#I hate when character just survive or whatever they go through is just rectified because we just can’t lose said characters ewww

[captlok]

Pacifism Isn’t A Character Trait

Or: MLK Day is Upon Us so Let Me Do You a Learn

Or: As An Aang Stan I Got a Bit Over-Zealous But Lemme Explain Why For A Hot Minute

Plus some History and Tumblr commentary that even non-ATLA fans can chew on

And by ‘hot minute’ I do mean this is going to be a long meta, so strap in.  For those of you who just might be tuning into this debacle, I, a person who has not used Tumblr, much at all, except for the last half year, ran into some trouble. 

If you wanna skip the whole TLDNR interpersonal stuffs and get straight to Why Aang is the Best Thing Since Sliced Bread, I will embolden the relevant parts, and italicize the crit of Korra, if you want that alongside.

I was excited that ATLA was seeing a resurgence due to the Netflix remake. I wasn’t even trying to apply any steep expectations for it. (learned not to do that the hard way with the last live action adaption, and to a much lesser extent, ATLOK, since it had good . . . elements, *ba dum tsshh*) 

So, these are a couple aspects of the issue: (1) Even on the internet, I am extremely introverted and until recently mostly came for content, not socializing. My main online interactions thus far have been in forums and artist-to-artist on DA. Tumblr is still very strange to me because it splits up its ‘threads’ so you can’t see all the replies if a certain pattern of users responds in their own space. I’m not even 100% sure it’s in chronological order, and replies are not nested next to each other so you can look in the comments and someone will be replying to something you can’t see in that window. And also since it is a bizarre hybrid of a blogging system, posts are somehow considered ‘owned by’ or an ‘extension of’ OP in a way forum threads are not. (2) ATLOK was good in a cinematic and musical way, to be sure. It also had some good concepts. I can go into it just appreciating it for the worldbuilding and be somewhat satisfied. But the execution was terrible. I was on AvatarSpirit.Net for years, and If I had maintained my presence on ASN to current day and had gotten around to downloading their archive now that the forum is dead, I would include some links to other peoples’ detailed analyses on just how flawed both the plotting and Korra’s frustratingly flat learning curve was especially in the first two seasons. But, that is a task for another day, and only if people are interested. 

No, what I’m addressing today, on the issue of Korra as a writing exercise, is how Mike and Bryan said specifically they wanted to make her ‘as opposite to Aang as possible’ and in so doing, muddied the central theme of the original ATLA series.

Now, again, I was mainly an art consumer for my first major round of ATLA fandom. Tumblr is an alien beast to me. But, after I write my first major Aang meta, talking about how amazing it is that he has the attitude he does, and how being content in the face of this overwhelming pain and suffering is an ONGOING PROCESS and an INTENTIONAL DECISION and not a simple PERSONALITY TRAIT, I start hearing that Aang gets a lot of hate from the fandom. Now this would be bad enough if it were merely people not liking his crowning moment of pacifism because they don’t understand the potential utility (I’ll elaborate on that in another post) or the ethics involved.

Aang is easily the most adult member of the Gaang. But he apparently gets hate for his few moments where he actually acts his age, a preteen, and maybe kisses a girl in a historical timeframe in which ‘consent’ discussions were probably nonexistent. Even in the present day, we are still practically drowned in movies that reinforce this kissing without asking trope. And even some female bodied people complain that asking kills the mood! But somehow he is responsible and reprehensible for this, even though the first time she kissed him back. I’m only going to get into the pacifism discussion today, but that was just another layer of annoyance bouncing around in the back of my head.  Other peoples’ crit of Korra that was stewing in my subconscious, plus this Aang bashing, which thankfully I had not directly read much of, made up the backdrop of gasoline for the match that set it off.  Even that seems a pretty melodramatic way to phrase what I actually said, which was: Aang, on the other hand, lost dozens of father figures and was being steamrolled by Ozai who was gloating about genocide TO HIS FACE, yet he still reigned in all that quote, ‘unbelievable rage and pain’ (The Southern Raiders). We Stan Aang, the Superior Avatar. No I did not f**king stutter. #AangSupremacy In another meta, someone complained that I was too defensive of Aang as a character and didn’t apply literary analysis enough, which I quickly rectified.

What set this off? Someone was kind of indirectly praising the line from Korra,  “When I get out of here, none of you will survive” To them it was emotionally resonant or whatever, and I have to point out that no, it was a martial artist not having control of their state of mind, as is the bedrock of the practice. It was never addressed by the narrative, which is a severe oversight.  I had a conversation with someone in the chats, making this distinction between Korra’s character traits and life philosophy. If she were to kill people while enraged and she was fine with that, that’s one thing. But if she regretted it, that’s a whole other kettle of fish. People argue that she comes from a warrior culture, unlike Aang.

Never mind that warrior monks are a thing. That’s what Shaolin monks are. You can be a pacifist and skilled at fighting. Those things are not mutually exclusive, which is the whole point of Bagua, Aang’s style.  And also, Katara’s style. 

That’s one reason I like Kataang so much- their congruent styles. Both of their real world martial arts are dedicated to pacifism, even though ATLA specifically doesn’t spell that out for Katara and her learning arc. 

There was a meta where someone briefly tried to argue that knowing “martial arts” is against pacifism. No. Quite the opposite. I’d argue that you are not a true pacifist unless you know exactly how to handle yourself if someone attacks you.  If you are not in a position to make conscious decisions about how much force to use, rather than merely operating on survival instincts, that is not pacifism. Or at least, not any energy or effort towards pacifism as a practical everyday tool.  I’ve made a few attempts to learn some tai chi and aikido, and it’s improved my physical and mental health, but some other things have gotten in the way. #lifegoals

I’m not going to tag the unfortunate soul whom I was replying to, because they’re probably tired of all this, but I’ll be sending them a PM to say that I’ve made this into a different post, because as I mentioned before, threads are somehow considered “owned” by OP, so it’s been pointed out to me that I should separate it.  I also said, I have basically ZERO respect for Korra uttering violent threats when the writers already minted a far more emotionally devastated and yet still resilient and centered character earlier in their franchise. People always try to excuse away people who genuinely like Aang more.  As if it’s just nostalgia or whatever. For me, no, it’s absolutely not. It is respect for a character who stands toe to toe with real people who are kind in the face of overwhelming injustice. (I have another meta on that). 

Both OP and people in the chats try to make excuses that she wasn’t raised as a pacifist, and that would be fine if they had addressed it with Tenzin and she had stated outright that she was rejecting pacifism and mind training. As it is, we are left with this nebulous affair where the lines between ideology and personality traits are blurred. 

We are told she “has trouble with spirituality” but what does that even mean? Does she have trouble with focus? Does she have trouble relating to the canonically real spirits? And pacifism specifically nor inner peace that it flows from is never even talked about as an extension of spirituality, which is canonically tied to airbending.

“Aang didn't have to deal once with the loss of his autonomy in atla” OP claims.

This was after I had noted that Aang was getting kicked around by Ozai and was most likely going to die.  Similarly, someone in the chat rejected the idea that a 12 year old trapped in a stone sphere that is heating up under a cyclone-sized blowtorch feels powerless. 

Sorry but that’s flat out ridiculous.

No one wants to admit that both of these people were faced with similar situations, and when push came to shove, one showed his LIFE PHILOSOPHY through conscious effort, and the other was abandoning the basis of martial arts, which is, no matter what the situation, keep thinking. Hold the panic at bay. Non-attachment would have served her well in this situation. Tenzin should have told her this. Before, or afterwards. It should have been addressed in the writing.  

People see this as “bashing” Korra, and oh well, can’t help that. If I think the writers didn’t follow through on their themes, that is my concern.  OP said I was “offended.” No, not really. 

I wasn’t offended by the post itself, or its commentary. Thought I made that pretty clear.

This is not dramatics. Let me be blunt.

As a ideological pacifist, and an actual practitioner of meditation, based on Buddhism, NOT just the fan of some show, I am for calling out writers who write one way from the survivor of genocide, and then stray from that ‘thoughtless aggression is immoral no matter HOW hurt I am’ to ‘let’s not address this character’s aggression in the narrative whatsoever.’ OP attempted to derail by accusing me of being racist or sexist against Korra. Also ridiculous. It honestly should have set me off more, but it didn’t. 

Meditation is about reigning in your emotions. Managing your anger when it gets out of hand, and digging down to the roots of it. Being responsible for your own behavoir. Acknowledging ownership of your own actions. Not blaming anything YOU DO on anyone else or any circumstances in your life. Like an adult, or should I say, an enlightened adult.

Or at the very least, that is the ideal ypu strive towards while being imperfect in the present.

. . .

Now.

I’m going to quote a passage in a Google Doc of mine, even though I’d really prefer if you asked to read the whole thing, with context.

“What do humans do when it is necessary to, or greed makes a nation want to recruit?

They go to the army to get trained, right?

Granted, having someone scream and get spittle on your face is, in the grand scheme of things, poor preparation for having bullets whiz past your chest and grenades shatter your ears. And, what do you do to prepare you for the pain of getting your leg blown off? Hopefully, nothing. Like taking a test where you only got half the study guide. But, it’s about the most ethical way to go about it, right?

Not everyone even sees action. So any more more extensive mental preparation for physical pain than that, and you’d have people definitely protesting.

Well, as it turns out, pacifistic protestors themselves, if they were in the right time and place, also very intentionally do this type of mind training. Except, when they did it, they actually did sit still and took turns roughly grabbing each other and throwing each other down and in some cases, even kicking and bruising each other.

Turns out, those pacifists are, in some ways, more hardcore than the army.

Why is this?

Because a pacifist’s aim, unlike a unit, who wants to gain the upper hand in a situation, is to grit their teeth and grind their way through all those survival instincts, and totally submit.

In this, they aim to get the sympathy of the public, who clearly sees they are not aggressive, or a danger, no matter how much the footage is manipulated or suppressed.

In this, they hope to appeal to their attacker’s better nature.

Make them stop and think, wait a second, are these people a threat like we’re told they are? I’m attacking someone who’s letting me beat them up. Or a bunch of people. All forming a line, and letting us peel them off. Or sitting, and bowing their heads. If I’m on the ‘right’ side of things, the law, why am I doing this?

It’s not like a bully, who’s just a kid.” They’re more self-aware.

And might I add the situation influences a pacifist’s actions too. There’s no reason to let a single or a few random attackers beat you up if you can evade or disable without permanent damage.

Pacifism is a dynamic set of responsive actions informed by values. Not a proscribed set or a checklist.

But in terms of organizing against state power, and recording wrongdoing, which unlike during the Civil Rights can happen from all angles from smart phones nowadays, these are the motivations.

“So, the pacifist knows this, and that’s why they go through all that trouble of training themselves to, not only submit, but not turn tail and run, either.”

See, a character trait is something like being a morning person, or ways of handing information, or a given set of emotions a character feels. Once you cross over into actions, you must make the distinction of whether an impulsive character agrees with their own uncontrolled actions, or is embarrassed or remorseful. Those are life philosophy. Now sure, one type of person or character may be more likely to subscribe to pacifism, but there is no gatekeeping on what you have to feel or how you look at things. You can be easygoing, or feel all the rage in the world, but as long as you at least attempt to have a handle on those desires and feelings to where they do not cross into actions, you are still doing the work of metacognition, which is what martial arts and its accompanying mind training are for.

It’s what we see Aang do.

He’s informed us, during the Southern Raiders, on how much rage and pain he feels.

Pain points, TRIGGERS, that were directly struck at when Ozai gloated over him.

He joins with all the past Avatars for several moments, and just like every other time he is in the Avatar State, he is enraged. He wants to exact revenge on the unrepentant grandson of a baby murderer.

We see it when he turns his head away, face still screwed up in anger.

For another example, I could cite my difficulties in being aware and reining in my tongue sometimes. I know the roots of these issues and I seek to let them go.

It’s just that process takes way longer than Guru Pathik would have us assume.

In fact, I would even say that Aang’s portrayal throughout the three seasons is not strictly a realistic representation of at least the sad side of grief. I addressed that a little when I talked about real life figures. But what it IS, is a metaphor that cuts very deep to the heart of pacifism. As I showed in that Doc . . . There is no limit of suffering a pacifist is willing to go through, internal or external, for the preservation of peace.

This was demonstrated during the Civil Rights, and with Gandhi and all his followers beforehand, inspiring them. The pacifists’ method of swaying hearts is probably the reason BLM exists in such numbers as it does today. Will the types of narratives that correspond with their full stories of the way they collectively planned and trained for and approached conflict make it into fantasy media? I’d say, probably not. For a host of reasons.

It could be hoped for, I guess.

But we DO have Aang.

As for myself, whether speaking sharply is an “action,” per se is up for debate- certainly it doesn’t seem to violate the non-aggression principle put forth by the vision of a “stateless society.”

For another example, let’s take my explanation at the beginning. I am examining how circumstances affected my actions, and now am attempting to fix it, if indeed it needs to be fixed. 

At least one person said that it not so much what I said, but how and when I said it. I don’t actually think I’ve said anything “wrong” per se. So I have to figure it out. 

[I’m considering splitting up this next part into a second post, as it only slightly relates to pacifism itself and is just kinda some more commentary on Tumblr itself- Tumblr discourse, as it were]

[I’ll put more brackets when I’m done in case you want to skip this part as well]

An interesting social difference between Tumblr and other places is this command you often get, “don’t chat/reblog/message me back.”

This is interesting for several reasons. For chats and reblogs, other people may be following the “conversation,” so it’s actually pretty rude and presumptuous to tell a person not to respond to whatever you said, because other people watching still may be interested in your take.

In a forum setting, if someone involved in a conversation doesn’t have anything left to say, usually they just don’t respond.

This method would work perfectly fine for Tumblr, but for some reason, maybe its super odd format, probably due to the “ownership”/“extension of self” I mentioned at the beginning of the essay, people don’t tend to do this.

Now, in comment sections, sometimes you’ll run across an amusing sort of “mutually assured destruction” where two people both say this to each other. You’d better stop responding. Omg just give up. Why are you still arguing. Etc.

But see, no matter where this behavoir pops up, and no matter who starts in on it, those who do this usually want to have the last say on the matter.

Instead of merely not replying, they want to assert verbal control over the conversation.

Tumblr, in its weirdness, is also sort of like a mutant comments section. You can post comment section threads as your own post.

Which is one reason why I’m puzzled when people say ‘don’t read the comment sections’ when Tumblr is so popular.

I’m an oddball in that I browse comment sections for fun.

Probably due to alexithymia, I didn’t really comprehend the emotional toll it takes on many people, so the warnings to “stay out of comment sections” read to me like “hey don’t eat that dessert.” After I’m done with the ‘meal’ of an article or art, I like to see what lots of different people have to say about it. The fluff. Anything vitriolic I either blip over, or extract anything useful, or if I judge the person is reasonable enough, I might engage.

Sometimes I mis-judge on how reasonable someone is, and I shrug and move on after being cussed out or whatever.

In this, I suppose I succeed much of the time in being a verbal pacifist.

[But let’s get back to the more serious stuff.]

We’re talking about what is done in life or death situations, here.

For myself, I may in the near future be working more with dangerously mentally ill people. I’ve had a little exposure to it through various means. Nurses are obligated not to retaliate against patients, and those who have, have been fired in some situations. Again oddly, this is not primarily what triggers my anxiety. Unfortunately enough, this requirement has also resulted in nurses getting seriously injured and violated. I hope to influence whether “no harm” techniques such as tai chi and aikido and arm locks may be allowed. The voluntary philosophy I was luckily already on board with is enforced by bureauacracy, directly relevant to my potential profession.

Were someone to get involved in a dangerous profession, such as a police officer, their moral duty would also be to own up to any spur of the moment anger or fear they acted on. 

It’s just that their bureaucracy acts differently, in excusing their actions.

Ideally, they would be taking steps far in advance, to avoid this often-cited fear of death reaction. As training pacifists like Aang do. 

And yes, army people are trained differently than police officers because the army, often, even when threatened, is supposed to avoid engagement or deploy deterrents that are non-lethal almost all costs, unless ordered otherwise. Whereas American police are given pretty much complete discretion and often not taught de-escalation techniques. Even police from other nations are better trained in that regard.

Enter the ironically named @avatarfandompolice whose account description should really speak for itself. Combative, dismissive, and their attention-hungry bread and butter is to find people they think it’s acceptable to ridicule.  They basically tried to say trauma was a valid excuse to take out your anger on other people, and in this situation, potentially kill. 

Now, does this hold up in the real world? Yeah, sometimes. Especially if some law breaker or law keeper has not been given the anger management tools, they perhaps could be excused, or better yet, rehabilitated.

But especially if anyone finds themselves in dangerous situations, or intends to put themselves in such, it falls to them to do this preparation.

As an aphant, I am at a bit of a disadvantage, compared to an average martial artist, being unable to visualize an attacker. But I still attempt it.

As the main “police officer” of the world- the coincidentally blue clad figurehead that is supposed to keep order, it is apparently fine for Korra to not do the work Aang did to keep level. To blow it off as too much trouble: clearing the First Chakra of fear. For herself or others. And its resultant anger. Had she had access to the Avatar State, the authority figure pretty much would have killed people.  This is what the “fandom police” and a certain chat goer ultimately support. Maybe they didn’t understand it that way, and since the second had blocked me, they will also never see this explanation. Unless I were to share it in Google Doc form I suppose.

So, I responded. “Remember kids, you are not responsible for your own behavior if you have the excuse that someone else did something bad to you.” A frighteningly common sentiment on this site.

When it’s low stakes like CAPSLOCKING or internet fights, that’s not such a big deal. But what happens if this attitude leaks into the real world? This isn’t even about Korra or Aang anymore, it’s about toxic mindsets. I didn’t know fans taking pro-Korra posts as anti-Aang was a common in the fandom. I’ll say again I’ve only just gotten really active on Tumblr like the past few months. This is about pacifism itself. MLK and his hardworking, training followers (yes some of them sixteen and POC and not super-powered like Korra) facing down firehoses and staging sit-ins long trained for would shake their heads at this defense of reactionism. 

Pacifism is not a Personality Trait.

It is deliberate actions and preparation taken over a period of time.

Then the “fandom police” tried more of this, and these two conversations ensued, the comments with another user resulting in the title and main thesis of this essay:

https://captlok.tumblr.com/post/638777472806273024/avatarfandompolice-response-to-my-independent

https://captlok.tumblr.com/post/638806142933467136/the-plight-was-not-what-i-was-getting-at-it-was

#atla #lok #atlok #atla meta #pacifism #martin luther king #civil rights era #history #blm #mlk #mlkday2021

[phantom-thieves-official]

What did you think of P5R's ending? (I'm sorry if you already said this)

I've talked about it briefly while discussing my thoughts on the game overall, but I've had some time to think on it now & here's my current opinion:

The ending was... fine. I don't dislike the decision to have all the characters go their own way, and although for most of them that seems like the logical step in their character development, my emotional side wants them to all stay together.

Speaking of, some of the futures the characters said they were pursuing were better than others. Haru, who's confidant focuses heavily on struggling to run Okumura foods & pursue her ideas for the company, is going to college for business. Great, love it. Futaba, who's character growth pretty much all centers on putting herself out there & living a normal life without anxiety getting in the way, is going to high school. Perfect, also nicely opposes the scene in her confidant where you show her around Shujin and she ends up feeling anxious & sad. Ann is going to go all in on whatever she thinks will help with her modeling, choosing to study abroad in pursuit of that goal. Good! Her arc, while it's not the main focus, does have smaller elements centered on her learning to tackle things head-on and take them more seriously, her modeling being one of them (in fact, part of her confidant explicitly states she previously only thought of modeling as a hobby and she now wants to work at it seriously.)

Ryuji's goal to start doing track again seems very opposed to his confidant arc, but I can't quite say it's entirely bad. His confidant never implies he doesn't want to run anymore, just that he doesn't want to go back to the track team. I suppose joining a track team at a different school isn’t in direct opposition with his lack of desire to join Shujin's team again. It still doesn't sit quite right with me, but it's not as bad as I initially thought. Plus, it's good to see Ryuji actively pursuing something rather than settling for the troublemaker role he's been boxed into. He strikes me as the least ambitious character, partially bc of the box he's been put in, so I'm happy to see him taking the initiative. And this might be a small thing but he also mentions he's going to run again because he likes it & wants to, but multiple times beforehand we've seen at least part of his reasoning before was in the hopes of getting a scholarship to help his mom (not to imply he didn't love track before, just that it's good to see him pursue something solely bc he wants to, yknow?)

The worst of the bunch are Yusuke & Makoto, who are given no stated goals of any real substance. Yusuke is simply hoping to finish his painting, and Makoto is.... moving out to live on her own. Neither of these seem particularly impactful nor relevant to the characters' growth (Makoto's especially seems lackluster considering a good portion of her growth is about her finding her own path & pursuing the goals and future she wants/believes in. But when it comes time for the game to show her doing this, she makes no decisions at all.)

I feel that, on the whole, the narrative would have been better served if Akechi had legitimately survived Shido’s palace. Maruki brought him back to life, and it’s safe to assume he willingly turned himself in (as in, that was not Maruki twisting reality, that was his decision made entirely on his own). But Lindsey, I hear you cry, Akechi’s character growth centered around him finally making his own decisions, no longer being manipulated and controlled, and that’s exemplified when he chooses to reject Maruki despite knowing he will return to a reality in which he’s dead! And sure. I’ll give you that. But the same ideas could have been presented in any number of ways. If I am to believe Akechi’s character truly does center on the idea that he is finally a) able to and b) allowing himself to make his own choices; to decide the truth of things for himself; then why did it have to be shown in a way that still ends with his death? I have a few big problems with Akechi’s fate. One: dying is the easy way out. Instead of being forced to face the consequences of his crimes (something he was willing to do, as he did turn himself in) he dies. He escapes the consequences related to the things he’s done, which feels especially bad when I consider that he was willing to face the consequences. He was at the start of a properly-handled redemption! And instead of seeing that through, they killed him off still. Two: Through Akechi’s confidant, both in vanilla p5 and p5r, it’s obvious one of the things he’s least capable of facing & expressing his honest feelings about are the Phantom Thieves, Joker in particular. The scene where he dies he gets called out for it, as he’s acting like he hates Joker and doesn’t care; acting like he truly wants Joker dead; but in truth he does care. He does want friends and teammates and he does like Joker. He doesn’t want to kill Joker. But he’s so under Shido’s thumb and so deep in his own head that he can’t be honest - and when he finally comes to his senses, he’s killed. Now please consider. If his growth is even in part supposed to be about him deciding the truth for himself, then doesn’t it stand to reason that he should be given the chance to make his own choices about his friendship with Joker, clear of Shido’s influence?  He should be allowed to rectify things. He should be given the opportunity to rebuild the relationship, after facing the consequences he deserves, of course. His feelings towards Joker were clearly such a huge point of contention in his confidant, it is baffling to me that he isn’t given any sort of closure on that at all. His working with the group in Maruki’s palace doesn’t come close to the sort of arc he should have gotten, as it’s an almost begrudging alliance formed out of necessity and not in any way is it Akechi forming his own honest opinion about Joker.

Maruki could have died when his Palace collapsed and I wouldn’t have cared. He’s got a sob story but that doesn’t excuse his full-blown god complex and the incredible depravity of just deciding what’s best for people and forcing that upon them. I wish he actually faced any repercussions, truth be told, but he doesn’t. He just shows up happy as can be at the end. He got off wayy too easy.

#long post #mod answers #asks #p5r spoilers #dude im so sorry abt rambling this got so out of hand #wow im advocating for akechi to live. never thought id see the day.

[sonofkhaz]

Musing: Pathologic 2

Pathologic 2 is what you get when Russian game developers down an entire bottle of Flintstone Vitamins with some Vodka while listening to Hardbass after being awake for 72 hours straight. It’s probably one of the best games I’ve played in terms of story-telling and themes. 

It’s a great game, despite some mechanical issues. A few years ago, I got the original game off of GOG and only got about halfway through before giving up out of frustration and a little bit of boredom. The sequel fixed a lot of the problems the first game had. For starters, there’s a lot less walking back and forth; rather than having to literally walk around the whole town to check up on your patients to see how they’re doing, it now tells you at the end of each day if they’re okay, in danger of infection, or infected. It’s easier to track your character’s thoughts, the map now has markers, and you can sprint instead of walking (sprinting is now a feature, yes). You can use a ferry system to fast-travel around town at the cost of a coin called a Fingernail, and you can hold down CTRL to highlight points of interest and characters you can speak to.

Despite being praised in Russia and having very positive reviews (91% at the time of writing this) on Steam, the game didn’t get much traction upon its release in the west, with “game journalists”, a term I still don’t fully understand, comparing its difficulty to Dark Souls (yeah, some people still use Dark Souls as the litmus test for game difficulty) and claiming that it has Skyrim-inspired RPG elements. It’s as if “game journalists” have never played anything outside of Bioware games, Skyrim, Dark Souls and Pokemon.

Yeah...despite the fact that comparing a game like Pathologic 2 to something like Dark Souls or Skyrim is completely obtuse and ignorant, I think I understand where the frustration comes from, which I’ll get to later.

The game takes place in Town-On-Gorkhon, an isolated town in the steppes built upon contradictions. From a glance, the town might just look like your average early 20th century Russian town, but it’s inhabited by two groups of people: the Townsfolk, who are just becoming industrialized, and the Kinfolk, a group of Steppe nomads who hold veneration for bulls because they believe that the town rests on the back of a giant auroch, Mother Boddha. In addition, the latter group has a species of humanoids called Worms who water the ground with blood to grow plants, women called Herb Brides who dance in the steppes to make the twyre bloom, and other practices. Despite the contrasts, the two are not at complete odds at each other; rather, both cultures have meshed together.

In the first game, there were 3 different playable characters, but for now you’re only able to play as Artemy Burakh, the Haruspex. His father was a Kin doctor and his mother was a Townsfolk. After six years of medical school, Artemy is called back home by an urgent letter from his father, only to find out that he’s been murdered. See, a haruspex was someone in history who could divine the future from entrails; since Artemy is technically a surgeon who just returned to a town where cutting arteries, attacking someone with a knife, and digging holes in the ground are all considered taboo, he’s the primary suspect, so everyone hates his guts. People will initially refuse to trade with you, shopkeepers won’t sell their goods, and some people will try to attack you in the street. In the wake of this, a mysterious plague referred to only as the Sand Pest hits the town.

Pathologic 2 is like an adventure game and a “horror survival” tied into one. The imagery of the game goes from uncanny valley to flat out dark, with red pustules and moss-like substances growing on the buildings and streets of infected districts, infected townsfolk shuffling towards you to try and infect you, and plague clouds that manifest and chase you down the street. If you’re unfortunate to get infected with the plague, you hear voices in your head telling you, gently, to lay down and die so your suffering can cease. While you’re trying to find a cure and trying to save NPCs from the plague, you yourself are trying to survive.

Your overall survival is dependent on more than just your health bar. Sergei tries to shank you for your track suit and Semechki seeds, yeah, your health will go down if he manages to hit you. But then you have to factor in your hunger, exhaustion, immunity, and stamina/thirst. You’re hungry, so you eat some toast, but now your thirst meter is going up; while it’s not immediately detrimental, it affects the duration you’re able to sprint and fight. Your exhaustion meter is full, so you lay down to sleep for a few hours, but now your hunger is going back up and you’ve just spent precious hours that could have potentially have been used doing something else. Uh oh, you just got hit with a plague cloud and your immunity is dropping - do you use the immunity boosters/tinctures you were saving for patients to bring it back up, or are you going to take the risk and wait for it to slowly climb back to where it was?

Any time you die, your screen blacks out and you speak to Mark Immortell the Theatre Director, who gives you a tut-tut-tutting on dying and sends you back to your last save file with a penalty. Your maximum health/exhaustion meters are reduced, you get hungrier and more tired as time progresses, so on and so forth. These all stack, and they’re all permanent across all save files, so there’s no going back to scum save to prevent the penalties. If you die enough, you get visited by a friend who will offer to remove your current and future penalties forever...for a cost that you may not learn of until it’s too late to change your mind.

This ties back to my previous statement about how people were criticizing this game. A lot of survival games in modern gaming tend to be generous towards the player in terms of, well, survival - you have a meter that’s running low, or a supply that’s dwindling, so you stop whatever you’re doing to rectify the situation. Should you fail there’s usually an “out” by returning to a previous save. You can’t do this in Pathologic; one reason being mentioned in the previous paragraph. Another is the fact that time is always working against you - really, the only moment where time tends to stop moving is if you’re in a dream sequence or if you physically pause the game. The clock is always ticking so you need to frequently assess the efficiency of what you’re doing and if it will pay off in the long run. The game has a lot of choices, and not in Peter Molyneux’s Fable or Black and White perspectives of “choice”. The decisions can vary greatly. Let’s say that one of your friends needs a water barrel because they want to get water for the poor and impoverished in their district. Well meaning, but what if it infects the neighbors? The hospital needs the tinctures you need to boost the immunity of nameless patients; everyone will like you more if you carry the task out, and you’ll get paid the next day, but what if tomorrow means that half a dozen cast characters get infected and you don’t have the time to make more tinctures? 

Critics of Pathologic 2 have bemoaned the fact that you can’t just walk around, immune to virtually anything and everything, and talk to the NPCs while freely exploring the town to learn more about the Sand Pest and the overall story. The desire to know more about the story is a fair point, but here’s where I see the problem: There’s a genre of story-driven adventure style games, usually referred to as “Walking Simulators”, that are typically praised and lauded by the “video games are art” crowd. Games like Dear Esther, Firewatch, What Remains of Edith Finch, and Gone Home are usually put in this category.

The difference between Pathologic 2 and those games is that the latter group takes a more “hands-off” approach in their storytelling. You don’t have a lot of interactivity or mechanics that directly tie into the games. The named NPCs you speak with in Pathologic 2 are fleshed out; it’s personal because Artemy Burakh has history with them, and the decisions that you make, or don’t make, will ultimately decide their survival. Many of them have multiple outcomes; you speak with them, see their angles, see what information they may be willing to give out or abstain from initially giving, so on and so forth. The game pushes you towards investing them emotionally. Not only are you trying to save them from the plague, but you’re trying to save yourself. You’re also trying not to starve, you’re also trying not to get infected. Rather than watching a sinking ship, you’re part of the crew trying to bail the water out and plug the hole. 

Not all the mechanics are perfect. Guns and their ammo, while being extremely rare/expensive to find, have a tendency to jam up way too much and hitboxes can be choosy. Hand-to-hand combat can feel clunky, and the inventory can be a colossal pain in the ass to manage since the game does not auto-sort individual stacks and uses Diablo-style inventory management. However, I have very rarely seen things like these critiqued by the “video games are art” crowd; rather, they complain about the meter management. The problems of the town seem real because you’re in it as well. Without having to manage your meters, making sacrifices and decisions, it takes away the conditions that make moments in the game memorable.

Remember: Failure is a very real, understandable and relatable aspect of human life and society. There are times in life where you fail repeatedly before you see the light at the end of the tunnel and triumph. One of the marketing pitches of this game was, “You can’t save everybody”. For example, I spent three consecutive days treating Andrey Stamatin after he was afflicted with the Sand Pest, and it ultimately came to naught because he died anyway. Some of the game's most memorable moments and interesting dialogue come when you are unsuccessful, because the game knows that you’re going to fail at some points even when you try your best.

Overall, would I recommend Pathologic 2? Absolutely. Would I recommend it to someone who cares about story-driven games? Totally. Would I recommend it to people who have low frustration walls? No.

#pathologic 2 #pathologic #computer games #musing #long post

[yunaffie]

Shu Takumi interview

Several years ago, Official Nintendo Magazine UK (now no longer existent) had an interview with Shu Takumi and it was even on their website. Now their website is no longer around, but I did manage to find the interview on the Wayback Machine and I figured I’d repost it to make it easier to find, as well as give people who haven’t seen it yet the opportunity to do so.

    On the day that Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney - Dual Destinies is released, Takumi talks to us about his best-loved series

Shu Takumi's most famous creation, Phoenix Wright, is famed for his 'turnabouts'. These whiplash-inducing twists of logic see him step into the unknown in order to seek his client's innocence; he's essentially a chancer, blagging his way to victory. Talk to Takumi, however, and you sense that he leaves nothing to fate. His stories are intricately plotted, his jokes laser-targeted and his heroes full-bodied personalities.

In a medium in which storytelling starts and ends with 'man hates thing, man shoots thing', Takumi is a rare exception to the rule. With his latest yarn, Professor Layton Vs. Ace Attorney, on the horizon, Associate Editor Matthew Castle was lucky enough to cross-examine one of gaming's definitive voices.

Matthew Castle: Before we start, just for any readers who might not know who you are, could you tell us about your role at Capcom?

Shu Takumi: I'm a director, which means that I propose ideas for new titles, design the games, write the scenarios and direct the projects. In addition, I mutter complaints and, when the intense pressure of an impossible schedule finally gets to me, escape into a fantasy world of my own creation [laughs].

MC: Before developing Ace Attorney you worked on Dino Crisis. How does one go from dinosaur survival horror to virtual courtrooms?

ST: Dino Crisis was the brainchild of my then boss, Resident Evil creator, Shinji Mikami. Working on his projects taught me not only how to make games, but also how to think about them. After Dino Crisis 2 wrapped, Mr Mikami gave me six months in which to create any kind of game I wanted.

I was still pretty wet behind the ears, but as I'd originally joined Capcom with a desire to create mystery and adventure games, this was a huge chance for me to make my mark as a creator. In the end it took a team of seven 10 months to produce the first GBA Ace Attorney title. Having the freedom to create exactly the kind of game I wanted was amazing and it was a real pleasure to work on that project.

MC: Can you remember when the idea of Ace Attorney first came to you? How did your bosses respond to the idea of a lawyer-based adventure game when you first described it to them?

ST: It was in 2000 when Mr Mikami said I could make my own game and my original idea was a fairly typical adventure with a detective as the main character. Most mystery adventures have the player choose from a number of different dialogue options for their character in order to progress the story, but I wanted a new gameplay style that enabled players to deduce for themselves what was happening, rather than just selecting canned responses. I developed this into the concept of facing off against the suspect in a crime and exposing the contradictions in their statements.

I was sure my new idea would be a fun and original take on the genre, so I started to revise the main character, since a detective would be too traditional for such an original concept. I asked myself, "What kind of professional would face off against a suspect and expose their contradictory statements?" The answer, of course, was a lawyer and so the Ace Attorney concept was born.

Incidentally, I wrote the game design document at home during my summer holiday straight after Dino Crisis 2 finished. One day, I got a call from Mr Mikami. Despite having supposedly given me free rein to design whatever I wanted, he warned me off doing a game about courtroom trials!

MC: Ace Attorney paints the police and legal profession in a silly light. Have you ever had feedback from lawyers or policemen about your portrayal of them?

ST: A few years ago I had the opportunity to speak with some police detectives and they told me that their real-life investigations are nowhere near as absurd as those that were depicted in Ace Attorney. I thought to myself, "Well, I had sort-of guessed that already..."

I've never had feedback from any lawyers, but I imagine it would be the same. They'd tell me they don't scream out "Objection!" as vigorously as our characters and I'd think to myself, "Well, I had sort-of guessed that already..."

MC: Every Ace Attorney game is full of great characters, so when you wrote each sequel how did you decide which people to bring back?

ST: The first time a previously featured character returned in a later case was Larry Butz. Phoenix defended him on a murder charge in the very first case of the first game and he showed up later in the same game as a supporting character in the fourth case.

He wasn't originally planned to be a recurring character, however. The schedule for designing and drawing a new character for that case was so tight that there was a serious risk we wouldn't make it in time, so we decided to reuse an existing character simply to save time on asset creation. Thus, Larry made his encore appearance, which ended up being a well-received element of the first game's storyline, so from the second game onwards, we started bringing old characters back intentionally.

How we choose who to bring back is simple: it's usually either characters who are popular with fans, or those I am fond of [laughs].

MC: For all the madness, there's something traditional about the mysteries at the heart of Ace Attorney. Did you draw on any classic crime writers for inspiration?

ST: You could say that there is a mixture of the spilled blood of victims, the guilty tears of killers and the sweat of hard-working detectives flowing through my veins... To put it less graphically, from the time I came across the Sherlock Holmes series as a child, all the way through to my university days, I've been obsessed with reading classic murder mysteries. It's safe to say that Ace Attorney would not exist were it not for Perry Mason.

When writing the cases for the games I've found inspiration in the works of GK Chesterton, Ellery Queen and Anthony Berkeley, to name but a few. And I can't leave out that modern classic of the genre, Columbo.

MC: How hard is it to devise a juicy twist and to hide it from view? In storytelling you often want to obscure the details, but videogame design often requires clarity. Did you find it hard to rectify those two things?

ST: They say that it's harder to create a puzzle than to solve one and that's certainly proved to be the case in my experience. For the first game, with my lack of experience I found it less like a challenging task than a hobby with which I became obsessed.

You need to control the information presented in the game so that there is a single right answer for the player to deduce, but also weave in plenty of initial inconsistencies for them to uncover and our trademark 'turnabout' twists to confound their expectations. This is where reading all those mystery novels in my youth has really paid off.

MC: Having worked on four Ace Attorney games, how did it feel to step away and work on Ghost Trick? Were you nervous to leave that safety bubble?

ST: I first started working on the Ghost Trick concept in 2004, after the completion of the original GBA version of Ace Attorney 3. The third game was supposed to be the last one, but plans changed and I ended up working on the first DS Ace Attorney, which, as you know, was the first Ace Attorney title to be localised and released in the west. My next project after that was Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney, so by the time I got around to finishing Ghost Trick it was 2010, six years after I first thought up the concept.

I certainly felt a lot of pressure when making Ghost Trick, as it was a brand new IP and I had just left the Ace Attorney series, but I was grateful for the chance to take on a new challenge.

MC: Ghost Trick featured some incredibly gruesome murder concepts - death by giant roast chicken is my favourite. From where did you draw inspiration for such a huge variety of deaths? Did any not make the cut?

ST: I feel that the most violent way of murdering someone is by directly shooting, stabbing or strangling them, so for Ghost Trick I wanted to have more indirect ways of killing someone, with a darkly comical, more symbolic feeling to them.

Combining this approach with the fact that the Nintendo DS screens are not the largest, or most high-resolution displays out there, it became important to make sure that whatever death we were presenting to the player was visually easy to comprehend. So being crushed to death by some giant object was a perfect fit for our requirements, whether it was under a big rock or a huge roast chicken.

As far as cut ideas, there was going to be a stage where the victim had been crushed by a huge safe that fell from the ceiling, but time restrictions meant the whole stage was cut. I do love having giant objects fall on people, don't I? That's probably the influence of Tom and Jerry on the young Shu Takumi showing through.

MC: More importantly, how did your team react as you presented these death ideas to them. Was anyone worried for your sanity?

ST: Yes, and not only that, but I also made it my goal to cause the team to worry for my sanity whenever I presented an idea, because if they were, it meant it was a good one. I would hear a little voice in my head saying, "You win!" at times like that. The more "You win!" moments one can have in life, the better.

MC: There were nods in Ghost Trick to Ace Attorney - Missile the dog, for example; a character who looked like Wright - do you see the two games as existing in the same universe?

ST: Those are really just coincidences: the guy who looks like Phoenix actually only has the same colour suit on and the dog is not the same breed as Missile, which, coincidentally, is the name of my pet Pomeranian.

Ghost Trick takes place in what is obviously a much more fantastical world than Ace Attorney. You may have noticed that the level backgrounds in Ghost Trick never have any kind of writing in them. This was an intentional design choice to prevent the game's setting from being identifiable as taking place in any particular country or era from the real world.

MC: Could you imagine an Ace Attorney/Ghost Trick crossover? Any deaths that we couldn't prevent by way of possession could then go to trial in a courtroom...

ST: ...or Phoenix Wright could be killed and Sissel could prosecute his killer in court! Whatever form it might take, a crossover between these games is something I would love to see happen.

MC: When you return to Ace Attorney after a period of absence - whether it was to write Apollo Justice or Professor Layton Vs. Ace Attorney - how easy do you find it to slip back into that world and that writing voice?

ST: Writing for Professor Layton Vs. Ace Attorney was the first time in several years that I wrote in the voice of Phoenix and Maya, but those characters are so dear to me that I carry them around everywhere in my heart, so it was very easy to pick it up again. It was like a reunion with old friends and was a very pleasurable and nostalgic experience for me.

MC: When you came to write the scenario for Professor Layton Vs. Ace Attorney, how hard was it to make those two universes gel? Layton's world traditionally dispels the paranormal, while Wright tends to embrace it.

ST: I worked together with Level 5 to develop the world in which the crossover takes place. It took quite a lot of time for both sides to find a setting into which we were happy to place our biggest characters. The starting point for me was when I wondered to myself if one could still use logic to solve a case in a world in which crimes could be committed using magic. I really liked this idea, so it was hard, but fun, work to design the court sections of the game around it.

MC: Putting all diplomacy aside, who would win in a battle of the wits between Professor Layton and Phoenix Wright?

ST: If you ask me, I don't think Phoenix would be able to hold a candle to Layton in a real battle of wits. However, we all know that the hand of fate somehow always manages to bring a 'turnabout' in Nick's fortunes, no matter how sticky the situation, which means, well, sorry, Professor, but you're out of luck!

MC: With Ace Attorney 5 and Ace Attorney Investigations how does it feel to see your characters in the hands of other Capcom employees? We imagine it must be like a parent sending their child to school for the first day.

ST:

That's an apt comparison. I do have mixed feelings about it sometimes. For instance, I was really surprised to see that after we focused on the new character of Apollo in the fourth game, the Dual Destinies team decided to bring Phoenix back. Ultimately, though, having creators other than myself take the helm of the series is a valid choice, as it brings new directions and new story possibilities.

The team on the new game have looked at what the essence of Ace Attorney is, and as long as they can give the fans another great game to enjoy, I'll be happy. After all, the fact that the series is still going over a decade after I made the first game is something I couldn't possibly have imagined in the first place.

MC: Have you seen the Ace Attorney film? If so, what did you think of it? Was it funny to see characters you sketched out all those years ago in the flesh?

ST: I saw it, and I even got to make a little cameo when the film company invited some Capcom staff to visit the set. You can see me briefly in the spectators' gallery in the final court scene.

It was really something to see the story I wrote for the first game brought to life on the big screen by real-life actors.

And those costumes! They were such perfect recreations. The director, Takashi Miike, is an expert at making existing works from other media into entertaining live action films and he did a great job with Ace Attorney. I highly recommend that everyone reading this check it out, if they can.

MC: This interview is part of our 100th edition and we're looking back over some of our magazine highlights. Looking back over your own career, what is your personal highlight to date?

ST: As a creator, the greatest compliment to me is when someone tells me that they played one of my games and enjoyed it. In the course of the press tour for Ghost Trick in 2010, many players from around the world expressed their love of Ace Attorney to me and it's moments like those that make me glad I became a game creator. Also, I'm deeply honoured to have been asked to take part in this special issue and having myself, my team and our work considered a highlight of your magazine's history. I'd like to thank you on behalf of everyone at Capcom. This opportunity is in itself a highlight for us.

MC: Many of our readers are keen to know, what's next for Shu Takumi?

ST: Game projects are a complex balance of so many factors: what I want to make, what players might make of my concept, what Capcom as a company wants from the game, and also broader trends in the gaming industry. My next project is in the preparation stages and I still don't know myself what form it might take by the time it's finished.

Whatever happens, though, I'll be pouring my heart and soul into it and working towards that eternal goal of hearing positive reactions from the players at the end of all the hard work.

#ghost trick #ace attorney #shu takumi

[spacetimewraithwrites-archive]

12/12/12

I was tagged by @livvywrites! Thank you.

rules: answer 12 questions in character as an OC, ask 12 questions, & tag 12 people!

Warren Cougar will be answering this today from the year 2272!

1. What teachings from your parents still affect you to this day? Do you wish that they didn’t?

My parents taught me to love everybody, regardless of who they are and where they’re from. But they were also very firm on the idea that some people don’t deserve your love and attention, and not to blame myself if someone turns out to be just so vile that my love would be wasted on them. It’s gotten me through a lot of shitty relationships both romantically and platonically, and it’s helped me survive jobs with terrible bosses.

Lookin’ at you, Hastings, you fuckin’ douche. Rest in shit.

Honestly, it’s one of the values I hold closest to my heart. So, thanks Mom and Dad for that one. I miss you guys.

2. Who is the person who has made the greatest impact (good OR bad) on you, and who you are today?

Hm...I think a combination of a few people in my life are responsible for who I am today. My parents, naturally. Grandma and Grandpa Cougar, who opened their hearts and homes to me when my mom and dad died (miss you guys, too, deeply). As much as he’s a dickass, I do think maybe Hastings shaped me a bit. Gave me thicker skin.

And this goes without saying, but I owe Thrive so much in terms of...well, everything, but especially for showing me that I’m worth something to at least one person.

He’s shown me that my presence is not inconsequential in the best way.

3. If you could do anything, without strings or consequences attached, what would you do?

Oh! I’d absolutely take a ship to Zliyagi and blast the eliyi to pieces. Absolutely.

4. A genie gives you three wishes. What would you wish for?

A deserted, tropical planet for no one but myself and Thrive where we can live in peace for the rest of our lives without being harassed by people wanting things from us...and I guess [REDACTED] can join us too. *Chuckles* I think I’m technically just wishing to live on Tournaltis without any drama.

I’d also wish for all of my friends to live happy, healthy lives. Especially Guetry. He deserves so much better.

My last wish would be...for Thrive to finally find peace of mind. He’s pretty damn good at hiding his inner turmoil, even from me sometimes, but I know everything he’s been through has created a permanent scar on his heart. I want more than most things for that pain to be eased for him.

5. When you go to pack for something—whether it be as simple as tucking items in your pocket for a normal day, or an overnight trip—what are three or so items that you couldn’t live without?

The letter from my mom, the one she wrote before he died. I’m still blown away that Thrive kept it in perfect condition for me over the course of two-hundred-plus years.

I haven’t read it yet, but I think I’m getting closer to having the strength to try.

I don’t know if I would need to bring anything else. Between living on various spaceships and planets and not knowing where I’m gonna sleep next, I’ve kinda had to let go of material items. That’s fine with me, to be honest. I’ve never really been a materialistic person. I mean, I love coding and programming but I'm able to do enough of that without a personal phone or a computer these days, you know?

6. Is there someone in your life you can’t live without? Who are they, and what is your relationship like?

Mm. Definitely Thrive. He makes me feel like the only other person in the universe, and even writing this now has me smiling like an idiot.

I first met him when his spacecraft crashed spectacularly in the lake by my cabin. He’d been flung all the way from the Andromeda galaxy just to land almost literally in my lap. And he hated me at first. No joke. I’m pretty sure if I had hit just the right button he would’ve choked me out or broke my neck.

But I guess I grew on him like a fungus because he and I click so hard and work so well within our relationship and as a team that I sometimes can’t even believe that we’d ever been so strained. I guess...maybe our hostility was hidden tension. Either way, he’s beautiful and incredible and I don’t have enough words to describe how much I love him.

7. What do you think your childhood self would think of you now? How is your life different from what you pictured then?

My ten-year-old self would be like, “Wait, I’m gay?!” And then he’d be like oohhh...that makes so much sense. That feeling I got around some of the boys was not a deep desire to be best friends with them. *Laughs*

I think he’d also freak the fuck out that I’d get to see the far reaches of space and interact with actual aliens. I get giddy just thinking about it today and I’m living it right now.

8. How do you feel about where you are now? About the person you are now? What, if anything, would you change about yourself?

...I kinda like who I am now. Which is a MASSIVE change from who I was at like, 17-18 when I was at my lowest, mentally. I do think I probably strive too hard to be the best version of myself I can be. I think maybe I throw myself too quickly into dangerous situations for the people I care about. I’m living for others, too, now, so I should take it easy.

9. What do you do to de-stress, and take your mind off of things?

I either sit in front of a window and watch the stars, dance, or spend whatever quiet time I can get with Thrive. Maybe all three. Dancing helped me through hard times in my life and it still keeps my mind free, and the others go without saying.

10. What is the most ridiculous thing that you can recall doing? Do you remember why you did it?

My whole LIFE is a ridiculous thing?? Uh...I taught a bunch of venevans some of my dance moves after I won a drinking contest against Ysha, that was pretty fucking weird.

11. If someone were to record what was happening to you, the story of your life, how would you want to be portrayed?

Just...as honestly as possible. Get all my flaws, all my stupid mistakes, all of my good decisions, all of my indecisions. I’m not perfect. I don’t even think I’m a good person when it all comes down to it. I’ve done shitty things. As I’ve said probably a thousand times to Thrive, I’m only human.

12. What is your ideal future life like? When all is said & done, what does peace look like to you?

Peace looks like...adventure. I wanna explore the galaxy and beyond. I want to know everything I can possibly know. I want to help people, to help the universe heal. I want to make a difference.

Also, I want to live forever.

Tags and questions under the cut!

I’m tagging @madammuffins, @pen-in-hand, @touchingmadness, and @ditzysworld! No pressure, and sorry if you’ve already been tagged or don’t want to do this. Your OC questions are:

1. If you could take back one thing you’ve ever said to someone, what would it be and why?

2. If your house or place of residence were to catch fire and all of the people/living creatures inside were guaranteed safety, what would be the first thing you’d try to save?

3. If you have dreams, what was the best one you’ve ever had? If you don’t have dreams, what’s something you think about a lot that makes you happy?

4. What would you be doing if you weren’t doing what you’re doing now?

5. What would you say you’re surprisingly good at? Any hidden talents or abilities or hobbies you’ve perfected?

6. What’s your worst flaw? Are you trying to rectify it?

7. Who do you see sticking by your side forever? Romantically, platonically, or some other way?

8. Do you have a favorite type of music? What comes to mind when you hear it?

9. Who is someone you regret ever meeting?

10. What was your best decision? How has it changed your life?

11. What do you want most in life?

12. Is your happy place a mental space or a physical space? What’s it like there?

#profile: warren #tag game

[tessatechaitea]

Cerebus #14 (1980)

This is what happens to Cerebus because he still hasn't taken my advice to stab everybody he meets before they become a huge annoyance.

I'm not suggesting everybody stab everybody they meet so that they'll never have to deal with any non-stabbing drama because then everybody I meet would be trying to stab me. That sounds like a bad social contract. A good social contract is to not talk to anybody at all in public unless they work in the service industry and also maybe don't make such aggressive eye contact with people on the street? I'm just trying to get from Point A to Point B with as little human contact as possible. I wouldn't mind interacting with people except for one huge problem: most people are way more terrible than they realize. And the more enthusiastic and social a person is, the more likely that they're the real life version of Red Sophia or Elrod. On a similar note, I really love this thing where we're all wearing masks. Now if we can just develop a virus that spreads through eye contact so we're all forced to constantly wear dark glasses, I'll be pretty fucking happy about the state of the world. I mean I'd be happy with the state of the world in regards to what I have to deal with when I go outside (which is people trying to talk to me and looking into my eyes). I don't mean I'd be overall happy with the state of the world which is fucking terrible because a bunch of assholes think teenagers telling them they can't say retard on the Internet is worse than Donald Trump and the GOP's self-serving style of governing where they think taxes shouldn't be used to make the country better but should just go back into the pockets of corporations and Wall Street pricks and other politicians and the already extremely wealthy. Also, a lot of centrist Democrats think the same way. They're only more acceptable because they mostly aren't racist, sexist homophobes. Now that all the snowflakes have stopped reading and went to hug their guns in consolation of my mean Internet words, I can get to the review. In "A Note from the Publisher," Deni claims this is the funniest issue of Cerebus to date. Since it's Cerebus' first visit to Palnu, I'm not even questioning her claim. It's almost certainly true. Dave Sim's Swords of Cerebus essay is a textual stroking of Prince Valiant creator Hal Foster's dick. Sim's mostly talking about Foster's art style but he obviously decided to mimic some of Foster's story telling style as well. See, Prince Valiant was a continuous story that ran (or has run? Is it still going by his son or grandson or something?) for decades, a story which chronicled the life of Prince Valiant and, eventually, his children. Cerebus is a comic book that didn't run for as long but whose continuing story was easier to follow and had a drunk aardvark as the main character. So there are some similarities there, right? This was also the first issue of Cerebus after going to a monthly schedule. Dave Sim would now have to do 300 issues instead of the 150-something he had been planning. Ha ha! Sucker.

This would have been a most opportune time for Cerebus to start his stabbing people upon meeting them practice.

I knew at some point I was going to have to admit this so I might as well begin with it: I don't think I've ever sat through an entire Marx Brothers movie. It's possible I have but I just don't really remember because it happened so long ago. But I need to also reveal this: I loved Groucho Marx as a kid. I've revealed before that I had a grandfather fetish as a child. I loved hanging out with old men and I loved watching old men on television. Going in Style was one of my favorite movies and I simply adored Art Carney. I also loved The Shining because it was about a young kid who got to hang out with one of my other favorite older guys, Scatman Crothers. Groucho Marx in You Bet Your Life fit into the old guy category. I don't think he was as old as the oldest men I loved but, as a young kid, he certainly seemed ancient. I think the duck that dropped down when somebody said the secret word helped a lot. But I would watch reruns of You Bet Your Life whenever I found them on television because it was like hanging out with an old man, my favorite pastime from around four to ten or so. As for Groucho's movies? I've definitely watched parts of some of them as I stumbled on them on television and realized he was in it. But I've never made the effort to start one from the beginning and watch it all the way through. I should probably rectify that. Cerebus has wound up in Palnu thanks to a short diversion in a comic strip that appeared in The Comic Buyers Guide. He wound up marooned on an island with Lord Julius' son, Lord Silverspoon. Upon being rescued, Lord Julius decided to reward Cerebus for saving his son. I don't have the issue of Swords of Cerebus with that story so I can't comment on how annoying Lord Silverspoon almost certainly was. Cerebus' reward is to be put in charge of Lord Julius' security forces and granted the title of "Kitchen Staff Supervisor." It doesn't make any sense because Lord Julius invented bureaucracy. He realized the only thing that can really keep a leader safe is to make sure that nobody else knows what the fuck is going on.

Oh, see? I suppose I could have just read a few more panels and realized Lord Julius explains it himself.

As Kitchen Staff Supervisor, Cerebus' job is to keep assassins from assassinating Lord Julius. Aside from that, he was pretty much free to do whatever he wanted. Unless he only thought he was free to do whatever he wanted and whatever he wanted was whatever Lord Julius was manipulating him into wanting. Lord Julius is a master of getting people to accidentally do the thing they didn't think they would ever do that Lord Julius also didn't want them to do but actually secretly did want them to do. Basically anybody who has recently spoken with Lord Julius is actively doing Lord Julius' bidding, whether they know it or not. For some reason, Cerebus decides to take on the role of Kitchen Staff Supervisor even though it's the most boring thing he's ever done in his life. At least it's entertaining for the reader because nearly every line out of Lord Julius' mouth is a solid gag. And since I haven't really seen any of Groucho's movies, I can't say how many of the gags were stolen outright! I have to assume it's all new material and only Groucho Marx parody. Some people, in an attempt to never be fooled by anybody, never believe anything at all. I am not one of those people. I believe everything I hear until somebody slaps me and yells, "How can you believe that obviously falsified tripe, you fucking moron?!" Assassins try to poison Lord Julius and Cerebus tracks them down to an underground group trying to free the city from the clutches of Lord Julius. When the assassin, Cerebus, and Lord Julius wind up in the same place, Cerebus outs himself as a spineless centrist.

The Centrist loves to believe that not taking sides is the only logical conclusion to any matter that doesn't seem to immediately affect their lives.

Some people are probably wondering how that previous caption is a negative criticism. "Um, yeah. Seems about right. If it doesn't affect me, why should I offer up an opinion!" And yet when a situation exists where one side is full of abusive and manipulative people controlling the reins of power and the economic purse strings of the country and the other side is being bullied, cheated, and abused by that side, not taking a side is siding with the powerful and the abusive. Even if your life hasn't been affected. Of course, Cerebus doesn't need to take a side here. I mean, he does take a side: he sides with the people who have all the money. But he doesn't really care is the point. You'll see he retains this philosophy of rich people winning every argument later when he's Pope and gives out his wisdom that "God loves rich people which is why they're rich and hates poor people which is why they're poor." Pretty much the philosophy of evangelicals in the U.S. Cerebus survives the battle with the assassin and then gives Lord Julius some free advice about running the country. So Cerebus kind of does agree with the assassin but also the assassin wasn't paying him anything so he deserved to be thrown five stories to his death. Lord Julius says, "You can rest assured that I'll give the matter all the attention I feel it deserves." Is there a better way to tell somebody to shove it than that? It's so elegant! In Aardvark Comments, Dave Sim answers a letter on how to go about self-publishing. And so his role as Independent Comic Book Publishing Mentor begins! In his list of things you'll need to get together to successfully publish your own comic book, he kindly leaves out "talent." Obviously Dave understood how to go about getting something published but he also put in the hard work and had the talent to produce a comic book that began well above mediocre or average. I can't imagine a lot of self-published books began at this high of a plateau. And even if they were eventually capable of Cerebus quality, how long are readers going to give them to get there? Probably not even two issues, would be my guess.

The Single Page had a comic called "Sex Education" by April. I thought the first two panels were cute.

Cerebus #14 Rating: A+. As with Elrod and Red Sophia and The Cockroach, Lord Julius' first appearance is a banger. Dave Sim never once falters with Lord Julius' repartee. Solid gags throughout. Sim really is a master of dialogue and, to think, it only gets better.

#Cerebus #Dave Sim

[ghostmartyr]

SnK 90 Thoughts

Have you ever had this perfect story idea in mind, then realized that in order to get to it, you have to write basically an entirely separate book to set it up?

Have you ever decided that you really don’t feel like doing that?

Usually, that is when the words stop and the project goes into a desk drawer. Mostly a figurative one these days.

But--bear with me here--what if...

You just skipped all the boring parts.

There’s something delightful about watching Attack on Titan develop. Art and pacing have come so far since the first chapter, but you still get these glorious flashes where the reveal of our main character’s arch-nemeses is done with such a complete lack of fanfare that you’d be forgiven for thinking you were reading a fake scanlation even if you had the volume open in your hand.

Isayama knows how to craft a story. His telling, on the other hand, regularly spends its time stumbling up to the podium in its pajamas and happily shooting its laser pointer every whichway all over the pretty projections on the screen until you’ve started wondering more about the laser pointer’s battery life than whatever the lecturer was supposed to be saying.

The main reason you don’t want to wrap up a plot point that has been present since day one of your seven years of writing in two pages is because--

Well, presumably that stuff mattered? To the story?

Isayama’s decision to kill off most of the Paradis titans in two pages involves looking at those confused statements, and declaring, “No, not really.”

Authors do not typically do this.

Heck, most stories don’t even get to the point where they can look back at their starting premise (that has survived seven years) and inform the audience that the physical realities of that particular conflict aren’t relevant enough to be worth covering the conclusion extensively.

The story goes that humanity hides away in a cage from the inhuman monsters lurking outside--until they decide to rise and fight.

Those monsters turn out to be human.

We’re technically sticking to the same story we always have been.

We’re just now doing it without titans.

It’s like Isayama looked at his Eldian plot, and thought to himself, gee, this makes that titan problem kind of redundant, doesn’t it?

And the grand solution was to just write the common titans out of the story.

Because that is what you do with plot inconveniences. Naturally.

This is not how satisfying storytelling works.

It is hilarious, and the time frame on dealing with the worldly issues portion of this has adopted a scale that can probably handle it better, and there are a number of things that a time skip can make interesting--but holy fuck how long is that laser pointer’s battery life.

I’m going to harp on about this a little longer than I need to (shocking, I know), because as someone who tries really, really hard to get pacing right, this whole process is incredibly fascinating.

Having introduced the rest of the world to this tiny stage, this one plot detail, it of titanic proportions, it that has guided so much of the story, is so irrelevant to where the story is going that it can be excised in two pages.

That is extraordinary to me.

I don’t think I have ever seen such a prime example of an author recognizing that a prominent plot line has outlived its usefulness. It’s like he went full-on original flavor Vader.

Obviously, ideally, the Eldians vs. The World plot would tie into the common titan problem of Paradis, and the story would be allowed to proceed on both fronts. Doing it smoothly would be a challenge, but that’s writing for you.

Just as obviously, that’s not happening.

In a perverse way, the first 80-some chapters of this series behave like one of those windup toys. We didn’t know why Eren could transform into a Titan. We didn’t know why the titans attacked. We didn’t know anything about society outside the walls. We didn’t know what was in the basement. We didn’t know how the walls came to be. We didn’t know who the real enemy was. Our heroes were isolated in their struggles to rectify all of that.

We have now had our full orientation. We do not need the play-monsters anymore. We have the answers. All that’s left is to put the toy down and see how far it can go.

This is not what I would call good storytelling, but it’s so neat. I don’t think we would get to see this story with someone who was better at timing. Most people whose work is being published wouldn’t look at the series’ most well-known plot feature and put it up as collateral for the story they’re more interested in.

That kind of abandon is not something you usually get to see with a story of quality. You don’t just... gloss over parts of the story that matter. That’s common sense.

Offering the counterargument that those silly details were never meant to matter, when those silly details were formerly thought to be the plot?

That’s daring to suggest that there are parts of the story that are more worth spending time on. If the roaming titans of Paradis are deemed inconsequential, then what’ve you got for us?

It should be something good.

It should not, for instance, be forty minutes of the main character stuck in his own head until he breaks out and a bunch of people clap for him.

While I will continue laughing at the execution, one of the main reasons I’m okay with the time skip is because I’m still down for this story. This is still about humans fighting monsters for their right to breathe free air.

The difference now is that the training wheels are off.

And very promptly thrown into the sea.

It isn’t about mindless monsters eating people. It’s about human beings whose hatred and cowardice lead to them demonizing and abusing an entire race. This isn’t faceless cruelty anymore.

The fight is the same it always has been, but it’s now an informed fight.

So all that’s really great.

...Except then I get to thinking that people in the walls could actually maybe live outside the walls because the titans mostly vanished in two pages and my head starts spinning because who does that.

Never let it be said that this is a graceful story. Just a good one.

Speaking of gracelessness, this chapter was, in fact, longer than two pages.

And Floch exists.

Jean 2.0, featuring none of the insecurity that can pretend to be tact.

Floch’s role in this chapter is painful on multiple levels. He’s the sole survivor of a suicidal charge, and he did everything right. He saves his commanding officer. Humanity’s Commander. He takes them to the people who can save his life. He performs admirably even though he calls himself a coward and cannon fodder.

He’s another broken person, but the first one we’ve seen broken in part through our protagonists’ actions.

He tells the truth as he sees it, but he has no care for the damage he inflicts with it. He might find it important that Hitch get an unvarnished view of what Marlowe’s last charge is like, but he doesn’t offer emotional support. He might hate the decision Levi, Eren, and Mikasa contribute to, and think it deserves to be known, but Armin is the one he hurts, and Armin’s the only blameless party involved.

He lectures the rest of the 104th for what goes down, but Connie, Sasha, and Jean aren’t there for most of the exchange. They show up and have no clue what’s going on. Hell, Sasha’s unconscious during the rooftop discussion, and Connie’s carrying her. Jean’s the only one free, and by the time we know he’s there, Hange’s breaking up the fight.

Floch sits back and watches Mikasa pin Levi to the rooftop with a sword to his throat before he says a word.

He can be mad at Levi and Mikasa and Levi all he wants, but lashing out at Armin and the rest of the gang isn’t a matter of principle. He’s just hurt.

We don’t know enough about Floch to know how much of what he’s saying starts from a good place, but by the end of his sequence, it’s pretty obvious that his honesty, however powerful it is to hear, has its own bite of childishness.

It’s still sad, though. When Armin says Floch is right, Floch doesn’t look happy or victorious. Being right doesn’t change the mess they’re in or make the pain any less.

But geez. He manages to make half the people he talks to look like they’re questioning their will to live. Kid could use a kick to the shin and a hug.

The story has his back on making sure the words land, though. This chapter is a nostalgia trip and a half.

“In other words, you couldn’t throw away what was important to you, right?” --to Armin

“But even a piece of fodder... should at least have the right to assess the situation!” --and to Jean.

Yeah.

“Don’t get mad when you hear this... but Jean... you’re not a strong person... so you can really understand how weak people feel. [...] I mean... most humans are weak, including me.. but if I got an order from someone who saw things like I do... no matter how tough it was, I’d do my damnedest to carry it out.” --Marco, 18

Marco never comes up in happy conversations.

My personal favorite goes to Mikasa, though. For maximum pain.

“You gave up in the end.”

Hello, I am excite.

I’m not capping the whole thing because I adore these two panels on their own, but for the sake of full context, that hand of hers was holding Eren’s shoulder the moment before Floch’s words.

Hange convinces her to stop fighting for Armin on the roof.

Logic and history say she’s going to lose him and Eren.

Mikasa has spent such a long time refusing to give up. The first time the need to truly resonates, she stands and fights anyway.

She always fights. If you don’t fight, you don’t win. That’s what her first moments with Eren teach her.

Then there’s Floch, telling her that she’s more of an adult for giving up. Giving up on her family, accepting the loss.

She’s going to lose them. There’s nothing to fight here, and one of them is only alive now in spite of her, not because she was any help. There’s a hopelessness to Eren and Armin’s situation that won’t be denied, so what, is that the answer again?

Giving up on them?

Watching both of them die?

Mikasa could really use some proper pages dealing with all of the above, but for now I’m really psyched that the little moments are happening. She literally lets go of Eren in paralyzed horror.

Can has more? Please?

Besides making pitiful puppy eyes into the abyss, though, this chapter actually does have me really jazzed for whatever’s awaiting Mikasa.

The conflict that Floch keeps hammering away at is one that’s been lurking in the background for ages. Since the very first volume, to be precise. We’ve since seen in explored at length through Levi, Erwin, and the serum bowl, but like with many things in this manga, we start with Mikasa.

“Humanity is on the brink of extinction and you’re trying to dictate your own rules?!” --Eren, 4

Mikasa’s devotion to her family has been a primary character feature since her introduction. Her development has rarely been highlighted, but constantly in the background and her moments of foreground, she wrestles with the conflict of being a loyal companion and an exquisite soldier. She’s conscious of her decisions and mistakes without letting them tear her to shreds, which is a claim very few characters can make.

When she leads the charge in Trost and neglects to be there for her comrades, she knows it. When she ignores Levi’s commands against the Female Titan, she sees the damage and carries the responsibility forward. She remembers failing to kill Reiner and Bertolt and guilts over it.

Responsibility is seldom actively neglected in this series. Otherwise I wouldn’t have such easy things to quote as an example of a character making a bad choice; if someone does something questionable, you can expect a dialogue bomb to reference it at some point.

But Mikasa learns. Her mistakes aren’t creating an ever-deeper fault of trauma for every new horrible thing to trigger. She’s taken some extraordinarily hard hits, and it’s left her fragile in places, but when she experiences a mistake, she tries her best to correct it for the future.

The easiest comparison to that is Erwin.

Quotes are fastest, so I’ll go ahead and do that with something I wrote a week ago: My view on his increase in personal goals is that his guilt for being less than what he should be turns into him overplaying his baser qualities. Instead of being a good man and leader who has a weakness to overcome, he tries to frame himself as a bad leader, freeing him up to indulge in the absolute worst of his selfishness.

I believe the phrase is go big or go home. Erwin sees his mistake of putting himself over humanity, and he overcompensates in the wrong direction.

When Mikasa’s mistakes happen, she continually progresses in a direction that offers solutions to her errors.

That might be why she ends up stuck on the sidelines more often than not. Someone who quietly observes and grows at a steady click, without having their world knocked down every other week, can be hard to portray dynamically outside of key moments.

Here’s what makes all of that the fun of the hour: Mikasa’s personal, at times obsessive, loyalty, rooted in trauma, is now clearly facing its losses against her own sense of honor and duty. As much as she loves Eren and Armin, protecting them at all costs has slowly turned to only most costs. There’s enough distance between her and her trauma that there’s room for her independent respect for the world is calling her out when she does something she shouldn’t.

Eren doesn’t have that.

Eren, the first loud voice we heard screaming about the worth of humanity, has found the persons he would give everything for, and he can’t step back. He can be ashamed of his conduct on the roof, but if the same situation were to happen again, the same desperation for his friend would still be there.

Eren’s been beaten down so many times that I think his ability to let go (already one of his weaker points, since he always fights to win) has up and left him.

He can’t lose his family.

He can’t regret that Armin’s the one alive, and he refuses to put Historia in danger.

Back when Jean first joins the Survey Corps, he voices his criticisms plainly, and makes sure everyone around him knows the stakes.

“Look, Mikasa... not everybody is like you... We’re not all volunteering to die for Eren. All of us, Eren included, should know... what our lives are going to be used for.” --Jean, 22

It isn’t about just one person. It’s about the bigger picture. It’s about fighting for the sake of humanity. It’s about humanity.

It’s supposed to be.

But Ymir will give up her life and freedom to save the girl she loves, and then two random schmucks she can’t make herself leave. The pinnacle of Historia’s arc has her placing one life she cares about over plenty of others. Erwin will forget humanity for his dreams until his closest companion corrects him--only to fall into a similar trap because he can’t face sacrificing Erwin.

Grisha gives everything to his cause, but because he doesn’t love his son, he fails.

Reiner, Bertolt, and Annie are never in sync, and they die alone.

So what’s going to end up winning?

No one life is worth more than the rest of humanity, but if you don’t fight, you can’t win. If you sacrifice your interpersonal bonds for a grander purpose, you’ll never make it, because you’ll be fighting on your own.

Right now, the healthiest balance goes to Mikasa and Hange. They love fiercely, and will protect what they value with all of their strength, but their responsibility to the rest of humanity means too much to risk being selfish. Some sacrifices have to be made. Sometimes you have to let go.

But not until the very last second.

Hange understands all of that, and is grown up enough that it all flows.

Mikasa is still wrestling with how deeply that goes against how she’s fought for her family for years.

Eren, meanwhile...

I think it’s fair to say Eren is a fucking mess?

Eren, as he starts out, is idealistic, passionate, and naive enough to believe that you can change the world by running down that road at full speed.

As Eren is right now, I think he holds the memory of that being the way things should be, but he’s so bogged down in everything that’s happened, he’s lost the original spark that keeps that flash of optimism functioning.

When he talks about the ocean, he can bring Armin back, but he can’t bring himself back. His aunt’s mangled corpse is more real to him than the dreams he had as a child.

Mikasa and Armin make it to the beach, and despite all of the pain they’ve gone through getting there, they can smile. They can squeal over the tide over their feet. They’re happy.

But for Eren, the ocean that has always been one of the solid carrots of his struggle has turned into a reminder that they’re still not free. They’re still stuck. They’re still surrounded by monsters. It never ends. Making happy dreams come true is a temporary flight of fancy that can’t save them.

Death, though. That can fix it, right? Just... kill them all.

I don’t think the bleakness of RAB’s perspective has ever been presented so quietly.

Eren has fallen to a place that dreams can’t reach, and his only answer to that sense of desolation is to turn it on their enemies.

When the choice between Armin and Erwin is presented, Eren’s strongest argument for Armin is that he can still dream. He isn’t consumed by revenge. He sees something outside of death and chaos when Eren can’t.

After another year of life, that difference has only expanded, and now Eren really can’t find anything to hope for.

And that’s essentially why there are those few paragraphs of theme up there. Becoming a slave to a cause and abandoning softer things is dangerous. There needs to be that balance that people like Hange have, otherwise you’re just going to fall apart.

Learning to let something go is valuable, but if it’s done because it hurts too much to hold it close, it isn’t growth. It’s destruction. That’s why Mikasa’s struggles, while agonizing, don’t separate her from joy the way Eren’s have.

Mikasa’s learning that there are some things you can’t fight. Eren’s found despair in thinking victory can’t exist.

And look, I’m an optimist with this series. I know that, and I know it’s probably annoying or laughable on occasion.

But that setup is so perfectly arranged to oppose the themes presented in their first meeting that I can’t help but hope they’re going to go through all of this, losing faith in beliefs that have sustained them for years, and then find them again.

They aren’t young children anymore. Idealism is hard, and their lives have only made it harder, but that’s what makes it matter so much. Their values don’t deserve to lose, and if they don’t champion them, no one will. And I’d kill to see them find their way to believing in that again after being through hell.

With that thoroughly rambled about, we turn to things I don’t have complete thoughts on, but will bring up regardless.

Starting with the fact that Marlowe’s name variances would drive me to drink if I drank.

Eren pretty fragrantly calls back to what Levi tells him in the forest when they’re first facing the Female Titan.

“I don’t know the answer. I never have. Whether you trust in your own strength... or trust in the choices made by reliable comrades. No one knows what the outcome will be. So, as much as you can... choose whatever you’ll regret the least.” --Levi, 25

“I don’t know... what the right choice is. How can anyone know the future?”

When Levi says it, it’s a call to action. Who knows what the right choice is, but you’ve got to make one. When Eren says it, it’s an attempt at comfort. A choice has been made, so let’s work with it and not fuss too much over how, yeah?

Besides, Armin is so unbelievably amazing that regrets are even more of a waste than usual. For sure.

And the last thing I can work myself up to care about is that Historia rocks, and I’m gladdened that she instructs her people to not be such lying jackasses without hesitation. Hail to the Queen and etc.

But when Eren has his more complete flashback to the incident between his family and the Reiss family (harking a return to feeling slightly bad for Grisha--whatever his mistakes, Eren, Carla, and Mikasa are his world, and that’s a worthy perspective), what I really want to know is if Historia sees it too. They’ve experienced mutual memory magic before, but that was in the cave of mysteries.

Mikasa and Armin seem to notice that something has happened, but Historia’s the one to get the large panel of her eye (I need a tag for her eyes still), and I’m dying to know if that’s because she’s the one looking at Eren’s expression head-on, or because she sees what he sees.

Because if she’s receiving flashes of his flashbacks when they’re connected, Eren’s attempts to protect her by keeping one of her potential uses a secret is possibly already long dead when they hit the beach.

Also it would make my favorite character maybe relevant for another arc.

I deserve nice things, this should happen.

#Shingeki no Kyojin #SnK 90 #Mikasa Ackerman #Eren Yeager #shingeki no spoilers #SnK spoilers #spoilers #tl;dr #chapter post

[kiryienka]

RWBY Volume 4: Chapter 1 Review

NOTE: I am a big fan of RWBY, have been since its inception. Please view any of the ideas and views presented in this review as somewhat tongue-in-cheek as intended, but also note that any negative criticisms are not just ‘hating’ or anything like that. I want to see this show succeed just as much as the next guy.

RWBY, the brainchild of the late Monty Oum. A significant pioneer in the world of online media, RWBY has in a short lifespan become one of the largest shows online. Volumes 1 through 3 were huge successes, and so when Chapter 4 started late last year, people were understandably very much looking forward to it, myself included. Today we seem to have reached the end of the Volume with Chapter 12, and after taking everything in and processing it, it is with a heavy heart that I say:

RWBY Volume 4 was pretty bad.

Ok, so I don’t have to be told that this is an unpopular opinion to say the least. So far I have heard mostly good things about the season in general. The reason I’m making this review is not 'to convince you that it’s bad’, but more to expand on my thoughts as to why I think it’s bad, and what could have been done better to rectify it. I liked RWBY when it started out, and I’d like to see it continue for many more seasons to come, but not if it will follow what seems to be a pattern of self-degradation.

I now find myself re-watching the season so that I can give you the best and most understanding perspective I can. Let’s start off with Chapter 1: The Next Step.

The first shot of the episode is this weird pool of goo which turns out to be a Grimm birthing pit of sorts, the camera panning out to reveal a whole bunch of these things in the area. I really like this start, actually. First of all, it gives us some information on how Grimm are made/where they come from, and it also provides the groundwork for the animation department to show off the extent of the new and improved rendering techniques. In this shot, they look great, with dynamic lighting being the most notable improvement. Not just the Grimm, but the entire environment, seems to be lit and  rendered in a similar way, and it looks pretty good and, at the very least, brand-spankin’ new.

So that shot transitions smoothly into a looking-out-a-window shot with Mercury and Emerald, kinda just… looking. Emerald has this puzzling expression of what seems to be a mix between shock, disgust, grief and confusion. And Mercury just looks like he woke up on the wrong side of the bed that morning. They’re summoned to a table by Cinder (who, by the way, is not dead, so immediate red flag going off in my head), who is accompanied at the table by three other men, all of whom are immediately presumably lackeys of Salem: Guy with suit and mustache who immediately looks like an asshole, Guy with unkempt hair and squinting eyes, squatting on his chair rather than sitting and grinning creepily at nothing (he’s crazy I guess, fine, whatever), and sleeping beard guy, who actually doesn’t look too menacing and is the only one at the table that I give any thought into 'who is this guy and what are they like’.

Then we look at Cinder, who has a wicked scar coming from the left side of her face, which is covered by a patch of some sort and her hair. I immediately find myself asking, what happened at the end of the last Volume that didn’t actually kill Cinder, and seems at first appearance to have only superficially damaged her, but that drove her away/stopped her? I assumed she was dead, but lo and behold, she does not just survive, but lives to fight another day. I guess I like Cinder’s character in general so I’ll let it slide for now.

We are now 1:30 into a 20-minute video, so you can tell that each part of this review is gonna be a bit on the long side. Can’t wait for part 12 (the video having been a whopping 27 minutes, which is a whole other thing I want to complain about).

So, everyone I’ve mentioned so far is now around the table. Suit-mustache guy is the first to speak, telling Cinder to 'keep her “possy” in check’, with a snide and asshole-ish tone of course. There’s one for two on character assumptions. But also, what prompted him to even say that? It seems that this exchange is to show SM guy’s disdain with Cinder and 'possy’, and vice versa, but it is sorta just thrust in there without warning, or even reason. Then he goes on to mention the wonderful 'silence’, despite the fact that the room was completely silent before he opened his big dumb mouth. Then he of course pokes fun at the fact that Cinder was beaten by a 'little girl’, and crazy guy suggests what he would do; hunt her down and then… he makes allusion to the fact that she (being Ruby) 'took’ Cinder’s eye… so I guess Cinder lost an eye? Ok, that’s a bit more problematic, sure, but it still feels weird that such a specific injury derived from the indiscernible flash of light that ended the conflict in the last Volume. Also, this guy is crazy, so I’m 2 for 2 on character assumptions. If that wasn’t enough to convince you, he then laughs crazily just so the point gets across.

The theme I’m noticing at this point is this: present the information to the audience in the most obvious way possible, so we know nobody will misunderstand. I know it probably wasn’t the intention, but I feel like my intelligence and skills of reasoning are being insulted. It’s not giving me even a chance to make inferences about these characters and the situation, and is instead making everything as clear as possible from the very first scene. Oh, there are these three guys. Oh, one of them is an asshole to Cinder. Oh, Cinder is banged up. Oh, specifically, Cinder lost an eye. Oh, this guy is crazy. It feels like I’m getting slapped in the face with basic information that could have been inferred within a few minutes of screen time, not having even been given a chance to do so.

Cinder tries to talk, but is too hoarse or something. I guess her voice is gone too… for some… reason? If the narrative reason for the fact that Cinder is injured in a way that still allows her to get back into the thick of fighting after a little while, and if it’s as black and white as everything else in this scene, it’s that they didn’t want to put this character out of commission to fight. Spoiler alert, that mentality persists through the entire series, not just for this character. More on that a few episodes down the road.

Before SM guy can get more mockery in, the doors to the room open and in comes Salem, with her own theme music too! She walks around the room to the other side of the table, menacingly, and stares at some candles. “Watts”, she says, drawing the attention of SM guy – if I knew his name was so simple as his character, I would have taken a guess. Then she uses the word 'malignance’ to describe his behaviour. I had to look up this word to find that its definition is… the quality of being malign. Well screw you too, I’m just gonna assume it means something like f***ery and move on. After that (which was totally 100% necessary) Salem signals everyone to sit down (they stood when she entered the room, forgot to mention. Didn’t think it’d be worth mentioning. Watts responds to her by apologizing, followed by the conversational equivalent of a vague-post directed towards Cinder, which kinda negates any possible meaning behind the initial apology. Salem defends Cinder with the whole fall maiden thing, and this is the only thing so far that I can infer that hasn’t been thrown in my face: Salem, despite acting like it, doesn’t care any more about Cinder than anyone else at the table, and is using emotional manipulation to put Cinder under pressure to do… whatever it is she’s supposed to do.

Now, I have to ask, why is Cinder at this table? That is to say, why was Cinder taken into this group at all? If it’s to get the power of the fall maiden… why? Why couldn’t Salem do that? Now, obviously, Salem wouldn’t exactly be able to stealthily permeate the tournament like Cinder did, but surely there were other ways. I suppose you could go with the 'Salem is a Grimm’ theory, but I haven’t seen enough to buy into that yet.

So Salem lists off these great reasons why Watts shouldn’t be poking fun. About how she’s the fall maiden, brought down Beacon, and 'killed dear Ozpin’. So first of all, yeah, Ozpin is more important than he let on, great, dandy, like we couldn’t figure that out. But more importantly, this list was presented in a specific way. Salem put great emphasis on the killing Ozpin point. A clear narrative sign that Ozpin is, indeed, not going to be dead. Because I’m going to forget later, spoiler alert: He is dead, but they’re going to continue to BS his way in the series one way or another, and I hate the way they eventually did…

So Salem asks Watts the good question; what was Cinder’s 'failure’ that he keeps mentioning? The girl with the silver eyes. According to Watts anyway, which prompts beard to chime in (who I thought was asleep but I may not have cared enough to notice) about how they’ve dealt with these people already. But how is that a failure? Ruby was kind of an unforeseen circumstance in my estimation, and judging by the fact that Salem doesn’t mention it, it almost definitely wasn’t part of Cinder’s instructions. Though, if they know that silver eyes means trouble, then that means that Cinder really should have got Ruby out of the picture as soon as possible, so I guess you can consider that a failure.

Watts continues to grill Cinder for a bit and then Salem says something weird that made me pause: 'It’s because of the maiden’s power’. Um… That doesn’t explain how Cinder was bested… quite the opposite actually. Salem talks about a 'crippling weakness’ that comes with the newfound strength, but doesn’t bother mentioning what it is. It also begs the question, exactly how long ago was the fall of Beacon with this conversation only just taking place now? Cinder is told that she will stay there as her treatment continues. Then Salem calls up 'Doctor’ Watts all of a sudden. Doctor of what? Does it matter? Probably not, but it does still annoy me. So Watts is told to take Cinder’s place and meet some informant in Mistral. Take note of that, and keep it somewhere you can find, because when will we find out who this informant is? The very end of the very last episode.

Tierian (which is a really annoying name because they could have easily gone with a real name like Tiernan, but nooooo), who is apparently the crazy guy, is instructed to continue a hunt for the spring maiden. Hazel, who is beard, but I might still just call him beard anyway, is to go to the leader of the White Fang, an encounter arranged by Adam, who for whatever reason is still on these guys’ side.

Now Cinder wants to speak, so she raises a hand which apparently means 'Emerald, come over here so I can whisper in your ear’. The message, Cinder wants to know what about Ruby? Watts states that it’s 'Cinder’s problem, not ours’. But… you just said that that was her 'failure’. You stress this quite a lot for something which you now claim doesn’t matter. Even though it apparently doesn’t matter, Salem changes Tierian’s mission to go get Ruby and bring her there.

After Tierian laughs himself silly, we see a smash cut to… this… guy… who is this? Well, they look young I guess, probably around 15. Clothes indicate a rural life, probably literally on a farm. And no, it almost 100% is not the spring maiden. Stop perpetuating that nonsensical theory.

Anyway, farm-boy here wakes up from a nightmare, and because I’m an asshole I have to point out that he was sleeping in his bed in his regular day-clothes (with like a suspender and s**t). Anyway, he leaves his room and the next cut reveals that he is indeed on a farm. My clairvoyance frightens me. And do we learn anything else about this character? … No. No we don’t. It was a proper waste of a minute or so of my life.

And now we cut to a forest. In this forest we see Nora talking Ren’s ear off discussing what their new team name. Nora argues that because there are more members of JNPR than RWBY in their crew, they should go with JNRR, even though, according to Ren, 'junior isn’t a colour’, which I wasn’t aware was a prerequisite to be a team name (CFVY? CDNL? They are names of colours, but very unconventional names the layman wouldn’t know.). I guess colour is an important thing with names in this society. How do I know this? Well, Ozpin mentioned it in a speech in season 2, the only time it was ever mentioned. So when you throw it into this conversation, it doesn’t make sense to most viewers, and it took me a while to understand the logic as well. Ren’s proposition is that because the objective is Ruby’s, she should be the leader, making RNJR appropriate (but I don’t remember 'ranger’ being the name of a colour either). My suggestion for a name was TDFM, which stands for THIS DOESN’T F***ING MATTER. Jaune shared my sentiment, though, not as violently. But then backpedals and says that 'JNRR is way cooler’, because sure, let’s continue this comedic scene which is more infuriating than it is funny.

Cue rumble sound and ground shake, and Ruby is fighting some big rock monster. It looks pretty damn cool, if I’m honest. But more important than that is, how is the fight choreography? Simple answer: not great. Individual movements are not bad, but everyone has a much more ridiculous weightlessness, almost flying in their attacks for seconds and seconds. Not only are the characters weightless, but their weapons are as well. Nora swinging around her hammer looks like she’s playing with a styrofoam toy. It’s silly at best. Nora also says 'crap’ randomly in the battle (at a point when nothing is really happening so I don’t know why). I don’t have any problem with cursing, if you can call crap a curse word. They’ve just never done anything close to that in this series so far. So I can expect that that will hold up, right? This is a more mature show now with more mature themes, right? Nope. Only instance of a word like that that I can remember, there may have been one or two more at most. Next point, Ruby uses her semblance… excessively, to put it lightly, in this battle. Now that would be fine, if we didn’t already know that that uses up her aura, and we’ve already seen that she isn’t able to use it too much without getting tired. Then, Jaune comments on the fact that he doesn’t have a weapon. So what happened to his weapon? Eh, let’s not address it now when it’s actually important.

So this big ol’ rock-Grimm poses a demonstrable threat, and they have a lot of trouble with it. Eventually they find that the way to defeat it is to attack its face. When Jaune comes to this realisation, he formulates the plan to knock all of its limbs off at once and then attack the face so that it can’t protect itself. How does he present this plan to the others? “Guys, I got it! We hit it… harder!” Are. You. F***ing. Serious. Let’s just move on from this scene, because the list of things I could complain about in it is growing faster than the f***ing rate of acceleration of the universe. Though, I will just add, everyone was then told the plan to knock off all its limbs and then attack the face, and the Grimm was defeated by… not doing that. God, I need a drink.

So apparently they were just doing an extermination job for some old dude in a village, which I suppose prevents me from asking why it’s necessary to fight this thing, but inadvertently makes me ask why they’re wasting their time doing odd-jobs. Then they go to a blacksmith, where Jaune’s weapon apparently was, along with a shiny new set of armour. He takes off his old armour, which reveals on the front of his hoodie, a cute design of a bunny. Now first of all, I’d wear the s**t out of that hoodie, but second, at this point we begin what may be the most irritating exchange I have ever watched in any show, movie or short.

Ruby starts to make fun of Jaune’s hoodie, which is fine, it’s a little unexpected of him I guess. But then she starts laughing and screams about how 'it’s got a cute little bunny rabbit’, as if that wasn’t obvious to anyone in the world. Jaune details that it’s 'Pumpkin Pete’, from some brand of cereal, as Ruby continues to laugh. She jokingly asks if it was a box top prize, to which Jaune responds that it was, needing a whole 50 of them. And she continues to laugh and laugh and laugh, and where it gets seriously obnoxious is at this point where the animation department decided to make her whole head grow and do this weird movement towards the camera. It’s extremely jarring and highlights a few things. Firstly, her facial expression is not one of somebody dying of laughter. If you cover her mouth, it looks like she’s in pain, and if you cover her eyes, it looks like she’s talking normally. Mashed together, it looks like Lt. Cm. Data trying to heartily laugh – it conveys the fact that Ruby is laughing, but it looks so mechanical, artificial and bland that it takes you out of that mindset, and the entire scene, completely. Also, the movement of the mouth and face is ridiculously minimal. It doesn’t look like she’s laughing at all. It almost looks like whoever animated it did so without hearing what the laugh would sound like, and the voice actress did the laugh without seeing what the animation would look like. Lastly, it is the first point that you will notice – and this will continue for the entire season – that shots last way too long. The zoomed-in Ruby laughing portion of this exchange, with minimal movement and no change in anything else, lasts an agonizing 8 seconds, which is extremely long for what isn’t even a gag, but a character’s reaction to said gag.

I also hate how Nora and Ren just stand there, just f***ing stand there, while this goes on. I imagine they’re not laughing because they knew about this sweater already, but then you’re not even gonna defend Jaune or something? Not gonna contribute to the conversation and make more fun of him? Not even gonna tell Ruby to shut up? They just stand there with dopey half-smiles on their faces as if part of them doesn’t really know what’s going on, another part is wondering why they’re wasting time here when they’re trying to go to Mistral, and the rest of them is just like 'why are we being dragged through another season of this hell’.

So then the blacksmith brings out the new sword and shield, commenting on the nice metal Jaune brought him and that it 'accents the white nicely’. When asked from where it was procured, Jaune states that it’s 'from a friend’. Now, because this exchange is extremely vague, and this point is never addressed again, I’ll spell it out for you. Jaune melted down the metal from Pyrrha’s shield and possibly her weird crown-thingy. It’s hinted by the similar shape to that crown towards the bottom of the shield’s design. So… did Pyrrha not have any family that would have liked to have the last remains of their daughter? Did they just say 'nah, let her former boyfriend of 5 seconds keep it, I’m sure it means a lot more to him than to us’?

So when they leave the smith, in one shot Jaune puts the sword in the sheath and it attaches to the back of his arm somehow. It just floats there, so I think 'oh, I guess that’s where it goes now, fine, whatever’. Then, in the shot after next in the very same scene, it’s on his waist. What. I don’t. Kill me.

So they continue on to the next village, where they hope to find an operational 'airship’ to quicken the journey to Haven Academy. They also allude to the fact that Nora seems to have lost their map as they walk aimlessly in a direction, but the camera pans away anyway because who needs maps am I right? That’s not important.

The transition into the next scene is a little jarring but somewhat smooth at the same time. The camera slowly moves into the sky and fades from clear blue to another sky with a few clouds, and then suddenly, jets. Turn down your headphone volume or it will be a little uncomfortable. We see Weiss in some room, staring dramatically out a window before someone enters the room. Judging by the white blandness pervading every object in this room, it’s pretty easy to guess that this is her home, quickly confirmed by the new entrant, a butler, summoning 'Miss Schnee’ to her father. And it is with Weiss’ character model that I first though, 'something isn’t right’. At this point in, I wasn’t sure what, just that the characters definitely looked weird to me for some reason. I’ll bring it up again when I realised what the problem was, which will be a few episodes on. And the episode ends there, just suddenly. I ask, what was the point of showing Weiss in this episode pointlessly for less than a minute? Especially when you consider the fact that we weren’t shown Yang or Blake. The world may never know.

So finally we reach the new opening for this season and it’s… horrendous. There’s no being kind to this, it’s simply awful. Immediately, the song 'Let’s Just Live’ is sub-par to the Williams’ standards, and it also has a confusingly upbeat nature despite this season coming off the back of such a dark end to the last, and not being expected to get much brighter. The first shot in this opening is a s**ttily animated sphere of some sort with portions coloured red, white, black and yellow. The reason why I complain about it is twofold. The colours within the sphere are not divided equally, and instead look like an Egyptian flag with an unexplained discolouration on the right side. And despite the fact that the sphere is not coloured in quartered segments, the halo around it is, which makes it look all the worse. So then there are Grimm clawing at the thing and one eats it, any potential meaning behind which is far too vague to parse at any point in the season. Then you have four coloured circles of the same colours spinning around aimlessly and then they break out of what looks to be Beacon Tower and go off their separate ways around a map. This is obviously to represent the four members of team RWBY off having their own journeys and development, but it could have been conveyed in a way that didn’t look quite so lazy.

We cut to Ruby walking along when wind blows off her hood (which was up for whatever reason) and the remainder of JNPR is behind her. The camera zooms in towards them with… speed lines. Why this was thought to be necessary by the animation department is a question that I may never find the answer to, because it really is there not just for no reason, but for a completely nonsensical purpose. There was nothing fast about the camera’s or anything else’s movement, nor was there anything exciting in nature about the shot. Then they walk off and we see a crow fly towards the camera, and this is the point where you ask yourself why we haven’t seen Qrow, who we can assume with reasonable certainty is following RNJR/JNRR. The crow transitions into a standing shot of, you guessed it, Qrow, as if literally to dispel that thought you just had not half a second ago.

Then we cut to Weiss reading a book, and she turns around to see her butler (I know his name is Clyne, but I don’t know if that’s how it’s spelled or if it’s Klein or Klyne or Clein or Clayne or any number of spellings so I just didn’t bother writing it up to this point) and somebody standing behind him. Judging by the short stature, white hair and neat and tidy suit, I am going to assume it’s Weiss’ younger brother, and chances are he’s going to be an asshole (no points for guessing whether that assumption will be correct). Then it cuts to this dude in a study who we can assume to be Weiss’ father, who is probably also an asshole. I say assume, because, correct me if I’m wrong, I don’t remember ever seeing this guy’s face at any point in the last three seasons. Ironwood is there too I guess. Then it zooms into Mr Schnee’s eye to transition to Weiss seemingly having a mental breakdown. You can ascertain from this that Weiss’ father is emotionally/psychologically abusive or manipulative. I see that as heavy-handed, but for that one I’ll concede that maybe that’s just me.

Smash-cut (literally) to Blake standing on the long-pointy bit on the end of a ship (I could look it up, but giving people something to complain about other than this review seems like a good idea). Sun suddenly jumps from behind her and hugs her quite violently. Let’s ignore for a moment the fact that such a motion would have pushed the both of them clear off the front of the ship. If you look at the frames just between 18:46 and 18:47, the strange expression on Blake’s face coupled with the robotic stiffness of her body should at least give you a chuckle. I would criticise it more were it not for the fact that this is the 4536th word in this document and I would like to finish this as soon as possible. This other huge guy with a big beard and really weird chest hair (which I will address once this character is actually introduced) puts his hands on their shoulders. Now, one can’t really derive just from this who or what this character is, and at this moment I assumed he was someone on the ship or something (which was wrong, shocking, I know). And then he violently pushes Sun away, and another character jumps into his place. It’s a shorter but older-looking woman than Blake, and most importantly she is a cat Faunus as well, which immediately leads to the realisation that she is Blake’s mother, and the man is therefore her father.

Then we take a look at Yang, who seems to be training with her father Taiyang, no arm and all. Her hair looks bizarre in how large it is and how much it juts out, but that’s really the least of my qualms at this point. The camera is spinning around the pair, and when it’s behind Yang, Taiyang is replaced with a replica of Yang, +1 arm. And then she falls backwards into a weird fiery image of Adam. At this point you think 'fine, makes sense, it’s PTSD or whatever’ before two random people jump in front of the scene for seemingly no reason. One is visibly a Faunus, and they both are wearing strange robes with a red hood vaguely in the shape of a snake head. We learn who these people are a few episodes later, but any possible connection to Adam or Yang is actually never explained, so the way this is cut together is especially strange.

Then we see Hazel, Cinder, Tierian, Watts and Salem in succession, standing at different strata of a rock structure and posing menacingly. It goes from there to a scene with Ruby fighting Tierian, with oddly slow and sweeping movements from both parties. What’s worse, in this exchange none of Ruby’s attacks are at all in a position or direction to threaten Tierian, and he isn’t even attacking at all, just sort of break dancing. Then we go to Adam attacking Blake. I can’t even notice the choreography of this exchange because it’s all put on the back burner by the goofy expression of 'fear’ on Blake’s face for a whole half a second of panning in. It transitions then to Weiss. If patterns are to be followed, she’d be fighting one of the bad guys, probably Hazel or Watts, right? Nope. She’s just… practicing, I guess? In her room, nobody there. Then we go back to RNJR/JNRR fighting random Grimm with more slow and awkward movements before they stand there and pose. One last crow wipe shows the members of team RWBY standing around and looking away from the camera as it tracks up to the title. A title that also appeared near the start of the opening, would you believe.

Well, there you have it, that was my review of RWBY Volume 4 Chapter 1. Again, this is written to be tongue-in-cheek but also because I want to see the series get better, not worse. These are truly my opinions, just exaggerated for entertainment value (because who wants to read about 5000 words which are boring?). I don’t have a timeline for the next part of this review, but if people want more then I will try to do it within the next two weeks or so if possible. Until then, thanks for reading.

#rwby #rwby spoilers #rwby review #wrote this late at night so there might be some errors

[haililly46234-blog]

An Overview To Usual Redaction Errors.

Coming from Center English mistaken, to misconstrue, from Old Norse mistaka, to take in error: mis-, incorrectly; see mei-1 in the Appendix from Indo-European roots + taka, to have. That's not about our mistakes in life that determines who our experts are actually, this concerns the character that is actually created due to all of them, the wisdom that our company obtain off them and also the expertise that when our team perform make oversights our team are going to acquire beyond them as well as still stay a great life. . Slang), slip up (casual), misjudge, goof (laid-back), fall a clanger (casual), place your feet in this (casual), be vast from or even be off the spot I thought I had miscalculated, so I redid it. While your mistake might have influenced many other individuals, that's still approximately you to elbow most the after effects. 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To error A for B → A mit B verwechseln, A für B halten; that can easily certainly not possibly be actually confused for anything more → das ist doch unverkennbar!, das kann man doch gar nicht verwechseln! A mistake, as this appears to me, is actually none the much less a mistake given that this is actually created deliberately in the search from a mistaken goal. Ultimately, the last major oversight that numerous women make is overcomplicating their course. The elimination of error-prone steps in a procedure is actually an additional method from blunder proofing. You can consistently seek quotes and also contrast that with four to 5 demands and pick the most ideal. Merryll Manning: Trapped On Secret Isle by John Howard Reid was actually published over twenty years ago in Australia. This is necessary for you to be and also avoid this blunder organized other expenditures like evaluation prices, assessment expenses, funding processing fees, and so on There really are actually no mistakes, only choices you created accordinged to the viewpoints you contended the amount of time. The specific blunders our company will certainly consider in this particular post are actually: They do not properly established their Job, They state they'll cover anything, They over pledge and also under supply, They do not compose the very best they can, and They just believe they're earning money $4. Realize that everybody which properly takes a trip a rewarding profession course makes mistakes at one time or even another. And also, hopefully you'll recognize that just because you slipped up does not mean you enable that to void each one of the good options you've brought in as well as the benefits that is in your center. It is necessary to know the way that oversights can easily taking place agreements to make sure that your business is actually not become associated with agreements which could be made void or even voidable as a result of a blunder entering into the contract. BLUNDER 4: Too many photos as well as Flash computer animations- Pictures and animation make your internet site look attractive to the guests. If you have any thoughts with regards to where and how to use yellow pages uk jobs (perderopesooggi1.it), you can make contact with us at the web site. Spend some time to exercise the response to these 2 questions, as well as mention them to your manager when you state the error. I am actually describing business errors that were created by accident, whether it was actually something your staff carried out (or even didn't) carry out, or even it was actually one thing under your firm's obligation. Jenna was actually speaking with Pharrell Williams at the Golden Globes on Sunday when she suggested to inquire him about his election for the film Hidden Bodies. Most people photo identification fraud as something that occurs when an individual search your garbage can searching for bank card claims or exactly what have you. Utilizing words such as go here" or even find out more" in interior links is actually a big oversight given that the online search engine cannot comprehend just what the webpage being connected is all about. I have expanded to think that our team are actually all ideal merely the way our experts are actually which includes our errors. Amount of money errors are actually infamously surviving in individuals's minds, as well as usually they locate this complicated to forgive on their own or even others for oversights long past. For handling over a million package deals, packages, bags, pouches as well as various other things a year, these primary freight firms slip up under one per-cent from the moment. The necessary point in my view is actually not to affix the blame for an oversight on someone, yet instead to determine exactly what caused the mistake. When you slip up you can utilize the Sedona Strategy in order to help you discharge the negative psychological charge that associateds making a mistake. They aim to play the prey job, intend to seem ideal, as well as fully deny any engagement in creating the error. The ones that never discovered or even recognized their faux never ever produced this into the business field as well as never created a difference in their personal life, or the realm. If all you must recognize was certainly not available to you at the time you chose that made an outcome you were not looking for, you have at the very least found out one technique certainly not to accomplish something later on. James Joyce named them, gateways of breakthrough." Regardless of how large or little you perceive your mistake to become, once you realize that you have actually been incorrect; this just asks for modification, nothing at all else. As a professional in the POP Culture, the best interesting aspect of people can be summarized in one term: oversights. The only error that could genuinely injure you is preferring to not do anything just given that you are actually also scared to earn an oversight. If you may handle to prevent bring in any of these 5 oversights outlined above, you'll be properly installed to win back your ex lover partner's soul ... and rebuild a pleased, loving partnership that is going to stand up the examination of your time. However, some of the biggest causes our experts limit our own selves coming from new knowledges is because-- although we've all made and come through many from them-- we hate blunders. . Then there are the exclusive oversights that some folks carry all around for a lifetime; their filthy little bit of secrets. Yet our team performed certainly not accomplish just what our experts preferred, and also significant mistakes were created in attempting to do this. We will certainly obtain to the base from this, and also I will take whatever activity is actually required A business owner will in fact have to function more challenging due to the lack from a company identity. Anybody that possesses ever before had the courage to walk out in to the planet and carry out one thing recognizes there are actually only pair of sort of errors: ones our experts can recoup off and also ones our team can easily certainly not recuperate off. To locate the best options to oversights when setting up marble floor tiles mentioned in this particular post, you can do so right here. As well as without fail, ONE HUNDRED% from the moment, I created the examination costs back in renegotiations with the homeowner. It is consistently smart to figure out as well as rectify the mistakes right before the last represent the year are made. The details errors we will certainly check out within this article are actually: They don't correctly put together their Gig, They say they'll blog about everything, They over assurance as well as under deliver, They don't write the very best they can, and also They just think they're earning money $4. Recognize that everyone which effectively travels a gratifying occupation road creates errors at one time or even yet another.

[cathedralreims]

Daisy Daisy: Chapter II

Read Chapter I here. 

The Knight of Swords heard yet another rustle and through his blackening eyes, a luminescent blue ball accompanied a lanky figure. He immediately discerned the figure as a subject from Wands. Wonderful. Even Lady Fortune snuffed him from under her wheel. He wanted to die a noble death, and now, he would have to die by the most ignoble of ways - by magic. 

With some effort, the knight staggered to his feet, clutching his side with his right hand and holding his sword with the other. "Come any closer, knave," he coughed up blood, "and I will end you." 

The magician slowly blinked. "I'm afraid you are not in a fit state to carry out your words. Why don't you lay down and I can rectify that for you?" 

"Never!" The Knight coughed again, more violently this time and he knelt beside the tree trunk, sprouting thinly veiled insults in between coughs. 

"Well, I'll have to resort to other means then. I hate it when egos get in the way. Somnus." 

Yellow spores erupted from the mage's wand and covered the Knight, entering in through his nostrils. Soon after that, he had trouble keeping his eyes open and his limbs felt like they were attached to stone. The Knight didn't even have a chance to retaliate before his mind plunged into darkness. 

He woke up to a pleasantly warm feeling, as if he was in his soft, warm bed back at home - and then the memories of what happened before rushed through his head. Immediately, he sprung up from his spot and saw the magician from Wands sitting across from him, lazily stirring a pot of soup. However, the wound on his side flared and the knight stifled a painful scream and relegated to propping himself up on one of the trunks. 

"Good morning, sunshine," said the magician brightly. "My title is Two of Wands, but I suppose that a bit of a mouthful, so just call me 'Two.' I'm guessing you're from Swords?" 

Wonderful. Another Minor Arcana. Well, a mere peasant wouldn't be able to survive the journey now that he thought of it. Maybe with sheer determination they could... He wasn't familiar with the Kingdom of Wands, besides that they mainly used magic (as if that wasn't apparent enough), and Two seemed to be averagely competent in his own abilities and temperament. Wands was usually a fickle kingdom when it came to alliances, but the Knight considered himself a good judge of character. Two could have killed him when he had the chance, but he didn't. 

The knight nodded. "Indeed. I hold the prestigious title of the Knight of Swords. You may call me 'Knight.'" 

"Fascinating! I guess the main purpose why you're embarking on this twisted quest is for the Queen of Rings hand in marriage, I presume?" 

"...Yes? Why else would I be here? Isn't that what you are here for too?" 

A frowned darkened the knight's comfortable countenance. He couldn't think of any other reason why someone would be endangering himself in the Betwixt Forest. 

"Not exactly. I'm here to examine the Sunlight Ring and I figured using this grand game would be a suitable front for my intentions." Two shrugged, his slightly too-large white robes fell from his limbs. "I propose that we forge an alliance between the two of us. You help me get to the Sunlight Ring and you can have it once I'm done. I can't survive through the Betwixt Forest alone, you know. Why, without my guiding blue light, I think I would've turned back hours ago, haha." 

Two twiddled his fingers, as if he was suddenly aware of the darkness surrounding the two. 

The knight hesitated before answering; he was experiencing a moral dilemma. Pride prevented him from accepting any help; accomplishing this task on his own would be much more satisfying. One was perfect, two were a crowd, so goes his personal saying. But, his nobility urged him to escort this poor man through the forest, as if he were a damsel strolling through the mud ridden streets. 

"Why do you need to examine the Sunlight Ring," asked the knight. 

Two straightened his back. "Well, I'm a cleric in Wands, you know. And clerics specialize in healing magic, so I thought since the ring had restorative properties, I thought I could use it in concocting future spells. Really, that's all I'm here for. If you would like, I know of a promise spell of sorts that ensures that I will keep my end of the deal." 

"I will help you," answered the Knight of Swords. He was quite tired of hearing Two prattle when time was of the essence. The knight stumbled to his feet, slightly wincing at the pain stemming from his side. It was bearable, the Knight thought, as he walked around the perimeter. Whatever Two did to him, it was working his magic. "Collect your things. We're going." 

Two looked at him in bewilderment. "Aren't you going to eat first? Magic doesn't solve everything. Part of the healing process is self-care, and besides, its late. You've been unconscious for about three hours. Please, good sir," Two's voice hardened as he tilted his head to meet the Knight's eyes, "can you sit down?" 

"Fine." The Knight sat down and placed his arm on his right knee. 

The pair sat in silence, waiting for dinner to be ready. Onions and leeks perfumed the air with their savory scent and made the corners of his mouth water, and then it occurred that the Knight had his own provisions and he didn't want to greedily devour the mage's own rations... 

The brown satchel was located on the other side of the circle, right next to Two. The knight's legs have fallen asleep, and so, he grudgingly asked Two if he could give him it.

"Of course," Two replied, and without looking up from the pot of boiling soup, he whisked the satchel into the Knight's lap. 

Eagerly, the Knight opened up the latch, only to find the food he packed turned into a distasteful brown mush. Looking up from the satchel, the Knight swallowed his pride once again and asked if Two could share some of his food with him, and he said yes.

"Tell me, Knight," Two started. Using his wand, he dimmed the flame and ladled the soup into two bowls, giving one of the bowls to him. "Are you happy with your life?" 

"Why wouldn't I be?" He took a sip of the warm broth, smiling of how its warmth ran through his veins. "Nothing is particularly troubling, well, instead of possibly dying the next day. Still, I believe that I have the capability to survive anything the hostile mysteries of the Betwixt Forest." 

He would do anything for the Queen, this he was reminded of when he was still a carefree child running along the cobblestone streets of Swords, reminding him of the first time he saw the future Queen of Rings visiting his country on diplomatic terms. Behind her sunny veil, the Knight saw a face of luminescent beauty. The two even met briefly at the ball the Royal Family of Swords hosted for Rings, where they danced and chatted for a while until her departure. It was, in short, love at first sight. 

The Knight kept all of their written correspondences, written in secret. If anyone from Swords knew, then the consequential scandal would ruin them. On some, desperate cold night, they even planned to go away - where he would travel west towards Rings. It was only by the luck of the timing of this competition, that prevented him from doing so. Although the Knight loved her, he couldn't bear to abandon his creed of loyalty, and thanked the higher powers, wherever they may be, for an opportunity. 

Thought, that still didn't stop him from sending clandestine messages to the Queen. The vestiges of their final letters floated through his mind, a guiding light to keep him sane throughout this long night: 

Dearest beloved, I love you from A to Y. And what about Z? Because even my love has limits; it will never reach zero. 

At the words, the Knight of Swords sighed and dreamily stared off into the distance. 

Two lifted his chin, somewhat amused of the Knight's uncharacteristic lovesick demeanor. "I see. Hurry up and eat your soup, would you? Don't squander my efforts." 

The Knight, embarrassed that someone saw him in this state, obliged. The rest of the night was filled with spoons scraping bowls, followed by a sound silence as they fell asleep on the soft earth.  

#original writing #original #Title: Daisy Daisy #Minor Arcana #Tarot Cards #Knight of Swords #Queen of Rings #romance #adventure #fantasy #Daisy Daisy: Chapter II