestWorlds already addresses the lethality of combat in its own way, its method of combat resolution is so different that it isn't readily adaptable to D&D. Luckily, there are some very trad RPGs that have blow-by-blow combat in the style of D&D that address lethality in ways that respect story convention.

I'm going to talk about 7th Sea. As opposed to the very narrative-logic driven QuestWorlds, 7th Sea is a very traditional role-playing game albeit one with many nods towards genre emulation. It is a swashbuckling RPG, set in a fantasy world very much inspired by the Age of Sail, distinctly European in flavor, and meant to emulate various swashbuckling romances. Its genre emulation tools (Hero Points, Danger Pool) are resources that can be used by players to achieve improbably stunts or by the GM to introduce additional complications or adversity into the story. As such, Hero Points and Danger Pool also achieve some of what QuestWorlds' adaptable difficulty due to story demands does, but the lethality issue is the most interesting one. One of the GM's available uses for their Danger Pool is Murder, which means that a Villain can kill a Helpless Hero.

I spelled Villain, Helpless, and Hero with capitals because they are all game terms. A Villain isn't simply any old adversary: a palace guard that stands between the Heroes and their goal isn't a Villain. A Villain is a named NPC that opposes the Heroes. Now, Helpless is very much like Dying in D&D, so when you've taken too many wounds. The distinction should be obvious: a Helpless Hero isn't necessarily dying, but they have sustained so much damage that they are prone and can not act (unless they spend Hero Points). The only way to kill a Hero is to have a Villain present and for the GM to have enough points in their Danger Pool to Murder them.

But even then, a player whose character is present at the scene can immediately spend all of their Raises as well as a Hero Point to save their comrade. That character is now out of the scene, but also immune to any further attempts to Murder them in this scene.

The simplest way to adapt this rule into D&D is to simply make it so characters are by default not dying once they hit 0 HP, but simply helpless and stable. Characters may not even be unconscious, simply too weak to move. This also achieves the potential for losing without dying: a group that gets beaten to 0 HP gets taken captive or left to die.

Only once there is a named NPC villain on the scene can players die. Now, without introducing the Danger Pool into the mix simply having an NPC villain murder helpless PCs might feel unfair, so this is where I suggest you look for a hack or house rule that addresses that issue.

And finally, the resource management structure of D&D does little to help shape conventional narratives. This one is the trickiest because resource management is so innate to the structure of D&D and without resource management in some form you risk screwing over game balance. Taking one-hour rests between combats also feels detrimental to story momentum.

Well, there's a little lesser known RPG that once tried to address these things: Dungeons & Dragons, 4th edition.

Now, I'm going to be frank, D&D 4e didn't succeed at all it set out to do with these rules, but it at least tried. First of all, short rests in 4e last only ten minutes, which is much less of a chunk of the day than the hour proposed in 5e. Secondly, and this is the big one, 4e experimented with something called a Milestone. This is not the milestone from milestone leveling in 5e, but a special reward for every two encounters completed without a long rest in between.

The reward for a milestone is simple: an action point and an extra use of a magic item's daily power.

Action points are a very powerful tool in 4e because they can be used to literally gain an extra action. However, the sad truth is that even with all these benefits for completing multiple encounters back to back, the benefits of taking a long rest ultimately still outweigh the benefits of an action point and an extra use of a magic item's daily power. Especially since you couldn't use more than 1 action point per encounter, meaning that you were already not encouraged to hoard them any way.

But there is still something there: a mechanic that encourages players to dive headfirst into danger. The mechanical reward for going on without a rest should outweigh the benefits of a rest until narrative tension has been resolved. I feel looking at QuestWorlds in addition to 4e might not be a bad idea here.

Honorable mentions that I am not going to talk about in depth here:

Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay. Despite its reputation for lethality WFRP is actually less lethal at starting levels than most editions of D&D simply due to Fate points, a resource that is gained at character creation and that can be used to save a character from death and permanent injury. They are permanently expended but can be gained through divine intervention or for especially brave or heroic actions.

Break!! This action adventure RPG inspired by old video games is very much a D&D in its structure, being very much a challenge-based adventure game, but where it deviates from D&D is how it handles injury. At 0 hearts characters don't immediately die, but instead roll on an injury table. The number of times you have already been injured weighs the odds towards death, but the first time you fall to 0 hearts you simply won't die due to how the rolls are interpreted.

Fate family of games. Fate has both rules that model story convention above simulation as well as a conflict system that does not result in death as the only result from combat. Fate's rules are available for free so there is nothing stopping you from reading it. Not all of it is adaptable to D&D of course, but even beyond specific rules applications Fate has a lot to teach about different philosophies to running games. I highly recommend it to everyone regardless of what games you're running, just to broaden your perspective.

I am not sure if there's going to be a part six because I'm not sure how much more use people are going to get out of "hey, consider playing these games instead." As said, all of the games mentioned above are already soft recommendations from yours truly, but as a general rule you have nothing to lose from broadening your horizons and reading more games, even if you feel D&D is perfect for you as is.

#long post #the big damn post

[dustteller]

I just finished watching all the available episodes of The Apothecary Diaries, and I have to say that it surprised me!

The premise of an apothecary working for the emperor's consorts and solving medical mysteries is already a gun one, but the execution really elevated the concept past entertaining romcom to genuinely fantastic storytelling. It's not revolutionary, but it's certainly deeply endearing, and I really enjoyed how it found a balance between lighthearted comedy and acknowledging the awful aspects of sex work and being a woman/lower class in a world where neither are valued. It doesn't explore the darker side in detail, at least not so far, but it still does a fantastic job in making the horrible parts feel like a real part of the setting while still making the choice to focus on the women's joy even when faced with hard situations. I guess I just appreciate these things being openly discussed without immediately having it be a psychological story about dealing with trauma?

The characters are also soo good, and while most lack depth (its been nine episodes, so for a cast this big, that can be excused), usually their schtick is strong enough that it can easily carry their appearances. You also get the sense that while a lot of these characters do fill out comedic roles/archetypes, there's a lot more going on beneath the surface. Their schtick is fun, but its not all they have, its just there to help the audience familiarize themselves and bond with the charcaters while their entire personality is unearthed. The entire cast is genuinely absolutely delightful and reasonable and feel incredibly real while also being really funny.

The romance portion is also really really fantastic. Both Maomao and Jinshi are hilarious little freaks, and their dynamic is so fun to watch. Maomao is such a good take on the cold, blunt, genius character, who is socially challenged but very far from frigid. She's practical and logical while also keeping a very strong emotional core founded in empathy and genuine care for the people around her. Her obsession with poison is also pulling triple duty, as it 1) serves to break her cold facade and provides comic relief in the form of an ongoing gag, 2) gives the reader a strong understanding of her guiding motives/desires, and 3)gives her role as a medical investigator narrative justification. Of course she'd know what was used to poison someone, that's her whole thing! Jinshi himself is a counterpart to Maomao's colder tendencies, being very clingy and emotional. This show is not afraid of making him a pathetic little obsessed man, and it's all the better for him. Unlike other possesive and obsessed male leads, Jinshi manages to mostly stay away from the creep factor by being so uttely pathetic and cringe that he never really comes across as an actual threat. Couple that with him actually being very respectful of Maomao, only engaging in light flirting, and how he never actually wants to change her (most rapey MLs try to break the FL out of their feisty charcater or demean her for it while showing her how they're more powerful), and Jinshi makes for a very good love interest that also feels like a very safe comfortable person, which I feel matches the tone of the show very well. He's also as much of a freak as Maomao ("she wants to crush me like a bug <3333🥰🥰🥰), so they're very well matched there, too. He's such a petty loser, and that makes him a stronger character.

The story seems to be ramping up, and while I don't think it'll ever lose the lighthearted tone, I'm excited about how it already seems to promise a more in-depth exploration of the world it's set up the scaffolding for. For what it's worth, I also think the show has done a very good job at making the world feel expansive and mysterious, while also balancing that wholesomeness, which for a show centered around sex workers is quite the feat.

Anyways, long story short, I think the nine episodes that are out so far are really great, and the story thrives through how utterly endering it is. I am charmed by the world and the characters and what the plot has promised us, and while I don't expect it to revolutionize anime or whatever, it's still a masterclass in narrative shorthand and the act of balancing its heavy themes, especially when it comes to the characters themselves. There's so many of them that are so fun and memorable that I didn't mention, but who absolutely deserve their own posts, and that's only nine episoded into a comedy show, which I think goes to show how strong of a start this series has. Overall, I'd rate the show so far an 8/10, and I'm really excited to see what will come from the next 15 episodes.

#my thoughts #the apothecary diaries #maomao #jinshi

[nogacheloveka-blog]

The Bad Sanses somehow ended up in the Backrooms. №3

next 4

prev 2

This is the translation of the another post from Russian to English. I understand English, but it is very difficult for me to write in English, so I asked chat GPT to help me. I have corrected some parts, but there still may be mistakes.

Continuing the narrative) I understand that "Absolutely Normal Old Good Ikea" is an SCP Foundation object, not the backrooms, but its ambiance fits well within the laws of the latter, so let it be, I don't see anything wrong with that =) And Wow, I like this gradient effect for Error's patches

The group entered a hall of all sorts of goods behind one of the doors in the yellow corridors. A pleasant change of scenery. Due to Error's glitching, it became clear that this was indeed some other place. At first, there were wide rooms with a pile of soft toys and dishes, but the further they progressed, the more price tags and symbols appeared. It's IKEA. Clean of people and cluttered with strange words on the products. Well, a typical IKEA.

After half an hour of wandering, Horror said he could smell cooking. And indeed, following his nose, they arrived at the cafeteria. The explosion of joy from the change of Almond Water to meatballs and lingonberry sauce caused nausea and migraines for Nightmare, but nevertheless, due to their poor sleep and diet, even the minor injuries inflicted by the pack of monsters were healing poorly.

After a good lunch, they stopped for a long break to nap. It's a good thing they're Sanses and can fall asleep in the strangest places and positions. (Sanses = cats)

While resting, the lights suddenly went out. This worried those who weren't sleeping (Nightmare, Error, and Killer), but since nothing was happening, and Nightmare and Error can easily navigate in the dark, the concern quickly passed.

The period of calmness helped Error try to figure out why, wrapped in his threads, they moved together, not separately.

The threads are an extension of him, and by touching someone, they mark him as part of him too. As if he were something like a hydra - multiple minds, connected by one physical body.

This turned out to be quite useful, as many of the negative effects he saw in the code didn't work on several observers at the same time. Plus, their natural magic caused fatal errors in the operation of some scripts. Too bad. He would have thrown one target on legs into at least one of them.

Nightmare belongs to Jokublog Killer belongs to RahafWabas Dust belongs to Ask-DustTale Horror belongs to Sour-Apple-Studios Error belongs to CrayonQueen Cross belongs to JakeiArtwork

#bad sanses #cross sans #dust sans #error sans #horror sans #killer sans #nightmare sans #the backrooms #underverse #undertale au #au #bad guys in backrooms #bad sans gang #fanart #crossover #ikea #scp foundation #scp-3008

[ok-sims]

Good Omens 2 and playing with expectations

so I watched good omens for the first time in like 2020, had a blast but didnt really think about it again until s2 came out.

and now i realize that one of the things that caused me this obssession brain rot this time around is just how the whole season, but specially the ending, completely subverted my expectations, yet everything that happened is extremely coherent with season 1.

crowley has been asking aziraphale to run away with him for quite some time now. and aziraphale has been "choosing" heaven over him.

smaller things are very coherent too. crowley and taking part in nebula/planet/starmaking. aziraphale and forgiveness. crowley being "unforgivable". alpha centauri.

how can such a coherent finale surprise and smite me so much?

I guess part of it is the queerbait that many fandoms have been subjected to, historically (I was very much into sherlock back in 2014-2017, so you can see where I am coming from...)

but another part is how the final fifteen have a very different tone to the rest of the series. of course, there are some heavy moments in both seasons (the Golgotha being the main one), but those were taken from the biblical lore and not directed to aziraphale and crowley. while there is some drama between them in s1, it is never really serious .crowley was devastated when he thought aziraphale was dead, but we (the audience) knew he was fine. soon, they reunited and faced the end of the world together. there was the fight over holy water in the flashbacks, but we see then make up in the very next scene. so our expectations were set to having crowley and aziraphale have their conflits to be: silly and/or quickly resolved.

I guess that, along the fact that their feelings now have an undeniable romantic nuance confirmed to them, was my fall down the rabbit hole.

I did not expect the series to acknowledge so clearly, very much on screen, the romantic connection between them. before that, this was really heavy subtext, but the leap to text is still pretty uncommom in similar works. even more rare is having the characters kiss, because it leaves no room for subtext anymore. it changes the dinamic between the characters, as well as the perspective of the audience. tv often runs from this sort of change, because it is a risk, but I'm very glad the show took that risk and went with it without looking back.

the risk of changing the tone (even if just for the final fifteen) is also often avoided. "is this show not a comedy?" "isnt everything fine at the end?" so we were left with our expectations completly subverted in both aspects. and yet it all makes sense with everything good omens has showed us before. we were blindsided by the expectations that were firmly constructed for us, the audience, but the ending played out in consonance with the narrative built all through seasons 1 and 2. aziraphale creates situations just to have an excuse to see crowley. crowley is always coming to aziraphale's rescue, no matter what trouble this may give him in hell. btw, crowley could not care less for hell or heaven. "we can go off together, angel". "listen to yourself".

s1 and s2 are so very much in line. I'm glad good omens had the courage to take the leap and subvert everything we were expecting: be it subtext to remain subtext, or a comedy to have its conflit being easily resolved in time for the credits to roll in. and it did it all while making perfect sense for the narrative, with no last minute ill-planned plot twists. it's no wonder we haven't been normal about it since july: when was the last time you watched something like this?

#good omens #good omens 2 #crowley #anthony j crowley #aziraphale #ineffable husbands #ineffable divorce #ineffable idiots #good omens meta #good omens 2019 #good omens 2023 #aziracrow

[sylvies-chen]

alright nobody asked for it and yet somehow I feel like this fandom needs it so let’s put our thinking caps on and talk about the women of the rookie, flawed female relationships, and where exactly the rookie falls short in terms of representation:

so I should start with the positives and affirm that the rookie does show very well the systematic barriers that a lot of women face in the workplace, from professional perception to workplace advances to insubordination due to sexist thinking in a largely male dominated field. and all of this makes for really great and sadly relatable content for us viewers, because almost any woman with a pulse has had an experience with a shitty workplace environment and discrimination. these barriers and prejudices are as old as time and it’s naive to think they don’t exist, so to see our experiences validated and recognized, especially with three women of colour at the centre of the show, is rewarding and is part of what makes the rookie sooooo good.

at the same time, how the rookie deals with those barriers narratively can be troubling. there doesn’t always seem to be a sense that the environment, the attitudes, or the system will or should change, but rather that these women will learn how to adapt to the circumstances around them and overcome the odds. instead of the hurdles being pushed to the side, the woman molds herself into someone able to jump over them, which then undermines the idea that the systems should change at all. and this feels good to watch on a surface level— watching a woman like nyla harper literally hold her breath underwater and then point a gun at a criminal after having just given birth, or angela prove she’s right on every case, lucy winning the shooting champ or being top of the class for UC school, bailey being flawlessly trained in practically every useful skill— but it becomes a problem when it doesn’t leave enough room for error.

and the only thing that truly bothers me about this show is how it writes its women into a standard of perfection that is simply unrealistic. nyla, angela, lucy, and bailey all have moments where they might seem a little fashion-obsessed, hypersensitive, sassy, or demanding, but these moments are mostly exaggerated for comedic effect (in a way that is stereotypical in and of itself). however, at no point are these women ever WRONG. save for celina making honest mistakes as a rookie which could easily be pinned on nolan too, the women of the rookie have seldom if ever had to genuinely apologize to their male counterparts. their reactions to events and circumstances they face have been nothing but proportioned and appropriate, they never leave a loose end hanging, they don’t crack under pressure or lash out. things often, to me, feel very contained when it comes to the women of the rookie, and I can’t help but feel like the rookie is subscribing to this more neoliberal, performative version of feminism that— where true feminism says women should be equal to men even when they’re imperfect or unlikeable or flawed or in the wrong or make mistakes— turns around and says feminism means women can be just as strong as men if not stronger and watch this impeccable girlboss make zero mistakes in heels and eyeliner prove our point.

this is where fandom reaction also plays a part in things. there is a tendency in this fandom to protect lucy at all costs, but because of the slightly one dimensional way the show writes women, this protective instinct often ends up protecting lucy from ever being wrong or flawed. and not flawed as in she has baggage or pain, but in that she makes a rash decision or lashes out or judges someone too quickly or gets too cocky, which are all normal things we’ve all done at one point or another. the storyline with tim kind of illuminates this well, because the one storyline which focused on lucy having to deal with a genuine mistake and learning to move on from it professionally was turned into a haranguing on tim for allegedly not being cool with her going into uc and letting her make the mistake when she asked for hardass TO tim instead of helping her. so the storyline which could have been about how an overthinker like lucy finds a way to let go of the guilt of a mistake and show growth from a previous flaw becomes a storyline about how she actually didn’t do anything wrong, and the system is against her. then the standard of perfection is maintained in fandom and in canon, because no one will admit where lucy has shortcomings… so she just never has them.

case in point also goes with nyla and angela!! because they are pretty much always in the right and are allowed to be as short as they want with people because of it. and they’re not necessarily good with people all the time (at the very least this isn’t shown to be a strength of theirs) but that could have been developed as character flaws in need of developing and instead it wasn’t. and now people in the fandom insist that nyla and angela are mean, vindictive, and hateful towards lucy because they looked at her wrong— which, again, leaves them no margin for error. but also I honestly believe the reason that fan reactions were so strong was because we never see this women be anything but supportive to each other, and we never see them be anything but badass!! lucy can’t be in the wrong and they need to be understanding, there just isn’t any flexibility in our perspective. they don’t have enough moments of humility or shame or recklessness or weakness. and real equality comes when women who are messy and imperfect can easily access that kind of power and respect, not just women who try to remain flawless.

#abby goes bzzz! #the rookie #lucy chen #nyla harper #angela lopez #the rookie meta #abc the rookie #the rookie abc #melissa o'neil #alyssa diaz #mekia cox #meta #analysis

[mdhwrites]

In an answer to another question, you said that Amphibia acknowledges how change can be beneficial but also difficult and harmful, partly because the ‘quick’ and ‘forced’ change Andrias inflicts on Amphibia by trying to bend the world to his will is presented in a negative light. This is a very good point, but isn’t there a bit of a double standard when it comes to the forced change inflicted by the Guardian?

At journey’s end, the Guardian drops Anne back in Amphibia with three shards for a one-way trip home. It was nice of them to give her a ticket back to Earth…but it also forces Anne into a position where she has to leave a world she loved enough to give her life for, and potentially never see her found family again.

Now, it would be pretty hypocritical for Anne to talk a big deal about accepting that things change whether we like it or not in All In, only to turn around and pick a fight with the god of the multiverse out of a refusal to tolerate being separated from the Plantars. But the Guardian didn’t even consult Anne or ask her if she’d be okay with this before putting her in this position. They just…sent her back, left a little note saying “TTYL,” and didn’t even explain why they couldn’t give her a way back to Amphibia.

Sure, the Guardian knows how much damage was caused by creating the stones to see what mortals would do with unlimited power. Recreating the stones for Anne would have easily risked another disaster happening. But if the Guardian is truly all-powerful, surely they could have given the Calamity Trio a two-way portal that couldn’t be exploited by the wrong hands?

And in the deleted alternate ending, the Guardian does recreate the stones anyway when an old Anne forgets the deal she made and forces them to start their search for a replacement all over again. Now, this alternate ending isn’t canon, so it might not actually be what the Guardian would do, but again, the Guardian never explains why they’ve given one-time-use-only shards.

By all appearances, this is a quick and forced change to inflict on Anne, Sasha, and Marcy. You say the forced changes Andrias inflicts on Amphibia are portrayed as bad, but the narrative doesn’t even question the forced change brought about by the Guardian. Nobody raises so much as a word in condemnation of its actions. Not once does Anne even think to look up to the sky and ask ‘What gives? I sacrificed my life to save Amphibia, and you won’t even give me a two-way portal?’

I understand two-way transportation would have contradicted the message of accepting change and how love transcends distance. But throwing an entity who supposedly could, but won’t, give them a way back muddles things, in my opinion. A big part of Anne’s arc was learning to stand up for herself. Shouldn’t she have stood up to the arguably unfair hand she was dealt?

(Sorry for how long this ask was, I just have a lot of thoughts on this stuff and I get carried away rambling sometimes XD)

So for the sake of focus, I'm going to take all the stuff about the two way transportation and Anne supposedly being out of character for not arguing about the stones and put them to the side. One: because you yourself admit that approaches are flawed, Two: things get deleted for a reason. I could literally probably give you a clear, logical, narratively consistent reason why EVERY storyboard we're shown for TOH was changed or deleted, and Three: I could genuinely go into each topic on its own and so it would make this blog incredibly long.

Instead, I'm going to focus that while it wasn't my first point, I did continue for one more line about why Andrias' change upon the world was so destructive. I specifically point out that it is forcing the world to be something it is not and to bend it to his own will. It is selfish and uncaring of others and the show's themes of community always punishes selfishness.

Instead, the Guardians' final choice... Actually evokes the first sin in Amphibia's timeline, at least for the trio. The Guardian's logic is actually pretty easy to figure out after all. After what the girls did, especially Anne, they deserve a chance to go home, even if the Guardian is now done with allowing inter-dimensional travel, at least easily and by his intervention. So they're given shards to allow them to choose what form of change they want, what sacrifices they will make, but change HAS to happen either way. It is simply best for everyone, you yourself admitted this and a two way portal would not magically fix the issues with it, from the Guardian's perspective to keep the worlds separate..

It is not selfish. Instead, he is doing it for the best of the dimensional community... Just like Marcy's father was going to make them move likely for the sake of keeping his job or a promotion or any number of reasons that were likely motivated by trying to keep his family together or help them prosper. The change it would inflict on Marcy would not be of her own choosing, just as we cannot control the change those around us inflict upon us, but it wasn't done maliciously, nor was forced to be faster than the nature of the change required. There is no way to make a change like that smooth or consequence free. It was always going to hurt, much like when someone around you dies.

Instead of running though, the trio embrace it and head back home where they'll have to deal with reality the most. It's a stark contrast to, while still paralleling, the actions that began the show. A scared girl running from inevitable change and deciding a fantasy world was better than her actual home. For an ending, it's perfect.

So why not show the pain? Well... Because a story needs to end eventually. Amphibia in the end is extremely optimistic about good intentions, community and change so showing Anne or any of the trio cursing God himself for not giving them a fairytale ending makes literally no sense to include in the finale and just adds more time whining when that time could be better spent saying farewell to the characters and staying committed to the hopeful message that it has.

That's something I don't think a lot of people entirely get with stories. There are actually plenty of TOH scenes I've dug into HARD not because there isn't a logic to them or I couldn't explain to you why the characters are behaving the way they are or because it is literally written badly but because, you know... It needs to actually serve the story and the point of a scene. Even if it doesn't 100% adhere to pure logic, it needs to adhere to the thematic and emotional logics of the piece. Those are ALWAYS more important.

Otherwise, you get people bitching at SpyxFamily for the fact that trained spy Loid doesn't give a shit that his wife has literal superhuman capabilities. Logically, they're correct. But... The show IS a comedy. And 90% of the time, Yor's strength and skills are used comedically because that is the tone and purpose of whatever scene is going on. It adheres to the logic of what the show at least pretends to be. It's actually why I find myself questioning the serious portions of the show more. Not because they make less literal sense but because they make it so when the show shifts back into silly times with Anya at school, it is fucking JARRING.

And for Amphibia's ending, the point is how much good change has done these characters. Saying farewell and embracing how much both the characters and the audience have treasured the characters they've been with. There's a reason why the epilogue, and even the farewell before it, come across like a curtain call to a play as much as a natural scene. A final chance to say farewell before we probably never see them again. And, you know, because they commit to that instead of trying to prove they're so smart or address every potential thing someone might claim is illogical about the show mostly set in a frog world, it is able to genuinely say goodbye to those characters and stay emotionally and thematically consistent throughout.

Because those things, in 99% of stories, is WAY more important than being 'logically correct'. It's also why I don't really think there is a better version of Amphibia's ending. Period.

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#amphibia critical #Amphibia

[cycle-hit]

kotoko being a drop out/"on break" will never not be important to me. she says its just because theres "something she wanted to do" but i know its deeper than that girl. you dont go on break or drop out just because you abruptly decided you need to hunt down criminals with no deeper reason. did you grow tired of what you were being taught kotoko. did you realise that none of it would actually help the cause youre fighting for and become frustrated. did you realise what youre being taught actually just perpetuates the unfairness of the system.

like. i make fun of kotoko by saying "she'd probably beat the shit out of you if you said acab" but kotoko. WASNT trying to become a cop. she went to law school for at least two years instead of a police academy. its not like she wouldve been afraid of the direct confrontation that comes with policework either. she knew the justice system sucked shit and desperately wanted to change the world's beliefs, enough to the point she deliberately chose to go into law instead of becoming a part of the corrupted police force.

kotoko PLEASE just tell us your childhood trauma. PLEASE. I WANT TO KNOW WHY OUTSIDE OF MILGRAM YOU ONLY HUNTED CRIMINALS WHO ENDANGERED WOMEN OR CHILDREN. I WANT TO KNOW WHY YOU KNEW ENOUGH TO NOT GO INTO THE DOGSHIT POLICE SYSTEM WHEN YOUR BLACK AND WHITE BELIEFS AND BEHAVIOUR IN T2 COULDVE EASILY LED YOU TO THAT. WHAT DROVE YOU TO THE BOILING POINT OF "TAKING A BREAK" FROM EDUCATION.

"umm shes a cop in t2" yes but also no. she is very much meant to be reminiscent of a cop but we made her into that. she was desperate to see milgram (and in proxy, es) as being the ultimate determination of "right and wrong" or "good and evil" because she wanted to be told that what she did was right. so she could have a reason to keep going. and then that same system, us, essentially told her "yeah you were correct in beating up that guy bc he was evil" with our t1 innocent verdict with no further thought put into it. and then we went "yeah we judged these four prisoners as guilty" or. "evil" in the standards kotoko gave. and two of those prisoners were two people who kotoko questioned if they really belonged in milgram (mahiru and mikoto) and then. A CHILD.

we told her that a woman, a child, and a guy with a disorder were "evil". like. damn imagine trusting so fully in the narrative and then having it hit you in the face with a complete "yeah you know the "weak" you wanted to protect? these people fit all those criterias. but we judged them evil and also that it was cool to beat the shit out of that guy because the vast majority of innocent voters in trial 1 affirmed the absolute worst parts of her eagerness to fight crime. so yeah what we're saying is go beat the shit out of the people you once strived to protect. lol. lmao." like. damn. fuck.

and not es. btw. es didnt say that. es tells us multiple times that they didnt want this. the fuckign voices dude!! kotoko can literally HEAR why people thought she was innocent and the vast majority played fully into her "i want to be told i was right so i don't have to think about it anymore- think about myself anymore." in the absolute worst ways possible. kotoko wasnt a "cop" pre-milgram or in trial 1 as much as she is in trial 2 because that wasnt who she was. we made her into that.

anyways. srry. im terminally diseased about kotoko

#im not maintagging this bc imo i dont think i provide enough evidence for my points #but AAUUUUGGHHHH KOTOKO #IM SORRY “WE” MADE YOU INTO THIS. IM SORRY WE TOOK THE PART OF YOU SCREAMING OUT FOR HELP AND SILENCED IT. #little guy posting #also once more just a stream of my thoughts rather than an analysis i think

[nerves-nebula]

I know this might be kinda stupid but. do you have any music recs. specifically of the child abuse variety because I'd be very interested in that.

*sweats* ok so here's the thing- I have a playlist called "Abuse" and its full of music that is either explicitly about abuse, related to abuse thematically, or just has Abuse Vibes to me (some of which is likely inexplicable to other people)

im also kind of self conscious about my taste in music, cause sometimes it's like. i dunno. the steven universe soundtrack or a fnaf song i really like. and thats CRINGE! and really any genre of song can be about Child Abuse so it's like. idk if you'll like any of the things i recommend.

THAT BEING SAID, here's a selection i guess!! because I'm flattered you would even ask haha. a lot of these are pretty well known already tho so idk how helpful this will be. anyway this got hella long so. under the cut!

songs explicitly about or including themes of child abuse/having shit parents/having familial issues:

Guiltless by Dodie

Black by Okkervil River (narrative about a guys girlfriend telling him about her dad sexually abusing her. one of, if not the first, song i ever heard about CSA and it holds a special place in my heart)

The Mute by Radical Face

Ripple Effect by Scott Helman (kinda more about generational trauma & healing if im honest. i dont listen to it as much as the others on this list)

Poplar St by Glass Animals

Daddy Issues by The Neighborhood

Twin Sized Mattress by The Front Bottoms (classic i know)

The Family Jewels by Marina and the diamonds

Family Line by Conan Gray

Christmas Kids by ROAR (ok technically not about the kids but i find the subtext of how the kids are used in this abusive relationship horrific. also, it reminds me of my parents)

Drift Away - Steven Universe (OK I KNOW ITS NOT TECHNICALLY ABOUT THAT BUT TO ME IT'S ABOUT MY MOM. IT TRACKS TOO EXACTLY TO NOT INCLUDE HERE)

Other Abuse songs:

labour by Paris Paloma

This Hurts by Mindless Self Indulgence (my ex wife says i listen to this song to go joker mode and i hate that because i know she means Straight Joker and not Camp Joker but i do really like the song)

I'm your puppet by Gregory And The Hawk

Eric by Mitski (REAL GOOD)

Believe Me by James and the Shame (more about spiritual abuse sort of)

Girl Anachronism by The Dresden Dolls

Thermodynamic Lawyer esq GFD by Will Wood and the Tapeworms

We'll Never Have Sex by Leith Ross (less about abuse and more about, like, a healing relationship. still i think you can easily read into the alluded past abuse or sexual issues going here)

Fuck About It by Waterparks

Please, Please, Please, Let Me Get What I Want by The Smiths (this is just such an abused person song)

This Hurts by Mindless Self Indulgence (my ex wife says i listen to this song to go joker mode and i hate that because i know she means Straight Joker and not Camp Joker but i do really like the song)

Sex With A Ghost by Teddy Hyde

I Cant Handle Change by ROAR (obviously)

rotting by vivivivivi

rook by sardonica

My favorite "Abuse Vibe" songs (NOTE: some of these songs might be about abuse or toxic relationships but um. im not very smart or good at sorting so. they ended up here):

Take a Slice by Glass Animals (PLEASE LISTEN TO THIS ONE FUCK THE REST OF THIS LIST EXCEPT ANIMALS I LOVE THOSE TWO)

Animals by Stomach Book (SEE ABOVE)

Youth by Daughter

Duck Or Ape by ROAR

Million Dollar Gold Digger (idk what it is about this remix im not even a huge fan of either of the songs its mixing. this is the VIBES part of the rec list i don't have to explain myself)

I'll Be Good by Jaymes Young

Gooey by Glass Animals

Breaking Down by Florence & The Machine

Moby Dick by Jakey

Aurora Borealis by Lemon Demon (hard to justify but this song just brings such vivid "abused kid failing to be normal while hanging out with someone and further isolating themself" vibe. yes im projecting. leave me alone)

The Dismemberment Song by Blue Kid (sometimes you just wanna kill your parents)

I'M GONNA WIN by Rob Cantor (this one just feels like anger and bitterness and being suspicious of anyone who tries to help you. I listen to it when im fucking going through it. its also a bop but you prolly already know that, i think it's pretty popular? idk)

It's Alright by Mother Mother (stereotypical i know)

South Dakota by Jakey (honestly i dunno. i dont even know where south dakota is)

My Blood by Twenty One Pilots (for all you sibling havers out there)

My Play by AJR (my parents arent divorced but man i wish they were. Also, this just brings up very vivid memories for me trying to show my parents things and it is fucking crushing haha)

Best Of You by Foo Fighters (idk just more shit that reminds me of my parents)

The Woods by San Fermin (this one is just very "I should have died as a child"-core to me)

JUVY ft. Julia Bard by Nnamdi Ogbonnaya (this guy is weird and i didnt like his stuff at first but then... i came back... and now he holds a place in my heart)

Grape Gil by Nnamdi Ogbonaya (i think this is my favorite song of his. I nearly made an owl house animatic to it)

Obsession by OK GO

Better Than Me by The Brobecks

ARE WE STILL FRIENDS by Tyler The Creator

Dumb Dumb by Mazie (honestly this one just reminds me of thinking "i hate it here everyone is so dumb" and then maladaptive daydreaming for hours to escape the situation hah)

Stone Wall, Stone Fence by Gregory And The Hawk

Never Wanna Fall in Love With U by Nelward

Another New World by Punch Brothers (this one is such an explicit and straightforward narrative i really can't explain it other than like. the emotions.)

Julep by Punch Brothers (once again, the emotions)

Always Sayin' by The Littles Man Band

A NIGHT OUT ON EARTH by Waterparks

Consequences by Lovejoy

Scum by Lovejoy

SMELLS LIKE TEEN SECRETS by lil boodang (another hard to justify one. idk. it just feels like it ok. sue me)

anyway i'm sure there's more but thats just a quick selection from my Abuse playlist. and by quick i mean you better appreciate this cuz i put way more effort into this than i needed to.

#nnstuff #ask #music