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#lao huang
sicahyart · 6 months
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It's something about this planet...
Transparent full res files available on my Ko-fi shop
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aeviann · 4 months
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And here's the last commission from my last batch~ I am so unbelievably blessed that I got to draw so much Xenoblade for my comms aaaaaaa Thank you my beloved @lao-huangs-bitch for letting me draw the man once again and for also letting me draw him with wings specifically <3
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moonllita · 2 months
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Lao Huang portrait commission
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lao-huangs-bitch · 8 months
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"I can tell you what they say in space,
That our Earth is too gray.
But when the spirit is so digital
The body acts this way"
- "Disassociative" by Marilyn Manson
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wiffhuff · 2 months
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A collection of cursed XCX characters I did earlier today on Insta!!!! I think my favourite one is either Buff Tatsu or Catboy Doug w/ heart glasses ❤️
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qifreigen · 2 years
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xeno series in a nutshell
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sharonpearlee · 4 months
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Just some XenoX Doodle ft. lil Sharon and Pear~
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Today's disabled character of the day is Lao Huang from Xenoblade Chronicles X, who has an unspecified trauma disorder
Requested by Anon
[Image Description: 3D model of of a man with long black hair and grey eyes. He is wearing metal futuristic armor with tan highlights. He has a medium light skin tone.]
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princesslink25 · 5 months
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Like so many people have said that Leon would call Ada and their daughter “his girls” and it makes me think of
And then I get sad because I was thinking about Lao
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xemobladechromicles · 2 years
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Top 5 Best Villains
5. Ramsus (Xenogears)
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I’m going to admit to not entirely remembering Xenogears’s story, but Ramsus was my favorite antagonist there. The problem with most villains in the game are that their most important content happens in disc 2, which is too abbreviated and difficult to follow to properly sell their impact. Overall, Xenogears is a game heavily bogged down by its complexity. It was ultimately both too ambitious for the skill and resources of its creators, which results in a story that presents interesting ideas but is also clumsy and difficult to follow.
Like, many characters, he is a strong concept with a difficult to follow execution. He is a general of Solaris, which are functionally Nazis, while still trying to follow his ideals. He spent his childhood being groomed by the people running Solaris to hate Fei because of lore reasons. So, he’s conceptually meant to be a good person who was raised from birth to be a commander in a fascist government. In practice, Rammus is primarily a Disc 1 antagonist, who starts off intimidating but the player learns about his past over time and starts to sympathize with him. Ultimately, the execution is clumsy and difficult to follow, but his concept always stuck with me. 
He also acts as a counterpart to Elly, who is also a soldier from Solaris who ultimately defects. I honestly don’t remember if this idea is even explored because Rammus’s backstory is mostly revealed in Disc 2, which summarizes and skips over a lot of stuff. 
Overall, you can probably tell from this that I don’t have the same respect for Xenogears as a lot of its fans, but the main thing that elevated Ramsus over other major antagonists was that I was able to understand the major story beats of his character before consulting the wiki. The only other antagonist to accomplish this was Id, but I wanted to talk about Ramsus because Id barely has the chance to do anything because he’s primarily a disc 2 character. 
4. Dickson (Xenoblade Chronicles)
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Dickson is a really well done twist villain. He’s primarily a scumbag with shallow motives, but he makes up for it by his plot presence. His VA does an amazing job selling him as enjoying himself but not completely off from the Dickson we knew before that point. He treats the affair of betraying the party like a business as usual ordeal where he just enjoys his job. 
He does a lot of heavy lifting in setting the game’s final act, beginning it by killing the game’s protagonist and talking about how he only raised Shulk because he was Zanza’s vessel. Before this point in the game, Dickson was a secondary character who was somewhere between a dad, a jokester, and a cheesy action hero. He effectively goes from being a fun side character to being a fun fuck-you villain. Out of the Zanza-aligned antagonists, Dickson is the only one with an established personality, so leading this act with him shooting Shulk kicks off the final quadrant which is defined by fighting former friends and loved ones, betrayal, and everything the characters knew about the world coming crashing down.
As an antagonist, Dickson is pure evil. No redemption, no mind control, nothing; he does what he does because he does. This hurts because he’s a likeable character, therefore you want him to be redeemable, but he simply isn’t. As a side note, while I don’t think Dickson did the most subtle job at foreshadowing his eventual betrayal, I do think he did a good job at ensuring that this act didn’t come out of literally nowhere, which is the most important thing. Xenoblade chronicles has a lot of foreshadowing in the form of off-handed dialogue, especially placed in the earlier parts of the game, which works for Dickson because even if the player catches on that Dickson is deceiving the party in some way in Satorl Marsh, his betrayal is so much later in the game that there’s a high chance of the player forgetting it. The moment before he shoots Shulk is also great. There’s just enough timing for dread and anticipation to crop up right before he shoots on second viewing.
Dickson’s death was also perfect for the character. He isn’t redeemable, he’s been lying to you this entire time. Despite it all, he did watch the protagonists grow strong enough to beat him. So, his send-off is bitter-sweet. I like how Shulk cries while walking into the portal to fight Zanza. I also like how Dickson calls off the fight when he’s dying and goes to die in a corner and take a smoke. Even though he’s ultimately a piece on Zanza’s chess set, he still got to choose how he wanted to die, a right afforded to him by Shulk, who is fighting to end everyone’s predetermined destinies. 
He’s a simple antagonist that could have benefitted from more complications, especially from Shulk’s or Dunban’s part, but he fills his role in the story well for what he is.
3. Kevin (Xenosaga)
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Warning: abuse mention
Kevin is interesting to me because he’s such a shitbag. Like, holy shit the amount he emotionally manipulates Shion is ridiculous. I think the Xenosaga series has issues with the concept of restraint, but it really works here. He also acts as a foil to Allen, where Kevin is trying to save Shion from her fate but does so by emotionally scarring her, Allen cares a lot about Shion and wants to protect her but cannot. 
He’s first introduced in Xenosaga Episode I as the primary motivator for her to complete KOS-MOS. She was their project and even though KOS-MOS killed him due to a malfunction, Kevin would have wanted her to finish their project. Shion treats KOS-MOS almost like her child because of it. The player doesn’t learn that he faked his own death until Episode III, where its first primary conflict is KOS-MOS being scrapped in favor of T-ELOS, an android created from KOS-MOS with significantly higher output, which is secretly run by Kevin. By this point in the series, KOS-MOS has established herself as somewhere between a person and a weapon, effectively having a soul, so killing her isn’t going to fly. This also reflects on how Kevin is more than happy to take Shion’s feelings and throw them into the garbage dispenser just to advance his own goals. Which is contrasted by how much Shion obviously loves him. She was willing to complete and defend his legacy in spite of her own mixed feelings because of how much she loves him.
The protagonists of Xenosaga can be defined as being weak but human, while Kevin made the decision to give up his humanity to become strong. This weak but human dynamic is most represented in Allen, who is literally just some guy, but he cares a lot about Shion and even though he’s so nothing, he’ll always try to stay by her side. Allen cannot save Shion from her death, he cannot save the universe from collapsing in on itself, he can’t protect Shion from her trauma, but he’s still there doing every limited thing that he humanly can. Kevin can save Shion from her death, he’s working to prevent the universe from destroying itself, he can do so many things that a human like Allen could never hope to do, yet he’s still a self-serving bastard. He isn’t trying to save Shion because she wanted to be saved, he’s doing so because he wants to save her. And his methods are a major source of trauma for her. Watching him, it becomes unclear whether he even truly cares about her. 
Kevin’s also an extension of the themes KOS-MOS vs T-ELOS represents between materiality and spirit. KOS-MOS was created by Shion in memory of a dead loved one and holds Mary Magdalen's soul, while T-ELOS was created by Kevin for the sole purpose of housing Mary Magdalen’s body. Which is reflected in how the two characters see the world. Shion is a very emotional character. She sees the life and value in what exists around her. Kevin, on the other hand is a very material heavy character, he sees the world only in terms of what does and does not exist. So of course Shion’s creation would house a soul while Kevin’s would only house a body. This theme of soul vs material is extremely common in Monolith’s writing and it’s very present here as well.
What I like about Kevin’s story is how messy it is. The story is told almost entirely from Shion’s perspective. Her rose-tinted lens of the man. As the player, it’s hard to know whether he’s a genuinely good person making bad decisions or the biggest pile of dicks to exist ever. But ultimately, through all the feelings of love or any of his stated intentions, he abused Shion. At the end of the series, he sacrifices himself. Whether he did so to protect Shion or for redemption, it’s up to interpretation. I honestly cannot tell whether or not he’s meant to be sympathetic, and I like that because it just adds to the mixed feelings the character leaves you with. 
The character being so difficult to get a read on works because that’s how abuse works. Victims of abuse will have a hard time realizing that they’re being abused until it’s too late, they’ll side with their abusers, they’ll see them as good people and make excuses for them, even when they act inexcusably because on some level, abusers are human beings and their victims know this. A lot of stories that cover abuse struggle to really get this aspect of it correct. Usually them being an abuser will be signposted to the audience way before the characters, which makes the character’s sticking with them look like poor judgement rather than what it actually is. Kevin is unique because his hands are never fully revealed, so even after his true death, the player is left without a clear direction on him.
2. Lao (Xenoblade Chronicles X)
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Warning: Suicide Mention
Lao starts off as a party member, who then betrays the party for the Ganglion. He is the main focus of the game’s strongest story beat. Lao is a hero villain. He is also the first in a series of villains in the series who is beaten down by despair and opposes the party out of a suicidal desire rather than a malicious one. I personally am not a fan of the villains who want to kill the world because they are suicidal because that explanation doesn’t make a ton of sense to me. Generally when someone wants to kill themselves, it comes from a sense of deep hopelessness and wanting a way out. I’m not saying that it’s always the case, but these villains are typically presented as destroying the world out of a sense of hopelessness. So, I’m left confused on why these antagonists chose to kill the world rather than just themselves. Ultimately, characters like Jin and N feel like they’re trying to imitate Lao without truly understanding why he worked.
As an antagonist, Lao’s value is derived almost entirely from his motives. In Xenoblade X, you should be playing the sidequests experience the full story, so you have likely already encountered evil human characters or characters colluding with the Ganglion, especially if you’ve completed Hope’s second affinity mission. What makes these characters different from Lao lies in their motives and thematic purpose. The human NPCs in X are complex as a whole, each having their own subtly different takes on the events of the game. Earth’s destruction, mimeosomes, etc. They exist to show the complexities of humanity. How some people will do everything they can for the greater good while others will act selfishly, even when it’s to the detriment of both their own and everyone’s survival. Which are how these side-quest antagonists typically fit into X’s themes. As a suicidal character, Lao is not unique either. Throughout affinity missions and NPC dialogue, you learn that many human characters feel disassociated in their mimeosome bodies. Either seeing themselves as not real or expendable. Which is only compounded with by witnessing their friends and loved ones die with the earth.
Lao exists as a combination of ideas already presented in side-stories. He wants to die and he knows that dying can’t be permanent because of the stasis created by the mimeosomes. Even if he took his own life, he’d just be brought back in another mimeosome. It would be an endless cycle. Thus, it would easier to just tear everything to the ground than to go on living in these empty bodies dying over and over again just to protect the parts of humanity least worth saving. All he has to do is steal a piece of data, run, and wait for the clock to go out. His motives become more thematically appropriate upon learning the context of Chapter 12. 
On his own, Lao provides an interesting perspective on everything. So much of X is about how humanity intends to survive after losing everything. Elma is the character most representative of this. Her sole focus is the survival of humanity. Lao asks if humanity is worth saving. After all, it would be easier to just accept death than fight this uphill battle. Which is what the conflict between him and Elma is fundamentally about. You could say during this fight, the protagonists represent fighting for humanity’s survival while Lao is fighting for humanity’s soul. That’s also why he gives up on his goal upon seeing Lin stopping Elma from shooting him. Because she proves that humanity still has a soul. It is also why he acts the way he does during Chapter 12, if humanity is worth protecting, he will protect it. The final fight with Lao isn’t about the opposition between humanity’s survival and, well, humanity, it’s about overcoming the ugliest parts of humankind to pave a way towards the future; a sweltering uncontrolled amalgamation that just wants to survive and die and aimlessly destroy where one consciousness has no hope of ever directing the mass of disfigured beings. 
The fight against Lao during Chapter 11 is one of the most thematically dense moments in the series, especially among the more recent games. I’ve already talked about how Elma represents survival no matter the cost while Lao represents the cost itself. But the actual details of their debate says a lot about both Lao’s and Elma’s characters. To Elma, there is no such thing as a soul, rather the human experience can be surmised as a collection of one’s memories. There is very little variance between human to human, after all, the DNA of two people on opposite sides of the Earth are functionally identical. Thus, factors like race, class, age, etc. weren’t things she saw as important to consider when it came to archiving the human experience and, in more practical terms, who was worth saving. Lao argued that because she ignored those things, only the worst of humanity escaped Earth’s annihilation. It doesn’t matter if those issues aren’t logical, humans will still do it anyways. The only survivors from Earth were the ultra wealthy and the military. What about the people who were neither rich nor useful? The homeless, the poor, the disabled, the young, the elderly, his family. This isn’t humanity. Lao challenges the very reason you’re trying to save the human race from extinction. 
Then there is Lin, the sole child to survive human extinction. She represents everything humanity is meant to protect. Though she was only brough aboard the White Whale because of her engineering talents, she is humanity’s future. Lao recognizes this. While Elma treats Lin as an adult, entrusting her with a world of responsibilities, Lao sees her as the kid she is. For her, he puts aside his depression and takes care of her in whatever capacity he can. He takes her out for tea, he jokes with her like an uncle, he keeps an eye out for her wellbeing. Even when he’s seeking to destroy the human race, he’s still trying to protect her from his hopelessness.
Lao is the climax to Xenoblade X’s themes. An interesting villain with easily understood motives hiding a lot of depth. He acts as a foil to the two protagonists, giving them a lot more depth. Elma in particular really shines during the Lao fight because he challenges everything she stands for.
1. Metal Face (Xenoblade Chronicles) 
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Metal Face is a pure fuckboy villain, and he leaves a glorious first impression. He has the perfect combination of amusing and terrifying, ending his run as pathetic. He establishes the Faced Mechon and the mechon as a whole as malicious and threatening, which sets the scene perfectly for every mechon-related villain after him. 
The reason he’s able to establish himself as a threat so quickly and effectively is that his first two encounters consist of him taking the protagonists down a notch. During his first encounter, you just got the Monado and just obtained some way to fight the mechon, only for this one mechon to appear that cannot be damaged by the Monado and then said mechon proceeds to kill an established party member. Metal Face’s decision to leave doesn’t appear to be caused by the protagonist’s actions either. In all of Shulk’s rage and Fiora’s desperate final stand, they were only able to scratch him. The second time Metal Face shows up, he doesn’t even fight you, he only taunts you. This time, he appears right after Xord’s death, which establishes that the Faced Mechon are not invincible. Metal Face uses this time to reestablish the Faced Mechon’s threat and to undermine any growth the protagonists might have undergone between his first and second encounter. Even resident badasses and heroes Dunban and Dickson showing up only proceeds to amuse him. Xenoblade Chronicles is a shounun, which uses strength as a metaphor for growth. By having the protagonists unable to even shut him up, it’s a reminder that they are still weak and powerless. But the fact that he is forced out of the encounter by a Telethia piloted by some unknown man says that seriously threatening Metal Face, and, by extension, the mechon as a whole, is possible and the protagonists will get there. As a side bonus, it also puts the Telethia above the mechon in hierarchy early in the story, which helps elevate Zanza’s threat during the final quarter of the story.
Metal Face’s role in the story changes during Prison Island. While his first two encounters consisted of him knocking the protagonists down a peg by showing up at the worst times possible and being a dick, you are prepared for him this encounter, and you destroy him. Shulk rips his arm off and could have killed him easily if not for the revelation that the Faced Mechon were once homs. Now that the protagonists can annihilate the mechon, which is represented by Shulk chopping Metal Fuck in half, the story begins to shift towards should he do so. Metal Face goes from representing the image of all mechon to representing the evil of the mechon. If Metal Face didn’t exist to ask the question of “can Shulk destroy the mechon,” it would have diminished the tension of “should Shulk destroy Egil,” which is the primary question that follows Metal Face’s death.
During Metal Face’s encounter during Valak Mountain, he attempts to pull the same stunt as his second encounter where he appears out of nowhere to put down the protagonist’s goals of making progress, but he ultimately fails at that mission as the goal has begun changing from “defeat the mechon” to “understand the mechon.” Thus, introducing Egil here as the leader of Mechonis progresses that goal while phasing out Metal Face’s importance. As Mumkhar, he is presented as a pathetic man using the power given to him as a mechon to incite petty revenge against Dunban. Mumkhar is not an interesting character and the story doesn’t try to make him one either. 
I will say that the story stuff surrounding Mumkhar is weak. Most of the details are left to the imagination. Was Mumkhar corrupted by the Monado? The mechon? Was he always a dickbag? He’s established as a coward in the prologue, but does that translate to him being a murderer? These questions at best create some uncertainty around Face Nemesis, but are undermined by her trying to have a conversation with the party before he interrupted. Mumkhar’s death was also quite weak. The party spares him, but he ultimately gets himself killed in a last ditch effort to kill the party. This could be meant to set up the idea that no everyone can or deserves to be spared, which could have lead nicely into the decision not to spare Zanza or his disciples, but this is never properly reflected on by the party, which results in Metal Face’s death feeling like a cop-out.
Overall, Metal Face does an amazing job establishing the groundwork for Xenoblade Chronicles. He gives the mechon a face before that torch can be passed to Egil. He also sets the scene of the conflict of the Homs and Mechon as being a simple conflict, which will be subverted later in the game. On his own, Metal Face strikes a strong balance between fun and threatening. His existence enhances the presence of many other villains that follow him.
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twinsand · 3 months
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Ok I’m gonna need someone to make MK fanart recreating these photos but with the characters they play PLEASEEEEE
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tiger-6e · 2 months
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It’s not unusual.
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nadilu · 28 days
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lao-huangs-bitch · 7 months
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Random color practice inspired by Arsonist's Lullabye by Hozier bc I love putting Lao w that song bc this man is just a little Fucked Up and I love that for him
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wiffhuff · 1 day
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Turn on the audio for some XCX Chapter 11 content!!! I drew this because I found a reel with the audio, and it gave some brain juices I could work with. I really like how I did the armour this time, so please enjoy!!!
I know everyone is aware about Elma being very distrustful about Lao throughout the game, so her anger is more like a vindicated rage. She is angry that a human would go so far and ruin the efforts of so many. Whereas with Doug, his anger comes from a place of hurt. He knew this man for so many years, and seeing him worsen over the recent years must be heartbreaking. He must want to believe there’s some version of Lao before all the bitterness still existing, but it’s hard to think that is possible with what Lao has done.
I’m just bringing my XCX stuff over bit by bit, as I’ve noticed my XCX art hasn’t been doing too well on other places (tbh the algorithm is kinda wonky rn so it’s probably not me, but it’s HELLA demotivating so I’ve been keeping some art private at this point). I do have another XCX reel that’s about Chapter 12, but I’ll have to see about getting a video of it 🗿
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