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fifthpilot · 1 year

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So About the New Asra Tale by Dorian...

The plot was, not great. It was pretty boring, but it did touch up on a few interesting points from Asra's main story; like how much of his memory did he loose, his past before MC's death, and what extremes he had to go through because of MC's death like erasing his own memories of certain spells, which in my opinion is a very interesting scenario. Things did seem rushed considering the fact that the story had two endings depending on whether you chose to use the spell or not; and how the supposedly "bad ending" kind of implied that you and Asra somehow may have brought back the plague? or Lucio i.e the plague? It was left up to interpretation. The writing was, not good. I think they did try their best to stay true to Asra's tone even if it was a bit too on the nose at times and a little overbaord. But it was mainly the MC and the Magician that felt most off note to me.

That all being said, I like many others don't consider this a part of canon, it does ultimately give off a very wattpad feel. But in all honesty so did some of the main content after probably halfway through the main 3's routes. I think many people forgot just how erratic and disorganized the Nix Hydra Team was and how many people who came up with the original storyline had left the company before the end of the M3 routes. But a lot of people don't seem to notice that because all the content was in one place, the arcana app. Which brings me to my next point.

I think a good portion of the hate Dorian is getting is mainly due to the fact that their app is terrible. The UI is confusing, the app lags a lot and it's very slow. The game looks different on the dorian app, the font is wrong, there's no music, the character sprite animation is messed up, and the LI never says your name. And a lot of people have demanded that Dorian uploads the new conent to the Arcana app. But after thinking about it I personally think it's a good thing that the Dorian content and the "original" content stay physically seperated, so we know where one starts from where one ends. And I know a lot of people would disagree because using the Dorian app is a hassle, but like I mentioned before. Dorian is making fanfiction (but worse). They're using whatever's left of the arcana fandom to make some cash. This whole thing with Dorian creating new routes and new content is just another marvel-like tactic of beating a dead horse with a stick. And, they're even using the same Nix Hydra trick of placing the best content behind a paywall.

I'm personally not even upset at how terrible the app is, or how rushed and boring and generally just bad the tale was, I think I'm more upset that we won't put the Arcana Game to rest. And instead we have to watch as corporation after corporation uses the story for whatever means it wants to make money. I'm more upset that things can't just end and be celebrated for being. And how the way we engage with media has mutated into something more greedy and gluttonous.

What I'm saying is, we had a beginning and ending, we had prologues and epilogues and hidden scenes. We had plenty. We don't need more. Sometimes enough is enough.

#the rest should be left in the hands of fans #as free content creators for passion and love #not for a make cash scheme #while it was amusing to read a new asra tale and see some cute official art #i think we should put the pen down and honor the story properly #by leaving it the fuck alone #the arcana game #the arcana #dorian games #asra #asra alnazar #asra the magician #asra the arcana #arcana thoughts #also like maybe a new adaptation like an anime or novel woukd be cool but this.#this is shit

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peachypizzicato · 1 year

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The Five Of Cups: An Open Letter to Dorian

Hey everyone! Welcome back to my soapbox (or, if you see this and by some divine happenstance don’t know me: Hi! I’m Felix! Or Anemone. I go by many names.)

As you can tell by my Big Boy Letters, I’m comin’ to talk about kind of a serious subject. At least, it’s serious to me anyway. I wanted to talk a bit about the game The Arcana. You know the one. The definitely not at all divisive one. That Arcana. (/s)

(Warning: I will be touching on depictions of racism, misogyny, anti indigenity, antisemitism, and just general mistreatment of marginalized people!)

TLDR; The Arcana is full of harmful portrayals of marginalized people and the fandom at large ignores it at best and encourages it at worst. The best thing we as the community can do is make it abundantly clear to the company that this is not okay and should not continue.

To be completely upfront here, I’m not going to be going in-depth on every single problem with the devs or the distributors or anything. We’re all busy people and there’s not nearly enough time in the day. But what I am going to do is touch on a few things I’ve witnessed firsthand that I think are worth sharing with the wider community.

One of the behaviors I’ve noticed most often is what I can only think to call… Strange treatment of the love interests. Not by everyone, mind you, but on a startlingly normal basis. Now, what do I mean by “strange”? Well, it really depends on the character honestly.

With Asra, much of the portrayals feel significantly more sexualized than that of their peers. Drawn and portrayed as if their body exists to be ogled by someone else rather than lived in by themself, y’know what I mean? That, combined with blatant orientalist imagery baked into much of their designs, makes for a feeling of feast or famine when seeking out content. And this isn’t even to comment on the intense focus on them as defined by their relationships to others– namely Julian– and all of the mischaracterization that comes with that.

It’s not much different in regard to Nadia, if you can believe it. The image of “step-on-me-queen dominatrix” cultivated by the original writers persists in the community, with overwhelming focus put on her body and her sexuality over anything else. Anyone who’s known me since I discovered the game knows I actually really liked her at first, but it’s hard to have a genuine attachment to a character who seldom even gets to have a personality outside of basic traits and Having Tits.

Julian is, admittedly, a difficult one. I am not jewish myself, but I’ve heard testimony from jewish fans that his portrayal is less than ideal (to put it lightly). At the very base, his design itself is riddled with common antisemitic imagery and was based primarily on a real brown-skinned jewish man whose melanated skin they excluded, surely coincidentally (/s). but it goes even further than that (depicting a jewish man as a bloodsucking vampire, anyone?). I don’t claim to speak for any groups I do not belong to, but with the knowledge I do have it simply makes things uncomfortable to witness.

Muriel. Oh, Muriel. Again, if you’ve known me for any significant amount of time, you probably knew I was dreading this. But as much as I’d like to think nothing could ever be wrong when he’s around, there are definitely problems. Now, I could go into all the issues with the way the writers concocted his route, his story, his character as a whole (brown man with a ~foreign~ type of magic lives in solitude in the woods and is “in tune with nature” to the point of communication, very original /s), what I really want to touch on here is how this informed the way the community treats him. Listen, I’m not gonna sugarcoat this, a lot of Muriel fans are not subtle about their (most often white, but not always) savior complexes. More times than I care to remember I’ve seen him babied, treated like he’s incompetent, made at best into an animal to be tamed and at worst into an uncontrollable monster. I’ve seen pieces of fanfiction call him, a very blatantly indigenous-coded character, a real actual slur. Not to mention how watering down the trauma he faced has become something of commonplace. And this isn’t even an exhaustive list of ways he’s mistreated! For as much as it makes me angry, it’s also extremely saddening. The devs and writers made one of their most genuine kindhearted characters into a metaphorical punching bag, and the community has only continued swinging for years afterward.

But, I think I’ve made my point. Moving on.

Portia is a combination of problems I’ve already touched on. Conveniently, all of the stereotypical traits that Julian inherited happened to skip right over his little sister. What didn’t skip over, however, was the gene of being shamelessly and gratuitously oversexualizing of her. Take a look at any of her CGs; most if not all of them are centered on her chest or otherwise use color and design to draw the eye there. Every one of her sprite outfits are low cut to show varying levels of cleavage. And the few vocal fans she does have only serve to perpetuate this over and over again. To be completely clear, there’s nothing wrong with characters who embrace their sexuality. That goes without saying. However, for being the one “plus-size” love interest– which really in this case only means short and curvy– the emphasis on her body over anything else about her is startling and sad.

Finally, we find Lucio. Our one ethnically white male love interest. You may be wondering how a character like that could possibly receive “strange treatment”. Or maybe you’re not. I will elaborate anyway. The biggest problem with Lucio, with the fans and absolutely with the teams behind the game, is and has been for the longest time the complete and utter lack of awareness of his role in the world and the consistent retroactive rewriting of his character. What I mean by that is this: Lucio, originally and in every route but his own, is blatantly written to be an unforgivably cruel and immoral man. He seeks the best treatment he can get while cityfolk all but die in his streets, he takes advantage of the kindness and generosity of others and punishes their trust. There are many assumptions that can be made but we are shown explicitly that he can know Asra, a child (as an adult himself), and make sexual advances on them in adulthood with absolutely no guilt. He blackmailed Muriel into being and staying his slave and in turn forced him to perform brutal public massacres for an indeterminate amount of time: all we know is that it was long enough for a colloquial name to become well known and for his appearance to grow unkempt and haggard. All this plus more things that I don’t even have the time to list. And yet, he is arguably one of the most popular characters. Take two steps into the fandom at large and you’ll see countless postings about how his childhood was so tragic and how he’s so very sorry, he’s just a little oopsie whoopsie uwu soft boy! The few times I personally have seen his horrible actions even addressed by his fans was to underplay them, to insinuate that he has it worse than anyone he hurt. In spite of, or maybe even because of his extensive list of broadly observable crimes, he thrives in the community. The people love him. I don’t think I really have to explain why this in particular is so extremely chilling to me.

So, with all of these things laid out… What now? We’ve acknowledged the problems, there’s pages upon pages of other posts outlining ones I didn’t even cover here, so now what do we do? What’s the solution?

The answer to this isn’t quite cut and dry. There’s no simple solution to murky waters that run as deep as these do. But, for what it’s worth, I have a few suggestions I’d like to propose.

First off, I understand that all of the routes are finished. They had all completed well before the Dorian acquisition, I’m fully aware of that fact. However, in regard to said acquisition, I feel as though Dorian dropped the ball when transferring the property to their own app (and I’m not even talking about the writing of the tales, which is its own can of worms). Rather than simply copy-pasting the routes from the existing app, things could’ve been redone, remade better. Problems could have been solved now that the game had gained new life. This was much of the inspiration behind my own reworking of the concept, to address the problems and fix them. I don’t even believe that it’s too late for them yet; routes have only just begun being uploaded to the Dorian app, in theory there’s still room to reconsider things.

But that’s the problem. I don’t believe that the crew behind Dorian really cares. I don’t believe the original development team or Nix Hydra crew really cared. If the people involved really cared about these problems, there was ample time within the last nearly five years to fix things. They did nothing. They continue to do nothing. People like me shout endlessly into the void, hoping someone will hear and actually listen to the issues happening within their game. But they don’t care. They continue to make money, they continue to draw in players, why should they? If racism and misogyny and every other form of bigotry under the sun doesn’t hurt their bottom line, why change anything? Why care, why change if the community at large not only ignores it but actively encourages and supports it? Why listen to criticism if you can just block it and soak up praise from your unconditional fans? Why?

As I said, I don’t have a simple solution for any of this. But I’ve made personal choices in my own life to give less of my time and money to the company. If I want merchandise, I seek out independent artists. If I want to see or read something again, I can find screencaps. As much as I miss certain things, I don’t play the game anymore. I can’t help being attached to characters who have been important to me for as long as I’ve known them, but what I can do is make purposeful choices in response to the affection I feel. Maybe my singular actions won’t mean anything to them, but specifically and purposefully refusing to support the profits of a fundamentally flawed game that doesn’t even have the self awareness to be ashamed of itself means everything to me.

Thanks for listening. I hope anyone who happened to make it to this point can take something good from my impassioned ramblings.

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shrekshugebadussy · 5 months

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started playing The Arcana again bcuz i forgot it was a thing and i never finished it (only got halfway thru Asra’s route) & i got very curious about Lucio’s route since he’s practically the dead one & how that would work and let me tell you when that motherfucker opened his mouth… yeah i knew i was in trouble 🙃

#he most certainly fits my type #i mean he’s a little (a lot) full of himself. confident asshole. troubled. protective & flirty. mischievous.#just…#i’m ngl kinda reminds me of astarion a bit #but yeah i saw an ad for it and forgot it existed & i started the Asra route again #but i had to restart bcuz i couldn’t remember what happened #but i think i stopped reading before bcuz i constantly had no coins & i couldn’t earn them thru the wheel & i kept losing the game 🥲#i get they’re an indie developer but i hate that i have to spend so much just for a special scene #but only did i now learn that the paid choices do not affect the ending so i’m glad about that #i think that’s what mostly turned me away last time #i thought the coined choices got the good ending 😭#anyways #mine #the arcana #delete later?#oof

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wiltingdecay · 2 years

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every single post i see from the arcana's social media accounts just solidifies my theory that the current team did not actually play the game and got all their information about the characters by skimming through the arcana wiki for five minutes

#had this theory since i read heartsong festival tbh #it was cute but i was like 'something isnt right here. my blorbos dont talk like this'#the arcana #julian devorak #asra alnazar #nadia satrinava #muriel of the kokhuri #portia devorak #lucio morgasson #fuck nix hydra

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anime-academia · 5 months

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Rodya is god's specialest little prone to nervous breakdowns meow meow

#this man is all over the place #he is so pathetic #crime and punishment #c&p #asra's thoughts #asra reads #raskolnikov #bookblr

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asras-archive · 2 years

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"After spending a week in Cape Town, finding that they overcharged me at the hotel, and having seen everything there was to see, including the botanical gardens, which seem to me likely to confer a great benefit on the country, and the new Houses of Parliament, which I expect will do nothing of the sort, I determined to go back to Natal by the Dunkeld, then lying at the docks waiting for the Edinburgh Castle due in from England." - King Solomon's Mines (Chapter 1); Haggard [emphasis added]

#Man is not wrong #Parliament is a circus #ain't no one but clowns there #unfortunately clowns who hold power but clowns nonetheless #Asra talks #king solomon's mines #h rider haggard #asra reads

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futuristicallyshadowyface · 7 months

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I don't know why I still follow the arcana 😭😭 all they do is upset me by only posting fanfics bruh I want a story update not Julian and Asra sucking each other off 😭😭

#I hate dorian #not only that but I'm a Julian x Asra hater man #like call me immature but I'm reading and in love with the Arcana because they're supposed to love ME #Julia x Asra however hits a certain hate from me that I don't like like omfg stop #it's the same one I have with childe x zhongli #I'm not homophobic swear I literally just DESPISE these two ships #asras supposed to be my man 😩😩 back off #the arcana #asra alnazar #julian devorak

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ms-tillus · 1 year

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I think the most interesting part of The Arcana to me is the apprentice’s backstory. You know, the cannon, unchangeable parts of the story.

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tonberry-yoda · 1 year

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Hey my dear! How are you? I'd actually like to participate in your matchup game! If that's ok.

You can even surprise me with the fandom! Either Haikyuu (I got a Kuroo match from you once!), JJK or The Arcana! So I'm a heterosexual girl, that's also down for trans men! I'd love a romantic Mystery-Date ofc. I'm very open and talkative. I love cuddling and going on adventures. Hiking? A city trip? Count me in! I'm hardly ever sad, but I have a shoulder to cry on, and I like to take care of my loved ones by cooking for them or comforting them. I usually dress either in dark academia style or sporty. I love books, tea, and cottage core.

I have a vast music taste but mostly love Gorillaz, Musicals, and Nightwish.

My love language is definitely physical touch and acts of service. I mostly like to kiss and cuddle or help my loved one.

Love, Kia!

notes: hello my love!!!! first i would like to apologize that this didnt make it to the valentine's event, but i want to thank you for all of your patience and kindness that you have showed me. I know we've both been really busy, but i am so glad i get to make this matchup for you!!! sending lots of love dear <333 (also gorillaz is top tier so you're rad for that lmao)

the character I choose for you is...

ASRA!!

this man could listen to you talk all day tbh

like will just gush over you silently in his mind while he listens to you talk about stuff you love

BIG CUDDLER

honestly, you cant escape cuddles from this man

he's so cozy

and like really warm???

like s tier cuddles ong

LOVES ADVENTURES

like this is the perfect man if you want adventures and such

you two will just spend an entire day or even week just out doing stuff

it's amazing

you're the couple with the best stories to tell frfr

he's never really sad either, but to know that he has a shoulder to cry on makes him so overyjoyed omg

and he will also be that shoulder for you

he wants you to know that he is there for you at all times <33

literally you two will just take turns caring for each other tbh

like he loves cooking for you but LOVES when you cook for him

he's a lil passenger princess and he is proud

you're little malewife tbh

he just loves how similar the two of you are and it really makes the relationship a lot of fun

LOVES your style omg

like dark academia is his shit dude so he will just be amazed everytime you get all dressed up

you two will sit, read, and drink tea while listening to the birds chirp early in the morning <3

YOUR FIC, MADAM

Asra woke up after a long day to find you making breakfast. The window was wide open, the sheer white curtains pushed to the side and he could hear the chirping of the morning birds as the sun spilled in the room. "Good morning, Asra," you smiled. "Good morning, love," Asra yawned, pulling his cardigan over his shoulder. "That looks delightful." "Well, I know you had a long day, and sometimes, you need to be taken care of." Asra smiled at you and pressed kisses all over your face as you plated his food. When you finished, you threw your arms around him and he buried his face in the crook of your neck, taking a deep breath of you in. He smiled and sighed wistfully as you played with his shining, white curls. He pulled back from you only to press a couple of kisses onto your soft lips and scoop up his plate, leading it to the small dining room table. You followed shortly behind and the two of you ate breakfast in near silence, hearing the fresh green leaves on the trees rustling from the morning breeze. The tea kettle you had set was squealing and you ran over quickly to prepare both of your tea. When you had come back to the dining room, you found Asra reading a book, putting your current work in progress where you were sitting. You slid him his tea and he thanked you, his bright eyes meeting yours with a smile. The rest of the morning continued with reading and smiles on both of your faces. Nothing calmed Asra more than seeing your helpful face.

~~~~~

pinned post @tonberry-yoda

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