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electronicdelusionstarlight · 5 years

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And after that one post about Bella thinking the Cullen are a polygamous sex cult and wanting a hot piece of that...

The role of women in the Shadow of Mordor series.

Look at them! Gondorian Soldiers under siege by orks, instructing their women on how to shoot their enemies due to the lack of manpower! Does this remind you of anything?

Specifically, that one post about Elrond asking Aragorn to strengthen their ranks with as of yet unseen and unexpected troops and Aragorn mistakenly assuming he wants him to recruit the women while Elrond was actually suggesting for Necromancy.

And not just that!

Look at her! No boobplate, the same armor as her fellow Gondorians, and an instructed sergeant! Admidetly, she is the daughter of the top general and I assume lord regent of Minas Ithil AND her main role is mostly to guard the Minas Ithil historical archives and catalog their junk (basically, a glorified librarian with a sword), BUT Eowyn was also the daughter of the King of Rohan, yes she had to disguise herself to join the fray, this woman has rank, she has men working under her, she was at the head of a raiding party in the slums of the city defending the population during the evacuation from the Orks!

And look at her! The Blade of Galadriel! here pictured about to snap to Grandpa Magpie after he just found some new shiny trinket to steal!

(”She has the light of Galadriel Talion, take the Light of Galadriel from her Talion, we must get the Light of Galadriel Talion, stop making goo goo eyes at the elven assassin that recently stabbed you to death Talion, she is not going to fuck you Talion, just take the new shiny weapon Talion, I must have the new shiny weapon Talion...!”)

She is a kickass assassin! With a diverse cast of supporting Uruk Characters! And admittedly a boob plate BUT STILL! SHE IS A WOMAN! WHO KILLS PEOPLE! WITH SWORDS!

Oh yeah, also Shelob is being played by Yennefer of Vengerberg in this game, and used to fuck Sauron because she apparently is an all seeing eldritch beast daughter to some kind of cosmic deity or some shit, not so sure about that one. She is also here, giving vague hints and visions.

And how to forget Lithariel and Queen Marwen from the first game! Because Shadow of War sure did, with them being sir not appearing in this game, and Queen Marwen being possessed by Saruman for most of her time on screen and Lithariel filling the role of Talion hot blonde warrior princess gallivanting around him as he contemplates whatever or not to fuck with her and Celebrimbor, ever the Pragmatist, reminds him that his wife and son were killed not even a couple weeks ago and he might be a bastard overlord but “MELKOR’S BALLS, TALION, AT LEAST WHEN MY FAMILY WAS KILLED BY SAURON I DIDN’T TRY TO GET MY DICK WET WITH THE FIRST “WILDLING WARRIOR PRINCESS” I FOUND”!

Also, the “press X to kiss wife” wife of Talion. She also briefly exists before being brutally murdered in order to give Talion a flimsy, easily forgotten motivation to begin his revenge.

You see where I’m going with this?

The female characters of Shadow of War MIGHT, in theory, appear “strong:” They are warriors in a Tolkien setting, everyone loves warrior women in Tolkien setting, right? I mean, this is centuries before Eowyn even came to be, yes, so having the armies of men all about gender equality when their King will one day prefer necromancy over conscripting women, but still, “strong” female characters right?

Eeeee, not really. Their role in the story is minimal (I mean, it has to, The whole point of the game is about the Orks really, the supporting characters are mostly filler at this point), aside maybe from the Blade of Galadriel, who still not only manages to come off as highly unsympathetic after Isildur’s Banishment, but also Drags Down Galadriel with her minor appearances as a highly out of character manipulator and schemer. and Shelob is a spider with boobs and fulfill the classic manipulative woman in a position of power role. Most other female characters are non entities, there either to hint at Talion’s dick getting wet or to give the lord regent of Minas Ithil a excuse to give away the city and the Palantir to the Nazhgul. They are devices to the story of men, who have embraced their role as warrior, yes, but not in a way that truly matters.

So, anyway, the female characters in this series are lackluster.

At least the first black gondorian in the series is hot a fairly interesting and well written character tho, even if his DLC kinda fucks over the spirit of the game when you play as him (as in, capturing and controlling orks + death and rebirth mechanic, here replaced with hiring mercenaries and a roguelike state of the game but, hey, he has no ring of power or grandpa magpie to use, so it kinda makes sense), and they do sell his brother (a greedy mercenary captain) into slavery at some point, but hey, at least HE wasn’t the spy, I fucking trembled when they said there was a spy in Minas Ithil and a silhouette in shadow was shown, wouldn’t put it past them to make the first Black Gondorian in this series also a bloody traitor.

#shadow of war #shadow of mordor #lord of the rings #lotr #talion #idril #shelob #Eltariel #Baranor

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tumblunni · 5 years

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Okay I know that kingdom hearts has a bad reputation for sticking crucial plot information on obscure spinoff games but HOLY SHIT I just finally watched a lets play of the fuckin digimon tcg game and found out it ACTUALLY HAS A GODDAMN CONCLUSION TO ANALOGMAN FROM DIGIMON WORLD 1

like 90% of the damn game has no plot whatsoever let alone indicating its a digimon world sequel! and then suddenly in the last battle without being foreshadowed whatsoever analogman returns and gets possibly the best boss battle ever IN A GODDAMN TCG GAME

holy shit his whole fight is framed as ‘this is literally the same guy from digimon world 1, hacking another game’, the interface wigs out and a bunch of fake command windows pop up with rapidly scrolling code of the game supposedly falling apart. And then his boss battle flips the entire gameplay system on its head by giving him fourth wall breaking special moves that pull overpowered effects by “hacking the engine”, with cool animations to fit. Fuckin badasssss!!

and it also fuckin FINALLY EXPLAINS THE DAMN PLOT LIKE GEEZ

digimon world’s conclusion was so rushed, you never even meet the villain until the final battle and it ends all weird with just “something” going wrong that causes him to get sucked into a portal or something while screaming dramatically in weirdly high resolution terror faces??? the tcg game confirms that this was him attempting to flee back to the human world after you defeated him, but one of the stray attacks from the battle damaged his machine and it caused him to essentially commit accidental suicide when he turned it on.

and HOLY SHIT MY FUCKIN OBSCURE HEADCANON IS TRUE????

the game had some sequel bait hints that maybe analogman is somehow still around and that the portal explosion just turned him into “corrupted data” so he can never return to the human world. and i always thought it would be super ironic if he actually got turned into a digimon aka the thing he hates more than anything

WELL OKAY I GUESS CRITICAL LORE IN A TCG GAME IS OKAY WHEN ITS A BIG YES BUNNI U THEORY BE CORRECT

he appears in this game as a malomyotismon who does a damn good vexen face during the fight, lol. And he’s all “gahh that stupid kid ruined my plans but this accursed body at least improved my hacking abilities!” Tho its implied that his corrupted state is more like a bodyless cloud of data that can possess/copy different digimon, which would be REALLY FUCKIN CRITICAL to explaining the goddamn plot of Digimon World Next Order!

Seriously wtf is up with this series? Digimon World 2 is not the sequel to Digimon World 1, all the numbered games are entirely separate individual stories with wildly different genres from pet sim to roguelike strategy. The real sequel is fucking DIGIMON THE CARD GAME THE GAME and then Digimon World Next Order a bazillion years later for the ps4. In which i am STILL REALLY SALTY that they have a FUCKIN RAD remix of analogman’s boss theme yet he doesn’t appear in the game. The added context of this damn tcg game confirms once and for all that the Ambiguous As Fuck Ending actually WAS him appearing in the game, this unexplained “oh wait the villain was good all along and he was just possessed by an evil virus” was supposed to be corrupted-digi-analogman and seriously WHY DONT THEY JUST FUCKIN EXPLAIN IT!!! this tcg game wasnt even released in europe!! and even american fans probably had no clue it was linked to this entirely separate subseries! You have to friggin piece it together with context clues like the battle music and the fact analogman’s signature mon was machinedramon. I mean vjesus christ Next Order is a litera; sequel with the grown up version of Digimon World’s protagonist as a badass home ec teacher who still defends the digital world in his free time yet you couldnt spare ONE LINE OF DIALOGUE mentioning the name of the villain?? and summarizing the fuckin tcg game everyone missed??? AND CONFIRMING THAT THE VILLAIN IS INDEED MAKING A REAPPEARANCE POSSESSING THIS GUY??? oh god everything makes SENSE, thank you terrible card game adaptation. ehh but i do still love Next Order for making Hiro/Mameo’s canon partner Mamemon, he’s even more badass as this big tough bishie version of himself with a tiny adorable pal that can shoot rocket fists through space and time. (its funny tho cos the DW1 intro movie showed metalmamemon and metalgreymon and the american boxart flipped a coin and decided metalgreymon must have been the one the protagonist was using in that scene. Whoops!)

anyway even with the added context that IT WAS INDEED GODDAMN ANALOGMAN, the final boss fight in Next Order was as terrible as the rest of the plot. So I’m glad trash gramps got a suitably badass boss fight after all, even if it was a CARD GAME VERSION! lets all celebrate the awesomeness of this obscure fuckin spinoff game’s obscure fuckin intercontinuity cameo with the boss fight music that other game wasted

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seriously fuckin hell the biggest challenge in that final boss was that i was so distracted by SHEER OFFENDEDNESS at the cool music not matching it that it was hard to keep focused

its not just a great boss theme for a terrible boss, its a really fuckin EMOTIONAL song for anyone whose childhood was fuckin defined by the first game!!!

and look you had a PERFECT FUCKIN EXCUSE for a REALLY GOOD boss battle against MY MAN GRUMPY GRANDPA OF THE COOL DAMN NAME. Seriously guys analogman was THE FIRST digimon villain! digimon world came out before the anime, digimon world was the BETA FOR THE ANIME! this was the first place they had the ideas for file island, so much of the areas in the game are awkwardly mistranslated versions of stuff that would later appear in the anime in a different form. before this digimon had never been anything more than a fuckin 2-bit graphics tamagotchi and this was (after the manga) only the second goddamn time these monsters had an actual full colour character design! all of those charmingly janky 90s gross out show styled tcg illustrations? that was concept art that this game was working from! fuckin hell this game thought up the idea for metalgreymon’s changed design that ended up becoming the iconic partner of tai in the anime. (you can also see beta tai in the manga with a beta veemon as a partner instead! o_O)

SO LIKE...

JUST....

I HAVE FEELINGS ABOUT ANALOGMAN OKAY!!! he’s a badly written guy with only like five sentences across all the videogames but fuckin hell he was such an Iconique part of the development of this series that they named him fucking ANALOGMAN

like dude you could have SO EASILY made me scream at my tv in a more positive way by bringing him out as the surprise villain and showing us wtf his deisgn is even supposed to look like cos god all we have is a blurry faceless early ps1 model buried under the glow filters of Mt Infinity’s funky background effects.

AND FUCKING

IF IT IS CANON

THAT MY FUCKIN

STUPID THEORY

IS CANON

slap a fuckin O on this man and LITERALLY LET ME BEAT HIM UP

like dont even give him a team or anything, just let me fight THE MAN HIMSELF

you canonically fuckin said he’s a digital ghost now and basically the same as a digimon

let me beat the shit out of a regular businessman in a suit and tie while he pulls his badass ‘i’m hacking the game i’m in’ bullshit from the GODDAMN TCG GAME THAT WAS MORE CLIMACTIC THAN YOUR SHITTY CASH GRAB FAKE SEQUEL

man god i didnt expect a fuckin TCG GAME to revive my righteous fury from back when i first played that piece of shit. i hate it cos Next order is so pretty and its gameplay is so good and i really loved my twin digis but there were SO MANY bugs and cut corners and missing content and really bad writing and GOD it made me so sad that the dub team really really tried, they tried so hard that they got fuckin renamon’s original voice actress back even though the renamon in this game has nothing to do with the anime one. THE DUB WAS REALLY GOOD BUT IT COULDNT SALVAGE THAT SCRIPT!! THE MUSIC WAS REALLY GOOD AND THE ART WAS REALLY GOOD AND THE DIGIMON THEMSELVES WERE MY BEST DAMN FRIENDS FOR THAT MONTH OF MY LIFE BUT THE GODDAMN FUCKIN SCRIPT!!! the postgame was MORE FUN because FINALLY everything opened up like the sandbox of the first game and you could just fuckin hug u digis without being distracted by constant cutscenes butchering your childhood nostalgia

man i wanted to write a fic/draw a comic about my headcanons on how to fix it but i never managed to do it cos holy shit it was basically “throw everything out and make a different game geez” I COULD RAMBLE FOR HOURS ABOUT THE ENTIRELY DIFFERENT SEQUEL THIS SHOULD HAVE BEEN!! and a fuckin!! tcg game!! was closer to that sequel!!!

and fuckin MY THEORY WAS RIGHT AND MY BETTER GAME IDEA ACTUALLY WOULD WORK IN CANON

fuck it im gonna do draw myself decking business gramps in the face

oh! and the female protagonist design! thats another rare good part of that thing! i loved the pixellization effect on her ponytal, way better than the male equivelant having a very ordinary costume design just with a pixel corner taken out of his jacket. also why did the plot never actually make a thing out of that? like you’d think that ‘unlike every other digimon tamer i’ve got this scar of my digitization’ would be a plot point. like they didnt give everyone else a cool pixel squares mark! they could have at least used it as an excuse why the protagonist is the Only Chosen One who can do all this plot shit. or if it was me i would have made it early foreshadowing for the Return Of Business Gramps, like you were partially infected by the Oooo Mysterious Unexplained Digi Virus (seriously why did they not just have ONE SENTENCE explaining its the fuckin original villain returning????) during the prologue and i dunno somehow that gives you powers to break analogman’s control on the digimon he possesses. or maybe the pixel thing is like a tracking device he put on you? or just give that cool design trait to the protagonist of digimon cyber sleuth instead, whose entire plot is that theyre a digimon human hybrid with literaly the power to pixellize themself into computers.

ALSO!!! actually do something!!! with mameo!!!

they really fuckin hyped up in all the prelease materials that the digimon world 1 protagonist was gonna be in this game and he’s all grown up now. and then he does NOTHING in the plot except babble exposition and stand around your home base. and has one line about how he’s a badass teacher now and his partner is mamemon but hey we made a bullshit excuse for why his digimon is sealed away and he never gets to fight :<

give me an actual cool teamup of new protag girl and her cool teacher dude beating the shit out of business trash with their bare fists and also their digimon’s bare fists while THE BEST DAMN MUSIC GOES UNWASTED

...fuck i sure do Feel Intensely about nostalgic games lol. i wonder if i’ll be so rambley when i play kh3? maybe itd be a really shitty lp, aaagh...

#no gramps shall go unappreciated in the bunni house

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