#Animation is one of the most important artforms out there | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

evertomorrowart · 4 months

Text

Best of YouTube 2023

Yes, I did spend the first week and change of January on this. I wish I could have had it done for New Years, but too many people came out with incredible work in December, so waiting turned out for the best.

What these creators do are a huge influence on my life, I would honestly have difficulty doing what I do without them. That isn't to say that my favorites of the year are *only* on this image--It was almost impossible to narrow down my favorites. Many creators I wanted to include couldn't fit on a single page, and too many of them made more than one video I wished I could draw too!

But, to all of you, thank you for what you do. You're an inspiration.

For those who don't know, further is an explanation.

At the bottom center is an artistic masterpiece by Defunctland: "Journey to EPCOT Center: A Symphonic History." Over the last several years, Defunctland has risen from delightfully-entertaining commentary on decommissioned theme park attractions to occasionally dropping profound statements on the creation of art itself. "Journey to EPCOT Center: A Symphonic History" is worth treating like the cinematic experience it is: No second screen, you sit your ass down in front of a TV, set down the phone, and then you *watch it.* Any Disney, theme park, or independent film fan needs to pay attention to this one.

Bottom left is Caelan Conrad with their piece "Drop the T - The Deadly Consequences of Gay Respectability Politics." While I do think they've done more visually or artistically-daring pieces before, "Drop the T" is one of the most important videos released on YouTube in today's current climate of hate. We as queer folk (and our allies) need to understand how integral every identity of the queer experience has been since the start of the Civil Rights movement (and before!). While we are not identical, we *are* inseparable, and we deserve having our real history easily accessible.

TERFs and other conservative mouthpieces need not reply. Your opinions are trash. 😘

I cannot stop watching and rewatching this video by @patricia-taxxon, "On the Ethics of Boinking Animal People." It's not just a defense of furry fandom and its eccentricities, it's a thoughtful and passionate analysis of what the artform achieves that purely human representation can't. Patricia goes outside of her usual essay format to directly speak to the viewer about the elements that define furry media (the most succinct definition I've ever heard) and just how *human* an act loving animal cartoons really is.

As an artist who can draw furry characters, but never really got into erotic furry art, this video is a treasure. Why did I choose to have her drawn as a Ghibli character, hanging out with one of the tanukis from "Pom Poko?" Guess you'll have to watch, bruh.

Philosophy Tube continuously puts out videos that I would put on this list--I'm not even sure that "A Man Plagiarised my Work: Women, Money, and the Nation" is the best work she released in 2023. However, this video got many conversations going between myself and my partner, and the twist on the tail end of the video shocked us both to such a degree that I had no choice.

At the very tail end of the year, Big Joel released "Fear of Death." On his Little Joel channel, he described it as the singularly best video he's ever done, and I'm inclined to agree. However, for this illustration, I ended up repeatedly going back to a mini-series he did earlier in the year: "Three Stories at the End of the World." All three videos are deeply moving and haunting, and I was brought to tears by "We Must Destroy What the Bomb Cannot." While it may be relatively-common knowledge that the original Gojira (Godzilla) film is horror grappling with the devastation America's rush to atomic dominance inflicted on Japan, Big Joel still manages to bring new words to the discussion. Please watch all three of the videos, but if, for some reason, you must have only one, let it be "We Must Destroy What the Bomb Cannot."

Y'all. Let me confess something. I hate football. I hate watching it, I associate seeing it from the stadiums with some of my worst childhood experiences, I despise collegiate and professional football (as institutions that destroy bodies and offer up children at the feet of its alter as a pillar of American culture)--

I. L o a t h e. Football.

But.

F.D. Signifier could get me to watch an entire hour-plus essay on why I should at least give a passing care. AND HE DID IT. I might think "F*ck the Police," the two-parter on Black conservatism, or his essay on Black men's connection to anime might be "better" videos, but this writer did the impossible and held my limited attention span towards football long enough to make a sincere case for NFL players--and reminds us that millionaires can *in fact* be workers. That alone is testament to his skill.

Sit down and watch "The REAL Reason NFL Running Backs Aren't Getting Paid." Any good anti-capitalist owes it to themselves.

CJ the X continuously puts out stunning, emotional videos, and can do it with the most seemingly-inconsequential starting points. A 30 second song? An incestuous commercial? Five minutes of Tangled? Sure, why not. Go destroy yourself emotionally by watching them. I'm serious. Do it.

Their video Stranger Things and the Meaning of Life manages to to remind us all why the way we react to media does, in fact, matter. Yes, even nostalgia-driven, mass-media schlock. Yes, how we interact with media matters, what it says about us matters, and we all deserve to seek out the whys.

Folding Ideas has spent the last few years articulating exactly why so much of our modern world feels broken, and because of that his voice continuously lives rent-free in my brain. While the tricks that scam artists and grifters use to try to swindle us are never new, the advancement of technology changes the aesthetics of their performances. Portions of Folding Ideas' explanations might seem dry when going into detail of how stocks work in This is Financial Advice, but every bit of it is necessary to peel back the layers of techno-babble and jargon and make sense of the results of "Meme Stocks."

Jessie Gender puts out nothing but bangers, her absolute unit of a video about Star Wars might be my new favorite thing ever, but none of her work hit so profoundly in 2023 than the two-parter "The Myth of 'Male Socialization'" and "The Trauma of Masculinity." There's so much about modern life that isolates and traumatizes us, and so much of it is just shrugged off as "normal." We owe it to ourselves to see the world in more vivid a color palette than we're initially given.

Panels drawn after Kate Beaton and "Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands."

"This is Not a Video Essay" is one of the most intense and beautiful pieces of art I've ever put into my eyeballs. Why do we create? What drives us to connect?

I don't even know what else to say about the Leftist Cooks' work, it repeatedly transcends the medium and platform. Watch every single one of their videos, but especially this one.

The likelihood you are terminally online and yet haven't heard of Hbomberguy's yearly forrays into destroying the careers of awful people is pretty slim. Just because it has millions of views doesn't mean that Hbomberguy's "Plagiarism and You(Tube)" isn't worth the hype. Too long? Shut up, it has chapters and YouTube holds your place, anyway. You think a deep dive into a handful of creators is only meaningless drama? Well, you're wrong, you wrong-opinion-haver. Plagiarism is an *everyone* problem because of the actual harm it creates--the history it erases, the labor it devalues, the art it marginalizes--which you would know if you watched "Plagiarism and You(Tube)".

Watch. The damn. Video.

In fact, watch all of them!

Thanks for reading this if you did.

927 notes · View notes

mooncrestedwaters · 2 months

Text

Rafayel Headcanon's

🫧 He's always well kept, his hygiene is amazing, surprisingly so for someone who spends most of his time in front of an easel.

🫧 One spot of his remarkable hygiene that faults is his ability to get paint all over him, caked under his nails, through his hair and all over his clothes and body. He always thoroughly cleans himself when MC drags him to the nearest body of water because of his investment on his new piece though and he can never say no to MC (mainly because he fears his sanity with how much they nag otherwise)

🫧 Regardless of this cleanliness though his entire apartment is a pigsty. The resale value on his home would only stand due to his prestigious name in the art world.

🫧 His home is what he likes to call "organized chaos" and "well lived in"

🫧 {SPOILERS}

Spraining his ankle by slipping on a paintbrush getting out of the bath, wasn't a one off. MC has become known by name with how accident prone he is....and melodramatic

🫧 Speaking of melodramatic; retired theater kid, through and through

🫧 Outside of his paintings, he also sees his fighting style as an artform. Having a flair for the dramatic in battle, keep bravado and shrugging off his opponent with wit and eccentricities

🫧 His coffee order is what baristas fear, bitch about to their co-workers and cry about in the freezer room later over

🫧 Sweet tooth, denies it, but he has the biggest sweet tooth ever

🫧 Heavily anxious, possibly has GAD (Generalized Anxiety Disorder). Partially why he hates gallery exhibitions and the like, as well as travelling for work is because of how much anxiety it gives him

🫧 Cannot sit still. Always moving, if that may be bouncing his leg, twirling his hair, picking his nails or anything that keeps some part of his body moving, he will fidget

🫧 Hates being sick, absolutely a repeat victim of the 'man-flu'

🫧 Loves energy drinks, banned from having them (he was practically crawling the walls)

🫧 Never raises his voice. He hates noise and has only raised his voice a handful of times at people who provoked him beyond his breaking point, even after he'd warned them to stop

🫧 Patient. Surprisingly, extremely patient

🫧 Doesn't get angry, gets inconvincenced

🫧 Whenever he's upset, he lays starfish on the floor and blasts depressing music, will bitch and moan if you turn off the music

🫧 Hates cooking, door dashers lover him

🫧 Always extensively researches aquariums before visiting to make sure they look after the animals well, if not, he puts in a formal complaint

🫧 Loves juice, especially pineapple juice

🫧 Has used paint on his fingertips to sign important documents

#lads rafayel #rafayel love and deepspace #love and deepspace rafayel #rafayel #love and deepspace #love & deepspace #rafayel girlie

49 notes · View notes

finiansmile · 5 months

Text

First Post

12/9/2023

Hi, I'm Finian, and this is my first blogpost! I'm really into like every single artform, and my main passion is gamedev! I learned it in highschool, I'm working on it in college, and I hope to make it a career someday.

I'm very critical on myself, and I am very embarrassed to share any art I make, but I've wanted to make a blog for a little while. I think personal writing is fun. I recently received some advice that making a blog might strengthen my portfolio, so I was like "what the heck" and now here I am.

With that out of the way, this post will be about what I consider my first finished game. I did some stuff in highschool, but that was all in a website called code.org. I worked in Unity in my final year, but I served the role of mentor more than developer.

This game was created for my final project in my ENC1143 class, and shall be called my Multimodal Artifact. The assignment was to share what we'd learned over the year in any form of medium we wished, so I made a game. I've only previously done 2D games and I consider myself acceptable at pixel art, so I made a simple 2D platformer. All of my artwork was done in Aseprite and all code was written in Unity, with Visual Studio.

My intentions going into the game were mainly to let the player interact with the sign pictured above, which is something I've never done before. I also wanted the text on the sign to have a scrollbar. I started with an unanimated player sprite, and I made an incredibly simple ground texture, which I stretched to represent a wall. I coded the player's movement and interaction with the terrain. Once I was satisfied with the player's movement, I created some simple animations for idling, running, and jumping.

I then created a tileset of which I am extremely proud, as I've been struggling with grassy and leafy terrain for years. This is the second tileset I've ever made, and the first to perfectly link with itself.

Once I had my tiles in order, I replaced my gaudy primitive, and created the first area of the game as seen in the first image, albeit with significantly less foliage. I created enough level to comfortably house five signs; about half of the game. Finally I began work on the sign itself. The sign was probably the most important part of the game, as its writing is what I was mainly being graded on. There are nine signs in the game, each containing small pieces of the whole final assignment. I created a sprite for the sign in about 20 minutes, and tackled the text with a scroll view. I watched a very helpful video on how it worked, added my TextMeshPro font asset, and made a sign visual behind it all.

My sign was done, from a visual standpoint. I could finally tackle the code, which I did within two scripts. The first script, "Interactable" would be attached to the sign sprite via a child. The script was actually pretty simple, using OnTriggerEnter and OnTriggerExit in tandem with a circle collider 2D to detect if the player was near enough, and an if statement featuring the UnityEvent Invoke in its body. Invoke calls a function from another script, established in the inspector. In this case, I attached a script to the Canvas which disabled and enabled the sign GameObjects.

I also added to the sign sprite a key icon, again of my own making, to make sure the player definitely knows what to press. It has an animation which activates when the player walks near the sign.

Both the coding and the visuals for the sign are finally finished! My final steps for this game were: 1) finish designing the level 2) add some scenery 3) if I had time, a pause screen and maybe even a start screen

This was a single-level game, and since it was an english assignment that needs to be graded, I figured it ought to be very linear and very non-punishing. There are no enemies and no dying, so the difficulty had to come from platforming. The player can jump exactly three tiles high and seven tiles far. The game features one six tile wide jump and no necessary three tile high jumps. The first area, already completed features very easy one to three tile wide gaps.

The area has the player go from the left of the level to the right, and eventually upwards and back to the left. Within the first zone, it is possible to fall After every new challenge there will be a sign as the player's reward: after the first jump, , two-tile wide jump, series of one-tile wide jumps (pictured above), series of two-tile vertical jumps, and finally after the first four-tile wide jump. There are some punishing jumps in the upper layer of this zone, which cause the player to lose some progress if missed.

Before making any level past the first sign, I added a second tileset. I took my preciously mentioned first ever tileset, which was a greyish castle brick, and changed it to match my current palette. It's not perfect, but any imperfections are so slight nobody would notice unless they were specifically seeking them out. I added this tileset because I felt continuous jungle would start to get bland, and because I really wanted to get some use out of it. I think it fits in really well.

The second area of my game is a platforming section based off of the loss comic, a suggestion provided to my by my wonderful girlfriend. I think it's a lot of fun to involve others in the gamemaking process, and I think it's fun to work with a specific challenge in mind. I thought of something really fun to do with that idea almost instantly, and got to work.

For those who are unaware, the loss comic is a meme from 2002, which features this character format: I II II I_

I tried loosely to stay within that format, I don't think it tracks very well, but the intention and setup is there.

I wanted my third and final segment to be the most challenging, and I wanted it to be inside of the castle/temple setting, in hopes of making the play subconsciously go "oh, this area is different." Each area of the game has its subtle distinctions, but the distinction here is the least subtle.

The final area features a great deal of wide and high jumps, as well as the first and only head-hitter in the game. In the final set of jumps it is possible to fall back down to the start of the section, and the very last jump isn't very difficult. I think it sucks when you think you're almost done with everything in a game, and you mess up at the very end and have to start all over. I didn't want the player to feel that way, hence the easier last jump.

The level was done! My signs (the part I get graded on) were done! I could have some fun with the rest of the game, not that I didn't have fun with the entire previous process, this final bit was just leisure. I love programming.

I started with controls. I put the controls of the game as well as some arrows to point you the right way on rocks, which would not only fit well in the game's environment, but also served well to fill up empty-feeling areas.

After the rocks, I created some bushes. I considered making hanging vines, but I forgot about it somewhere in the creative process. There's obviously not as many of them as the rocks, but trust me when I say these suckers get some crazy mileage. They're everywhere, rotated for the walls and ceiling, flipped, darkened to appear more in the background, placed somewhat behind rocks. These four bushes were super important to the decoration of this game.

After the bushes, I adjusted the hue, saturation, and light of the tilesets to make them appear as background elements. I created the background of the game as a repeating tile. I am not confident in my ability to create a full artpiece, rather than smaller assets, and my wonderful girlfriend added some pixels which I feel made it look significantly better than my rendition. I hue shifted it, and it works excellently as the game's background.

My initial rendition (black was empty) and the final rendition

The final thing to do was to add a pause menu, which is also something I had extremely limited experience with, but found to be super easy. The code is just about the same as making the signs appear and disappear.

The game was not without its bugs, however. There were two that I wanted to fix: 1) sometimes while walking, the player would randomly get snagged and stop. I believed this to be an issue with the ground's collision 2) sometimes upon landing, the player would fly straight through the floor! I also believed this to be an issue with the ground's collision

I had the ground's collider set to a Tilemap Collider 2D, which is a collider designed specifically for tiles. The way a tilemap collider works is that it assigns a square shaped colllider to every individual tile, and would combine all of those collider together in order to save space if it were more efficient on the system. In my game's case it was not more efficient to combine them. However, combining them is exactly what would fix the first issue, the player snagging on the ground. I added a Composite Collider 2D to the tilemap, and viola! No more snagging. The player would still fall through the ground on occasion, but it happened to me so rarely I figured it would be a nonissue. I added a line of code that would set the player's position to the initial spawn if they went too far beneath the map, as well as the reset button in the pause menu which would do the same.

After these fixes I had my incredibly generous roommate playtest for me. He probably played for about thirty minutes, and he relentlessly fell through the map. It was amazing to me how often he just perfectly fell through the ground. Clearly, this was a bigger issue than I anticipated. Thank goodness for playtesters!

After some research, I realized the composite collider actually created an outline of the tiles, rather than completely filling them with collision. The player would fall through the ground because while falling, their velocity would continually increase. Since the collision of the ground was so slim, the player's high velocity would sometimes cause their collider to be on one side of the ground on one frame, and the other side of the ground on the next, not allowing for any collision to happen. The slim outline of the composite collider was not cutting it. There is a setting on the component labeled "Use Delaunay Mesh" which, when clicked, converts the collider from an outline to a full mesh.

The orange lines represent the collider

A Delaunay Mesh is a mesh based on Delaunay Triangulation, which is a complicated math term which can be simplified to mean the mesh has the least amount of big system-taxing triangles possible.

My roommate once again playtested for me, this time with no bugs at all. His thirty minute experience turned into a three minute experience. Magical!

There's more I would have liked to do, but my time ran out and I needed to turn the assignment in. I think I would have liked to make a starting screen, and maybe some hanging vines. If I had as much time as I pleased, I would've added walljumping and maybe some destructible decorations to make the player feel more involved.

I think the game was a success. This is my first game I can say I've actually completed, and I feel proud of how far I've come. If I were to do this again, I'd probably study the games "Getting Over It" and "Jump King," as in hindsight these games were fundamentally very similar.

The end! Thank you for reading my silly blogpost! This took way longer than I thought.

9 notes · View notes

cerastes · 2 years

Note

AI is almost cool, but you're right. Right now the only way to actually make it worth your time is to have a small warehouse of machines working together to do anything and that is just way too privately owned and way too beneficial to an individual who obviously wants to use it for money.

If a library or museum had it and was running it on their collection that'd be an entirely different story. They'd probably be able to source their creations correctly too since they have that metadata in abundance. I wonder how Star Trek's holodecks handle that, since holodeck programming is pretty much the same thing as AI Prompt Based Generation.

Besides what I've already said about AI in regards to artistic integrity and how I do not trust techbros to harness any of this tech in any way that could prove altruistic and not aimed exclusively at making money and maybe even NFTs 2 - The Sequel, I do think it's important to point out that the technology behind it is amazing and the applications and implications of advancing AI technology are sincerely intriguing.

For example, with AI art, an animation team could easily and quickly produce in-between frames in key animation, that is, the transition frames and smear frames between more important shots. This would, if implemented properly, alleviate a significant load off the shoulders of animators, and we know animators can use all the help they can get nowadays, in an industry that becomes more and more demanding to its workforce and that is yet so immensely disrespected and underpaid.

An illustrator could also get a lot of reference for their own art. Anatomy, backgrounds, certain poses, objects at different angles, the applications really are there! A writer of a more visual disposition could easily generate a number of assets for internal, personal use only, to help visualize locales, characters, objects, and what have you. With a more specialized model, I believe even sculptors and other more hands-on and physical artforms could definitely benefit as well, especially when you consider the leaps and bounds in 3D printing.

My scathing criticism of AI 'artists' is one thing, because I do not for one second think of anyone as an artist by just putting in a prompt into an AI that then generates an image for them, and that will not change, you didn't create art, you simply used a tool, so don't call yourself an artist for that one, to whoever it may concern, but AI technology in itself is fascinating, and what frustrates me is not the fact that there's an AI that can make visuals easily -- that's honestly fascinating -- rather, it's the fact I do not at any point trust the tech industry to ever respect art in any capacity because they have a track record of not doing so, and the interest in creating an 'art AI' is wholly based on a thinly veiled desire to mass produce for the sake of raking in profits while -- and I insist, bear this in mind -- disguising it as an "accessible tool" that can make anyone an 'artist'.

We have to make sure we don't go durr hurr technology bad, Tesla was a witch, because it's easy to do so and I've seen some bad takes on that regard already, it's ultimately techbros and the tech industry that live on this hardlane bubble of "profit no matter what we destroy or defame". Most everything nowadays starts by techbros selling the ideal of "look how helpful this could be!" and getting a lot of attention on their product, and when it's ready for a stable release, they paygate it behind the kind of money only big private industries can afford, and fuck everyone else.

And hey, that's been a lot of the world of business for a long time, in many, many other regards, but if people expect artists not to make a fuss when techbros look at art and try that shit there, I have no idea what they expect. Which is wholly disrespectful, anyhow, because everyone loves art but hates artists for some reason. Not to sound like a cafe blog for a second, but I do need to point out that during the harshest parts of the pandemic, art is what people turned to in order to assuage themselves. I hope that knowledge stings whoever it may concern.

#zonebooth

57 notes · View notes

seapasture · 7 months

Note

maple and harvest for the autumn asks !!

Thank you for the ask, Miki!! ⭐

maple - is there a hobby / skill that you’ve always wanted to try but never did?

I've always been really interested in clay sculpture! I would love to be left to my own devices in a studio with a block of clay for a day - it has always struck me as a really expressive artform and I really admire the way sculptors are able to create such evocative forms with just their hands and some tools. It's almost like painting but with further dimensionality. I'd be really keen to try it some day - maybe I should buy some airdry clay and start small!

harvest - what fictional character do you most identify with? Why?

Whew, what a question! It's difficult to simply pick one because I identify with various characters for many reasons. Seeing as he's been on my mind a lot today, I will say Mafuyu Satō from given!

Mafuyu is one of my all-time favourite characters - he is very dear to me and makes me feel very seen. When I watched given for the first time, he immediately stood out to me as a character I saw myself in. He is a reserved individual with a flat-affect, but do not be deceived into thinking he is unemotional! Mafuyu cares very deeply, to the extent that he struggles to move on from his past and often finds himself consumed by memories in the aftermath of trauma. The series explores the way Mafuyu has bottled up these feelings, and how this brings him a great deal of pain; he eventually finds a medium to express himself through and it becomes a rich and essential outlet to him. Mafuyu is soft, gentle, but also quietly opinionated and keen to use his newfound voice as a platform to help others. All of this deeply resonated with me as a viewer, and I have held him in my heart ever since.

I also watched the series at a time where I was trying to better understand myself, and it meant a lot to see the depiction of a canonically queer character in an anime which didn't reduce him to a harmful stereotype. Mafuyu falls in love with other boys, and it is not depicted as something weird or, alternatively, wholly character-defining. It is an important part of his narrative, but it doesn't dominate it - he exists as a broadly dimensional character, and it meant a lot at that point in my life to see the way queerness was simply normalised in the series and through Mafuyu's character specifically.

One other thing that struck me about Mafuyu was how deeply autistic-coded he is. Along with all the traits I have listed, Mafuyu appears to struggle with social cues and his methods of interacting with other people are distinctly 'unusual'. He speaks in a quiet monotone and tends to stare people down, but at other times he averts his gaze entirely. He swings between being emotionally intense and distant, and has a tendency to be directly honest with his words. He also exhibits echolalia and as a child is shown to line-up objects and generally play alone as opposed to with his peers. Watching Mafuyu onscreen was so meaningful to me as an autistic person with trauma - it felt like nuances about myself were being conveyed to me in a way that felt realistic and encouraging, as opposed to being alienating stereotypes. When I watched given in 2019, I found this article which explores Mafuyu's autistic traits a bit further - if you're curious, I highly recommend giving it a read. I haven't read the manga yet and (as far as I am aware!) he is not canonically autistic, but I feel like it is such a palpable undercurrent to his character that (in my opinion) it is difficult to interpret him as neurotypical.

Apologies for the ramble! Mafuyu is very beloved to me and I identify with him a lot! I will also give an honourable mention to Ugetsu, who is another deeply relatable character to me from given, but I will spare everyone another ramble!

autumnal asks

#thank you again for the ask miki!!! these were really fun questions and a pleasure to answer!!#i really love mafuyu very dearly - to anyone who hasn't watched given yet i can only offer my highest recommendation!#i hope this is eloquent enough - i'm a bit under the weather at the moment and i've been struggling to articulate myself lately :(#i'd like to share more of my ramblings some time so this has been a nice taster to it! it makes me very nervous but i like to chatter adfgs #sea answers #sea rambles #given

3 notes · View notes

penkraft123 · 1 year

Text

Introduction to Warli

The Warlis are one of the largest tribes settled on the northern outskirts of Mumbai in Maharashtra and also in Gujarat in Western India. The Warli art is a representation of their culture. It is not an art form, but a way of life for them. The art was first explored in the early seventies. Like other tribal art, this art, too, was born out of the creativity that the Warli people expressed on the walls of their houses. The Warli people painted their houses in vivid styles depicting elements that represent their culture and traditions. The paintings were mainly done by the tribeswomen. The unique and most important aspect of Warli paintings sets it apart from other painting styles in that it depicts the social life of the tribe rather than mythological characters or images of deities. The subject of Warli paintings is always human beings and animals, along with scenes from daily life which are created in a loose rhythmic pattern. Another unique characteristic of this art form is that it uses geometric shapes for creating designs and patterns, which shows that the tribe leads their lives with a sense of discipline. Warli paintings are usually painted using white color on the mud walls. Basic materials are used by the tribe for painting; like rice paste with water and gum for the white paint and a bamboo stick that has been chewed on that serves as a brush. Beautifully executed, the paintings resemble pre-historic cave paintings in their style and usually depict human figures engaged in activities like hunting, dancing, sowing, and harvesting. Traditionally, this painting is done on a red ochre background with white paint and these were the only two colors used for creating paintings. However, over time, a variety of colors started being used to replicate these artistic motifs on fabrics, home decor, or other artistic forms.

Penkraft conducts classes, course, online courses, live courses, workshops, teachers’ training & online teachers’ training in Handwriting Improvement, Calligraphy, Abacus Maths, Vedic Maths, Phonics and various Craft & Artforms — Madhubani, Mandala, Warli, Gond, Lippan Art, Kalighat, Kalamkari, Pichwai, Cheriyal, Kerala Mural, Pattachitra, Tanjore Painting, One Stroke Painting, Decoupage, Image Transfer, Resin Art, Fluid Art, Alcohol Ink Art, Pop Art, Knife Painting, Scandinavian Art, Water Colors, Coffee Painting, Pencil Shading, Resin Art Advanced etc. at pan-India locations. With our mission to inspire, educate, empower & uplift people through our endeavours, we have trained & operationally supported (and continue to support) 1500+ home-makers to become Penkraft Certified Teachers? in various disciplines.

0 notes

bao3bei4 · 3 years

Text

fan language: the victorian imaginary and cnovel fandom

there’s this pinterest image i’ve seen circulating a lot in the past year i’ve been on fandom social media. it’s a drawn infographic of a, i guess, asian-looking woman holding a fan in different places relative to her face to show what the graphic helpfully calls “the language of the fan.”

people like sharing it. they like thinking about what nefarious ancient chinese hanky code shenanigans their favorite fan-toting character might get up to⁠—accidentally or on purpose. and what’s the problem with that?

the problem is that fan language isn’t chinese. it’s victorian. and even then, it’s not really quite victorian at all.

--------------------

fans served a primarily utilitarian purpose throughout chinese history. of course, most of the surviving fans we see⁠—and the types of fans we tend to care about⁠—are closer to art pieces. but realistically speaking, the majority of fans were made of cheaper material for more mundane purposes. in china, just like all around the world, people fanned themselves. it got hot!

so here’s a big tipoff. it would be very difficult to use a fan if you had an elaborate language centered around fanning yourself.

you might argue that fine, everyday working people didn’t have a fan language. but wealthy people might have had one. the problem we encounter here is that fans weren’t really gendered. (caveat here that certain types of fans were more popular with women. however, those tended to be the round silk fans, ones that bear no resemblance to the folding fans in the graphic). no disrespect to the gnc old man fuckers in the crowd, but this language isn’t quite masc enough for a tool that someone’s dad might regularly use.

folding fans, we know, reached europe in the 17th century and gained immense popularity in the 18th. it was there that fans began to take on a gendered quality. ariel beaujot describes in their 2012 victorian fashion accessories how middle class women, in the midst of a top shortage, found themselves clutching fans in hopes of securing a husband.

she quotes an article from the illustrated london news, suggesting “women ‘not only’ used fans to ‘move the air and cool themselves but also to express their sentiments.’” general wisdom was that the movement of the fan was sufficiently expressive that it augmented a woman’s displays of emotion. and of course, the more english audiences became aware that it might do so, the more they might use their fans purposefully in that way.

notice, however, that this is no more codified than body language in general is. it turns out that “the language of the fan” was actually created by fan manufacturers at the turn of the 20th century⁠—hundreds of years after their arrival⁠ in europe—to sell more fans. i’m not even kidding right now. the story goes that it was louis duvelleroy of the maison duvelleroy who decided to include pamphlets on the language with each fan sold.

interestingly enough, beaujot suggests that it didn’t really matter what each particular fan sign meant. gentlemen could tell when they were being flirted with. as it happens, meaningful eye contact and a light flutter near the face may be a lingua franca.

so it seems then, the language of the fan is merely part of this victorian imaginary we collectively have today, which in turn itself was itself captivated by china.

--------------------

victorian references come up perhaps unexpectedly often in cnovel fandom, most often with regards to modesty.

it’s a bit of an awkward reference considering that chinese traditional fashion⁠—and the ambiguous time periods in which these novels are set⁠—far predate victorian england. it is even more awkward considering that victoria and her covered ankles did um. imperialize china.

but nonetheless, it is common. and to make a point about how ubiquitous it is, here is a link to the twitter search for “sqq victorian.” sqq is the fandom abbreviation for shen qingqiu, the main character of the scum villain’s self-saving system, by the way.

this is an awful lot of results for a search involving a chinese man who spends the entire novel in either real modern-day china or fantasy ancient china. that’s all i’m going to say on the matter, without referencing any specific tweet.

i think people are aware of the anachronism. and i think they don’t mind. even the most cursory research reveals that fan language is european and a revisionist fantasy. wikipedia can tell us this⁠—i checked!

but it doesn’t matter to me whether people are trying to make an internally consistent canon compliant claim, or whether they’re just free associating between fan facts they know. it is, instead, more interesting to me that people consistently refer to this particular bit of history. and that’s what i want to talk about today⁠—the relationship of fandom today to this two hundred odd year span of time in england (roughly stuart to victorian times) and england in that time period to its contemporaneous china.

things will slip a little here. victorian has expanded in timeframe, if only because random guys posting online do not care overly much for respect for the intricacies of british history. china has expanded in geographic location, if only because the english of the time themselves conflated china with all of asia.

in addition, note that i am critiquing a certain perspective on the topic. this is why i write about fan as white here⁠—not because all fans are white⁠—but because the tendencies i’m examining have a clear historical antecedent in whiteness that shapes how white fans encounter these novels.

i’m sure some fans of color participate in these practices. however i don’t really care about that. they are not its main perpetrators nor its main beneficiaries. so personally i am minding my own business on that front.

it’s instead important to me to illuminate the linkage between white as subject and chinese as object in history and in the present that i do argue that fannish products today are built upon.

--------------------

it’s not radical, or even new at all, for white audiences to consume⁠—or create their own versions of⁠—chinese art en masse. in many ways the white creators who appear to owe their whole style and aesthetic to their asian peers in turn are just the new chinoiserie.

this is not to say that white people can’t create asian-inspired art. but rather, i am asking you to sit with the discomfort that you may not like the artistic company you keep in the broader view of history, and to consider together what is to be done about that.

now, when i say the new chinoiserie, i first want to establish what the original one is. chinoiserie was a european artistic movement that appeared coincident with the rise in popularity of folding fans that i described above. this is not by coincidence; the european demand for asian imports and the eventual production of lookalikes is the movement itself. so: when we talk about fans, when we talk about china (porcelain), when we talk about tea in england⁠—we are talking about the legacy of chinoiserie.

there are a couple things i want to note here. while english people as a whole had a very tenuous knowledge of what china might be, their appetites for chinoiserie were roughly coincident with national relations with china. as the relationship between england and china moved from trade to out-and-out wars, chinoiserie declined in popularity until china had been safely subjugated once more by the end of the 19th century.

the second thing i want to note on the subject that contrary to what one might think at first, the appeal of chinoiserie was not that it was foreign. eugenia zuroski’s 2013 taste for china examines 18th century english literature and its descriptions of the according material culture with the lens that chinese imports might be formative to english identity, rather than antithetical to it.

beyond that bare thesis, i think it’s also worthwhile to extend her insight that material objects become animated by the literary viewpoints on them. this is true, both in a limited general sense as well as in the sense that english thinkers of the time self-consciously articulated this viewpoint. consider the quote from the illustrated london news above⁠—your fan, that object, says something about you. and not only that, but the objects you surround yourself with ought to.

it’s a bit circular, the idea that written material says that you should allow written material to shape your understanding of physical objects. but it’s both 1) what happened, and 2) integral, i think, to integrating a fannish perspective into the topic.

--------------------

japanning is the name for the popular imitative lacquering that english craftspeople developed in domestic response to the demand for lacquerware imports. in the eighteenth century, japanning became an artform especially suited for young women. manuals were published on the subject, urging young women to learn how to paint furniture and other surfaces, encouraging them to rework the designs provided in the text.

it was considered a beneficial activity for them; zuroski describes how it was “associated with commerce and connoisseurship, practical skill and aesthetic judgment.” a skillful japanner, rather than simply obscuring what lay underneath the lacquer, displayed their superior judgment in how they chose to arrange these new canonical figures and effects in a tasteful way to bring out the best qualities of them.

zuroski quotes the first english-language manual on the subject, written in 1688, which explains how japanning allows one to:

alter and correct, take out a piece from one, add a fragment to the next, and make an entire garment compleat in all its parts, though tis wrought out of never so many disagreeing patterns.

this language evokes a very different, very modern practice. it is this english reworking of an asian artform that i think the parallels are most obvious.

white people, through their artistic investment in chinese material objects and aesthetics, integrated them into their own subjectivity. these practices came to say something about the people who participated in them, in a way that had little to do with the country itself. their relationship changed from being a “consumer” of chinese objects to becoming the proprietor of these new aesthetic signifiers.

--------------------

i want to talk about this through a few pairs of tensions on the subject that i think characterize common attitudes then and now.

first, consider the relationship between the self and the other: the chinese object as something that is very familiar to you, speaking to something about your own self vs. the chinese object as something that is fundamentally different from you and unknowable to you.

consider: [insert character name] is just like me. he would no doubt like the same things i like, consume the same cultural products. we are the same in some meaningful way vs. the fast standard fic disclaimer that “i tried my best when writing this fic, but i’m a english-speaking westerner, and i’m just writing this for fun so...... [excuses and alterations the person has chosen to make in this light],” going hand-in-hand with a preoccupation with authenticity or even overreliance on the unpaid labor of chinese friends and acquaintances.

consider: hugh honour when he quotes a man from the 1640s claiming “chinoiserie of this even more hybrid kind had become so far removed from genuine Chinese tradition that it was exported from India to China as a novelty to the Chinese themselves”

these tensions coexist, and look how they have been resolved.

second, consider what we vest in objects themselves: beaujot explains how the fan became a sexualized, coquettish object in the hands of a british woman, but was used to great effect in gilbert and sullivan’s 1885 mikado to demonstrate the docility of asian women.

consider: these characters became expressions of your sexual desires and fetishes, even as their 5’10 actors themselves are emasculated.

what is liberating for one necessitates the subjugation and fetishization of the other.

third, consider reactions to the practice: enjoyment of chinese objects as a sign of your cosmopolitan palate vs “so what’s the hype about those ancient chinese gays” pop culture explainers that addressed the unconvinced mainstream.

consider: zuroski describes how both english consumers purchased china in droves, and contemporary publications reported on them. how:

It was in the pages of these papers that the growing popularity of Chinese things in the early eighteenth century acquired the reputation of a “craze”; they portrayed china fanatics as flawed, fragile, and unreliable characters, and frequently cast chinoiserie itself in the same light.

referenda on fannish behavior serve as referenda on the objects of their devotion, and vice versa. as the difference between identity and fetish collapses, they come to be treated as one and the same by not just participants but their observers.

at what point does mxtx fic cease to be chinese?

--------------------

finally, it seems readily apparent that attitudes towards chinese objects may in fact have something to do with attitudes about china as a country. i do not want to suggest that these literary concerns are primarily motivated and begot by forces entirely divorced from the real mechanics of power.

here, i want to bring in edward said, and his 1993 culture and imperialism. there, he explains how power and legitimacy go hand in hand. one is direct, and one is purely cultural. he originally wrote this in response to the outsize impact that british novelists have had in the maintenance of empire and throughout decolonization. literature, he argues, gives rise to powerful narratives that constrain our ability to think outside of them.

there’s a little bit of an inversion at play here. these are chinese novels, actually. but they’re being transformed by white narratives and artists. and just as i think the form of the novel is important to said’s critique, i think there’s something to be said about the form that fic takes and how it legitimates itself.

bound up in fandom is the idea that you have a right to create and transform as you please. it is a nice idea, but it is one that is directed towards a certain kind of asymmetry. that is, one where the author has all the power. this is the narrative we hear a lot in the history of fandom⁠—litigious authors and plucky fans, fanspaces always under attack from corporate sanitization.

meanwhile, said builds upon raymond schwab’s narrative of cultural exchange between european writers and cultural products outside the imperial core. said explains that fundamental to these two great borrowings (from greek classics and, in the so-called “oriental renaissance” of the late 18th, early 19th centuries from “india, china, japan, persia, and islam”) is asymmetry.

he had argued prior, in orientalism, that any “cultural exchange” between “partners conscious of inequality” always results in the suffering of the people. and here, he describes how “texts by dead people were read, appreciated, and appropriated” without the presence of any actual living people in that tradition.

i will not understate that there is a certain economic dynamic complicating this particular fannish asymmetry. mxtx has profited materially from the success of her works, most fans will not. also secondly, mxtx is um. not dead. LMAO.

but first, the international dynamic of extraction that said described is still present. i do not want to get overly into white attitudes towards china in this post, because i am already thoroughly derailed, but i do believe that they structure how white cnovel fandom encounters this texts.

at any rate, any profit she receives is overwhelmingly due to her domestic popularity, not her international popularity. (i say this because many of her international fans have never given her a cent. in fact, most of them have no real way to.) and moreover, as we talk about the structure of english-language fandom, what does it mean to create chinese cultural products without chinese people?

as white people take ownership over their versions of stories, do we lose something? what narratives about engagement with cnovels might exist outside of the form of classic fandom?

i think a lot of people get the relationship between ideas (the superstructure) and production (the base) confused. oftentimes they will lob in response to criticism, that look! this fic, this fandom, these people are so niche, and so underrepresented in mainstream culture, that their effects are marginal. i am not arguing that anyone’s cql fic causes imperialism. (unless you’re really annoying. then it’s anyone’s game)

i’m instead arguing something a little bit different. i think, given similar inputs, you tend to get similar outputs. i think we live in the world that imperialism built, and we have clear historical predecessors in terms of white appetites for creating, consuming, and transforming chinese objects.

we have already seen, in the case of the fan language meme that began this post, that sometimes we even prefer this white chinoiserie. after all, isn’t it beautiful, too?

i want to bring discomfort to this topic. i want to reject the paradigm of white subject and chinese object; in fact, here in this essay, i have tried to reverse it.

if you are taken aback by the comparisons i make here, how can you make meaningful changes to your fannish practice to address it?

--------------------

some concluding thoughts on the matter, because i don’t like being misunderstood!

i am not claiming white fans cannot create fanworks of cnovels or be inspired by asian art or artists. this essay is meant to elaborate on the historical connection between victorian england and cnovel characters and fandom that others have already popularized.

i don’t think people who make victorian jokes are inherently bad or racist. i am encouraging people to think about why we might make them and/or share them

the connections here are meant to be more provocative than strictly literal. (e.g. i don’t literally think writing fanfic is a 1-1 descendant of japanning). these connections are instead meant to 1) make visible the baggage that fans of color often approach fandom with and 2) recontextualize and defamiliarize fannish practice for the purposes of honest critique

please don’t turn this post into being about other different kinds of discourse, or into something that only one “kind” of fan does. please take my words at face value and consider them in good faith. i would really appreciate that.

please feel free to ask me to clarify any statements or supply more in-depth sources :)

#x #-__- another fandom essay sorry

1K notes · View notes

dontletthishappentoyou · 3 years

Text

Me: The time I spend thinking about a thing should probably correspond at least somewhat to how important that thing is. Also Me: I was listening to the ending credits to Hamtaro, and noticed something odd about the harmonies in the first section. For the majority of the song, it’s just in regular old F major. Lots of F major chords, a bunch of B flat and C chords (IV and V) as well, looking like the most standard thing you could find. However, the intro/outro is a little bit odd. First of all, it’s a little bit odd that it’s an intro and outro. The song follows a weirdly symmetrical ABCBA form, where the B theme only has lyrics the second time for some reason. It flows well and sounds natural, but it’s not a common form and I can’t think of any other examples. In the middle section, the C and B, I remember interpreting the lyrics to be hinting at some interesting music-oriented magic system. “Sing this secret spell” and “Let’s make a wish // Make it come true // Singing along with us is all you do” just makes it sound like there’s some sort of incantation that requires a melody to be preperly performed. It felt like the writers had an idea for some much more interesting fantasy series, but then 9/11 happened and they decided to just make a thing about hamsters instead to keep things extra light for a few years, but the lyricist had already written some gold for that other series, so he threw it in the Hamtaro song so it wouldn’t go to waste. I did a bit of research and cannot confirm that that’s not what happened. I did discover that the lyrics to one of the Hamtaro theme songs were adjusted recently in Thailand. They’re protesting their government, and the protestors are singing the Hamtaro intro theme, comparing the government to greedy hamsters, hungry for tax money. So if you hear a familiar melody in Thailand and there are people walking around with violently altered Hamtaro plushies, that’s why. Anyway, the A section. That’s where the music gets interesting. The melody definitely establishes F minor. But! When the phrase is repeated, it’s harmonized, which is a super common thing, but the harmony has a quirk. See here’s the melody, clearly in F minor:

And here is what I would say is the most natural harmony. Since the melody is in F minor, the harmony also stays in F minor. Right? That would make sense; that would sound normal.

But no! We get this weird thing. I realize it’s just off by one note, but that note is the third of the scale, the thing that establishes whether it’s in major or minor, which shows up here going directly against what was just established.

So yea, that bugged me a bit and I couldn’t figure out how to analyze it, or if there’s anything similar that follows the same pattern. You have things like the epic theme from Lord of the Rings. At first I was thinking that it was doing something similar, where the melody is in minor and the harmony is in major and the contrast makes a kind of epic heroic kind of feel that you also find a little bit of in the Zelda main theme.

So I listened loudly with headphones and there’s just not enough harmony for that to be a valid interpretation. It’s literally just those two vocal lines, and the bass is playing a constant F drone in the background with the Latin American percussion that I never thought sounded out of place for some reason. The interpretation I ended up settling on was that it’s a good example of a kind of polytonality uncommon before the 1900s in classical music. By that, I mean the melody is harmonized by an exact copy of the melody, moved upward. So instead of having a harmony that’s also in F minor but higher, we have a harmony that’s just in A minor, sung at the same time. Here’s an example in Bartok’s Concerto for Orchestra, where the oboes are doing the same thing, playing the same melody transposed a minor third apart.

The reason this works is because of a thing called Tonal Fusion. Every sound has one wave frequency that really stands out, called the fundamental, and then a ton of usually quieter ones above it. The sound of static will just have a ton of random noise at all frequencies, and noisy things like snare drums and the sound of the letter F will be similar, and every sound has a distinct pattern of pitches. A flute will be basically just that one tone with some quiet ones above it, a clarinet will have the fundamental and well known series of overtones that are closer to the same volume, but all pretty well in-tune. The problem shows up when we realize that if the clarinet is playing tons of distinct notes, and someone shouting “Fffffff!!!” makes a ton of distinct notes, why does it sound like exactly two sources of sound, rather than just one weird object, or thousands of individual objects? Our brains do tonal fusion, assuming that things moving in the same way are coming from the same object. If all of the notes above the fundamental frequency of the clarinetty sound are all moving together in perfect unison, we’ll hear it as a single object. So what Bartok is doing up there, is he’s making a new instrument. He’s taking the sound of an oboe, with it’s unique pattern of pitches above its fundamental, and he’s adding another oboe slightly above it, and when they move perfectly together, it messes with our brains and we don’t know whether to hear it as a single object or two. They tonally fuse. That’s kind of what is going on in Hamtaro as well. The melody and the harmony sort of tonally fuse together. The theme was written around the year 2000, and especially if you listen to the intro theme song, they are really playing with music production techniques, because that was what was cool at the time. This is especially noticable if you listen to the French version of the Hamtaro intro. The weird tonal fusion thing that’s happening here creates an effect very similar to things you can do as a music producer, messing with equalizers and vocoding. The fact that the vocals do this naturally is likely a result of the songwriters feeling that this is a natural way for the song to go because of the effects they’ve been experimenting with, since it seems pretty unlikely that they were inspired by Bartok, Ravel, or Holst to use this style of polytonality. I always find it fascinating when an artform is influenced by technology that was used to replace some elements of that artform. Painters practicing photorealism, animators replicating CG motions by hand, and this is definitely a good example. It’s possible that the harmony is another take pitch shifted up a major third, but it doesn’t sound pitch shifted. Instead it sounds like someone’s ear has been trained in a style influenced by developments in music production technology, converging on techniques that composers worked on a hundred years before to try to make new and inventive sounds. When we’re listening casually as kids it’s a completely different experience. I remember my synesthesia being way more intense before I shifted to whatever part of my brain listens analytically. This song was just fun, colors, and way too cheesy to admit that I enjoy as much as I do, and now it’s different. It’s a nerdy kind of fun, which I still really enjoy, and I never would have been able to have epiphanies about it years ago, but I could have learned to. I was capable of both ways of listening. Now I’m only capable of how I listen now, and it makes me feel like doors have closed forever, and I’m left with just the memory of what was behind some doors that I was very fond of. But honestly, I appreciate those memories immensely, and looking into this way more deeply just builds contrast that helps the happy joyful years of hearing that stand out better to me. It’s not a white on black where there was a purely happy experience superimposed against my dark, adult experience; it’s more blue on orange. It’s extremely different, but there aren’t many better ways to really bring out the blue than having the orange to contrast it. I hope that the overanalysis of fond memories can always just help me appreciate the pleasant tiny moments of the past. Anyway, that’s about all I have to say about the A naturals in the Hamtaro outro theme.

#hamtaro #music theory #mormon life

36 notes · View notes

jamboreeofsurprises · 3 years

Text

idk how to say this in a way that wont come across as whiny and dumb and make it even more apparent how autistic i am but whatever, its my personal blog, it’s meant to be a judge-free zone anyway. its not like im not putting out this thought to change how anyone feels about anything im just ranting.

pixar has been an important special interest of mine for decades (!) as their movies were literally some of the only movies i looked forward to seeing as a kid. i hated going to the theater because of the sensory nightmare of it all but braved it for pixar movies because they tickled my imagination so much. nearly every year had a new pixar movie which was a big event in my life for that year. i think they have struggled a lot since the 2010s especially as an over-focus on sequels happened (largely as a result of corporate disney grip) so don’t assume by any means i’m uncritical of them. as with anything else i like, i’m not about to pretend like it’s golden all the time just because i’m a fan

but i feel like most of my mutuals now immediately want to assume negatively of pixar because theyre mainstream and un-vogue and pretend like the incredibly stagnant, unchanged western animation landscape they were born of didn’t exist and how crucial their defiance towards it was for moving the medium forward. when it came to western animated movies we had disney movies and disney-imitation movies, that is to say, Fairy Tale Musicals and Other Fairy Tale Musicals. which, don’t get me wrong, i love a good fairy tale musical, but pixar were special and not just for beautifully introducing & advancing 3d cg feature animation, but because their angle was telling completely new stories that challenged this whole format. it was absolutely a breath of fresh air. and the movies could be pretty genuinely touching too for both older and younger members of the audience, usually without even having to have melodramatic character deaths or anything. monsters inc. is pure character-motivated drama and the ending made me cry buckets as a kid and still does because the characters are lovable and relatable. you don’t have to throw in a dead parents backstory or whatever for me to sincerely feel that emotion for them.

as we ushered into the 00s and walt disney animation, dreamworks, etc got a load of the critical and commercial success of pixar, their response was to copy the technology but very little of the creativity/heart. dreamworks i have come to realize at least with Shrek were still doing something pretty subversive albeit in a different direction that i think was forward-thinking but by and large, attempts to hop on the wagon of what made Pixar capture the world’s attention were pretty misguided. i think as the 00s progressed more unique animated movies started coming out as things picked up real good around 2009 (you need only glance at the academy nominations that year to realize just how varied and good every entry was) so pixar kinda got left in the dust a bit in the 2010s, and the change of direction didnt help but my god, that doesnt override their significance in the whole pantheon of animation. but i feel like everyone is forgetting that and it makes me feel like im losing my mind that im the only person remembering just how crummy most other american animated movies of the 00s were. dont get me wrong im not saying that anyone who dislikes pixar or is critical of a movie of theirs is doing it to be some Mean Hater™, but i feel that the level of negativity is strangely disproportionate to that of other animation studios which is like ??? is it just because people like them and have for years so now we have to turn that around arbitrarily?

idk i just feel like because other studios have stepped up their game some people discredit pixar entirely and that hurts. the thing that has sucked the most about it is how i don’t even feel allowed to eagerly anticipate anything pixar is going to put out even when i want to because it has to immediately be couched in such harsh judgment and discourse, which /*AGAIN*/ is not me saying they’re infallible and should never be criticized. anything and everything is open to criticism, i have my own apprehensions about some of their movies too. i just feel like the aura of negativity online surrounding each pixar release now leaves me an anxious mess while anticipating/watching the movie instead of going into it with the childlike wonder i want to go in with and could go in with because i feel like ppl are going to think i’m basic or just flat out stupid for liking the thing, no matter how sincerely.

which like, i’m not friggin basic. kanashimi no belladonna is one of my favorite animated movies lol. and so is up (the movie that made me interested in animation & storytelling as artforms), ratatouille, etc ... its almost like some mainstream things are good and popular for a reason?

this rant isnt even telling you anything, i know ive historically been overly sensitive to people being critical/negative about things that mean a lot to me and i need to get the hell over it, i just feel frustrated by everyone’s relentless negativity these days and feel like at this point so much of it’s not even coming from good faith

#journal

8 notes · View notes

lily-orchard · 4 years

Note

Why do you think story telling shifted its focus from the actual story and characters to arbitrary elements within the world like how the magic works or how big and fleshed out the world really is? I know everyone is always trying to make the next Avatar, but the show itself never gave a second glance as to why there’s an Avatar or why people are able to bend the elements. It just doesn’t make sense to me why we want stories with “clever” writing and fleshed out worlds over the fun stories.

New generation of writers who grew up drunk on fandom, where the world was the most important to create more fanfic fuel and forum fodder. People who spent their childhoods making fan theories and so incorrectly assumed that making a show built entirely around provoking fan theories would be better.

Also because writing is one of the least-straightforward artforms and a lot of young executive producers these days are animators who can’t write to save their lives.

#azrealini

29 notes · View notes

dweemeister · 3 years

Text

The count goes on...

I scarcely noticed it, but last evening with the publication of my write-up on Fanchon, the Cricket (1915), I hit 750 full-length film write-ups on this blog. As you may know, the write-ups are tagged “My Movie Odyssey”. You can access every single write-up via the blog’s index. Some years ago, when I was putting out these write-ups and watching movies at a faster pace than I do now, I jokingly put a target of 1,000 write-ups for myself.

As I approach nine years on this site, this blog is now three-quarters of the way to that coveted century mark, hitting baseball hall of fame numbers if that number was counted as home runs. It would not have been possible without the support - through likes, reblogs, shares, comments, and simple reading the write-ups - of my followers present and past, and of course family and friends off of tumblr. For every write-up you have interacted with, I hope you were introduced to new ideas and perspectives, the filmmaking process, and how each of those films fit (or may someday fit) in the grander context of the history of one of the youngest artforms.

I admit that, if this year-long lockdown was good for anything, it has inspired a run of some of my best write-ups here on tumblr. Very few of these were on 2020 films, as I felt sorta liberated from the pressures from watching the newest releases (who has that much money for all those streaming services?). If you’ve missed them, here are a few highlights from some of my “COVID write-ups” so to speak...

Movie Odyssey Retrospectives on the Walt Disney Animation Studios canon: A long planned-for project that never got off the ground until last spring (and thanks to a friend sharing their Disney+ account). Reviews have included Disney’s Golden Age films like Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937; this was write-up #700); Pinocchio (1940); Fantasia (1940); and Bambi (1942)... (1941′s Dumbo was written on a few years ago). Cinderella (1950) was published last month; this series continues hopefully this weekend with Alice in Wonderland (1951).

A Letter to Three Wives (1949): One of the finest pieces of feminist Americana I’ve ever seen, all thanks to Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s directing/writing and the stupendous performances from the three leads.

Diego Maradona (2019, United Kingdom): It is not often I feature soccer on this blog anymore. But when it comes along in the form of a write-up? I could never be more excited. This is Asif Kapadia’s documentary on the mercurial, controversial, and inflammatory late footballing genius of Diego Maradona. I wish it covered more time, but one can’t argue its effectiveness.

Ordet (1955, Denmark): As someone who was raised in a Buddhist family but was not raised with religion, I have always been fascinated by but nevertheless perplexed by narrative art that delves deeply into religious faith - especially in terms of the Abrahamic faiths (Christianity, Islam, Judaism). Probably one of my best efforts on a movie surrounding faith.

Once Upon a Time in America (1984): Epic-length gangster films are intimidating to write on. They hail from a place and time that I am very removed from - and I wish to stayed far removed from - and are so often celebratory of the “necessary” violence that they depict. Not this movie. This gangster epic is filled to the seams with regret. And I hope I conveyed that as effectively as I ever could.

Kaagaz Ke Phool (1959, India): Some of my best writing has come from write-ups of films that were deeply personal, if not fatefully biographical, for the filmmaker involved. You got that with Guru Dutt in his final film - a Bollywood box office failure but now largely considered one of the greatest examples of classic Hindi cinema. And, for those in the know, this film did pretty damn well in 2020′s MOABOS.

Tokyo Olympiad (1965, Japan): Another sports documentary? Well, this is not your typical sports documentary. This is an official film of the Olympic Games. And, other than Leni Riefenstahl’s propagandistic Olympia (1938, Germany), this is the most artistically accomplished of them all. And perhaps among the most important. I contextualize this film as essentially marking the beginning of Japan’s reintroduction to the world - perhaps not cinematically, but in the realms of politics, sport, and broader culture,

Flower Drum Song (1961): Before The Joy Luck Club (1993), the most recent film with an almost all-Asian cast was this. An adaptation of a famous Rodgers and Hammerstein musical that is never performed anymore (various reasons), it was a revelation to see so many actors of Asian descent that I had seen in bit roles in other movies or television star in this production. Even if that meant the film was not terribly culturally specific or accurate.

Wolfwalkers (2020): Another visual and thematic triumph from the folks at Cartoon Saloon in Ireland. There’s more to animation than just the major American studios and anime, as I hope many of you will learn if you haven’t already. Multinational European productions and Latin America are coming to the fore - and bringing ideas and visuals that the aforementioned American and Japanese studios could never produce.

The Cave of the Yellow Dog (2005, Mongolia): One of the gentlest films I’ve seen in the longest time. It plays like a fable, and - critically - like a lesson in learning how Mongolian nomads live without ever feeling like a university lecture. Wonderful performances from the non-professional actors, and an ideal watch for children.

Yi Yi (2000, Taiwan): A gorgeous portrait of a middle-class Taiwanese family as they navigate life’s messy current at the turn of the twentieth to twenty-first centuries. A pleasure to reflect on, however difficult actually writing this review was.

Thank you for your goodwill, support, and good humor for the first three quarters of this journey to a thousand Movie Odyssey write-ups. The fourth and final quarter begins. Onward.

1 note · View note

queen-of-my-goofball-army · 4 years

Text

Hazbin Hotel OC

Hey guys!! I’m back and fully recovered for the most part but I made some new friends so I wanted to talk about my new character that I made. I love this show probably way more than I should and since Addict came out yesterday I decided to redesign my OC.

Appearance: Estelle is a white fox demon, she has bright blue eyes like she had in life. In life she was petite and usually had to stand on a ladder in order to get something from the top shelf. It was either that or Angel had to be the one that helped her get it down for her. He was a regular in her shop since they grew up together when he accidentally hit her upside the head with a soda can after she had been thrown into the trash. She has marks on her throat from when she was gripped there harshly by her deceased mafia husband. She wears a chefs hat over her ears and is usually found working hard in the kitchen if she’s not playing cards or comforting Angel.

Death Backstory: After Angel Dust overdosed and left her behind she quickly found herself slowly sinking. Her bakery was losing clientele because her sweets had gone downhill after a rival shop opened across the road. She had lost her purpose in life. Maybe that’s why she had agreed to marry the local mafia boss in Little Italy. She had agreed to the proposal to save her shop. Even though it was the 20’s she had always been as Angel had lovingly called her “different” she didn’t get engaged by the normal sexual things. In fact, she was openly repulsed by them. Every time Angel did a sex lecture she would only listen to him partially. At first, she thought that the marriage would be fine since he still had his mistresses and she didn’t think that he would ever want sex from her. She was naive and of course he eventually got interested in it with her. She remembered a lecture that Angel had given her about consent if she had ever been forced into sex. She grabbed the closest thing that she could to his head, a lamp and just went crazy on him. Accidentally, he was murdered by her and since it was the 20’s nobody believed her when she had said the truth that he would’ve raped her if she hadn’t done anything. She was hung and sent to hell for her crimes against humanity.

A: What are/were this character’s best subjects in school? Her best subjects were math, astronomy and home economics. She was always a master at figuring out puzzles so math came more easily to her than it did to most of her classmates. The stars had always fascinated her and Angel would take her to the tops of the rooftops of New York where you could see the stars for miles around. Home economics was her favorite because she could bake for a class. She had always been a lover of baking and even though not everything turned out perfectly she still found a lot of success with the artform.

B: Do they have any allergies? She isn’t allergic to anything that she knows of. She did make a lot of sweets that were allergy friendly was one of the first to be able to do so.

C: Can they swim well? She is an incredible swimmer; it used to be one of her favorite things when her and Angel were kids. (Of course he was a piece of shit whenever she was nervous and would give her a push forward that was his job).

D: How do they react to being flirted with? She’s actually used to it since Angel has been jokingly flirting with her despite women not being his cup of alcohol.

E: How are they with children? In life, Estelle had a lot of siblings she was the go to babysitter when Angel didn’t need her for anything which was rare. She loved her family even if often she wasn’t understood by them. It was a little bit trickery for a lot of people that weren’t her best friend to understand her.

F: What’s one thing they’re really bad at? If I were to label one thing that she’s really bad at it’s probably going to be directions. She gets lost really easily if she doesn’t have somebody walking around with her. Angel always had to be the more alert one of the two of them especially if it was late at night. He wouldn’t let anybody hurt his best girl not while he was around.

G: How do they flirt? If she were to flirt it would probably be very sheepish compliments. The only person that she could ever flirt genuinely with was Angel though that might be all the couple pet names talking.

H: What is their deadly sin? Her deadly sin would be gluttony. She has always had a really slim figure, something that her best friend has always been jealous of since her diet has a lot of sugary stuff involved.

I: On a scale of 1 to 10, how much do they love themselves? On a scale of one to ten Estelle probably loves herself at a three. She has a lot of self doubt that manifested itself into her being a shell of who she used to be. Being forced to have sex wasn’t something that she had ever been planning to do. It wasn’t until she saw Angel again and learned that he had to go through the same thing that it suddenly dawned on her. She’s not alone, she never really has been. She’s been immensely blessed to have the most amazing best friend in the entire world. He helps get her back on her feet and gain that confidence that he’s always seen in her.

J: What’s their sense of humour like? Her sense of humor is rather wordy. She loves puns and making jokes about the wacky antics around her. She is also super sarcastic which is a side of her that really only Angel knows well.

K: How do you know when you’ve upset them? She shuts down, it’s hard to get a reaction of anything out of her. She’s broken up inside about a lot of things that have happened to her in her life that once Angel hugs her tightly to him and tells her that everything will be okay she believes him. He’ll always have her back. It's something that she has grown to love him like a brother for.

L: What is their favourite board game? Her favorite board game is actually anything that she can play with cards. As kids one of the first things that her and Angel started to really get into was war and the stakes were salt water taffies in their favorite flavors (He would almost always win and split them with her anyways giving her tips on how to do better next time).

M: What is their favourite dessert? This is the hardest question in the world but if she were to have a desert island dessert it would probably be struffoli. It’s donut holes dunked in honey and powdered sugar. Her family growing up was of Italian descent and when she met Angel she fully accepted that part of her life.

N: What do they usually eat for breakfast? Usually it’s a freshly made something that she made that morning whether it be a bagel or a croissant and a cup of hot chocolate.

O: What would it take to break them, inside and out? For Angel to fully abandon her for the sake of Cherri. She has gotten used to having her around, in fact they are so different from each other that they are surprisingly close.

P: How do they handle money? She handles money extremely well because she had to kickstart her own business because her parents wouldn’t help her out.

Q: Are they patient? She has had to be the patient one between her and Angel for the entirety of their friendship. He is always the first to get irritated by what’s going on around him and she’s always had to be the one that pulled him back from doing something stupid. The one time she wasn’t there he overdosed and she hadn’t been able to see him in the hospital.

R: What are their hands like? Her hands are small and usually covered with flour because it’s really hard to get her to take a break.

S: How stealthy are they? She is not stealthy at all mostly because she’s almost always humming something under her breath. Cherri got her into 80’s music once she arrived in hell and everything changed for her after that.

T: Where are they ticklish? She is immensely ticklish which is her curse once she arrives in hell and finds that Angel has become a spider with arms to torment her with.

U: What’s their voice like? Her voice is usually quiet unless she gets really frustrated with something that isn’t turning out right in the oven.

V: What’s the easiest way to annoy them? The easiest way to annoy her is to pinch her cheeks. They’ve always been huge and her best friends have never let her forget it.

W: Can they dance? She can dance, she was amazing at the charleston but her dance skills are a little bit last century as Cherri loves to tease.

X: What’s their most petty little secret? Her most petty little secret was her initial jealousy of Cherri once she arrived in hell. Mostly because she was so much like Angel and thought that she wasn’t needed anymore.

Y: What is one question they’ve always wanted an answer to? Why her husband wanted to be married to her when he could’ve had anybody that he wanted quite literally.

Z: How do they sleep? She sleeps very rarely because she doesn’t technically need it but Angel always makes her sleep when he’s with her. She feels protected around him and trust me when I say that he isn’t letting anything get to her ever again.

Do they sleep with a stuffed animal? She does sleep with stuffed animals once she arrives in hell and Angel saw that she didn’t have any here he got her some so that she could feel more comfortable.

Can they take care of a plant? What about a pet? What about a child? Once she arrives in hell she gets a cat companion the same day that Angel finds Fat Nuggets.

Ask them to describe their love interest. Estelle doesn’t have a love interest. I decided to give her a found family love instead of having to force her into a romantic relationship because platonic love is just as important as romantic.

Do they look good in red? She looks good in just about everything but she does have a flowy red top that Angel bought her that she loves

Speech! Speech! Speech! Speech! She would give a speech to Angel about how being broken in the same way doesn’t have to be a bad thing. They understand each other better than they ever could have when she was alive.

Who will they take advice from, no matter what it is? Who won’t they take advice from, no matter what it is? She will always confide in her best friends first they get first priority. She will never take advice from her ex-husband or Valentino (he gets his ass kicked once she meets him)

Describe them in three words. Now let them describe themselves in three words. I would describe her as immensely kind, snarky and a lover of everything that is her best friend’s. She would describe herself as a good listener, a bit broken but still beautiful and an amazing baker but that’s things that she starts to believe after reuniting with Angel.

Do they empathize with non-sentient things (dolls, plants, books…)? She empathizes with a lot of her books that she keeps in her at home library.

What age do they most want to be right now? She mostly is happy with where she is, but she has her two best friends and who can complain about that legitimately?

They’ve won the lottery. Spend, or save? Spend it on something for her friends there’s not even a second thought going through her head. Her second idea is to make improvements to her shop with what’s left over.

Do they like romance in the books they read (or in the book they’re in)? She does love romance just not the one that she got. She can be found crying every time she watches Painted Veil and Angel just hands her a box of tissues.

Name one thing their parents taught them. Her parents weren’t around for a good percentage of her life but they did teach her that hard work is extremely important a little bit too well considering that she rarely ever takes breaks.

Would they agree with the term ‘guilty pleasure’? They would agree with that term because she does love things that wouldn’t be loved by other people, mostly crappy B movies that she watches with Angel just to laugh at something.

What would they consider a waste of time– other than school or work? To her lazy days are a waste of time but she grows to love them once she becomes friends with Angel. He shows her that taking time off from constantly trying to work herself to death. Taking days where you can do nothing but laugh and joke around it’s perfectly healthy.

If money wasn’t a limit, what would they wear? They would probably own more cute dresses that expressed her femininity more. At the moment it’s a skirt over leggings with a cute hoodie.

Do they like children? She does love children!! It’s just she doesn’t want to be in a relationship at the moment.

Kissing: tongue or no tongue? At the moment she’s pretty kiss adverse except for the platonic cheek kisses that her and Angel have.

Do they study before tests? Practice before job interviews? She was a practicer before job interviews when she was alive and she did always study before tests too because she could never be too careful.

What do they like that nobody else does? Hmm there isn’t really anything that I could think of to answer this question. I think that between her, Angel and Cherri they have most everything in common.

What would it take for them to break up with someone? What would be the last straw? It would take a lot to eventually break up with somebody but as soon as they tried to force her into sex that was a big no-no for her.

Do they like being called pet names? Do they call other people pet names? What’s their go-to? She does actually love pet names but mostly the platonic ones that her and Angie have. Sweetheart, hun, doll face, and eventually spider-babe and foxy.

Stability or novelty? Stability would be the way that would comfort her the most.

Safety or possibility? She loves feeling safe and Angel makes her feel safer than most anybody out there.

Talent or effort? Talent is the best way to go and she’s talented at a lot of things.

Forgiveness or vengeance (or…)? Forgiveness she would forgive just about anybody except for her bastard of an ex-husband

Would they date a fixer-upper? She would date a fixer-upper but she isn’t currently interested in seeing anybody.

#oc #Hazbin Hotel #Angel Dust

9 notes · View notes

canvaswolfdoll · 4 years

Text

CanvasWatches: Id: Invaded

Okay, what if we could catch serial killers by entering their subconscious minds (referred to as an Id-Well), where the amnesiac avatar of a investigator must search for clues while also solving a murder mystery created within the bounds of a fantastic, mind bending world? Isn’t that an amazing premise for a combination platformer/puzzle video game?

Anyways, Id: Invaded is an anime. The only major complaint I have is how I would much rather be playing it than watching the proceedings, which probably just means it’s got a good concept.

Uh… it’s a mystery show with a season long arc and character progression so… spoilers? It’s a good show if you’re into that stuff. Handles grit and mature themes well, but… well, mature themes and violent images abound. So be careful of that.

So that’s the spoiler warning.

After watching the first episode and learning the basic concept, two truths were immediately evident: the young-looking police girl (Koharu Hondomachi) hearing the exposition is going to kill someone so she’ll be a candidate to dive into the id-well, and the elderly director guy overseeing the project is 100% the big bad.

Still, just because a couple things are easily solved by knowledge of narratives doesn’t mean there aren’t surprises. Like trepanning is a plot-important element in this for… some reason… it gives a secondary character superpowers!

Don’t… don’t blindly emulate your media, kids.[1]

The first couple of episodes telegraph what elements to pay attention to pretty clearly. Hondomachi is wide-eyed and overly interested in the Id Well machinations, and asks about how one becomes a candidate for entering the machine, and doesn’t look put out by the need to be a killer.[2] She also headbutts a drill to assist in the capture of the first serial killer of the show, so she’s not hesitant to take extreme measures. Which leaves the question: will she kill with the intention of joining the Id Well delving team?

Meanwhile, Takuhiko Hayaseura appears only long enough to be marked as important, but he doesn’t take an active part in the plot. Then the mysterious John Walker Phantom appears with similar old man body language, those dots are connected and you just have to wait for the plot to catch up.

Finally, our protagonist, Narihisago, dwells on wanting to save the perpetual victim of these murder dinner parties he’s investigating, signalling that Kaeru is more than a prop of the gimmick. I didn’t have enough details to take a guess at what her larger role would be, so the reveal in the later episodes was a successful twist.

There is a small tragedy with the structure of the anime course. While I typically prefer the 12 to 24 episode style, as it allows for limits for the artists to work with (like a trellis), and means that the series maintains a consistent narrative without flailing about to maintain momentum until given permission to die, we occasionally get a show like Id: Invaded where the central gimmick lends itself so well to an episodic, killer of the week style stories that I just want to watch the variations and not care too much about the myth arc. Because it’s set to conclude with episode 13, the show can only play with the gimmick for about half the course before having to buckle down and start telling the larger narrative, leaving me yearning for more new id wells and mysteries.

If the show were twice as long, it would’ve been able to play with the gimmick more, and have space to flesh out the investigative team to have actually interesting characters.

The first episodes introduce six characters watching Narhisago and analyzing the world around him to deduce the actual identity of the serial killer, but they have very little dialogue outside of exposition, and their mystery is opaque to the viewer until they solve it. The team could’ve been cut in half without losing anything.

But if Id:Invaded had two cours to stretch out and tell stories, the investigation team could have subplots and character revealing dialogue. But there’s no space for them, so… lost potential.

In fact, if this story was told as a video game,[3] there’d be plenty of space for the Wellside team to have incidental dialogue to develop them. The audience/player can also get more direct satisfaction out of solving the gimmick of each Id-Well, as they get to directly utilize the solution to complete the level. If the hypothetical game takes a page from Pheonix Wright, which is the game I most mentally aligned with the show, there can also be a section after the level where the clues found within the level can be analyzed and the player gets to piece together who the killed is.

It’d be fun.

But… er… the actual story.

It’s fine. The characters make a lot about learning who this John Walker fellow is, but the obvious culprit is sitting right there, so the viewer is just patiently waiting for the characters to catch up, amusing themselves with the episodic portion of the story.

Then, a twist: they find the device used to enter Id-Wells within an Id-Well. So, what would happen if someone used it?

So our protagonist does, and finds himself seemingly back in the real world, though before the death of his wife and daughter. He can set right what once went wrong!

Although… he knows this can’t be real. He remembers everything that led him here, so surely this is permanent.

But what if it is?

First order of business: Narihisago sequence breaks and puts a stop to the serial killer who murdered his daughter early, the fight placing him in the hospital, where he finds… Kaeru? Except her name’s Kiki, and when she sleeps, those around her experience her dreams.

Dreams where she’s constantly getting murdered, often in very brutal fashion. Huh.

Despite the characters attempting to lean into the mysterious nature of the machine allowing them to place people into Id-Wells, I took it for granted and assumed it wouldn’t need explanation.

Instead, we learn Kiki’s power is being exploited to enable the gimmick, which I should have seen coming considering how much the anime is built on women suffering.[4]

Eventually, Narihisago and Hondomachi (the girl who becomes a second Id-Well diver partway through) are able to use the time and space given in this recreated past to find a solid lead on who John Walker is. Just in time for the system to kick them out and for them to climb back out to actual reality.

Hayaseura, learning the jig is up, releases Kiki from the hidden chamber she’s been in, and lets her loose, where her powers rage out of control and pull everyone in the building into various Id-Wells.

He then goes to the chamber with the machines allowing the well-dives, and upon being confronted, he activates a machine to take him in as he shoots himself, intending to wreak havoc in the collective unconscious or whatever.

In hindsight, they probably could’ve just unplugged him and moved on to resolve the Kiki problem. Instead, our nominal[5] heroes follow him in for the final confrontation!

Then Covid-19 struck, and I had to wait three months for the final episode to get dubbed!

All my dubs are delayed. Which is fine. It’s fine and fair. I don’t want anyone to risk themselves just for my entertainment, but I’m allowed to be a little disappointed by fate.

So after a three month delay, I sit down to watch the final episode, not bothering to rewatch anything because I’ve waited three months and a not insignificant portion of my motivation was to just finish the dang thing.

The final episode was okay. The two detective characters work together to outwit John Walker, sending him to the time displaced universe via a machine in the Id-Well of someone who’s now dead.

Which… upon reflection, isn’t a permanent solution. Both Narihisago and Hondomachi went through that experience, and eventually got ejected to their original Id-Wells, and the death of an Id-Well’s owner doesn’t collapse the place (as proved by Hayaseura/John Walker using his own Id-Well to jump about despite being dead himself.

Outside the Id-Wells, the leader of the Wellside Team puts on a prototype suit version of the machine to attempt to get Kiki to stop making a mess of the building. He meets up with her, refuses to shoot her, and they all agree to put her back and maybe try and solve her problem.

So, at the end of the series, we’re mostly back where we started: using an applied phlebotinum girl to chase serial killers. Which keeps the premise open for a sequel,[6] but they’ll need to write a new overarching plot, as I don’t thinking curing Kiki’s dream projections lines up as a murder mystery. It’s possible, but I find it unlikely.

In the end, I enjoyed the show, and I’m glad I watched it. I’d recommend it to anyone looking for a more obscure anime after getting through the Canon of the artform. Still, the amount of female characters suffering, to the point that the plot itself operates off a woman’s suffering is uncomfortable. If there is more, hopefully they can lean off that element.

Also, let me reiterate one last time how Id:Invaded would make a great video game. I buy that Visual Novel in a snap.

Kataal kataal.

[1] Not that kids should watch this one. [2] The reason for this limitation is not explained, and is likely unimportant. [3] A desire I wasn’t being facetious about. [4] Most of the murder victims are woman, and there’s a worrying tendency for the killer’s methods to be based on maiming. [5] All three are killers: one a serial killer killer, a second a killer due to self-defense, and the last just a straight serial killer who happened to be useful. [6] And, indeed, a manga continuation started at the same time as the show, so the premise lives.

#CanvasWatches #id:invaded #anime #CanvasReviews

3 notes · View notes

lonesomealley · 4 years

Text

A Short Hike - In Depth Analysis and Review SCRIPT

POSTER'S NOTE: This script may have been slightly edited when doing the voice over for the video. Apologies about any inaccuracies.

A Short Hike - Indepth Review

By Count_

Big spoiler warning right off the bat with this video, I do not know how to talk about this game without spoiling either massive parts of what the game is trying to convey to you or what the game wants you to experience. I know this sounds really cheesy but this game works at its absolute best when you know nothing about it aside from the surface level screenshots. If you want a spoiler free overview of what the game is, it’s an open world exploration game that’s essentially a walking simulator. The game contains no real “gameplay” like fighting or difficult platforming, it is a casual experience. And you absolutely should not be going into this game expecting it to be something more than that. My overall opinion for this review is that this game is an absolutely fantastic experience that you should play. The only actual gripe I have with the game is that the price point is going to be a little too high for some people’s standards, especially if you like to get the most mileage out of your money. I would say the best way to legally get ahold of this game would be to subscribe to Humble Monthly and pick this game up from the Humble Trove. You essentially get access to this game for free alongside all of your Humble Monthly games, so getting it through this service is probably the best way to go for most people. Okay that’s all the spoiler free information I can give away, I highly recommend you go play this game before you watch this video because I will be spoiling what the game wants to convey and how the game goes about doing that. This video will not be going anywhere, have fun.

At the core of A Short Hike, the game isn’t even about the hike. The title straight out lies to you. The game begins with a dialogue between the protagonist Claire, and her mother as they drive out towards where Claire, and the player, will be residing for the rest of the game. Claire then appears outside of her cabin amongst a bright and sunny day, where the first character you meet: Ranger, or Aunt May will inquire about why she has been inside all day. To which you, the player, will promptly learn that you’re expecting a phone call, and there’s no service on any part of the island, except for the summit of Hawk Peak. And from there you’ve been given your first quest, get to the summit and get your phone call. Just as a little break off, it is possible to wholly avoid this part of the game by simply diving into the ocean and going the opposite direction. However, assuming you take the natural progression path, when you begin walking down the pathway and receive a small tutorial dialogue on how to glide, you’ll find Jen sitting by the beach. Talking to her provides you another quest: bring back 15 sea shells. Now sea shells aren’t hard to find, you just need to scout out the beaches until you’ve collected enough of them, however there’s a catch and I think you know where this is going. By going out to collect these sea shells you will stumble upon new things to explore and new people to talk to, and those people are also going to give you new quests or tasks to do.

This is the foundation for which the game is built on, because before you know it, in an almost Skyrim-like fashion, you will be far off from the main quest doing all of these different little side gigs. And what started as a short hike, turns into a one to two hour adventure where you do everything else except the hike that you’re told to do. The game even meta-mentions that this would happen by having one of the characters ask Claire if she feels “lost and directionless,” and then give you a compass. There’s two other ways to interpret this off the top of my head: one, is that this is just a joke to introduce the compass, and yeah that’s pretty much it. Or two, which can be tied to the end of the game, so we’ll come back to this. But through these little micro quests, you are actually experiencing the game the way that it’s intended to be played. You run around, meet all these people, do all these tasks for them, go fishing and gliding, and look through binoculars to see if you missed anything below, and this all has a narrative purpose.

You’re never told why you come to this island besides just, “It’s nice to get out of the city.” And you never learn anything about that as you continue playing the game, just that you’re waiting for a phone call. It’s a well wrapped scheme of omission that aims to recontextualize, the entire game. Because when you get to the summit of Hawk Peak, Claire finally gets that phone call, at what couldn’t be a more convenient time. Claire has actually forgotten that this was supposed to happen, and she has a heartfelt conversation with her mother where you learn that her mother has gone through surgery and that she wasn’t told anyone about it until after the fact. It’s never specified when this surgery happened, how Claire found out, or how long she has even been on the island, you just have to assume that she’s been there long enough that people know her name. But that information isn’t important, what’s important is that Claire’s mom probably brought her here to make her forget about the surgery or the worries that encompass it. The player is never told this information because the game wants you to feel the same way Claire does where you can just forget about your worries and have fun. It’s quite obvious how this information is introduced and then very quickly swept under the rug with no impact as you travel the Hawk Peak updraft back to your cabin. You’ll also speak with Aunt May and Claire will tell her that the surgery went okay and that things are fine, and then Claire will recount the experiences that both her and the player have gone through during the game. And that’s where this final interpretation of the line “lost and directionless” comes in because that could be Claire’s mental state in response to the news about the surgery. The hike is a metaphor for getting over worry and you don’t need to know that because it’s not relevant to the player’s overall experience.

That’s where I was primarily impressed with this game, the writing is almost too good for a Humble funded indie project made by one guy with help from a musician. And I’ve dedicated three paragraphs just to talk about the writing and I could write so much more about the animal crossing styled characters and humor, the side stories that these characters have that you can actively follow. On my first playthrough I came across these guys climbing up some play rock walls and I was told to acquire a golden feather and come back, but when you get a golden feather you’re already told how to climb and so I did just that. I climbed around and used my feathers for jumps and forgot about those guys back there. But they actually have dialogue if you come back and climb up these walls, infact through doing this you learn that they’re actually training to climb Hawk Peak and you’ll be able to spot these guys climbing the mountain later on through triggering this dialogue. And there’s so many more examples of this throughout the game like an artist suffering from creative blockage, or someone’s relative wanting you to remind them to hydrate themselves and take breaks. It all makes the world feel really expansive and it’s actually packed so full of content that even though I was pretty thorough in trying to explore and do everything I could, I still missed stuff. I didn’t even get the achievement for collecting all of the golden feathers, and when my girlfriend played she’d tell me about things that I had forgotten about or outright never found and experienced. It’s an exploration sandbox that leads to everyone having their own journey with the game. And that ending? You can complete that as early as you want, the speedrun for this game is 3 minutes and they completely bypass the minimum recommendations that the game gives you. You don’t even have to explore the world outside of just getting enough golden feathers to get to the peak. In a way it’s a game that feels personalized for everyone that plays it.

*ugh* I haven’t even gotten to the gameplay, graphics, or music. The biggest elephant in the room here is the retrograde graphics. Pixel art as an artform is often overdone in indie games because, let’s face the facts, many indie developers are not artists. Well actually Adam is, but we’ll get back to this. There’s something different about the way that the pixel art is incorporated in this game. You can tell because you’re able to swing your camera around in the game and the only way this would be possible is if everything was actually modeled and some form of pixelation was thrown over the visuals. Which means that this art style is entirely deliberate, and actually means something to Adam, the developer. A different art style could’ve been used for this game and still would’ve achieved the same general effect. In fact, the game features a cheat code that completely removes the pixelation, and it looks great! Some of the models are a little scuffed and everything is generally low poly, but with a little bit of polishing this art style could’ve worked. It turns out that this pixelation effect comes from a Unity package called GBCamera which essentially renders the visuals of the game at a small resolution, and has optional bit coloring, classic to the gameboy. At first I thought this was a mere visual effect just put over the game because the Itch.io description isn’t too descriptive on how it actually works. So I decided to ask Adam himself, and I also asked why he decided to use pixel art as the pivotal piece in his art style. And I actually got answers. GBCamera is essentially just a renderer that is capable of rendering in small resolutions that then can be blown up to the resolution of the player’s monitor. For why he used this for his game, he said he simply likes pixel art and that it allows him to make assets faster.

But something caught my attention with the way he worded his response, he thinks the art style is interesting and unique. Now while pixel art in of itself is not at all unique as it’s been pretty common throughout the history of gaming in many different forms, it’s not been quite used in this form before where a fully 3D game is pixelated. The only games that really cross my mind on this is Devil Daggers and DS games. Yeah you heard me right, DS games. The DS, much like A Short Hike, was capable of rendering 3D environments and models, the problem was that the DS had a limited resolution meaning that everything on screen was always very pixelated unless the assets were already based on pixel art. And that, in a way, drove the artistic direction that many DS games took. If things were small, they had to be distinguishable. If things were a fully detailed 3D world, it had to be simplified to avoid being noisy or ugly. The best overall analysis I can give of Adam’s opinion on the style is that he thinks games that are proactively retrograded is unique, and I have to say I agree. It’s a fresh breath of air, and Adam even had the foresight to include an option in the game to select how much the game is pixelated, because it can be an eyesore. My only gripe with this style is that there’s no option just to turn the pixelation off. There’s all of these other options like shadows, color corrections, image quality, etc. but there’s no option to just turn it off. As of the date of this video going up, it has been commented on that Adam has at least thought about adding this option, and if it is in the game by the time this video goes up I’ll leave a little message on the screen. It should also be noted that Adam has used this style in some of his other games, notably You’re Dead in Space and The Night That Speaks so clearly Adam has experience with this art style and he likes it enough to continue using and innovating on it. The somewhat ironic thing here is that You’re Dead in Space is very comparable to Devil Daggers in the sense that they are pixelated hoard shooters where you are expected to eventually die.

Let’s take a couple steps back to when I said that Adam was an artist, and the biggest piece of evidence that I’m going to use for this claim is Adam’s upcoming “Untitled” RPG. Comparing this RPG to Adam’s other games, even A Short Hike, immediately gives off the vibe of, “This was not created by the same person.” But when I sent Adam some questions, one of those asked if Adam was the leading artist for A Short Hike and if he was the lead artist for his upcoming RPG. Basically, he said that yes, he does most of the art assets, most because he does get help from some of his friends. And I just want to point out just how good his upcoming RPG looks. It appears pretty based on Paper Mario but it seems to be adding some more depth to that art style. It looks really good, and so does A Short Hike, and Adam should get the credit that he deserves.

Something else that is really good is the gameplay. Outside of just walking around and jumping, as you progress through the game you will earn the ability to sprint, do multiple mid air jumps, climb, dive, glide, speed glide, and you’ll find special feathers that give you the ability to jump higher and use less stamina while climbing. All of these features make the game feel much like a metroidvania and after you spend a couple hours in the game you’ll be jumping halfway up the map and doing speed glides everywhere you want to go. You’re given all the tools you need right from the beginning and everything you pickup is just upgrades that let you use those tools better. And you’re given a lot of freedom and versatility with those tools. And I would chalk that up to the world design. Everything is very compact and close together, and sometimes just stacked on top of each other in a way that makes traversing the island simple, time efficient, and just exciting. You don’t need to spend five minutes walking in one direction to get to a certain area when everything is pretty much just right next to each other with shortcuts, bounce flowers, and even an updraft to make traversing even easier that will continually get easier as you play the game. An example of this is the, what I’m going to call, Breath of the Wild climb that Claire is suited with. You’re able to climb up any slope or building granted that you have enough feathers left, collecting more feathers or even collecting the silver feathers allows you to climb for longer. The same goes for your jumps, collect more feathers to do more jumps, collect silver feathers to jump higher each time.

Another central piece of Claire’s moveset is her gliding ability and the potential you have for drastically improving how you use it. There’s a hidden island you can travel to that will teach you how to dive into a speed glide, and when you get the technique down you find that the game becomes very open. Your methods of travel will basically revolve around using speed glides to travel the longer distances around the island because it is just that fast. And while we talk about openness and speed, we should talk about speedruns. It’s natural for a game that can be completed at any time to be easy to speedrun, but speedrunners have, naturally, found a way to beat the game with less than the recommended amount of golden feathers. This is because of two methods, one being a bug and the other a feature. The first one is, what I’ll deem, chest jumping where you jump off of a chest while it’s opening animation is playing. And the other is these bouncy flowers that you provide water to in order to unlock shortcuts around the island. Whether intentional or not speedrunners have been able to use these methods to cut the game’s length down to less than three minutes. That might not sound like that incredible of a feat, but it highlights just how many different ways you can play and navigate A Short Hike. If you don’t want to be on your feet for the duration of the game, then you don’t have to. If you want to play the game by finding and doing the least amount of things possible, then you can even if it may defeat the purpose of the game. In these ways A Short Hike is comparable to a sandbox in the way that the game is very open with very little limiting rules or mechanics and in fact promotes the free use of what it provides you. That is what makes the gameplay effective at allowing the player to access the contents of its game.

Finally, I want to address the music, and I’m not a music guy so I can’t provide very complex insight on it, so it’s all going to be pretty basic. And in just one word, the music is good. The soundtrack contains exactly the type of music you’d expect from a game like this, while having a somewhat Celeste-y vibe to it as you progress up the hiking trail. I contacted Mark Sparling, the composer, and asked him some questions about what direction he was given and what his inspirations were. He actually gave a pretty drawn out answer to my questions which I can summarize down to: Adam and Mark discussed what type of music to use and reminisced on similar music that had the same tone such as Animal Crossing, Legend of Zelda, studio Ghibli’s music, as well as music artists and bands such as Sufjan Stevens, Punch Brothers, and Nickel Creek. Mark then produced Beach Buds along with an assortment of different tracks. However Beach Buds ultimately stuck and the rest of the game’s soundtrack fell into place.

The game features a simplistic, yet dynamic music system where certain parts of music tracks or different tracks altogether play in corresponding areas that gives the game a sense of progression. It should be noted that this was Mark’s idea. This system works well in correspondence to how varied the music is and how the music has been produced in the way that one music track holds different “stages” of music. As a system designed to derail players from feeling like the music is too monotonous, it’s pretty good at doing just that despite its simplicity. There wasn’t one time where I thought, “Man I don’t want to listen to this anymore,” over my three playthroughs.

It should also be pointed out that the music is well diversified. It’s a mixture of banjo, chiptune, electronic beats, piano, synth, etc. that’s played in an order throughout the game that is all about something that you don’t understand until you’ve beaten the game. And that’s Claire and the emotional baggage she carries throughout the game as you climb up her personal mountain. Music adds so much to video games, especially ones like this, that people often don’t think about or fully comprehend. And it’s important that the music is done right and it fits the settings and encourages players to be immersed in their experience. Just imagine if the game had no music, or... [rock music] But seriously, I can surely say that the music for A Short Hike does exactly the former, it’s simple yet effective in doing what it needs to do while adding and strengthening the narrative and setting. And while this video isn’t a review for the soundtrack, five dollars nets you the game’s music that comes in long and short versions so that you can listen to either the commercial releases intended for listening audiences or experience the full amount of effort that went into the music.

A Short Hike is a game that tells you everything you need to know right in the title. However it’s a game that’s simultaneously about a short hike while also not being about the hike at all. This is one of those, “It’s not about the destination, it’s about the journey,” kind of games because the way that it’s structured ensures there will be distractions among every step of the way. Whether that’s being asked to find an item, collect a certain amount of feathers, even just being exposed to the beautiful scenery of the game and wanting to see more. A Short Hike is about taking your time to explore and climb a beautiful, lively environment full of inhabitants that might just remind you of certain games you’ve played in the past with retrograde graphics comparable to the DS days. Barring external factors such as pricing, length, distribution platforms, etc. If I had to give a review score for this game, it would easily be, at the lowest, an 8/10. It doesn’t overstay its welcome, and if you’re willing to put $8 down for the game I’d highly recommend purchasing it through Steam or Itch.io.

Thank you for watching.

#a short hike #original #video scripts

2 notes · View notes

fantroll-purgatory · 5 years

Text

Fantrolls: A Self-Review Guide

I wanted to write up a quick guide on how I handle reviews in case you guys wanted to do some Homework on your fantrolls while our submit box is closed for the next little while. I’ll break it down part by part.

Themes: People don’t always tell us the themes outright, but when I’m analyzing a troll, it’s usually where I start. I read through the whole thing and either mentally Or physically write down a note of everything I see. I ask a couple of questions:

-What are they trying to accomplish? What is your goal here? Keep that in mind throughout the character building to make sure you do what you set out to do. If you want to build a certain type of character, have that type in mind while making decisions. There should be no frivolous decisions when building a character- everything should in some small way define this character.

-If there are multiple themes, how do these ideas connect? Is there a way to do it better? Is there anything extraneous? At this point, if there’s anything unnecessarily clunky getting in the way of the theme pulling through strong, you may want to ax it, or make it a less important part of the character without deleting it entirely. Remember here that sometimes less is more- for example, Orion is already a lot of themeatic baggage, you don’t need to try to make Orion the Barber Shop Quartet Masseuse (though you could, I guess).

-What do I already know about this theme? And what more could I know? So at this point, if the character theme is... for example, knights, I’d mentally go through everything I know about knights. They’re noble, they’re chivalrous, they have a code, the style and responsibilities have changed over time, they appear in a lot of stories... I ask myself a question like- are they trying to theme after Real knights or Storybook knights, because those are different? And then I research whichever direction they’re leaning. Here you should gather up as much trivia as you can. If you’re not fond of Extensive research, a wiki walk should be okay for most themes (some must be handled with more tact than that, but generally speaking). Pick which parts of this information interest you and that you want to incorporate and which parts don’t interest you so much, then as you build the character keep these parts in mind.

Name: I have a bit of a tendency to be most lenient here except when it comes to names that are just Totally off kilter or names that are insensitive in some way. You can get really attached to names, so it’s understandable when you get wary about changes. A good way to combat this is to come up with a themed name in the first place. If you already have a character, though, renaming can be tricky.

You can look for etymological roots for the name, alternative spellings and older versions. Barring that, look for words that have a similar vibe. Search up words that have the same first 3 letters and work from there. It can be a good way to preserve the feeling of the name!

If you’re not renaming and are just looking for a regular way to find names, there are lots and lots of options. Look for historical figures that have names that would not be common or read as names today, look for animal scientific names, look for fields of study, look for artforms or art movements that reflect the attitude you’re going for, look for various stars/constellations, make puns, take etymological roots of words, the world is your Oyster.

Age: This part is pretty easy and mostly relies on the kind of story you’re interested in telling with this character. Are they young and reckless and a little less experienced? Are they older and living out their last few sweeps on the planet, trying to prepare for or avoid their inevitable future? Are they old enough that they’re just about to be taken off planet and are coping with that? Are they an adult out in space, on the colonialist homefront? Or are they hiding out on Alternia, trying to avoid capture?

Strife Specibus: The #1 rule to keep in mind here is that while fitting the theme is fun, don’t go too specific here. The only time you should have a highly specific weapon is as a joke-- like Fancysantakind. Otherwise people usually have some pretty general weaponry- hammers, guns, sickles, swords. You can alchemize them into newer and cooler forms later, don’t stifle yourself by restricting things too specifically. Instead of butcherknifekind, do knifekind for example. They can still specifically use a butcher knife, but they now have more options, too. Make sure to pick a fun and fitting weapon- you probably don’t want to give a ballerina character a gun, for example.

Fetch Modus: This one is definitely a little bit trickier. This is where the trivia you researched will probably help you best. The general rule is that fetch modii need to be Functional but Inconvenient. They’re not all wild- there’s ones like the Wallet Modus that are generally pretty normal. A more utilitarian character will probably pick a normal modus that just Works without all the inconvenience.

You want to keep in mind your character’s personality. Are they stubborn enough to work through the inconvenience or do they need something a little simpler? Are they clever and so they like the challenge, or do they prefer something straightforward? If they play favorites, they might like a modus that keeps their favorite things up top. If they’re more egalitarian, they might have a modus that only lets them eject the least-used item first. Things like that!

When in doubt, you can always search for a boardgame or simple computer game that fits your theme.

Blood color: When it comes to this, you basically want to make sure you’re considering your character’s social status. Are they an underdog or a big dog? Do you want them to have that purple rage or do you want them to be more mellow? Are psychic abilities important to their character and themeing or would they be just as well in the olive slot? Once again you want to keep in mind that question of What Are You Trying To Accomplish? Don’t arbitrarily position your character, keep in mind the blood traits and use those to your Advantage when character building.

Symbol and meaning: This one’s both tricky and has a lot of room! You can use one of the extended zodiac for your character, obviously. There’s also other constellations, alchemical symbols, etc, etc. I’ve listed bunches of various symbols that can be used before, you just have to look for what fits the Vibes. The Themes. You can also always just make or adapt your own based on the sign languages! We’ve had a few people take symbols like The Atari symbol and just edit it to fit a sign language- stuff like that can work out well!

Trolltag: Get Fun. Don’t be scared to use really long and pretentious words- the more pretentious the better. The most important rule here is, though-- remember that characters “pick their own” trolltag. In character, this is the username that your oc has chosen themself. This means that you have to choose a name that they would use to describe themself. You can’t insult or mock them in the trolltag unless they would insult themself. This troll tag represents their interests and what image they want to put out to the people they talk to online.

Quirk: Quirks are another area where you can do literally anything, really. Reflecting the symbol or a number theme is always a good and easy way to go, making references to lusii, making references to stars, choose how they emphasize, choose how they capitalize. Are they formal or casual and all that can inform the quirk, too.

Equally important to quirk is the Way they talk. Do they use a lot of slang or formal grammar? Do they abbreviate or always use long forms? Do they use purple prose or only really simple words? Are they quick? Choppy? Do they ask lots of rhetorical questions? Are they long-winded continuing to ramble on forever and ever without pause all the time or do they only do that sort of thing when they’re nervous or never at all? Do they show all their anger through chat or do they carefully structure everything to present a perfect image? Lots of emoticons or none?

Special Abilities (if any): Remember that rusts through golds all tend to have certain amount of abilities (though some golds seem to Possibly not have psionics, the rules around this aren’t Quite so clearly defined yet) in order to make up for the fact that they’re physically weaker. Don’t just take them on- try to make them the character’s own. Goldbloods tend to have doublesight, meaning their psionics come with some kind of futuresight- use that uniquely, make it something special and themeatically appropriate. There are many different types of telekinesis, so don’t be afraid to explore for a rust. Don’t forget that indigos have Strength and purples have chucklevoodoos.

Lusus: For some trolls this is really easy. It’s a Themeatically appropriate animal. It can get a little trickier than that with some themes, though. When it comes to those kinds of themes, look for animals that have symbolism behind them that might represent some virtue your character holds, or that shows up in iconography around your theme. Another simple solution is Environmental play. If you can think of a themeatically appropriate hive or hive location for your character, start looking into what kinds of animals live there and pick one of those! You can also think functionally- what do you want the lusus to do for your troll. Conflict or comfort? Those things can feed your decision for the lusus.

Keep in mind the lusii patterns. Winged lusii tend not to show up until ~Jade/Teal or higher, though there’s exceptions for themeatic mutations. It seems like Mammals even of the mythical variety are most common for rusts, browns, golds, and olives. We don’t know much about limes/cherry reds, but arthropods are acceptable for them. Once you hit Jade+, reptiles and insects come into play. Lusii can HAVE disturbingly human halves. It also seems like Actual Musclebeasts cannot be lusii in most cases because they are... terrifying. Purples have Aquatic Mammals. Violets have actual water creatures, not aquatic mammals. Fuchsias have The Squid Mom, but can adopt additional pets!

Also remember that lusii are a big part of a troll’s life. You can work those into the character backstory and personality really beautifully. Vriska’s brutality, for example, comes in part from the fact that she’s had to kill people her whole life to keep her lusus alive. What are your lusus’ needs? What is their relationship like with your troll? How has that impacted your troll’s personality?

Personality: I’ve done a bigger post about this elsewhere, so I won’t go into this too heavily here, but remember that you want depth. Don’t just say They’re Nice and move along! Niceness has facets that can be explored. Keep in mind again that question of what do you want to accomplish. If you have a guard character, are you looking for a stern and serious guard, or a guard who is trying their best but is a little clumsy? Either could be objectively nice, but have different levels of professionalism, different ways of approaching their job. Think about character motivations here, why do they do what they do? What are their relationships like? This is what makes your character really shine, so give them the attention they deserve!

Interests: Interests tend to be in a feedback loop with personality and themes. You want themeatic and unique interests. You don’t Just want video games and music, because most people like those. Sure, you could have a character who likes those to a Big Degree and then it would be important, but you should always get more specific here. I like googling lists of hobbies, or even looking at the wikipedia List of Hobbies. You can usually scroll through and spot lots of things you’ve never heard of before. Unique, quirky interests can breed the kind of Weird Specificity spark into your character that a lot of trolls have. Make sure the hobbies have an ends to them, too. Your character should either do them for fun or in pursuit of a goal, not just because you said they do it!

Title: Now this is a liiittle too complicated of a topic to really cover in a single section, because titles have been being debated over forever and ever. Basically speaking, you just want to look at the character’s personality, look at their strengths and weaknesses. Decide if you want to strengthen their strengths or help them work on their weaknesses and become better, and then pick which title fits that. I’ve discussed the aspect traits in a post before, so you can use that as a loose guide to help you find your way (though this blog and classpeculation are still open to help you out if you need it)!

Land: We unfortunately haven’t been told much about lands or quests in Homestuck official lore, since most characters never even finished their quests. But what we know is quests have to do with title and probably have to do with the kind of growth into the role that the title implies. When you’re naming a Land, a good general rule is to do Land of [A descriptor of some kind, something that describes the vibe and appearance of the land] and [Something quest related, something that implies the goal]. A good example is John’s Land of Wind and Shade, and Rose’s Land of Light and Rain.

Dream Planet: I’ve also discussed lunar sway assigning in another post before, so I won’t go into big detail here. You just need to make sure that it reflects your character’s personality and way of interacting with the world. Don’t be biased by aesthetics- Nepeta is a dersite despite being bubbly and Vriska is a prospitian despite being a bastard, after all.

Design: We have a whole big post about Alternian fashion design rules. In general, you just want your design to be Functional (unless you have an over the top character who doesn’t care about function!) and Theme-Appropriate. Does it fit the character’s vibe? Does it fit their caste? A lowblood character with a noble moirail will more likely better clothes than one who is entirely self-reliant, for example. Does it fit what we know about personality? A hermit and agoraphobe will want to stand out less than a flashy fame-seeker. Does it fit their occupation or their hobbies? Those are the kinds of ideas to consider! When all else fails, a pair of nice jeans and a t-shirt usually work.

Also be careful when designing past-inspired characters. In Homestuck canon, even characters who are very interested in their ancestors in the past don’t tend to dress like it’s ancient times in ALL the time or in all ways. It’s unlikely most characters will want to walk around in a full suit of armor Even if they’re knight-themed unless you give strong character reason for that being the case!

I hope this all helps you guys with character building even when we’re on break from full reviews! Thank you for the time and all of your support! ❤

-CD

#fantrolls #homestuck #hs

26 notes · View notes