i-am-confusion-03

[i-am-confusion-03]

[i-am-confusion-03]

What can I say other than these two just make my heart happy. 🥰

[i-am-confusion-03]

Monday blues and yeah… putting this for the Seyloys and moths who need it

[i-am-confusion-03]

Knowing prices for Disney park food, I dread to thing how expensive it was to eat in Pangea Park

(Photomode near the lava is dangerous; I definitely forgot that the lava flows were flammable and lit Aloy on fire for these shots)

[i-am-confusion-03]

Hey bbg *leans on a expensive charger horn collection that i plan on expanding*

[i-am-confusion-03]

Seyka: IM GONNA DIVE

*me who's fighting for my life with the Horus and heard her say die instead of dive*: You're gonna fucking WHAT Seyka????

#horizon forbidden west #burning shores #seyka #I CANT BE THE ONLY ONE #I STRUGGLE TO HEAR PEOPLE ON A GOOD DAY OK

[i-am-confusion-03]

Aloy: rip to you but the forbidden west is only forbidden to side characters. im different

[i-am-confusion-03]

I spy trees? No, no. Big dumb trees

original

[i-am-confusion-03]

hii tumblr

[i-am-confusion-03]

MY HEART AAAAAAAAAAH

We're in this strange and wonderful period where the beans want to watch Winnie the Pooh and then go pretend to be Aloy, I'm enjoying it for as long as it lasts

[i-am-confusion-03]

EMERGENCY ART COMMISSIONS ARE OPEN!

Hi guys! I'm currently unemployed and in desperate need of some money, so i'm opening up art commissions on top of my writing ones. Here are the rules!

THE RULES

Each extra character is +50%;

Payment is via PayPal or Ko-Fi only;

I'm using USD, so please pay attention to conversion rates;

Please DM me via Tumblr so we can talk about your commission!

I DON'T DO:

NSFW;

Mechas;

Heavy gore (mostly due to inexperience);

Backgrounds

Anything else I may feel incapable or uncomfortable doing.

Some art examples under the cut!

[i-am-confusion-03]

Since it’s been a year since Burning Shores came out, some thoughts on Seyka:

TL;DR: Great character, really happy with her as a love interest for Aloy. They do some really interesting things with her that I never really see addressed so I wanted to talk about them.

She is tangibly shown to be much more of a match for Aloy through gameplay. Compared to other npcs, she solves things faster, does more damage, is a much more formidable melee combatant, faster climber - she even has a fucking Valor Surge using her Focus that does pretty significant tear damage to large machines like Slaughterspines. Environmental storytelling- Seyka’s skiff has at least 2-3 Tiderippers’ worth of parts, meaning she’s been out on her own killing the things to build boat motors, and she has some ambient dialogue that strongly suggests she’s fought and killed Slaugterspines before. Is some of this npc tech advancements in Burning Shores? Maybe, but it feels intentional. 

Seyka has a natural probing curiosity about the old world that for the most part Aloy’s other companions didn’t have without some significant hand-holding from Aloy to get them started, and some of her close friend (but not base team) characters just don’t have at all. I don’t mean this as a moral judgement, everyone is different and has different strengths and priorities , but it’s absolutely critical that a partner for Aloy have that kind of curiosity - it’s such a big part of her character. While she lives in this new world, she’s never going to be entirely a part of it. Like she says, she finds belonging in individuals, and not really the tribes. I don’t really see Aloy settling down in Meridian or Mother’s Heart. She needs to have a life of exploration and discovery and Seyka seems cut from that cloth too, whether she was always that way or being marooned gave her a fresh perspective.

Seyka did risk death using the focus and decided to do it anyway- in Rheng’s notes he calls for capital punishment for her. The threat is never *too* present but honestly I think that’s a broader critique of the series and pretty consistent with the writing of conflicts in Horizon. I agree they could have played up the dramatic tension a bit, but this is a person who weighed the risk of a military execution by a totalitarian state and immediately decided it was worth it to save her sister and others. I think Aloy can intimately relate, given what she went through for Beta.

Even though it’s a DLC, she has a TON of screen time, probably comparable to Kotallo in HFW, and Horizon does SO much storytelling through gameplay and ambient dialogue. I think she’s given a LOT of narrative space to breathe. She’s also has her own musical cues and leitmotifs that do a ton of foreshadowing work through the DLC - in terms of musical cues and framing she’s very associated with the acoustic guitar, and the flute melody in ‘Her Sky, Her Sea’ has for Aloy and Seyka the same function that ‘It Can’t Last’ does for Ellie and Dina in TLOU2 - next time you play Burning Shores, listen for it. That and the guitar cues from ‘The Idea of Home’ and ‘For His Entertainment’ do a lot of emotional work. It’s great stuff.

Okay and lastly- YMMV on this one - I’ve def talked about it with friends before but I don’t think I’ve said it on Tumblr. I’m a firm believer that meta narratives and the way that stories are situated and created in our own world matter and that art deserves to be taken seriously and dissected. I love Horizon, but it, and Aloy as a protagonist, are absolutely drenched in white savior and colonial storytelling tropes. Every time I play Frozen Wilds, all I can think of is Jack Sparrow going “and then they made me their chief”. There’s a lot of iffy stuff in the games, as much as I absolutely love them. We’ll have to see how H3 goes, but Burning Shores is MUCH better about this and honestly Seyka is a huge part of it. The story centers itself on a queer woman of color who is pretty tangibly presented as Aloy’s equal with her own strengths and weaknesses throughout the story and takes the lead just as often if not more than Aloy does, which I find really refreshing. It doesn’t entirely fix Aloy’s white savior issues but I think it’s a really good move for the narrative that continues the themes found in HFW about community and connection.

Horizon Zero Dawn: The Frozen Wilds (2017)

[i-am-confusion-03]

So one of my favorite places in the world is Zion National park. I remember hiking angels landing and the view. I remember jumping from bed to bed as a kid in the lodge, the same lodge you see decrepit and destroyed near Barren Light.

To say that it hurt to see is in a way I can't explain. Seeing the parks I know and love and seeing all the buildings destroyed, due to humanity's negligence touched me as something that could absolutely happen.

I love Horizon BECAUSE of this though!

To have a game that touched me so deeply is incredible!

Every time I boot up a Horizon game I think “nah, I won’t feel the existential pressure of this perfectly executed post-apocalypse this time. It’s fine!”

And then I see something like plainsong; a city built out of a satellite dish array that actually exists in New Mexico

And then I see a city built around a crumbling heliostat plant identical to the one in Nevada

And then the game tells me to go to the ruins of old Las Vegas

And then

And then

And then

[i-am-confusion-03]

"see you up there!"

little smugloy to start us off

[i-am-confusion-03]

get ready

[i-am-confusion-03]

me waking up after bottom surgery yesterday:

[i-am-confusion-03]

Strike from above