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#zora are way too addicting
babygirlgojo · 1 year
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Yeah I got some faves too! I currently have 100+ husbands🤣 a lot of husbands for someone who only watched 50 animes😭 it includes tr, mha, black clover, jjk, bsd, knb and a lot more but imma list some of them; hanma and taiju from tr, dabi and hawks from mha, zora and fuegoleon from black clover, gojo and nanami from jjk, nikolai and dazai from bsd and kise from knb. I still have many many more, I keep track because I list them in my notes🤗. I’m also currently addicted to blue lock🤣 *Oliver getting jealous for how many I’ve listed*. I love you too Oli😚☺️
-💙
i've seen a lot abt Asta (hope i got the name correct) from black clover and it seems like a really interesting anime! Dabi !! Dabee sorry not sorry my fav is Bakugou- feral gremlin... but overtime i grew out of him ig, now mind empty and only Aiku thots. I'm just waiting for Toji to get animated in jjk- lowkey excited too- Honestly, gojo looked really different in vol 0 than in the normal anime and i have drafts saved on him that i have to finish and release (way past his b day too but we don't talk abt that) Dazai is just... idk how to explain like he is an on edge maniac but he is so lovable- personality kinda falls in line with upto some extent tbh
Kise! found someone who watched knb- cause i used to think that it wasn't a very popular anime - i was really excited to watch the movie with them as vorpal swords pretty sure he would call you Aocchi- i've just taken the whole team as my husbandos. like -
Oliver : I am the only one. But. Oliver : I am. the. only. one. Or should I remind you? (¬////¬)
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mollysfoundfamily · 3 years
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what would happen if the family went on a game show like family feud or maybe double dare?
They would instantly get their own reality tv show afterwards those people are trashy network tv gold.
but before that… (I’ve only see Family Feud so they’re be on family feud)
Sylive can’t help but chuckle his little cocky shit meter is through the rough!
He was actually the one who wanted to come one the show in the first place. The child has a serious game show addiction. and come on, a word and social physiology game? They might as well just hand him the grand prize now! With his extensive internal dictionary and knowledge of common thought patters theres not way he could possibly lose.
to bad he forgot to factor in that the show was called FAMILY fued into that equation.
Things got off to a not so good start when he and Gio got into the tiniest little tiff during the intro and Beefton ended up putting him in a choke hold while Gio gnawed at his arm on camera. So yah typical brother stuff.
Indus answered every single question with the word BARRIER!!! and somehow kept getting them all as the number one answer on the board
“What is another name for a dam?”
Indus: *DEEP INHALE*
Percy kept answering with the biggest fanciest words that no one has uttered since showing ankles was considered risky. She is by far the most useless member of the team.
Gio kept smashing the buzzer with his bat screaming all his answers into the mic and accidentally blew out one of their speakers! The rest of the Banzi Blasters where in the audience and went nuts with support every time it was his turn they brought noise makers and confetti guns which they definitely weren’t supposed to have In a live studio. They eventually had to be escorted out by security which resulted in a mini riot outside. Gio has never been so touched!
There where only 7 spots on the show and for everyone’s sake Zora was tired up in the back room. With a sign on the door that said “do not disturb even if it sounds like someone is trying to escape a Saw trap for your own sake do not disturb“
Before hand Gio and Mera kept trying to convince Molly to dumb down the other team because there is no way they have enough collective brain power to pull this off but she had a much better plan in mind…
Molly: h-hi I um just wanted to say thanks for having us I kinda wish my mom could have been here with us today but I know she’s always in my heart so she kinda is! So I’m gonna do my best and win this one for her!
*Everyone is crying now*
Gio: Ohh *sniff* y-your good bear trap!!
Ramsey already knew Steve Harvey because how could he not and at some point he‘s just done with all of …. that. and hands Ramsey the mic
“it’s your family you deal with it.”
Ramsey: *evil grin*
Ramsey: okay what’s something You would fine in your freezer?
*opponent hits the buzzer before Mera can*
Ramsey: your answer miss. Salamin?
other dude: Wha-hey I was there first!
Ramsey: ohhh I’m sorry I’m just trying to keep things fair see she gets extra time on account of short arm length!
dude and Mera: SHORT ARM LENGTH?!?!
Ramsey: Oh course I mean look at these stubby little things how do you expect her to reach that buzzer in time when she can’t even reach her alarm in the morning with these!
Mera- THAT WAS ONE- UGHHHH I’LL SHOW YOU HOW SHORT THESE ARMS ARE COM ER!! *tries to choke him but is too short to reach his neck.*
Ramsey: I rest my case
Mera: AAAAHHHHHHH-
Moving On!
Ramsey: Now let’s get to know these charming people some more what’s your name again miss?
Zora Theodora Salazar.
Ramsey: awww that’s actually kind of a pretty- WAIT WHAT!?!
*They where down a player with him hosting so Zora was released*
Zora: hiya Ramsey *twirls gun.*
Ramsey: GO TO COMMERCIAL GO TO COMMERCI-
Zora insist she doesn’t need to get up form her seat to answer. Instead she prefers to shoot to the buzzer from where she is! and we all know she doesn’t miss.
Between Molly’s sob story cuteness and Ramsey‘s very… unique style of game rigging, and Zora being… Zora They where in the lead and don’t even need the final person to person round to win but still send Sylive up anyways because this is what he really wanted to do!
But the entire time Sylvie had been slowly dying in a small puddle of shame and hadn’t even gotten to answer one question. All he wanted was to show off how smart he was and win it with brain power not emotional manipulation and cheating!! He has never felt more humiliated as he is right now. So much so that when it’s finally his turn his mouth can’t form the words his brain can’t think and he just falls face down on the ground in a blubbering gibberish pile.
This of course makes everyone feel super bad for crushing his smug game show dreams. So they decide to forfeit their other points and just leave it all on him and the final round.
With that he finds the strength to put himself back up…. he answers those questions like the dusty old encyclopedia he is in his heart.
But they still lose because they forfeited all their other points. But it’s okay showing off how smart he was was all he really wanted. The others pretend to be okay with losing the 10,000 and two new car grand prize for his sake.
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blackcloverdatabase · 2 years
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There’s Black Clover SD Chapters on YouTube! Here’s a Link and Summaries to Each!
Remember how I said there were chapters of Black Clover SD that were serialized in Saikyo Jump but were never released in any of its manga volumes? It turns out they were released as YouTube videos on Saikyo Jump’s channel! They don’t have any voice acting, but they have background music and sound effects, which I think is pretty neat!
There are five chapters of Black Clover SD on Saikyo Jump’s channel, each divided into three short videos. You can find the full playlist at -
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLZlMwo93TWBwJF0zQFNbl1LV785YkGkrC
Here’s a short description of what each chapter is about, without spoiling the ending of any of them.
Videos 1-3: Find it! The Search for the Golden Kabuto Beetle!
I summarized the preview for this chapter before here. In short, Asta and Noelle tag along with Zora in search of the rumored golden kabuto beetle. While searching for this beetle, they meet a girl whose late father was the one who spotted this beetle. However, many people from her village didn’t believe her father and called him a liar, while others started looking for the beetle for nefarious purposes. Thus, Asta’s group teams up with her to help her prove her father’s words and protect her and the beetle from the people going after the beetle for profit.
Videos 4-6: Video Magic Panic!
A lot of magic knights have started making YouTube videos (called Maho Tube in this universe, which translates to “Magic Tube”). Asta gets addicted to watching these, and then decides he’s going to try to become a YouTuber. Luckily for Asta, Magna, Charmy, Zora, and Gauche have already been making YouTube videos for a while, so Asta joins their group’s channel. I’ll make a post covering all the YouTube channels from this chapter later.
Videos 7-9: Jack the Ripper and the Unbreakable Bond!
I translated the preview from Saikyo Jump here. The preview ended when Asta and Noelle make it back to the hideout only to discover that a baby magical beast accidentally clung to Asta instead of its parents. Of course, the baby is scared of them, so Asta and Noelle put on magical animal ears that allow them to understand what the baby is telling them and turns them into furries. Now able to talk with this magic beast, Asta and Noelle work to return him to his parents. Along the way, they run into Captain Jack and his squadmates Sekke and En. The baby animal is initially terrified of Jack, but between Jack’s feral personality and his good instincts in providing care for baby beasts, the baby starts idolizing him.
Videos 10-12: Asta is the prince, and the prince is Asta!?
Asta, Noelle, and Yami are given a mission to escort the prince of a small ally country to the Wizard King. They soon discover that this prince, named Atsa, looks just like Asta! However, they also discover that this prince is a total scaredy-cat. At the Wizard King’s office, Atsa explains that his parents disappeared a month ago, and an evil prime minister used that opening to start ruling the country. As prince, Atsa should fight him and take his rightful place as king, but he's too weak, both physically and mentally. Thus, Asta and Atsa switch places. Disguised as the prince, Asta, along with Noelle and Finral, head to the kingdom to keep the prime minister at bay, though Asta has a hard time pretending to be a prince. Meanwhile, Atsa stays behind at the Black Bulls’ hideout, where he learns to become a stronger person both inside and out.
Videos 13-15: The Black Bulls’ Horrifying Hideout!
Note: Video #14 and #15 will likely come out sometime this November.
Finral sees a terrifying apparition in the hideout. After telling Asta and Noelle of his experience, Asta recalls that he has seen some weird stuff happen to him, too. Thus, they decide to investigate the hideout and get to the bottom of this haunting. They run into a lot of false alarms thanks to their squadmates though.
If any of those sound interesting to you, click the playlist and check it out! Maybe more views will mean we get more spin-off content in the future…
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ranger-kellyn · 3 years
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The gif reaction! 🤣
Okay, so in my AU (They were made for the BOTW AU, but I could make a version for AoC as well.) they have two kids. Rylo and Prestille. (One day when I can draw humans and kids I will draw them, but for now have a little description of how they look.) I wanted the tradition of every female being named Zelda to be broken because let's be honest, that's just weird..
I made their middle names references to "Wild" and "Silent" (As in the flower, silent princess.) So their full names are "Rylo Wilde Hyrule" and "Prestille Silant (Pronounced more like sil-lahnt.) Hyrule"
(I had to use the royal family's last name because Link doesn't have one. I should make one up sometime.).
Rylo is the oldest, they're twins but he was born first. He has his mom's eye color and his hair color is in between Link and Zelda's hair color.
Prestille has Link's eye color and her hair is a couple shades lighter than Link's.
I was thinking that, depending on how BOTW2 ends, they would have powers carried over like the (Most likely) Zonai magic.
Prestille would probably have the sealing power despite not being named after her mother. I feel like naming them the same name over and over isn't necessary and it just started as a rumor that the royal family listened to. (She probably won't be needing to use it in her lifetime, but at least it'd be carried over for any other future Zeldas.)
Rylo and Prestille are friends with some other OCs that I haven't mentioned (That's a whole other ask for another time.). I will say that they are Zoras though.
Link, Zelda, Rylo and Prestille live in Link's house in Hateno, that's where the twins were born.
One day they found a stray Hylian Retriever puppy and brought him to Link and Zelda. Zelda tried telling them that they can't keep a pet right now, they proceeded to use their own puppy eyes and even Link joined in because IT'S A PUPPY! Zelda eventually gave in and the kids got to name the puppy. Since they're kind of addicted to sweets, and the puppy was a little sweetheart they decided to name him Cupcakes. He wears a little red bowtie instead of a collar. He follows them everywhere.
Their favorite foods are (Like I said before.) sweets. So the fruitcake, monster cake, etc. Actual meals they like though are omelets, cooked meat, soup and apples. They LOVE apples. (Who doesn't stop to pick all of the apples in BOTW?) So they aren't as big of a glutton as Link, but if you place some food in front of them they will most likely eat it.
Link and Zelda have an adopted daughter too. There was an ambush in a Rito settlement (Built after BOTW and BOTW2) and when Link arrived there seemed to be no survivors. He found an egg (I mean, I assume they lay eggs like normal birds. They are bird people after all.) that seemed unscathed and took it back because there seemed to be nobody else around. Zelda tells him to bring it to Rito village, but before they could it started hatching and whoops, now they have a baby Rito. They name her Veena. She looks like a pileated woodpecker. (We had them back home and they are big and so cool! They're like little raptors flying around.)
So now they have three kids and a dog to look after.
Paya babysits them when Link and Zelda have to go do some important stuff. Either by now she has left the village before or they drop them off at Kakariko for her to look after them.
The kids love her and always comment about how pretty, nice and cool she is. Asking her if she also has magic (Again, depending on how BOTW2 ends, they could possibly have the Zonai magic.) because they've been told about the Sheikah and their magic a little bit. Luckily they don't cause too much trouble for Paya.
Their favorite foods that she makes them are pumpkin stew and vegetable curry. (Yes, surprisingly they DO like some veggies. In fact, they only really eat them if she makes the dish.)
They LOVE the horses that Link and Zelda have. They like brushing their hair and they even get to go riding on them once in a while (As long as Link or Zelda is riding on the horse with them so they don't fall.).
That's all I have so far, but that's still a lot. 😅
so sorry for the late response!! i went to bed early last night and went straight to the office today and i just. have barely had time to breathe today djfhldk (i swear every time i finish scanning one folder i return to my engineer's office to find two more in its place lmaO)
but!!!!! aaaaAAA!!!!!!! I love them so much!!! i absolutely agree that zelda would very likely break the "naming the firstborn daughter zelda" thing. because like. if ANY zelda would do that, it would be her. there's no way she would want to pass off that "curse" of a name to her own child. (THO also from what little i've seen people mention about TP Zelda, she might be willing to do the same as well but that's a whole different game i've never played lm a o)
they seem like such a lovely mix of both their parents i aDORE THEM!! and an adopted rito child i- I Am Emotional (AND what a pretty bird to be based on!!)
this is all just so lovely and sweet and i am! Experiencing An Emotion!!!! thank you so much for sharing with me!! i hope you draw them one day, bc you can dEF expect some fanart from me after you do :D
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tactical-shovel · 4 years
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OK ALRIGHT LET ME JUST TELL YOU HOW GREAT THE VILLAINS ARE IN THIS SHOW RIGHT HERE OFFICER!! WE EVEN GOT SOME STUNNING PARALLELISMS!!
First of all I love how in epithet erased the super power doesn’t make the person, you are not your power you are just your own you like Giovanni who also happen to coexist with his adorable rad epithet. Well it’s a little different with our two villain ladies who really got in a nasty relationship with their own epithet. First of all Mera. Mera’s life huge struggle with her epithet is pretty much evident, she lived in orrible pain and anguish, she was completely invalidated by it she was always overthrown by her destructive toxic parasitic power. She couldn’t either convive with herself in peace, having to keep living with her chronic pain to the point to inevitably get used to it to keep on going and either having much contact with others in fear of hurting them. Her power not only obstacled and wounded her continuously but even shaped her to who she ended up being. She grew stronger over loathing and spitting on her fragile nature and unfair situation and over wanting to take a redraft against life itself. Why would she even think at this point to let someone else just take away her power and her pain when that same pain was everything she has to herself to begin with at this point, no matter how much she suffered out of this enormous weakness and how much it always overtook her and sucked the life out of her it’s also her only strength and emblem of how much she fought to survive it. Mera sadly is her power and couldn’t give it away anymore even if she just so easily could! But Zora is no different in a way even if it could seems otherwise. Because her internal conflict over her epithet is also like, immense. Zora is... overbearing, aggressive, moody a bad one showing off the strongest personality ever. She is so full of herself so big she is all over the place her presence is absolutely overwhelming almost oppressing. It’s not exactly a facade more like a prepotent trait she got from being her own self and having the strongest over powered epithet we have ever seen yet. Zora is really one in a million and she is fully aware of that, infact her entire ideal is in a constant conflict with this enormous power of her. Yet no matter how much she continuously preaches about how she is against her power how much she stands by the fact that it’s just unfair to be so powerful as she is (and it really is) she also cannot stand at all for this ideal she keeps going about. Zora is also too inferior and small against her own power and she is greatly overtaken by it constantly Zora is totally drunk and addicted from her epithet. She cannot stop abusing of her power even continuously childishly playing with it and using it on herself for her own selfish benefits. She keeps being hypocrite about herself and failing at respecting the line of thinking she should stand for ending up being unfair just like her power, I would love to see more of her being repulsed by herself,, it’s like... super tasty.
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Fairy Tail (fandom), MarsFana (ship), Zora (character)
+ Gaara and Lee ( I can’t post the screenshot of the second ask for some reason, sorry!)
This is about this ask game! Reply under the cut because this is going to be long. 
Fairy Tail:
  Favorite character: Erza.  Least Favorite character: Oh boy. Zeref maybe? 5 Favorite ships (canon or non-canon): Jerza, Gruvia, elfgreen, Miraxus, and LyonxJuvia. (though I only really ship Jerza) Character I find most attractive: Lyon. Character I would marry: No one honeslty. Most of them are fun to be with but not really husband material.  Character I would be best friends with: I wouldn’t mind be friends with Lucy, I think we’d get along.  A random thought: This is just a vague question. I think Fairy Tail might be one of the best anime, not because it’s Good, but it really let every character develop, even “weak and useless” ones and I’m a sucker for the Friendship and reedemed villains tropes and unlike what most people think I like how it treated its female characters, they always had something to do and were equals to their male companions, they weren’t there just for healing and cheering on the main character.  An unpopular opinion: Natsu is overrated as heck in the fandom and so is NaLu, and they give too much importance to romance when romance was never the point of the show to begin with.  My Canon OTP: Jerza. My Non-canon OTP: I don’t really have one. I mention in other posts that I’m not much of a shipper.  Most Badass Character: Gajeel maybe. I’m also partial to Ultear’s Time Magic, too bad it didn’t effect living things so it wasn’t as badass as it could have been. Most Epic Villain: My fav villain was Cobra and his powers are very cool (he can tell what people think, damn it). Pairing I am not a fan of: Gajevy. Why is it even a thing? He nailed her to a tree and no one sees an issue with that.  Character I feel the writers screwed up (in one way or another): I’m rather happy with how the characters were handled, but I wish we got to know were Aquarius is (though I feel that’s gonna be explained in the sequel). Favourite Friendship: Saying that I like the Found Family that is the Fairy Tail guild would be too cliché, so I’m going with the Jellal-Ultear-Meredy guild, besides the relationship itself I like the concept behind it.  Character I most identify with: Lucy maybe? Not much but that’s the closest I got.  Character I wish I could be: Natsu. He’s always so carefree and he’s always so confident in what he is doing. 
MarsFana: 
When I started shipping them: Since pretty early on, since the Dungeon arc. My thoughts: It’s a really cute ship. I feel like I’d ship it a lot more if they’d come back and we got more content for them.  What makes me happy about them: That they finally have a shot at being together.  What makes me sad about them: That they aren’t together.  Things done in fanfic that annoys me: I don’t read fanfics so idk Things I look for in fanfic: As above. If I were to look for one though I’d look for a modern AU.  My wishlist: Getting more of them in canon or in these fillers. That’s really all I’m asking.  Who I’d be comfortable them ending up with, if not each other: No one? Generally, I’d like for them to find someone and be happy I guess, but there’s no character I’d ship them with as of now. My happily ever after for them: After fixing things in the DIamond Kingdom, they leave it and its politics and just see the world together. When they inevitably need to settle down, it would be nice it they became instructors for the army and helped in raising a new generation of magic knights -in the right way, of course. 
Zora: 
How I feel about this character: I don’t hate him and I don’t like him. He’s okay. Any/all the people I ship romantically with this character: Age difference aside, I’d ship him with Noelle and with Mereoleona. Now, it’s clear one of these two ships must be problematic from an age point of view but I’m not sure how old Zora actually is.  My favorite non-romantic relationship for this character: Even non romantically, I like his dynamics with Mereo. I also like his friendly banter with Asta. My unpopular opinion about this character: He could try to be less of a dick. One thing I wish would happen / had happened with this character in canon: Show us more BB-Zora bonding moments. For now, it doesn’t really feel like he’s part of the fam. Favorite friendship for this character: I don’t know what to reply to this one help. My crossover ship: Same as above. 
Rock Lee ( I assumed you intended it as two separate character and not as in GaaraxRock Lee. Sorry if you didn’t mean it like this. I always misunderstand when there’s two way to read something lol):
How I feel about this character: I really like him!! They did my boy so dirty, he deserved so much more screentime and so much better in general.  Any/all the people I ship romantically with this character: I’d say Sakura but since she picked a-hole Sasuke over him she really doesn’t deserve him. So I’ll go with TenTen. My favorite non-romantic relationship for this character: His father-son relationship with Gai. My unpopular opinion about this character: I don’t believe this is an unpopular opinion, but HE DESERVED BETTER. One thing I wish would happen / had happened with this character in canon: I just wish he had any plot relevance after the Chunin Exams, am I asking too much? Favorite friendship for this character: Neji. My crossover ship: Never considered this before, but I’ll go with Asta because they have so much in common (Workout addicts, no magic/no chakra, want to prove you can be strong even if you don’t have magic/chakra etc)
Gaara: How I feel about this character: I luv him. My favorite character in the series. Any/all the people I ship romantically with this character: There was a time I shipped him with Fu, but that was long ago and honestly I forgot some parts of Naruto shippuden (that’s why I’m currently rewatching it lol) and besides I only ever watched a filler episode, I think it was a weird Killer Bee’s dream, with the two of them together. My favorite non-romantic relationship for this character: The sibling bonds he manages to build with Kankuro e Temari. My unpopular opinion about this character: I love him but he was really a bad person in Naruto, doesn’t matter how bullied or alone you are, you can’t crush people for the funsies. I feel like not enough people think ths is true. Also, whose idea was it to let him lead an army when there are more skilled and experienced Kages? One thing I wish would happen / had happened with this character in canon: I lowkey wanted a canon ship for him. Possibly more screentime. Favorite friendship for this character: Naruto duh. My crossover ship: None really.
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sandytree1 · 5 years
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Really great analysis of Zelda Breath of the Wild. I love his thoughts on exploration and environmental storytelling.
Reduced focus on narrative due to simplistic story
Maximize freedom - early Ganon kills needs to be possible
Not capitalizing enough on the backstory other than the main quest
At first the Forgotten temple seems like just the kind we’re looking for, but once you come over the shrine the place feels tainted a little. Instead there could have been some kind of mural on the back wall which visually explained another version of the backstory. 
Zelda could have chimed in more often every time we found a relic of Hyrule’s history. Voice acting without interrupting the gameplay. 
The map itself was just a generic terrain overview 
Place names appeared only after they’ve been visited
Prevents lazy players and developers from relying on it too much
Destructive trend: entering an area causes its place name to appear in bottom left corner. 
If the temple of time didn’t say “Temple of Time” down here, how would you know it was the temple of time? First it was the piano theme. Link could only discover this was the temple of time by opening the Sheika slate map. There’s nothing visual cues, items in it or anything around that even suggests it was somehow related to time. In other words, it’s actually not a temple of time. It’s just a generic cathedral with a name attached. 
Ocarina of time had the same issue
Tons of details scattered around the world, big and small
You can tell these Bokoblins have been practicing their archery
Arrows in the entrance gate of Kakariko village hint at either a bored villager or something even more sinister 
These guys are delighted to have found some durians
Riju’s seal plushies wordlessly hint at her immaturity
Robbie’s lab used to be a lighthouse 
The three hinox holding the keys to this shrine couldn’t have possibly been alive when the Sheikah erected the hint tablet, but they also happen to live inside massive rib cages which were the actual giants referred to in the text. 
Many NPCs have quirks and moments to be discovered
Koko struggling to stay awake so she can protect her sister
But Hyrule suffers from the sense that there’s not much definitive history to be found
Next to Hateno village, there’s a dilapitated horseback archery course. A nearby house holds some arrows, which presumably would have been sold to customers. Even it’s location on the main road makes sense for a business. All these things paint a picture of better time when the owner would solicit passing travelers. Riding a horse through it while picking off a few neglected targets sells the post-apocalyptic setting because it tells a story and even allows the player to become a part of it in their own way. 
Not many ruins like this to come across though 
Most relics of the past just seemed like generic stone structures or burnt out houses. Makes sense that not EVERY place should be meaningful. But some places that should be aren’t. 
Lake Hylia’s bridge is bookended by two towers complete with arrow slits and battlements, but there’s no way for guards to enter them. There’s no doors, no interior, and thus no sense that this was ever actually in use. 
Lanayru Promenade, the Coliseum, and Akala Citadel give off the same hollow impression
Guardian husks are well utilized in a couple of places, most notably Fort Hateno. But they crop up a bit too often for their own good, robbing them of some of their importance. 
This might be an underlying problem in how all of these ruins ultimately stem from a single event, leaving you with little to learn from their downfall. 
Considering the focus on exploration, archaeology seems like a fitting inclusion. 
So some decorative artifacts could have still been lying around in a few places waiting to be sold off or be displayed in Link’s home. 
Nintendo is family friendly, so there’s a lack of human corpses in the overworld, although they could be used to great effect in storytelling. 
Flashbacks, voiceovers, murals, architecture, corpses, spirits, artifacts ... All these avenues for fleshing out the world remain largely underutilized. Probably because of the extra resouces it would take, but maybe also because the area text engendered some complacency about how severe this problem was. 
If discovery is a reward for exploration, then another detrimental trend is the reuse of Hyrule. 
You don’t need to be a Zelda expert to identify Death Mountain and figure out that’s probably where the Gorons are. Try to remember back to that first Ocarina of Time playthrough. Gorons were a new addition in that edition and entering Goron’s domain resulted in a bunch of discoveries about them: they can roll around, they eat rocks, they have a chieftain, they’re having troubles, and they have a unique culture to be experienced. 
These renditions of familiar faces are superb in their execution though.
Zora’s domain looks beautiful
Korok forest looks more lush than ever
The Rito bird nest is an inspired design
Fantasy races are often homogenized, but here each race has tons of variations within themselves. 
Completionism and sense of permanence
If not for the blood moon, clearing out enemy camps might have been: the satisfaction of taking back Hyrule. Presumably this isn’t possible for technical constrains and ensuring the world remains filled with combat encounters and resources no matter how long the players take to explore. If they felt that their actions had an impact on Hyrule, it might be enough to motivate them instead of more combat engagement, not less. 
Tarry town quest is weak. Essentially it involves talking to NPCs until you find the right one, gather rewards, then repeat times five. At least nice to have gathering wood to be the focus for once -- more purpose to the mechanic. Relaxing to be working towards building a town and the mundane way than usual for a Zelda title. But repeat too many times, it can feel like a slug. 
900 koroks to find -- to make sure an average players will stumble across a reasonable amount
Standout areas to appreciate even if they lack permanence or distinct rewards. 
Thai flow forests reduced visibility
Lost woods: entry puzzle, three well-rounded distinct side quests, a cave of ordeals, most lively rendition of a forest town yet
Yiga clan hideout has enforced stealth plus unique boss
Eventide island
All these places have something in common: they’re restrictive
Just look at the path to Zora’s domain: 
more restrictive gameplay can lead to more memorable outcomes
It rains here and its a mountainous region. So the most reasonable option for progresss is to follow the path, which makes the player run into several enemy encounters. Given the choice you might be the player who fights them just because, but if you’re the type to go around, placing them right here in your path makes them more of a threat, which encourages you to take them out. 
Nerf the paraglider a bit
Won’t work if Link can continue to effortlessly glide over so much terrain
Should function more like Skyward Sword where it was simply used to break falls. Would make a fast way to descend without being so easily abusable. 
Shield surfing would then be a more feasible way to cover distance by speeding down sllopes. 
Actually more satisfying to cut down trees to cross ravines
Their camouflage is too easy to notice. 
So such ambush tactics is just what this kind of open world needs. 
Others have similar tricks: Octorocks, Koblins, minor talus, Yiga clan members. 
At worst they feel like random encounters
Problem: easy to run away after they reveal themselves 
Lionels and mounted bokoblins are the only real cases where fleeing might result in death
Deku scrubs, Bodongos, and the likes are missing - but also present due to octorok vairants accomplishing much the same thing
(... TBC 32:33) 
Something addictive about trying to grab that perfect shot of wildlife (photographer) 
BOTW doesn’t have enough variation given its size
Eventide island: people value every equipment and food they can obtain
Players can make it harder for themselves by sticking to self-proposed rules
making an experience feel real (reality) vs making it simply look real (realism)
Pro mode simply hides the menu items ➡ more immerssive
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♡ THE BASICS ♡
➥legal name: King Ganondorf Dragmire ➥nickname/alias: Lord of Darkness, King of Darkness, Demon King, Prince of Darkness, Great King Ganondorf, The Great Ganondorf, Emperor of the Dark Realm, etc. ➥birthday: N/A have never specified ➥birthplace: Gerudo Desert ➥gender | species: Male | Human - Gerudo race ➥preferred pronouns: Him/His/He, somewhat dislikes excessive flourish such as His Imperial Majesty, but would prefer it be done correctly if it is done at all. ➥sexual orientation: Straight, mostly just wants the ability to have children and a partner he actually finds worthy ➥spoken languages: Old Hylian, Middle Hylian, Modern Hylian, Archaic Gerudo, Gerudo, Sheikah, several languages used by monsters, basics of Goron and Zora, and can read Goddess Script (headcanon name for the oldest language, the kind seen in Skyward Sword)
♡ A HISTORY LESSON ♡
➥education: personal tutors, trainers, books, self-taught, personal studies and expeditions, among many other sources. ➥occupation: King, conqueror, hunter, warrior, scholar, teacher, among many other duties ➥socioeconomic level growing up: His education, training, and hefty food needs received a great deal of priority, one might even call it comparable to Hyrule’s and in the way of physical improvement far more (and far more dangerous and hostile). A great deal of the Gerudo’s little wealth went into his growth but beyond that he was almost entirely cut off from any special privileges, even luxuries most children his age would have such as small toys. The one luxury he did manage to attain before growing up was a guitar on which he began to learn music. He would move to prefer instruments with keys such as pianos and organs, but he would continue to enjoy string instruments from then on. He also had a notebook in which he’d occasionally draw, but beyond those it was all dedicated to advancement. ➥living conditions growing up: Extremely spartan, in more ways than just the lack of luxury goods. Constant training, studying, and working at almost every waking moment. His room was barren and his life sparsely had anything other than the brutal training regiment. ➥criminal record: In his own country, none. In other nations, a great and long list.
♡ RELATIONSHIPS ♡
➥parents: Koume & Kotake (adoptive), birth mother deceased, trainers would sometimes take on some motherly role. ➥siblings: None by blood, by tradition he calls almost all Gerudo daughters or sisters but its more a title than a statement of relation, more meaning daughter of the Gerudo or sister of the Gerudo than his specifically. ➥relationship status: Single ➥significant other/s: None, may become verse-dependent... eventually. ➥children: None ➥best friend(s): None, prior to the end of OoT it would be Nabooru ➥pets: a horse, five white wolfos, and a kargarok, later in the Adult timeline he has the Helmaroc King. One could make the argument almost all the animalistic monsters in his army are his pets and would not be entirely mistaken, but those are the ones he personally tends to. ➥rivals: Zelda and Link ➥enemies: Fate, the Gods
♡ LET’S GET PHYSICAL ♡
➥character’s build: Massive, heavy, a towering wall three men across at 4′3″ inches from the edge of his shoulder to the other shoulder, each leg as thick as a normal man’s torso at the thigh. ➥height: 9′2″ ➥hair color: Bright, sunny orange fading steadily to a dark bloody crimson as it curls up at its fringes ➥eye color: Gold ➥body modifications: Some traditional tattoos on his back. ➥scars/birthmarks: Born with a mark on his forehead, would accumulate countless scars across his entire body over the millennia, eventually his chest would be almost naught but scar tissue. Some of the most notable include a massive lichtenberg figure climbing up his arm and over his shoulder down over the right shoulder plate ➥powers/abilities: A great many. From neigh invulnerability to teleportation to lightning like speed, creation of servants and revival of beasts, sight across countries and curses that kill gods, he is not to be trifled with. ➥restrictions:  Pride is a great limiter, as is a sense of honor. For more physical restrictions he is unable to track everything, even with all his power he is, to some degree, a human. His power comes from his soul, if his soul is weakened, his connection to the Triforce strained, his energy worn down, he can be banished and imprisoned or, in some cases, even killed. The Demon King is not an easy opponent to bring down and often requires multiple people to challenge. ➥physical or mental illnesses: N/A I give descriptions of what he thinks and how he thinks, never prescriptions. ➥addictions: N/A
♡ THE JUICY STUFF ♡
➥vice: lust / greed / gluttony / sloth / pride / envy / wrath ➥virtue: chastity / temperance / charity / diligence / forgiveness / humility / kindness ➥religion: Originally the Gerudo religion which I have yet to give a name for but is a worship of ancestors and what Hylians would call the Sand Goddess. He still mostly believes in the ancestors and spiritual aspects but long came to understand who were and weren’t gods and that he had disagreements with them. ➥alignment:  lawful / neutral / chaotic || good / neutral / evil NO. Bad system, divides morality into absolutes and ignores subtleties. Always hated that system except when I can manipulate it like having a lawful good character that goes to the extreme and slaughters people on suspicion. ➥hogwarts house: I have never cared about Harry Potter besides enjoying John Williams and being forced to watch it despite not liking it. ➥element: This is such a broad thing, what element system of belief? Like the fire/ice/earth/wind version? Fire I suppose. Does it include “Darkness” and what does darkness entail in this variant? Far too vague a question.
REPOST. DON’T REBLOG.
Tagged by: Stolen from @cartoonlonk Tagging: I dunno whoever feels like it and is reading this.
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sometipsygnostalgic · 6 years
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tipsy reviews: breath of the wild
So last month, early november, I went and got myself a Nintendo Switch. And for my new console I bought 3 games: MarioKart Deluxe, Super Mario: Odyssey, and The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild.
What I used it for mostly during this time period was.... Mariokart. It’s a fun and addictive little game while the two openworld games required a lot of effort with no linear path, so I wasn’t looking forward to a lot of busywork.
To my pleasant surprise, when I finally sat down to complete Odyssey, I discovered that the game was filled with many little secrets. It would reward you for experimenting, for putting objects in funny places, and solving its puzzles. The addictive gameplay helped me steamroll through the game to its logical conclusion, and then beyond.
Breath of the Wild, fortunately, follows a similar path. Gone are the many hours of tutorials, talking swords, and narrow Hyrule paths. Now we find the world not only open, where you’re free to move in any direction  and climb any mountain, but filled with many secrets and challenges to spend your days working through!  It’s not fair to say that Breath of the Wild is without its challenges though; the open-world formula starts out with many, and though Zelda subverts the issues plagueing more well-known users like Assassin’s Creed, it does fall into some unique pitfalls. 
In this post I will discuss the different areas of this game - story, gameplay, puzzle elements - and see how they compare.
Environment: I felt like it was most important to talk about this aspect first, because the world of Hyrule is so significant to the potential and failures of every other part of the game. Everything to do with story, puzzles, difficulty, it’s all related to the open world, what’s in it, and how you navigate.   Breath of the Wild kinda looks like a barren, empty game when you look at its open world face-value. There’s very few cities, most of the place is ruins littered with some enemy camps and lots of caves. Not a lot of history at all! It reminds me of the empty Hyrule Fields in Ocarina of Time. And there are no sprawling dungeons like in its predecessors. The closest to this is the shrines, short mini-dungeons which were created by the Sheikah predecessors to help the Hero destroy Ganon.  But what Breath of the Wild does RIGHT is utilize this seemingly empty open world to its full advantage. It’s filled with a variety of animals and critters to use for cooking, challenging opponents who you can loot, korok seeds which you need to solve a riddle to collect (but which are far less irritating than riddler trophies), hidden treasure for you to discover... And perhaps the most immersive tactic is how we are able to take damage from the environment - you can freeze to death on a mountain, or dehydrate in the desert, or roast in the Goron mine. All of this, combined with the many, MANY shrines and seeds and their corresponding puzzles, makes this world feel... alive. Like people and animals actually live here.   And the most adrenaline-bursting part of all is entering a Divine Beast for the first time and realising you can manipulate the environment using the map. THIS is what makes a great adventure game. Now, it’s still a fair departure from the classic dungeon crawlers or the previous three entries, but I think Breath of the Wild pulled off its world very impressively. Much more fun to explore than London or North America. It is only for an issue I’ll discuss later on that I have to rank it as low as 8/10. 
Story: BotW does make an interesting departure once again from before, though in some ways I feel this had lost potential. The story is COMPLETELY optional - as soon as you leave the great plateau, you can fight Ganon and call it a day. But if you choose to dig deeper into the memories of Link, you’ll discover that you were ALREADY the Chosen Hero, sealed deep into the Resurrection Shrine by instruction of Zelda. You were identified early because of your upbringing as the son of a Royal Knight, and that’s about it for Link’s known pre-mastersword history. It’s unknown what adventures you went on before. Now you and four Champions were chosen to prepare to fight Ganon. The backstory between you and Zelda is.... mixed, kind of depressing actually; she resented you for a long time because you were so good at your job as the Hero of the Sword while she was deeply insecure over her inability to activate her powers and how her father kept putting pressure on her to constantly pray when she just wanted to become a huge nerd, helping out in other ways.  It ends with Ganon unleashing its power across Hyrule, the Champions being killed and trapped in the Divine Beasts they were going to use against him, and Link nearly dying protecting Zelda who  saves him last second with an awesome Light that Burns the Sky.   After watching 25-ish cutscenes, I... was quite disappointed, because they kept rehashing stuff I already knew; Zelda was insecure over her lack of power, she disliked Link but grew to respect him, and the other Champions are.... well, Mipha’s the only one who has any real history with Link. Revali sees him as a rival, Urubosa looks after Zelda, and Daruk is very hardy and enthusiastic. It’s really cool meeting these characters in the Divine Beasts but you don’t learn much more, and I heard the Champion’s Ballad DLC is the same...  Ganon himself isn’t a chilling villain like before, moreso an intimidating threat. He’s not nearly as scary as the Twilight Beasts or any named Ocarina of Time boss, and he takes very little skill to defeat, even compared to some of his Blights (Thunderblight Ganon took me multiple attempts with its fast hard-hitting moves). In fact I think I’d be able to sweep him easily without saving any Champions. The worst part of all though has to be how it just CUTS YOU OFF.  You complete the game? Yeah, that’s kind of it. There isn’t a “post-game”, it just lets you load your past save. That’s what pisses me off the most. I wanted to speak to Zelda about all those memories I found! Oh yeah the game is also sneaky and won’t load the secret ending cutscene if you didn’t report to Impa and recover the hidden memory after unlocking the Hyrule Tower memory, so good luck doing what I did and getting that one last just before the final boss.  All in all, 5 out of 10. It did its job, but was nothing special whatsoever, lots of wasted potential.  
Gameplay: When you first start playing Breath o the Wild it is extremely punishing. Your weapons  are shit, your damage is shit, you WILL get oneshot many times. But when you pump more hours into it, you gain lots of momentum; since there are so many areas of gameplay, so many ways to approach a certain situation, it becomes inevitable that you’ll figure out a good solution to any fight.  This is a double-edged blade; while it’s lots of fun to kill enemies inventively, the difficulty curb at the BEGINNING of the game is so steep that you’ll find it becoming stupidly easy later on, when you’re more overpowered and you’ve mastered the enemy attack patterns. Sure, they may turn black or silver and do hella damage, but what’s a god to a player who knows how to exploit their AI?  And you’ll be swimming in so many powerful weapons that you’ll abandon them all after a certain point, cos there’s nothing worse to trade out.   The biggest victims of the difficulty scaling have to be the Ganon bosses, all of them, which DO NOT gain health or difficulty at any point. It’s like fighting Champion Wallace’s level 40 watertypes with a level 70 rayquaza, which is what I did in my Emerald playthrough...  This means that the greatest elements of Breath of the Wild’s gameplay are those moments where your tools aren’t quite enough, where you have to prepare and plan. Maybe there’s too many moblins to take on at once? Maybe you’re playing the Island Trial and you have no decent weapons? Maybe you’re trying to complete the Zora divine beast quest and you come face-to-face with the Lynel on the summit? Maybe there’s multiple Guardians aiming at your direction and you have no Ancient Arrows? In all these situations I’ve had to be inventive, sneak around and attack on the sly, or avoid combat altogether.  But what’s even more reliable is the puzzles. You’re not handheld, you’re not told how to do anything outside of the very basic controls - every single puzzle you solve is completely your own accomplishment, your own skills, and sometimes it’s not set out clearly at all so you have to be creative. Nobody TOLD you to put that one rock in the gap between all the others, but you did it, and now you have a rock! And nobody TOLD you how to make a recipe that heals all your hearts and gives you 3 to spare, but your experimentation crafted a recipe.   THIS, in my opinion, is what makes a definitive gaming experience - respect for the player. 9 out of 10 too many royal swords.
Music - No videogame review is complete without an OST ranking. Now.... BotW tried to play a certain role with its music, having it in the background colouring your experiences rather than defining them. This is quite appreciated because it would have been distracting to have booming enemy music for an opponent I knock out in 2 seconds (cough OOT cough). However, outside of its main theme, Breath of the Wild lacks almost all the signature Zelda tracks that have been defining for the series. I’d say that the absence of this booming music makes it.... not feel much like a Zelda at all. It better reflects the open and partially destroyed world, at the expense of recogition. That’s not to say it’s without gems though.. there are very few things more chilling than the music that plays in ganon-possessed guardian containing the tormented soul of your dead zora girlfriend. 7 out of 10, servicable and decent. 
Conclusion - Breath of the Wild is a smashing game, which deserves the praise it gets, not because it’s an open world Zelda but because it REDEFINES the possibilities of an open world game. Instead of littering itself with countless copy-paste fortresses, it offers puzzles and challenges that show respect for the player’s adaptability, encouraging you to explore all the different options its mechanics offer. Instead of making you choke through an insufferable and possibly frustrating campaign to unlock new areas, it gives you the options and tools to go anywhere you like as long as you prepare. It says much when even this game’s biggest weaknesses can be played for strengths. And oh man, what a solid introduction to the Nintendo Switch generation. 
The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild: 8 out of 10. 
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mozgoderina · 6 years
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Stranger in America (Art in America) / Glenn Ligon
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AS A YOUNG BOY, Glenn Ligon would get on the subway with his older brother, traveling from the South Bronx to Manhattan to go to school. On the way to the train, he walked through a burned-out neighborhood in which the only intact structure was a police station, mordantly nicknamed “Little House on the Prairie.” Emerging onto the leafy streets of the Upper West Side, he headed to the progressive Walden School, which Andrew Goodman, one of three civil-rights workers slain in Mississippi during the “Freedom Summer” of 1964, had attended some years earlier.
In 1972, when Ligon was 12, one Walden School teacher wrote in an end-of-year report, “Glenn has a good knowledge of slavery and black history, but finds standard social studies uninteresting and as yet has developed no social conscience. He tends to be politically apathetic about being black, which is a shame.” That report, remade in screenprint on handmade paper as one of eight End of Year Reports (2003), presently hangs on the walls of New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art in “Glenn Ligon: America,” the artist’s midcareer retrospective, organized by Whitney curator Scott Rothkopf. Now 51, Ligon lives in Manhattan’s Tribeca and works in a spare, airy loft near the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn, down the hall from his longtime friends, the artists Paul Ramirez Jonas and Byron Kim.
Ligon’s relationship with the Whitney is longstanding. He graduated from the museum’s Independent Study Program in 1985, three years after he received a BA in art from Wesleyan University. The Whitney owns the largest collection anywhere of Ligon’s works, and it was the first museum to show him. He has appeared in two Whitney Biennials, in 1991 and 1993, as well as, in 1994, the museum’s landmark “Black Male” show. In the context of this retrospective, which demonstrates Ligon’s sustained and serious engagement with race-related issues over 25 years, that almost 40-year-old report strikes an ironic chord. Was Ligon just not acting militant or poor enough for the certainly well-intentioned teacher who was evaluating him?
Ligon’s contribution to the 1993 biennial, for which he won his first renown, was Notes on the Margin of the Black Book (1991–93), a dismantled and wall-mounted copy of Robert Mapplethorpe’s notorious tome [1], its 91 images of naked black men interspersed with quotes that Ligon gathered from scholars, writers, the subjects of the photographs and men in bars. The homoerotic Mapplethorpe images helped fuel the Culture Wars of the early ’90s. Ligon himself is gay, yet he most often discusses his work in the context of being African-American. He told French critic Marie de Brugerolle in 1995 that he found the images “very disturbing” when he first saw them.
I asked myself if those photographs were racist. I realized then that the question was too limiting, that it was more complicated. Can we say that Mapplethorpe’s work is documentary or fetishistic? Maybe, but at the same time he put black men into a tradition of portraiture to which they’ve never had access before.2
Ligon’s subtlety in staking a racial position with Notes on the Margin of the Black Book is a bold reframing of Mapplethorpe’s own defiance of norms. Yet the project fascinates, in part, because its complexities allow it to rise above a simple exercise in identity-oriented art. Today, the quotes Ligon gathered are like the voices at a raucous neighborhood meeting. “Color is not a human or personal reality; it is a political reality,” says James Baldwin. “I felt like a freak,” says Ken Moody, one of Mapplethorpe’s models. “People who look at these pictures become addicts and spread AIDS,” says someone named Rita Burke.
Almost all of Ligon’s paintings, prints and videos (the last medium is not included here, though a recent video is on display at New York’s Museum of Modern Art throughout the run of the Whitney show) are based on appropriation of some sort—mostly of text, but (as with Mapplethorpe) often images as well. A kind of polyphony is the result, even when Ligon is quoting just a single author. One of the most mysterious and magnetic qualities of his work is its capacity to be endlessly reread, its interpretations changing continually over time. This is very different from merely reflecting the era in which it was made. The voices in Ligon’s work sustain disagreement and argue gracefully among themselves. They make a virtue of uncertainty.
AMONG THE MOST POWERFUL pieces in the exhibition are three large paintings from the “Stranger” series, begun in 1996 and accounting for nearly 200 works produced over 13 years. The series appropriates excerpts from James Baldwin’s 1953 essay “Stranger in the Village.” Ligon has used texts by Zora Neale Hurston and Gertrude Stein, the critic Richard Dyer and the comedian Richard Pryor. Yet Baldwin has particular resonance for Ligon, not only because he was also black and gay but because he emphasized the role of language in creating the “legends” (a Baldwin term) that we make of one another. “Stranger in the Village,” for instance, relates the author’s experience in a small Swiss hamlet, where children, struck by his novelty, touched his hair with fascination or ran after him shouting “Neger!” Baldwin ruminates on what it means to be perceived as black in the village and in America, writing, “The root function of language is to control the universe by describing it.”
Some of the quotes taken from Baldwin’s essay are visible in the paintings—Ligon uses the first or last lines, or something in the middle—but most are not. The artist repeatedly stenciled the text in black oil stick, layering in coal dust. He proceeded in regular lines, from top to bottom. The letters rose from the surface and the text thickened until it was nearly illegible. Ligon has said he chose coal dust because he was looking for something with a literal weight. Catching the light and making the raised letters glint like gems, coal dust reminded him of Andy Warhol’s diamond dust. But coal can also be seen to have racial overtones, as in the phrase “coal black,” which in the early 20th century came to be used as a slur.
Ligon used the same technique, and text, in the diptych Untitled (Conclusion), 2004. Walking from one side to the other of this large (90-by-144-inch) painting, you can see letters, carved out through shadows from an overhead light, announce themselves even as they sink back into the oil and coal. Within the carefully built up and stenciled lines, you are able to decipher words here and there, even a phrase—“Americans have made themselves notorious,” for example. Ligon challenges viewers to see race, and to see beyond it, through a reduced palette of mostly black and/or white, and through his technique of erasing even as he writes. “There are a lot of things in our culture that seem clear,” said Ligon in an interview at his studio. “But I think what the paintings are trying to do is to slow down reading, to present a difficulty, to present something that is not so easily consumed and clear.” 3
The generous and judicious installation, proceeding mostly chronologically through 10 galleries, also organizes Ligon’s work by theme and series. From his earliest efforts, Ligon’s exceptional balancing of form and content, humor and wrath, and high and low is apparent. The show opens with a room of text-based paintings that the artist began in 1985, incising phrases from letters to gay porn magazines into layers of impasto. At the time, Ligon was working nights as a legal proofreader. Inundated with text, he made the imaginative leap of incorporating it into his paintings, which had previously been gestural abstractions.
A text in an oil-on-paper painting from 1988 echoes the tone of the teacher who wrote that end-of-year report on Ligon. In stencil, it quotes curator Ned Rifkin on Martin Puryear, as reported in a New York Times article that year: “There is a consciousness we all have that he is a Black American artist but I think his work is really superior and stands on its own.” Aside from its condescension, the statement gets under the skin because, in perhaps more veiled terms, similar things have been written about Ligon’s work over the years. Even recently, Peter Schjeldahl, writing in the Mar. 21, 2011, New Yorker, observed, “Ligon deserves honor for foregrounding, in the famously liberal but chronically lily-white art world, voices such as those of Hurston, [Gwendolyn] Brooks, and James Baldwin”—as if honor accrues to Ligon for merely representing his race. (Does he not deserve honor for quoting Stein?) Ligon is not simply transcribing these authors’ words and sticking them on museum walls; nor is he being “combative,” a term Schjeldahl uses earlier in his review.
In 1990, the artist began a breakthrough series of paintings on doors, undertaken after time spent contemplating an old door in his studio. Black all-capital oil-stick letters on a white-primed wooden ground read, “I feel most colored when I am thrown against a sharp white background,” taken from Hurston’s 1928 essay “How It Feels to Be Colored Me.” Ligon arranged the stencils freehand, guided only by horizontal pencil lines, and repeated the text across and down the 80-inch-high and 30-inch-wide door. Toward the bottom the letters crowd and bump up against one another, like thoughts in a busy mind. Ligon is a brilliant reader, selecting and reworking texts to shape his own interpretation of the world. “In the early door paintings . . . text goes from legibility to illegibility to black crisp words on a white ground, [serving] to metaphorically resonate with what the text is speaking about,” Rothkopf told me. “The form is really informing the content.” Ligon maintained the door format as he continued the series on canvas, using other quotes from Hurston, Jean Genet, Jesse Jackson and rapper Ice Cube. One work from the series, Black Like Me #2 (1992), now hangs in the Obama White House, borrowed from the Hirshhorn Museum. The repeating text, “All traces of the Griffin I had been were wiped from existence,” is taken from white journalist John Howard Griffin’s 1961 eponymous account of passing as a black man in the South.
The apparent simplicity of Ligon’s stencil paintings masks their depth. Ligon observed that while the “Stranger” and door paintings move toward abstraction, they speak more about how culture constantly modulates as time passes. “I think it’s thinking about things that go in and out of [cultural] consciousness,” he said, referring to the changing reception of Hurston’s and Baldwin’s writings. Although some time intervened between the door series and the “Stranger” paintings, they feel like close siblings.
Ligon grappled with the subjects of socially constructed identity and American racism more directly in Runaways (1993), a witty, deft, poignant rewriting of runaway slave broadsides. For this portfolio of 16-by-12-inch lithographs, 10 altogether, he had friends help him come up with descriptions of himself, which he then recast as the type of notices that 19th-century slave owners posted after a slave escaped. “Ran away, a man named Glenn. He has almost no hair. He has cat-eye glasses, medium-dark skin, cute eyebrows. . . . He talks out of the side of his mouth and looks at you sideways. Sometimes he has a loud laugh, and lately I’ve noticed he refers to himself as ‘mother.’” Also in 1993, Ligon produced a related suite of nine photoetchings (each 28 by 21 inches), Narratives, that likewise wryly mixes autobiography and history by drawing on the archaic voice and look of slave narratives. One sheet reads, “The Life and Adventures of Glenn Ligon/A Negro; who was sent to be educated amongst white people in the year 1966 when only about six years of age and has continued to fraternize with them to the present time.” In their adept, witty bending of genre, Ligon’s Runaways and Narratives take great liberties with the constraints of identity politics, even as they speak brutally and exactly about the legacy of slavery and the fear of difference.
Like so many of his contemporaries—artists such as Lorna Simpson, Janine Antoni and Byron Kim, who were also included in the 1993 “Biennial with a Social Conscience,” as the New York Times dubbed it, and “a saturnalia of political correctness” as it was deemed by Time’s Robert Hughes—Ligon and his work are often discussed in terms of identity, end of story. Yet the artist has also tapped into other traditions and concerns, exploring, for example, the seriality of Minimalism, the use of texts as found objects, and language-based abstraction. Rothkopf sees multiple links between Ligon and Jasper Johns. “If you look beyond the stencil as a vehicle for putting text on, it’s about how language and numbers can function within a work of art,” Rothkopf said. “Questions about the difference between reading and looking are very germane to Glenn’s work.” IN 1993, LIGON EMBARKED on a series of lush, chromatically rich, text-based paintings that seem to be equally about visual pleasure and the limits of speech. Quoting from sensationalist stand-up routines by the popular black comedian Richard Pryor, Ligon stenciled the words in bright colors against fields of contrasting hues. The paintings look a bit like Richard Prince’s joke paintings, a series of transcriptions of deadpan one-liners that Prince began in the mid-’80s. But Ligon’s joke paintings are more personal. Pryor was willing to make public, on prime-time television no less, the most outrageous, often highly sexual, private thoughts or in-jokes about African-American culture. This made him something like Mapplethorpe for Ligon, dramatizing socially taboo subjects. Ligon “performs” Pryor for museumgoers, who stare at the paintings in isolation, rather than, like the comedian’s audiences, laughing, cringing or blowing their noses in concert halls.
Several of the Pryor paintings, from 1995 and 2004, revisit the following quote by the comedian: “I remember when black wasn’t beautiful. Black men come through the neighborhood saying ‘Black is beautiful! Africa is your home! Be proud to be black!’ My parents go ‘That nigger crazy.’” Pryor’s anecdote exists as fiction and truth, joke and observation; it reflects on the contradictions of color pride. In a 2004 painting with a dark purple ground, the joke’s setup is stenciled in blue, while the punch line is in orange, which tracks into the purple, dissolving the clarity of the letters. As in the joke, it is complex, vibrant color—not just “black”—that is beautiful.
“Beauty was a complicated thing as we talked about identity and race. [It] wasn’t allowed in the critical dialogue, which often made beauty seem irrelevant or inappropriate,” said Thelma Golden in an interview. Director of the Studio Museum in Harlem, Golden was curator of the 1994 “Black Male” show when she was at the Whitney and has been a longtime friend of Ligon’s. “This retrospective lets us see how important beauty was as a strategy, device, tool, weapon for artists like Glenn, who were esthetic innovators and operated in that fine balance between content and form.” Ligon’s paintings from the ’90s allow the eye and mind to play with multiple levels. At the retrospective, they also lead directly to Ligon’s most recent work: the “Stranger” paintings and a final group of four neons.
The neon works were prompted by Ligon’s curiosity about whether it was possible to make “black” neon. The owner of a shop below his studio, Lite Brite Neon, said no, but suggested painting the front of a tube black, with the light cast onto the wall behind. Using this method, Ligon had Lite Brite craft several versions of the word “America,” in which the stencil-like letters glow on the wall or, in one case, only at their joints, which were left unpainted. The perception of “black” here depends on “white” light—a characteristic twist in keeping with Ligon’s career-long inflection of materials and meaning.
The latest neon, Warm Broad Glow II (2011) reads, in lower-case letters, “negro sunshine.” An understated yet loaded phrase, it is installed in the front window of the museum. The word “negro” challenges viewers to contemplate the ways that language carries with it the prejudices of the past. At the same time, the piece projects a qualified buoyancy of mood. The phrase is taken from Gertrude Stein’s “Melanctha” novella, one of her Three Lives (1909). In the novella, Stein’s language surrounding race seems decidedly retrograde—the dark-skinned character is dumb, coarse and promiscuous, while the light-skinned Melanctha is smart and brooding. Yet Ligon reads Stein as engaging in a knowing play with stereotypes and expectations, and offers both homage and critique.
From start to finish, the retrospective reveals Ligon to be true to his method, a devoted reader who repeatedly returns to a personal canon of texts. It also shows him to be a quintessentially American artist—in his humor, his delight in texts high and low, and his relentless mining of national history. Johns famously prescribed, “Take an object. Do something to it. Do something else to it.” With a keen ability to sustain contradiction and doubt, Ligon adopts this democratic tinkering spirit, fashioning a finely wrought syllabus of America.
1 The electricity of viewing these images in a museum has burned off a bit. Mapplethorpe published Black Book in 1986, and in 1989, his name became synonymous with shock art (for some) and censorship (for others) when the Corcoran Gallery of Art, under congressional pressure, canceled an NEA-funded traveling Mapplethorpe retrospective.
2 This and several other interviews, as well as Ligon’s own lucid writings, are collected in Yourself in the World, edited by Scott Rothkopf, forthcoming from Yale University Press. 3 Unless otherwise indicated, all quotes by Ligon and others are taken from interviews with the author conducted during February and March 2011. “Glenn Ligon: America,” which closes at the Whitney June 15, travels to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art [Oct. 23, 2011–Jan. 22, 2012] and the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth [February-May 2012]. It is accompanied by a 302-page catalogueby Scott Rothkopf, with contributions by Hilton Als, Okwui Enwezor, Saidya Hartman, Bennett Simpson and Franklin Sirmans, and a conversation between the artist and Thelma Golden.
  Source: Art in America / Carly Berwick. Link: Stranger in America Illustration: Glenn Ligon [USA] (b 1960) ~ 'Double Mirror', 2015. Ten-color screenprint on rag paper in graphite-wash frame (15 x 23 cm). Moderator: ART HuNTER. ✓ Facebook Page →  ✓ Pinterest board → 
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dillydedalus · 5 years
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what i read in february
check to find out if i defeated my nemesis thomas mann by reading the magic mountain or surrendered to his absolute rule over my unread books shelf
milkman, anna burns this is deeply divisive on the bookish internet apparently with fights over a) whether it’s brilliant or garbage, b) whether it’s difficult, c) whether literary difficulty is a moral issue (with both renouncers-of-milkman and defenders-of-milkman variously taking either side). here’s my lukewarm take: a) it’s good, b) it’s not that difficult but can be frustrating to read, c) it’s not a moral issue, like, obvi. anyway, y’all probably know what this is about (girl in belfast during the troubles finds herself stalked by dangerous paramilitary, gossip & violence abound). i found the decision not to use proper names, either for the characters (narrator is middle sister, other characters are ‘maybe-boyfriend’, ‘wee sisters’, ‘third brother-in-law’, etc) or the setting really interesting - it added both to the conversational feel, the paranoia in the community and the universality of themes like civil violence, paranoia, mistrust, sexual harrassment, pressure to conform etc. 4/5
paradise, a.l. kennedy (uni) idk man this is well-written and especially the writing about drunkenness & the depth of hannah’s addiction & misery (and joy, which kennedy does not avoid) is vivid, but i’m still p meh on it, and it was definitely too long for what it was doing. i’ll add more after the class where we’ll discuss it (update: the class was unfortunately a mess so I’m still ehhh about it) 2.5/5
die verängstigten, dima wannous (tr. from arabic) an english translation, the frightened ones, is coming out some time this year i think. this story is told thru two narratives, one by sulaima, a syrian woman with anxiety living in damascus, whose brother has been disappeared by the regime and whose lover nassim has fled the country, and one thru chapters of the unfinished novel nassim leaves behind for sulaima, narrated by a girl called salma, whose life story mirrors sulaima’s own. this is a very interesting set-up, and i think both the narrative structure and the combination of anxiety as a psychological illness and anxiety/paranoia as a social state caused by political repression & violence were really interesting, but sometimes the book felt a bit muddled and confusing to me. 3/5
der schlaf der gerechten, wolfgang hilbig (the sleep of the righteous) this is a collection of connected short stories set in a mining town in east germany - the first 4 stories follow the narrator figure (who’s not necessarily the same, but very similar throughout all stories) as a child and young adult, growing up in a town almost without men after world war 2, whereas the last 3 describe the narrator’s return to this town as an adult after reunification, struggling with his own and east germany’s past. i ADORED the first stories - they are insanely good, dark, atmospheric, beautifully written and so evocative of the materiality of this town, the ash, the coal, moulding fruit, gritty, grimy, ash coating everything (the blurb on the back says that your hands will come away from the pages stained with soot, and i feel that). the second set is good too, but it moves away from that sensual evocation which i loved so much. 4/5
the golden fool (tawny man #2), robin hobb y’all i really tried to read this one slowly, and it worked for four days but then i decided that i might as well read read the entire second half in one day so. anyway this is hard to talk about w/o spoiling a lot but robin hobb truly is the queen of character writing. loved the elliania plot, loved the coterie forming, loved the bingtown delegation, loved fitz and the fool having Feelings Drama (made me Big Sad tho - also fitz is my son & all but good god he can be a dumbass). i feel like this one’s mostly setting everything up for fool’s fate but it’s good. 4/5
the sixth extinction: an unnatural history, elizabeth kolbert engaging & accessible nonfiction book about extinction, including both past extinction events, the history of science about extinction and focusing on the current extinction event (with several example species, from frogs to rhinos) mostly caused by humans fucking everything up. 3/5
the course of the heart, m john harrison tbh i just didn’t get it.... maybe i’m not versed enough in gnosticism & weird esoteric shit. anyway, this is about three friends haunted by some spiritual ritual (lol) they held while at uni with a sinister guy called yaxley. you never find out what they actually did, but they construct a whole mythology about it that i uh. didn’t get. tbh i pretty much checked out halfway thru. 1.5/5
barracoon: the story of the last “black cargo”, zora neale hurston (audio) interesting & sad & really touching account of cudjo lewis, one of the last africans to be shipped to america as slaves, mainly made up of his own narrative, collected & put together by hurston. some interesting background info about how the book came to be as well. 3/5
how to survive a plague, david france in-depth account of the aids epidemic in the us, especially in new york, combining personal stories, insight into aids activism, scientific progress (and for most of the book, lack thereof) and staggering political neglect and failure. well-written, informative and well-explained but (obviously) very emotionally draining.  4/5
fool’s fate (the tawny man #3), robin hobb lmao i love emotionally dying about robin hobb books. anyway A LOT happens in this one & i was very emotional about most of it but most emotional about fitzchivalry farseer (idiot, son boy, changer) and the fool (beloved!) and my man burrich (lol say the words ‘heart of the pack’ & i’m already overwhelmed). anyway this was a very epic & hardcore emotional conclusion to this series & robin hobb may make me cry any time she wishes. 4/5, series rating 4.5/5
what it means when a man falls from the sky, lesley nneka arimah collection of short stories mostly set in nigeria and in the us. some of the stories are magical realist-y, some are more realist, but almost all are concerned with familial bonds and bondage, the complicated relationships between parents and children. the stories are well-executed and precisely told, but while i liked quite a few of the stories (esp. the title story) i just didn’t feel particularly strongly about most of them. 3/5
heimsuchung, jenny erpenbeck (visitation) another interesting take on 20th century german history from erpenbeck - this one is centred around a house by a lake in brandenburg & told thru the various people connected to the house over the years & decades, owners, visitors, neighbours, etc. it’s an interesting concept & well-executed & clever & erpenbeck can write but it kinda paled for me in comparison to her aller tage abend, which does a similar thing in very different way. 3/5
currently reading: look okay i have Not finished the magic mountain but i am still reading it so i still have a chance of defeating mann in single combat. i’m actually kinda liking it but it’s A Lot, so i’m taking it slow. also call me zebra which i am v v...... unsure about??
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kagapop · 7 years
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I'm thinking of buying botw. I'm already buying nier automata and horizon zero dawn, but botw seems nice and seeing you so hyped about it makes me consider it. May I ask you to convince me to? Like, scream all you like about the game, tell me what's awesome about it, please. I don't even mind some minor spoilers if you think it's gonna convince me. Please, I don't know much about Zelda, but this game seems so good. (If you don't mind, of course).
IT HAS A BEAUTIFUL FISH PRINCE AND PRINCESS WHAT MORE CONVINCING IS NEEDED.
Ok but in all seriousness, even if you aren’t really familiar or into the Zelda series, here are some fun things about this game from what I’ve played so far:
absolute freedom to travel the world and discover quests and places all on your own in whatever order or way you like (i don’t even usually go for open world stuff but i’m praising this aspect so i guess that says something? idk.)
the game doesn’t treat you like an idiot and hold your hand every 2 seconds with needless tutorials or guidance which was also a thing in past zelda games. it never bothered me but i know it bothers a ton of people so like. there’s that.
you can find wild horses and tame them and name them and there are lots of colors which is important to me. mine are all named after desserts. which seems to be a common trend. eclair is my fave horse.
this is extra cool ‘cause usually zelda games just throw a mount at you (usually a brown horse. sometimes a bird. sometimes a boat that is a person. sometimes you’re a dog.) and that’s it but you can find different ones with different stats and have several of them!!
also you can befriend doggies????
there are tons and tons and tons of people to interact with in this world!!
ENDLESS SUPPLY OF BOMBS.
BOMB EVERYTHING I’M NOT JOKING.
again there are beautiful fish people
also bird people
the bird people part confuses me bc the story in another game’s setting was that the bird people evolved from the fish people but they are both in this world and idk if i’m gonna get an explanation but i hope i do
badass ladies
giant fairy women who could probably eat you whole but they give you better clothes instead
the towns are cute and i love them
the characters i’ve met so far are all pretty interesting!!
you can cook which at first i was kinda like “uughh what is this harvest moon” when i heard about it BUT IT’S SO ADDICTING AND USEFUL AND FUN. combining shit to see what you can make and what effects you can get is great.
it’s so fun to just explore and get distracted in this game. if there are any walkthroughs or anything available when you get it, fucking ignore them ‘cause all the fun is in exploring in this
the game will tell you you need to go somewhere but you can absolutely go somewhere else and do 500 other things before you even bother
except i should’ve gone to kakariko village when i was told to i would’ve had better armor earlier on but no i had to chase zora fin instead
BUT I DIDN’T HAVE TO AND I STILL HAD FUN
there’s a cool old man in the beginning who you will maybe want to give a hug
i wanna give him a hug
are you convinced yet
is me talking about fish people and giant fairy women doing the trick
i should point out that the zelda series is one of my fave things i literally wore heart container earrings to work yesterday so i mean maybe there’s a lot of bias here BUT
IT’S A GOOD GAME OK
LIKE I DO HAVE PROBLEMS WITH OTHER ZELDA GAMES BUT THE ONES IN THIS ONE ARE SO NIT-PICKY THEY HARDLY MATTER.
except idk how i feel about the motion control puzzles
there aren’t too many so far but
fuck ‘em
idk about the wiiu but the switch is hella sensitive and i scream
there’s a lot of ancient technology stuff which is always neat
you have this stone tablet thing but it’s basically an ancient magic iphone
complete with google maps
but like you gotta venture out to these big towers to download the google maps updates
and then you aren’t getting enough updates so you go to the apple store to upgrade your phone tablet and the apple store is run by an adorable little child with an also adorable outfit
also you can buy a house
so you have an iphone and a house
and maybe 5 horses
also your iphone comes with cool apps that give you superpowers
you can take your shirt off
your first mission is “equip pants” basically
there are small fish children among the fish people and i’m adopting all of them
that’s not an actual mechanic or anything i’ve just decided to adopt them
and i’m marrying the not-child ones
you can get lots of different clothes and also you can have them dyed different colors
i’m gonna cut myself off bc i could be playing it right now but i’m out of control
you’re probably better off looking up an actual review on youtube or something but i mean i typed this out it’s here
here you go
just bomb everything.
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