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felassan · 1 month

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I was sent a link to an 'interview with Mark Darrah about BioWare' video that I hadn't seen before. it's called "Mark Darrah on BioWare, Dragon Age 4, & EA's Impact" and [here is the source] link. the interview took place in 2022, so bear that in mind when watching, but it still has interesting insights and things in there. Mark had been invited on to chat after his BioWare Magic video. the video description reads as follows:

“Mark Darrah spent over 20 years with BioWare and has overseen its many incredible RPGs such as Baldur's Gate, Knights Of The Old Republic, Jade Empire, Mass Effect, and most notably on his portfolio, Dragon Age. He was also present during the pre-EA era and experienced much of the changes within the company after BioWare had been purchased by them in 2007. Today, he joins the show for a sobering conversation on the status of this once beloved gaming titan after speaking out in a recent YouTube video of his on "BioWare Magic" in which he holds the developer accountable for their bad processes. The conversation goes into deep waters no other outlet has reached yet, so we do hope you enjoy our biggest interview yet.” [source]

the rest of this post is under a cut due to length.

this post is just some notes and transcribed quotes of interest from the video, in case that's of any use to anyone, for example for accessibility.

Dragon Age: Dreadwolf / 'current or recent general BioWare'

Mark explained the ‘hockey stick’ analogy about game development that he has previously outlined in a video on his own channel. There is a tendency in game development, that is not unique to BioWare, to focus on “microscopic efficiency”, especially so in studios that have gotten bigger and bigger. This ends up building a backlog of content and things being built in isolation from each other, and devs working in isolation from one another. But at some point, a game has to come together for different reasons, like an upcoming demo is approaching or money is running out etc, and when that happens, this completion tends to build upon itself and it ends up happening rapidly. At BioWare, historically the idea of ‘don’t worry, it’ll all come together really fast at the end and it will be great [like magic]’ [I am paraphrasing there] was called “BioWare Magic”. This term is from the late 90s but it still has bubbled around within the studio in more recent times. Mark said, “I think it’s partially because of the way that the leadership works on projects at BioWare. There’s a leapfrogging that happens. So the team that led KOTOR ended up being the team that led ME1-3 and Anthem, but meanwhile, between those games, other games are being done with different leadership teams. So culture can have this weird sort’ve almost, like it takes two steps forwards and then one step back as a new leadership team kinda gets into the driver’s seat. Because basically, what ends up happening is that the team that is closest to ship, at least for the big games, tends to drive the studio to a large degree.” There are other leadership teams in the background at those times, but from a culture perspective they are largely in the background.

Sonic Chronicles had a team of just over 20 devs and Mark led this. The smaller team size meant they had more agility and more ability to control and understand what was going on in a way that doesn’t really exist on larger teams. “Something that BioWare has been struggling with is, BioWare has had big teams all along. In the Baldur’s Gate [era], it was teams of 100+ people at a time, at a time [in the industry generally] when teams elsewhere in the industry were tiny. So BioWare has processes that have been around for a long time that are actually pretty good at dealing with team sizes between, say, 100 and 200 people, but what’s been happening for a while is that those teams have started to get beyond 200.” “What has happened at a lot of other studios, they have processes that work at 60 but don’t work at 150. They’ve had to develop new processes to work at larger sizes. BioWare kind’ve got to skip that step, they didn’t do that, but now they’re having to do that, because now we’re beyond what their processes can handle.”

On what prompted Mark to make his ‘BioWare Magic’ video: “I don’t know, it was just kind’ve, it’d been chewing away at me and I know that James Stephanie Sterling, it’s one of their go-to things, when they’re talking about process, is to go ‘BioWare Maaagic’, when talking about BioWare specifically or just game development in general, because someone did say that, on Anthem, I don’t know who but I do have my suspicions. So I think maybe it was just eating at me for a while. I don’t think anything in particular triggered it.” “BioWare Magic kind’ve became a term that I recognized as something that was being used to kind of paper over things that weren’t great, processes that were problematic, on DAII. Part of the reason it was gnawing at me was I kind’ve felt like this was a term that we had left in the past. We talked this way in the early days of Baldur’s Gate, Neverwinter Nights and DA:O, but that we had learned our lessons – I think most people had, but I think there remained enough people in senior enough positions that hadn’t had the experience of shipping as many games, or had been in places where they hadn’t shipped for a long time, or had just kept this romantic view of ‘just keep going, just keep driving, it will all come together in the end.’”

“As to why the revamps of Anthem and stuff [got cancelled], I don’t know. EA has launched things that have fallen on their face, Battlefield 4, Battlefront 2, that then they’ve spent the time to fix, but in the case of BioWare, that hasn’t been the case. That’s not what happened with Mass Effect: Andromeda. Maybe it’s partially because BioWare is doing multiple things at once. If you’re at Dice, and you want Battlefield 4, and it’s a problem, it’s like, well, ‘you better fix it because you got nothing else to do’. Whereas with BioWare, it’s like, ‘well, you could fix it, but don’t you want those resources on Dragon Age or Anthem or whatever’s coming next?’ So maybe it’s that. I don’t know, I’ve thought about this and I can’t.. It could also just be ‘too big to fail’. Battlefield was too big to fail. Anthem wasn’t. It disappointed but it wasn’t a franchise that needed to continue.” “[looter shooters] It’s a tough genre, there weren’t a lot of people who understood it from a dev perspective.”

On the EA “scapegoat” / blaming EA: “I think there is some truth [in it], I do think it’s an easy scapegoat and I think it’s very easy to say, ‘oh, Big Evil Corporation’, but you have to remember that, honestly, I mean BioWare would have probably shut down in 2007 or 2008 if we hadn’t been acquired by EA. The coffers were pretty empty before it got acquired by BG Holdings or Elevation Partners, the company that sold BioWare to EA. There was no money left. So they kept the company going, it’s hard to be too mad at them. I think that EA doesn’t understand what BioWare is. I think EA ultimately understands sports games, and shooters because you can kinda treat them a lot like a sports game and you get away with it, they’re quite competitive. But if you look at the franchises within EA that are not like sports games, The Sims, BioWare [franchises], they’ve struggled with that, they don’t understand and they’ve had a lot of trouble, and so when they look at BioWare, what they see, RPGs are expensive. So what they see is, thee are expensive, they don’t sell as well as Battlefield, what’s up with that? Has EA had negative effects on BioWare? Absolutely, but I don’t think necessarily in the way that people think. So, like, some of the stuff you’ve heard about Dragon Age: Dreadwolf, it’s like, ‘it’s gonna be a live service extravaganza’, ‘it’s gonna be singleplayer’, like that bouncing back and forth, that’s mostly coming from EA, that’s the kind of stuff that you’re getting from EA. But in terms of second-to-second pressure around what the futures of the individual games are, it happens, but that’s usually just rogue executive, not actually EA saying ‘we need this to be more BIG HEAD TURTLE RACING’, that’s not really happening. Or if it’s happening, a decent Executive Producer can judo it out of existence. So I do think, yeah, I mean, was there pressure on DA:I and ME:A to be on Frostbite? Absolutely, like that was politically basically effectively mandated, so there’s been impacts, and honestly I think maybe, since I did the BioWare Magic video, I’ve been thinking about this. One thing that happened before EA was that BioWare games slipped more, like wayyy more, which was probably why the company was almost out of money. So games have slipped since EA, but other than SW:TOR, games have not slipped years, except because of massive externalities. So Dreadwolf has moved, but because of it basically being restarted, but other than those externalities, things haven’t really moved as much. And I think maybe the reason why BioWare Magic maybe worked in the past was because you pivoted eventually and then you just kept going until it was great. If your date can’t move as much, you’ve pivoted and then you run into the date [and crash], and you’re just, that’s what it is, and you’re done.”

On Frostbite and whether the ‘omg Frostbite Bad’ stuff from players is overblown: “Every time you change engines, there’s a consequence to that. I do think there’s a fetishization of engine use by fans, but also honestly by devs. I think there’s a ‘grass is always greener’ [thing going on/mentality]. My feeling is, the best engine to use is almost always the engine you just used. So if you just shipped a game on Frostbite, probably you should use Frostbite for the next one, because you’ve built things to ship that game, so you can build on top of it. There are extreme circumstances where that’s not going to go, Eclipse was long in the tooth and it didn’t look very good, and so it’s hard to imagine that you could continue going down that road and continue using Eclipse indefinitely. Bethesda has essentially done that with their engine and it shows, but it’s left them being incredibly successful. Honestly, the mistake that I think that was made at BioWare regarding Frostbite, it’s again this sort’ve, independence of leadership. DA:I was made using Frostbite and we went in learning the lessons that Mass Effect had learned on ME1 from Unreal, like respect what the engine is, build on top of what’s there, don’t try to force it to be something else. And a lot of stuff was built and then ME:A started in the middle of DA:I’s development and basically started over again from blank DA:I. And then that’s going on, and then Anthem starts, again before DA:I has shipped, and starts effectively AGAIN from a blank sheet. So for me, for BioWare the problem wasn’t Frostbite, the problem was never Frostbite, the problem was we went through the pain of adopting an engine three times when we should’ve done it once.” “I’m sure there was somebody there that wanted DA:I to be on Unreal, but I didn’t feel that from the team as a whole. What I would’ve wanted to see, in a world where resources were unbounded, would’ve been a fast follow of DA:I, something that came out in 18-24 months, built not just on Frostbite, but on the DA:I tech base. I think there was an opportunity there. You know, we’ve pitched all kinds of stuff inside of Frostbite for, in early Joplin, like making the tools available to the public, like modding and what happened with DA:O and NWN, where the tools were available for building modules and things like that. There was no appetite for that within EA at the time. Interestingly enough, right before I left [his EP job], there seemed like there was growing appetite, but now with the latest news on Battlefield, I’m actually wondering if they won’t ceremoniously take Frostbite out behind the shed and shoot it in the head. They’re definitely laying blame on Frostbite for, in the case of Battlefield, which I mean, of all the franchises where I feel that’s undeserved, that would be Battlefield.”

On leaving BioWare at that time a few years ago: “Casey and I did not coordinate our departures. Certainly I didn’t coordinate with Casey. Casey resigned a day after I did. It is possible that I triggered him to resign. I don’t believe that’s what happened. There was timing for other financial things that sort’ve lined up for both me and him that I suspect was probably the trigger for both of us, but we were not coordinated in this. It was frustrating, and was it getting more frustrating? I don’t know that it was, but for me at least, because we were getting to the period where Dragon Age was going to be in the primary driving position for BioWare - I don’t think that anything corporate changed in November, early December of 2020 that triggered me [to leave]. Casey would’ve been in conversations that I wasn’t in, so it’s possible that there was a trigger for him that I’m not aware of.”

Is the idea of ‘omggg classic BioWare’, the spirit of that era, overblown? “I don’t think so. I think that actually, the thing that makes a BioWare game special, for me at least, is the characters, the followers specifically. Obviously when you look at Anthem through that lens, you can kinda see a glaring problem. You have characters, but they’re not followers, not as present as they are in other games. But the funny thing is, we never said that out loud until, pretty much 2019, in the post-Anthem world, was when I think people started to really say out loud like, ‘you know, it’s about the characters, stupid!’ I think we’ve had conversations in the past where it’s like ‘BioWare tells its stories through characters’. There’s been the knowledge, but I don’t think that there’s been the acknowledgement of, say the thing that’s most important out loud and make sure that you’re respecting that. There was almost like, we were too confident in it and we’re like ‘we don’t need this because we can set it aside, we can have characters that are just in your base, we don’t need followers’. It took us saying it out loud to really acknowledge that. I think that that is still true, and I think there is still a pedigree at BioWare that can execute on excellent characters. The reality is, if you look at the story of, frankly, any BioWare game, they’re not amazing, what makes it amazing is you’re experiencing it through other characters, that elevates the story overall. Of course, that’s how it always has been and how it should be.”

On Dragon Age: Dreadwolf and the then-recent reports on its rumored release time [remember this video is from 2022]: “I don’t know where the ‘it’s got 18 months left to go’ measurement is coming from, but timeline, that makes perfect sense to me. They would’ve needed to adapt, and even like when I was still there, we were probably headed towards, yeah, probably towards 2023 even then. So I think that it’s very plausible to me, and I think that if they��ve been able to increase their completion urgency and bring things to further phases earlier, they could be in really good shape. There was stuff getting there when I was still there a year ago, and if they were able to be stable enough to keep that stuff, then they probably have a really good foundation to build upon. And I would think that they probably were able to keep the things that were nearing completion when I left, so, I mean, they probably have, for 18 months out they probably have - so I’m trying to say this correctly. Not that they have more things that another BioWare game would’ve had 18 months out, because that’s actually the problem, tons of things. [but] they have more done 18 months out than any other BioWare title probably has ever had. So a tighter core, maybe not as much stuff yet, but a tighter core, but that will let them go faster when they’re going. Essentially, if they’ve taken the hockey stick, and they’ve pulled this part up, and I think they have, then I think it should put them in significantly better shape going forward.”

One of the podcast/media folks shared the following comment: “What I personally have been told, I never call it a report or a scoop or anything like that because it’s just a sentiment, but the sentiment that had been shared with me [about DA:D] is sort’ve like, ‘we need to nail this’, not like a desperation like ‘we’re done if we don’t’, but like, we want this high score, we want to remind people why they love BioWare games.” They then asked Mark about whether he views DA:D as a “do or die moment” and about what the vibe inside BioWare was around this. Mark: “Not in the early days [of DA:D’s development], as that’s pre-ME:A and pre-Anthem. But I think, in a post-Anthem world, I think ME:A was, could weather that, but ME:A and Anthem together, yeah, I think there is some truth to that. Now would EA shut down BioWare? I don’t know, as you say they’ve done it before [to other studios], also studios become effectively in-source houses for other studios. There are fates that are almost as bad as being shuttered. So is it actually do or die? Honestly, I think the reputation matters more, because if people give up on BioWare externally, why would EA keep them around? If everyone just decides that BioWare is a bunch of hacks doing garbage then why would EA bother? One of the things that has kept EA kind of interested in BioWare is, BioWare is kind of like the sub-arm of a movie studio that makes the Oscar Bait. So maybe that excuses it for some people, it’s like, well yeah, your games cost more and they sell less than the Battlefields, but Battlefield was never gonna win Game of the Year, even if they made a perfect Battlefield, it’s probably never going to win GOTY, it’s the nature of the disrespect certain genres get. Like how you can make a perfect Marvel movie but it’s never winning Best Picture. So I do think that if BioWare is making quality that is respected and making people excited, that gives it leeway within EA that another studio that’s making things that may sell better may not get. So I do think that this needs to be a good game, and I actually think EA knows that too, and I think EA recognizes that, you know, they deserve some of the blame for Anthem and some for ME:A, less, but some. So I think that when they look at that, when they look at Jedi Fallen Order, a game that honestly doesn’t make a lot of sense within EA, it exists in part because it kind of brought in a studio that made it. Like it’s not the kind of game that EA would typically greenlight. But when they see it and that it did well, they’re not stupid.”

How much corporate-speak is there in a ‘I’m leaving the studio’ announcement letter like Mark’s when he left his EP role at BioWare? “So most public things, if it’s on the website, it’s gone through somebody, like there’s legal, it’s gone through somebody to approve a message. One of my frustrations in EA is just how, I mean, I was effectively like second Community Manager for Anthem because they weren’t willing to tell me ‘no’, and so I was able to basically put out messages that wouldn’t have survived the process. But I mean, they didn’t pay me anything to say nice things, I didn’t get paid anything on my way out to be nice, so I do actually believe that the core of Dragon Age remains strong, that there are definitely people there that know how to make a great game, and there are people there that know what the IP is, and I think that they are well-positioned to do that.”

“In terms of what, like, something that made me say ‘no, that’s enough, it’s over’ [re: his time at BioWare], there’s good days and bad days. I don’t know that there was any particular project that made me say no, enough, I’m done. Anthem isn’t the high point of my career both as a leader and also in terms of the product that came out the other side, but I don’t feel like there was a moment of ‘no, we’re done.’”

Other BioWare things

To a degree, BioWare have been a victim of their past success and were just leaning on that, or the thought from upper management was doing so. “I think that’s also partially weirdly caused by the leadership teams being somewhat isolated. I was responsible for shipping DA2. That was a big wakeup call for me and leaders on that project. But other people didn’t experience that, they were on Mass Effect at the time and then they shipped ME3 and had a different blowback for different reasons, but not for the same kind of development reasons, so they learned different lessons than I learned. They learned a lesson about the endings, but not necessarily about the way games come together.”

On Anthem’s failure and the cancelled attempt overhaul Anthem Next: “I think there’s tons of blame to go around for Anthem, certainly part of it should fall on me. For a lot of Anthem’s development, the team, this was before I was on the project, the team was not really recognizing that it was a looter-shooter. So you have to remember that this was a game that started development before Destiny even came out. No one knew what Destiny was except that they were making it clear it wasn’t an MMO. I feel that one of the early mistakes that was made was that when Destiny came out, when Borderlands was out there, there was a reluctance to draw that connection and say ‘this is BioWare’s Destiny or BioWare’s Borderlands’, that gives that clarity and draws that connection. A lot of it just came together really late. The leadership team had lost its ability to make decisions, or had that ability taken away potentially, so there was just a lot of churning happening, and decisions being made and unmade, or being left unmade for a long period of time. But what that means is, when I came in, I’m great at making decisions, and in a vacuum, decisions got made, but what that effectively resulted in is I just took the stick and pushed it down. I’m used to working with a leadership team that pushes back and I think what happened is this leadership team was so desperate, so hungry for decisions to be made, that rather than pushing back on the stick that I’m pushing towards the ground, they’re actually pulling it towards the ground like ‘Yes, finally!!’ And instead of me aiming like this [motioning with his hands like a plane’s downward flight] and the resistance happening like this, I think what happened is this actually caused us to go way too fast [and crash land]. It’s hard for me to see a path where things are actually way better, because we knew a lot of things, we went into the Christmas break before it shipped having not done a complete balance pass through the loot structure, and we did it in this awful hotseat way with QA playing the game 24 hours a day over that break. So we knew that things were shakey, but the team was tired, and you know, EA wanted it in the fiscal year, and the problem is.. so I do see a path [in an alternate universe] where you get a better Anthem, but that path requires the game to basically enter Beta around the time when it launched, and then sit in Beta for six months, say, and then launch in August or whenever that would have been, but EA wasn’t that company then. I don’t know if it’s that company now [video is from 2022], but it certainly wasn’t that company then. It wasn’t prepared to put a game out into Beta for that long and spend the time. I think if we had just spent six more months on it without having gone into Beta, it would have been better, but it wouldn’t have been what it needed to be. It needed to get out into the world and get the pushback.”

“There was a lot of politics in Frostbite [as an engine choice]. It was Patrick Söderlund’s engine when he ran DICE, he was in a very senior position, he could push for it. I think EA still remembers forcing render-ware down everyones’ throat and that blowing up in their face. So I think they’re reluctant to mandate it simply to save a few bucks. At the time, when DA:I, I can’t remember if it was me or Aaryn Flynn, at the time I would’ve described, Unreal was like a NASCAR car. A good fast car, you can go in a race. At the time I would’ve described Frostbite as a Formula One car. Way faster but way harder to drive, and if you don’t know what you’re doing, in a NASCAR you can probably not kill yourself. In an F1 car, I think you’re gonna plough that thing into a brick wall in 3 seconds and you’ll die. And that’s what you’ve seen happen with Frostbite in that sort’ve time period, back in the 2012 - 2015 time frame. Teams that approached the engine with respect did well, teams that didn’t ploughed their car into a brick wall. But I don’t know that that analogy still holds, I don’t think Frostbite is still the graphically-superior engine to Unreal anymore. Back then it made sense to use Frostbite, we could get a better-looking game using Frostbite than using Unreal. I question if that is still the case.”

“In its very core EA is a publicly-traded company. I haven’t worked in a senior level at other publicly-traded companies, but it is very visible. It is difficult to move a game between fiscal quarters. It’s virtually impossible to move a game between fiscal years, because of just like, that is the way the company, I’m not gonna say it’s run by its CFO, but sometimes it feels like it’s run by its CFO.”

DA:I was a victim of the moment in time it was made in, when open-world games were like taking over the universe. “It’s bigger than it needs to be by somewhere between 20-50%.

The team made DA2 in very difficult circumstances and were very aligned the whole way through.

The perception of a game in its first week after launch can make or break a game forever. This put a cloud over DA2. “Though it’s become the BioWare game that’s most fashionable to love, second after ME:A. DA2 was flawed because of the pace at which it was made. ME:A was flawed because things like bugs and things that should’ve been caught escaped. ME:A is a better game now than it was at launch [patches].” “DA2 has sort’ve recovered from the initial kneejerk reaction it received. ME:A has actually repaired itself into a better game.”

“I don’t think there was a reason that ME:A was excluded from the remaster [MELE]. I mean, the easy answer would be, it’s on Frostbite, the others are on Unreal, so to include it means just from a logistics perspective, it’s just a lot of extra work. I mean honestly, it still looks fine, so it’s not in as desperate of a need of a remaster either, it’s not on last generation.”

On the difference in design philosophy between DA:O and DA2 and why it happened: “It’s mostly marketability. The marketing for DA2 was supposed to be ‘tree houses and frat houses’. It was like, we’re gonna make sure that the game is appealing to the people that love DA:O as the tree house, but we’re also gonna make this thing that’s AWESOME and EXPLODING. The problem is, what happened in practice is that the marketing kinda forgot the tree house completely and didn’t market to them at all, and leapt into the frat house marketing and only made this sorta thing of ‘bruuuh! Bro! You can totally bro, bro!’ It’s essentially a victim of confirmation bias. The marketing said, this isn’t DA:O, this is a heavy metal guitar riff of a game, and then when you played it and it’s more action-y, you just went yep, it’s exactly what I was worried it was going to be, and you basically discounted it. There’s a love-hate relationship with even the term ‘RPG’. I think we’ve grown past this as an industry but also BioWare has as well. I think, ‘RPG’ is seen as inaccessible, that only a very small amount of people are willing to play, so there’s been an attempt to say like, you know, this is the kind of game that anyone could enjoy, to try to reach a branch out to other people. Accessibility does matter because RPGs are expensive, so you want to make something that can appeal to as broad of a group as possible, or alternatively, you need to decide that you’re making a game for a smaller group of people and scope and budget accordingly. The other universe path for DA:O would’ve been to stay in the vein of, effectively, turn-based or pause-n-play, tactical RPGs, and accept that the game sells 4 - 7million copies, 7 on the very upper end, and budget accordingly. So that’s where EA has an influence. If there are two options, EA are definitely gonna say you wanna go for 10 million. And honestly, one of the things that I think that has hurt Dragon Age has been, it’s never been allowed to just be what it is, it’s always been, much more than Mass Effect, it’s been subject to, ‘but could you be more, could be more accessible, could you be bigger?’ Even though DA:I is the best-selling BioWare game of all time, and before that I’m pretty sure it was DA:O. I think because Mass Effect has a cultural impact because of N7 that Dragon Age simply doesn’t have. ME has genius branding.”

[source and full watch link]

#dragon age: dreadwolf #dragon age 4 #the dread wolf rises #da4 #dragon age #bioware #video games #anthem #mass effect: andromeda #next mass effect #jade empire #long post #longpost #(ty for sending me this link!)

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trans-luis-serra-navarro · 3 months

Note

Hii!!!

Thank you so much for tagging me before, I hope this isn't too late (?) Days are hectic for me but nonetheless, I would very much like to touch up on your tips and advice you have when writing for Luis. I loved him in the remake, and I would very much love to do him justice in some form of written work!

Thank you for reaching out, this really helps me!!

HIHIHI ITS NOT A PROBLEM AT ALL!!!!! And don’t worry it’s NEVER too late!!! I have stuff sitting in my inbox from like. December HCNEHNDJDJJXNS

I Must admit I’m not really an expert nor am I much of a profession fanfic writer or anything- I only do it for fun!!!! So if you want something like, more specific PLEASE pretty please feel free to ask I’d be more than happy to help!!!! But in terms of general tips and tricks??? Here’s a few that I have under the cut!!!

As weird as this is gonna sound a lot of time I’ll just go and watch Luis’ voice actor André Peña’s streams on Twitch to try and pick up on lil mannerisms or speech quirks that get shown in-game!!!! If I can find an example I’ll put it here, but just generally picking up on what Luis would theoretically sound like if he were talking in a casual conversation helps me out!!!!! (Also he’s just in general a very lovely guy and his twitch streams are always fun so I reccomended them if you’re able to catch one!!!)

On a similar note, if you’re watching any cutscenes and any small characteristic sticks out to you- use that to your advantage!!!! I’ve always noticed how he kinda smiles differently when in different situations/levels of stress/talking to different people so I use that to my advantage when writing scenes with him!!!!

OR OR EVEN, if you’re able to and have the time, go look at older livestreams where the cast talk about their roles in RE4R and see what André has to say about Luis!!!!!! I’m more than happy to link the streams once I can find them again if you want!!!!!!!!! Seeing the actors be so genuine and passionate about the characters and putting their whole selves into the role truly does make them feel just so,,,, h u m a n <<<<33

Also, I know everyone and their mother says this, but research truly does help!!!!! There’s a LOT of things people miss about his character if you only view him on a surface-level or go into his character assuming he’s just a cardboard cutout ‘bad-guy-turned-good’ Typa character, so reading analysis posts on him to get a better idea of why he does what he does and how he is as a person will really help!!!! (Obviously I’ve got my own posts under the tag #luisposting or #othersposts, but the lovely @blveherb has some amazing posts of their own I can’t recommend enough!!!!)

There’s a LOOOOOOT of just. Very incorrect misinformation out there HXNSUSJ (staring at you resident evil fan wiki. Staring at you. VERY HARD) so if you ever come across a post that seems to only lean towards a negative view of Luis as a character or never gives him the benefit of the doubt,,,, it most likely won’t have been made with good taste in mind or properly researched HCNEHENDUDJ

Also also also, looking for things that he was directly inspired by!!!!!! I C A N N O T make this post without mentioning the 1957 Don Quixote film- it’s free on YouTube and it is SOOOOOO SOSOSOSOSOSOSO GOOD!!!!! Capcom TRULY put their all into the Don Quixote symbolism in his character and if you’re able to get your hands on a copy of the book, it’s well worth the read!!!

AGAIN on a similar note- looking at his culture and history is SOOOOOOOO important!!!! For example, the beginning of Seperate Ways features Luis doing a style of Flamenco called ‘Seguiriyas’- and once I’m awake in the morning and fully able to navigate the horror of the tumblr tagging system I’ll look for a post that goes deeper into this HCNEHWNEUDJDIS but Indigenous and Spanish culture are full of such rich and beautiful history you can pull from it is SO worth taking a look!!! Not to mention, you can play around with the fact that Luis was raised pretty Hardcore Catholic or the fact that it’s implied his Grandfather fought in/would have survived the Spanish Civil war as concepts a ton!!!

And if you’re writing specifically for Serennedy, taking a look at the Queer history of Spain/Europe as a whole is DEFINITELY worth your time!!!!! Looking back and remembering the people who came before us is always important and lends a hand to how we perceive our own funny lil fictional guys BCBEHENEJDNXJ

That being said, I only ever see this with writers who already have bigoted views and you seem like literally the nicest person EVERRRRRR so this TOTALLY isn’t directed at you!!!!!! But it’s super important not to fall into just straight-up racist stereotypes- calling Luis a predator, saying he’s a sex-driven animal, generally referring to him as ‘dirty’ etc is stuff that unfortunately you don’t JUST see with Luis but with many other POC characters too (like Carlos for example- he gets the brunt of it a LOT) so when you see stuff like this, don’t be afraid to call it out!!!!!!

I HOPE THIS LONG ASS POST DIDNT SCARE YOU OFF OR ANYTHING AHDNWHENXUDNXIX I TRIED MY BEST TO COVER ALL OF MY BASES CUZ I WASNT SURE WHAT KIND OF TIPS YOU WANTED!!!!!!!!! Again if you want something more specific feel free to ask!!!!!!!!

#I’m soooooooooo normal this post was so totally normal on normal levels of normal #asks #luisposting

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arcofacatboy · 2 months

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is it weird to say i feel like i'm mourning arc of a scythe? like it'd be one thing if the book was actually just not that great n whatnot like harry potter but. the book is actually good. i almost wonder if neil tripped and fell into writing a book with good commentary when he seems to be so incapable of understanding those same things

its not that its nessecarily that its just good, perse, but it made me want to read again. i felt like this series was meant for me, and it permanently affected my taste in books

sorry if it seems like im venting in your askbox its just. im kinda just wondering if my feelings are just felt by me or if others understand

No it’s okay - I’m gonna break some of this down with my own thoughts where I can.

First of all, I can’t really say how you should label your feelings about Neal and his books. I’ve personally tried to avoid using words like mourning or grieving due to the context of why I’m retracting support from Neal in the first place. People, children, are being ruthlessly murdered every day. Me being upset that my (now former) favorite author is completely apathetic towards the victims of genocide will never compare to the grief, pain, and trauma that the people of Gaza and Palestine have been made to face for months now. That doesn’t mean you can’t label your feelings that way! That’s just something I try to keep in mind when talking about Neal myself.

The reason I shifted the focus of this blog, while keeping its original branding, is because I want to at least try to help in a way Neal is refusing to - making his fans aware of the absolutely inhumane treatment of Palestinians at the hands of the Israeli government. Like Neal, I’m by no means an expert on… anything going on right now. I try my absolute best to spread accurate information, but that doesn’t make me a professional or expert. I’m not Israeli, and I’m not Palestinian. I’m a white person living in the relative safety of the USA, who isn’t going to be the target of antisemitism or Islamophobia. I should not be anybody’s primary source of information. But, unlike Neal, I feel like I’m at least doing something, and I want to keep trying to do as much as I can. I’m not trying to one-up Neal here, this isn’t a competition - but I’m saying that all the excuses he’s used for saying nothing could easily be applied to me, and many of the people who have spoken out against him. And yet, here we are.

I haven’t reread Arc Of A Scythe with knowing the additional context that Neal is okay with being completely silent on a genocide, but I have been rereading Dry while keeping that in mind, and, yeah. Neal makes a lot of parallels to real-world crises in that book, and how governments, people in power, and regular people treat them - with where I am in the book right now, everyone not affected by the Tap-Out seems to be completely apathetic and not concerned, because the Tap-Out hasn’t made their life any worse… so it can just be swept under the rug while the people of Southern California lose access to potable water. Literally most of my notes are pointing out how hypocritical Neal is being with his commentary - he’s doing things right now that he portrays as bad things to do in the book. The most egregious example so far is linked here.

So, I can’t say why Neal has taken the stance that he has right now. There’s no point in speculating if he was always this performative in his activism, or if he’s fallen into the Israeli propaganda trap, because it ultimately doesn’t matter. He’s being ignorant and harmful, and he deserves to be condemned for that either way.

You’re not alone in how you feel, I think - a lot of former/current AOAS fans have been really thrown for a loop by Neal’s shit. We have to move forward from here, but no one person can tell you how to do that. (Also, none of this was me trying to be rude or disrespectful, so I’m sorry if it came off that way. One adjustment I’ve had to make for this blog is not talking like a YouTube shitpost, so my tone probably seems a little different from posts I made pre-“Neal being a colonialist sympathizer”.)

P.S about the Harry Potter thing: I’m not sure what you mean by “not that great”, but I agree with you there. There’s so much “not that great” stuff in Harry Potter that the average person doesn’t even know about - the entire franchise is rooted in these really weird ideas about race, class, and a million other things, so it’s bad beyond “oh the goblins are antisemitic caricatures and the author is a terf”. Those things are still extremely bad, don’t get me wrong. But if you want to know more about how bigotry permeates into every part of the franchise - not just the movies, books, and Hogwarts Legacy! - I recommend this video essay by Lily Simpson. It’s ten hours long, but definitely worth a watch. (Yes I did watch the entire thing over like, a week this summer.)

#arc of a scythe #scythe #the toll #thunderhead #neal shusterman #aoas #gleanings #unwind dystology

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capnkerfufflez · 3 months

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I contain multitudes, so i made a uquiz for some of my quintessential sonas for fun

i dont really expect people to take it, but man i love an excuse to draw some of my boys i don't give much love to brief descriptions and the result descriptions under the cut

here's the link outside of just embed btw : https://uquiz.com/hkfS0R

in image order and i marked the number and color of the background above we have :

1 [red] E : non-fandom sona I use to vent mostly - "Conceptual Chaos Junkyard" / "CC Junkyard" so he's mostly negative traits of myself turned up to 11. He's the overly emotional and sentimental and over-reactive side of the duo between him and G.

"[[ oh baby girl, I'm so sorry for you, get some help ]] Everything you've ever done blows back up into your face, you don't know what you're doing wrong?! Or well, you've figured out a few things wrong with you, but you can't figure out how to fix those things about yourself…"

2 [red/orange] Knox S. Consumer : kinda a minecraft sona? - "What's Minecraft is Yourcraft" / "Yourcraft" He's in general a minesona, at least when I first made him. In Yourcraft he is the sona/character version of an oc that's a minecraft youtuber/streamer and who is very distinctly not me, so Knox falls into an odd character category where's he's both my sona and an oc's sona. He's an old grouchy wizard type, but breaks character often to help friends

"[[ you may think im stretching on this one, but i assure there's more obscure ]] You know so much yet so little. The type of guy that can recite so many video game lore details and fun facts across all subjects, but will fail to realize that they really did mean it calling it "cream cheese," it is actually a cheese. You are very smart though, with your intelligence only rivaled by your stubbornness."

3 [red/pink] Dong : pokemon not a big surprise, but he's a pokesona of sorts. He's a Mareep that's specifically paired with my friend's Wooloo "Ding," he's somewhere between a pokemon in the anime and pokemon mystery dungeon in terms of personification, he's very bitey.

[[ haha dong ]] Lil gremlin guy. You're the typa bitch to fucking taunt people bigger than you and when they get pissy you go 'oh im just a lil guy a lil birthday boy.' All talk no bite. well, maybe a lil bite, like consensually or deserved.. BUT the point is you take no responsibly of the misdeeds you may or may not do !

4 [orange] Bibbly : double life / life series Bibbly is the character I made soulmate's with my friend cause we were watching other people make sona's and pairs with their friends too. Bibbly is based off of a drawing I did based on a more literal interpretation of one of my minecraft skins (specifically my 453 skin), "Bibbly" coming from "Biblically accurate." Personality wise he varies a lot cause in conception and most practice he is an utter coward, very reliant on my friend's character, though in other interpretations I make him a lot more jaded and no-bull shit but also those are usually what is supposed to be later in his development and/or away from my friend's character

[[ telephone game of sonas ]] You are a recursion of self analyzation. You try to map out your intricacies only to have your theories on yourself become rules. And once you've realized its a set habit of thinking. You know trouble and you avoid it the best you can.

5 [muddy yellow] Clart : minecraft sona ? - "What's Minecraft is Yourcraft" / "Yourcraft" Similar case as Knox, where Clart is my sona and the sona of one of my oc's who isn't me, but for Clart he and the oc, they align closer with who I am so it's not quite as weird a case. Clart is very easy going and cares a lot, he isn't particularly notably in Yourcraft as he's not really someone who develops more a character that help's the other characters develop

[[ straight up gooping ]] You just want a break, things to be nice and easy and do menial tasks and be with your friends. You give all you can, not because you feel you need to, you just want to and you can. You know pain and cruelty, you choose to be kind.

6 [yellow] [453>- / 453 / The cooler Casey : a general sona He's a more stylized, exaggerated version of myself and usually a lot more malicious for the fun of it. In his "lore" he is a shapeshifting sand.. thing, it depends on the specific backstory I'm going with. He is generally very energetic and bitey and evil for the sake of it cause man villains are fun when they are having fun and he is having a blast

[[ creature !! ]] You are the coolest sexiest mother fucker out here! or you sure pretend to think so. A whole fucking jaw breaker flipping between god-complex and inferiority-complex, who knows what's at it's core (probably inferiority). You love to be an edge case, probably the type of guy to make a fan character concept that's over done but do it with a twist. No fear of ocs coming off like a mary sues just cause YOU know how cool and really clever they are really even if they give a bad first impression.

7 [lime/green] Casey : general sona / how i draw myself This is just me, like, just how I draw myself, it's as general and genuine as I can manage which my not really be all that accurate maybe but oh well

[[ oh fuck u are just like me frfr ! or like at least closest approximation ]] You are only human. You love your friends more than the world and you try to be worth all you're given. You have some self esteem and self image issues, but maybe if you shove your ocs full of enough of your issues you'll solve some.

8 [green?] Caddle : general sona / fursona / the one i use for sexual stuff Caddle is a cow-adject shapeshifter. He is the sona I use the most when it's anything sexual, usually paired with my partner's fursona, but he's supposed to have other buddies too that I never really draw. I've got complicated feeling on sexual stuff and myself in relation to it, so he gets those feelings dumped into his character too. But aside from that he is a fun character especially to draw cause inconsistency is baked in and I love him dearly, he is very lazily chill with a big heart, he's also a rodeo clown even though i dont draw a full on clown get up for him much

[[ honka honka we got certified clown ova here ]] You are silly, a goofball even, one may even argue a jokester. You may present all goofs, gafs and dick jokes, -and by all means you do genuinely loving goofing gaffing and dicking- but you are a person with complicated wants and thoughts and feelings. Wants and thoughts and feelings you hold close to yourself, you do not know how to voice, so more often than not, you don't.

9 [bluish green] Gilon Kurt : lesser sona Gilon is a sona that I made just on a whim off of a twist on my name with "fluffle" being a the name for a group of rabbits, he's "Capn Kerfluffle." And then I made him a rival to my main fursona in their story and he gained a personality outside of me as they so often do

[[ rage rage murder rage !!!! ]] You have worked so hard for what you have and yet it is never enough. There is always something else to achieve more to earn, people clawing for what you have. You can have no peace nor solace, relax? chilling? never heard of her!! There are experiences to be had!! People to meet!! Friends to continuing loving!!! And you'll fight for it all, fight until you die!!

10 [cyan] Yeode : minecraft sona [real] Yeode my beloved, she is my darling rock-based robot made to search villagers that learns to live for herself kinda. A lot of her kindness and softness and story comes from backstory for just me playing minecraft ig who is a lot less kind in practice.

[[ yippee !!! ^.^ ]] You are a people pleaser to your core! You are born and molded by your attachments and use to others. Even in their absence you still live on for them in part.

11 [saturated blue] G : non-fandom sona I use to vent mostly - "Conceptual Chaos Junkyard" / "CC Junkyard" similar situation to E of mostly negative traits, but the other side of it for the most part. she is full of anger and malice at being stuck with little control over her situation and takes it out on E

[[ oh sweetheart, no ]] You think yourself a "bad bitch" a "girl boss" even. Emotions are not your strong suit. You have a hard time managing your own feelings, let alone dealing with other people's. You may not always be right, but you work hard to try to be.

12 [less saturated dark blue] D. Base : minecraft sona, specifically in magic mods / heavily modded minecraft he came about from when i was testing a modded server with my friends there was something that would crash my game if i entered specific chunks, and in those 'dead' chunks was my silk worms so i made dBase as a character for the friend server and he is supposed to be that glitched silkworm i got in testing, uuh end then that server slowly broke too, so i like to think it was somehow also his fault; while i did get to play on the server i got really into a few magic mods, mainly mana and artifice so he is not only gitchy but a magic man

[[ grub ]] You think of yourself highly, not perfect, but damn good. You've worked your ass off for the skills you've obtained and are happy to show off when they are even slightly relevant. Your "fuck it we ball" attitude somehow works out for you most of the time, though some collateral damage to others.

13 [light blue] Clerk James : fursona / used to be mascot character to note if you see other art of him there is a stark difference between the silly goofy Clerk that's my sona and the asshole angsty backstory version of him before he got so very concussed; current Clerk is very sweet and very dumb, he's the "capn" of a pirate themed ferry though also goes on some genuine treasure seeking adventures pg pirate style

[[ consider it the post-drownings one, don't worry ]] A mix of poor memory, self-doubt, and self-hatred that results in a potent blend of guilt for things you aren't really sure you deserve to hate yourself over, being it maybe not or fault or maybe never really happened. Aside from that you're upbeat and a bit stupid in a silly lil guy way. You're just a lil guy!

14 [purple] Cassio Inerta : homestuck / trollsona - "retroll" he is baby, very sweet and well meaning but oh so very problem avoidant and low empathy mostly from being sheltered; in retroll he is canonically in-universe a self insert of myself watching the plot go down and has a made up boyfriend given to him who loves Cassio by virtue that is what the boyfriend was made for, but kinda just puts up with Cassio, a projection of how i felt and feared in some previous relationships

[[ explicitly cannon self insert huh ]] You are a suckerrr for romance. You want and want and want so badly and you feel and in every instance you are given a taste it feels unreal. it feels unearned. It feels disingenuous. But you need it so bad. You don't know shit about anything, so terrified to fail you're terrified to try. But little by little you keep trying.

15 [magenta] Carcumber : a sona based off of my friend's previously-main sona's species so my friend's main sona and mascot character was a "lavamander" though the species had other character with other elements such as ice and sound waves and species had name trope of two favorite foods combined; Carcumber's name was Carrot + Cucumber but my friend changed main sonas and has since renamed most to just a single food name hence the opening statement for the quiz, i dont remember if he had an element associated, if he did i think it was "cart" or "car" or "money" or something stupid like that, and his is a used car salesman, similar energy and pathetic-ness of spamton

[[ oh man do i gotta change his name now that's that not the naming scheme? ]] You are passionate about everything you do! Cause if you aren't you don't do them! You exaggerate yourself to the point the mask becometh you.

god ya that's a lot of em and i have more sona's than just that, but most fall similar to others or i dont use enough to care

if you read it all thanks so much i love u :D

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hotasfahrenheit · 4 months

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So you wanna get into NCT, eh?

Part 3 - NCT 127 - More MVs and Social Media Links

Oh hey I'm finally back. It's been more than a day but life happens and it's only been like two days... or so? (it's been three) but let's get back into this!

So last time we covered a little bit about the members of the group and then I linked some MVs. I realised something I could have done there was link some social media accounts so let's do that!

There are general accounts for NCT on most of the big social media services such as Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. There are also accounts for all of the subgroups, so NCT 127 does have their own accounts on all of those as well. I feel like the Youtube content deserves its own post so I'll get to that but 127 does have a Youtube channel as well.

The individual members share things like the Twitter and Instagram accounts on and off, taking turns sometimes to post on there, tho most posts are from the company. Facebook gets posts from the company and not from individuals very often. The boys do all have their own Instagram accounts tho, and they also all use Bubble to varying degrees, which is an app which a lot of kpop groups use where fans can pay to access special posts from idols that include text posts, pictures, voice recordings, etc. I have never been a Bubble user, but I follow everyone on Instagram so here's all of those:

You can use those to become more familiar with the members and see some of the nonsense they get up to. Some of them post often and some post almost never so your mileage may vary with them as a tool, but I'm a sucker for personal social media accounts so I'm clearly following those all.

It's also worth throwing out there since I skipped talking about positions last time that Taeyong is the leader of both NCT 127 and also of NCT in general. He's also a main rapper, main dancer, visual, center, helps write and produce music and has since The 7th Sense was released, etc etc, you name it, he's probably done the thing. He's ridiculously talented, basically. (They all are.) I could list everyone's positions but there's tons of wiki pages and etc with those kinds of lists and I find them to be less helpful when you have a group like NCT where everyone kinda does everything a lot of the time and has multiple talents and jobs since the rappers might be singing or the vocalists might be rapping depending on the song and literally everyone is a visual etc. But that's part of why you might be noticing that Taeyong is front and center like... a lot. Very often. He's recognisable and has a distinctive voice and being the leader is a good extra excuse to focus on him.

Anyway, let's get back to the music! I somehow managed to come up with ten more videos to link to hit the max per post so you're getting another full variety tasting of 127's style and range with a special treat at the end.

youtube

Favorite (Oct 25, 2021) was the lead single from the repackage of Sticker and was not quite as divisive as Sticker but still a bit weird. Released right before Halloween, there's a whole vampire concept going on (GREAT) and the MV and live stage performances all have a weird electronic dance break 2 1/2 minutes in (BAD) that I am PLEASED TO TELL YOU is not part of the song on the actual album. The first time I watched the MV it threw me for such a hard loop that I almost hated disliked the song but when I listened to the album later on spotify I was like "wait it's gone!!!! it was all just a bad dream!!!" and I try to forget it until I do something like watch the MV to make a post like this.

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We're gonna mix in some of 127's Japanese releases today starting with their first one, Chain (May 8, 2018) off their first Japanese mini album. Despite NCT's initial plan to have groups based in different countries and markets, they are still now in early 2024 only ABOUT to have their first Japan-centric subunit debut, which means that they've just been having 127 (and Dream) release some stuff in Japanese in the meantime. It helps that they have a Japanese member. Anyway Chain is just a great song so here it is.

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gimme gimme (Feb 15, 2021) suffers a little from the eternal problem of kpop songs even in primarily Japanese having some.... wild? English lyrics (spicy disease? dead clowns? who wrote these lyrics? why did their native English speakers go along with this?) but despite the nonsense it's a catchy, mesmerizing earworm of a song with a tight MV with a lot of neat cuts and transitions and I have watched it VERY MANY times. I love it. Spicy disease and all.

youtube

In the first main NCT intro post I included WayV's version of Regular (October 8, 2018) and linked both this and the Korean version. I was going to include the Korean version and just link the English here since the Korean one is the one that I personally listen to the most, but then I noticed that the English version has like 66 million more views so I decided to reverse that and you get the English one. Anyway. All versions of Regular are great and the English version has some great weird lyrics too ("I be walking with the cheese that's the queso" is like... ultimate. Incredible. A+. How did Jaehyun record that without laughing? Legendary.). It's also, with Simon Says, one of the only MVs that has all ten members of NCT 127. It also has a CGI tiger, shiny cars, rockets going off, Winwin jumping off a building, there's just a lot going on.

youtube

Sliding back to Japan for a minute, I feel like I should include Wakey Wakey (March 18, 2019). I almost forget this song exists sometimes and I think it's because I just want to block out having seen the absolutely terrible wig they put on Johnny for this MV. Seriously why? The song itself is solidly in the weird but also very catchy lane that 127 does so well but I just keep thinking about the wig. Johnny had some long extensions for NCT 2020 that looked great on him, but this wig was just not it. My eyes are drawn to it every time he's on screen. I need to put this into my regular listening-only playlists and let my brain block that wig out the way I forget the dance break in Favorite exists.

youtube

127 started 2023 off with Ay-Yo (Jan 30, 2023) which was the (somewhat delayed) repackage of 2 Baddies, which we'll get to in a moment. I wasn't sure what to think of Ay-Yo at first but it has definitely grown on me despite having veered back into some questionable hair territory mainly for Taeyong (and I say that as a grown up late 90s punk kid who thought giant hair spikes were cool). The MV has some absolutely wild visuals mixed in, and the song is definitely outside of the realm of standard kpop releases even if it's not as weird as some others like Sticker. It's solid.

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Okay so. Like. I honestly didn't really pay enough attention to the general reactions to 2 Baddies (Sep 15, 2022) to tell you how divisive this song was to most people, but it split one of my group chats VERY strongly and one of my friends has refused to listen to any 127 releases since then because she hates this song so much. I tried to get her with Fact Check at the very least and she's so anti this song that she still refused and I may have lost her on 127 altogether 🤣 It's mainly the chorus that she dislikes, and I'm a little back and forth on it myself sometimes honestly but also I have absolutely BLASTED this song while driving down the highway so it feels kinda like a guilty pleasure song sometimes. If you ignore the chorus the other parts of the song are so goooooooood and no one can deny that the last part of the bridge slaps. Plus there's a whole lot of shirtless Johnny and Yuta which you can never go wrong with.

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Touch (Mar 13, 2018) is a little off from the style of kpop that I listen to regularly since it's a bit more in the bubbly poppy side of things that I don't always go for but the vibes are immaculate and everyone looks so happy in the MV and there's fuzzy sweaters and everyone smiles so much? It's hard to not love it. It's fluff and cheery and delightful.

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I don't know if SM actually started the "track video" trend (short MVs that have an edited, cut down version of a song so they cost less to produce than a full MV- Lemonade is 3:10 on the Sticker/Favorite album, but this track video is 2:01 for instance) but they love doing them with NCT, and despite Lemonade (Sep 9, 2021) definitely deserving a full MV, since it wasn't the lead single it didn't get one but it did at least get a track video and was performed a lot on the music shows when they were promoting Sticker. It's catchy and has some clever work in the full version lyrics that involve titles of other NCT 127 songs and I've listened to it as much as or possibly more than Sticker.

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I've covered all of the lead singles and there ARE some other track videos or special release songs like the recent Be There For Me that I could be using the last slot for but you know what? We're gonna go fully off the expected path and include Let's Shut Up & Dance (Feb 21, 2019) instead because it's wild and fun. 127 doesn't do much besides sing part of the chorus and do a bunch of dancing in this (on the ceiling? on the walls? in an alley?) but like. Lay is here too and the song is SO fun and an absolute bop so that's what we're closing this post out with.

So that wraps the NCT 127 music videos! I'm thinking the next post and the last of the 127 centric ones will be a guide to some of their Youtube content, since there's a whole lot, and that'll kinda set up expectations for the posts about Dream and WayV as well when we get to them. I think after I get through the main posts of MVs and content for all of the sub-units that I might do some special posts of performance videos for songs that don't have MVs just to get some of those out there, or I might just post a bunch of links to them. We'll see how I'm feeling and if my audience of like two or three people has any kind of preference (that's you, hey, yeah you, lemme know what you want from me).

This post is the third in a series of posts introducing new fans to NCT in a way that makes sense, by getting familiar with one subgroup at a time before moving on to the next. Linked down at the bottom is the intro post, and the rest will be linked as they're added.

Dedicated as ever to @catatonicrainbow and @poetry-protest-pornography 💖

[So you wanna get into NCT eh? 1 | 2 | 3]

#so you wanna get into nct eh #nct basics #how to get into nct #nct info posts #nct info #nct #nct 127 #mia talks about kpop things #mia talks about nct things #Youtube

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moonchild-in-blue · 5 months

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yoooo omg i didn't know you're into lotr!! not to go on a thousand tangents but it's also one of my fav media properties, are you a movie or book person or both? are you into any of the supplemental books like silmarillion, beren and lúthien, etc? fav characters or plotlines/moments? :0

HA! It seems we're once again bonding over our shared feral love over media, Aqua. Get out of my brain (joking, this is extremely cool to me!!!)

You have no idea the ancient can of peas worms you just opened. To say I love LOTR is an understatement lmao. Also, I can't help but go off a million tangents and write Way Too Much, so I feel you, really. Let's get to it then (this is so loooooong i apologise) 🧝‍♀️

Movie or Book Person?

Both! Although I have to confess, it has been many years since I've read the books. I've been meaning to re-read them, and for some reason I have been noticing a spike in LOTR content on my dash, so I guess I kinda really have to now! I absolutely ADORE the movies (yes, even The Hobbit trilogy with it's unnecessary plotlines -> looking at you elves and that weird romance. Everyone did such a great job! Also, Thranduill, my beloved elf daddy, and Sauron, you sexy evil dragon), and have re-watched them an ungodly number of times.

They are beautiful, iconic, and just so comforting. AND THE SOUNDTRACK AAAA. I still get chills hearing Pippin sing "The Edge of Night" while Denethor destroys that tomato. It's such a beautiful, chilling, and poignant tone shift and portrayal of Pippins loss of innocence due to the cruelty of the world, and the realities of war.

Supplemental content?

Not yet! I have read The Hobbit a long time ago, and I really want to read The Silm. I tend to procrastinate a lot, but I want to get them done during this next year! I have yet to watch Rings of Power as well. Speaking of Silmarillion, may I nudge you in the direction of @summeringminor? I have only recently discovered their account, and they make BEAUTIFUL Silm fanart, among others. I can't recommend them enough!

(oh, if you're into asmr and/or audio books, I'm leaving here these links of Cavern, a guy on youtube who read Chapter 1 and Chapter 2 of The Hobbit, in sort of a soft-spoken, cozy tone. He does all the voices and accents - his voice is so so beautiful and warm to hear! Also he's cute lol. He has done some other soft-spoken reading as well, like E. A . Poe! I find it super calming and relaxing 😚)

Fav Characters/Moments/Plotlines?

Samwise Gamgee my beloved 💙🥔

If I'm being honest, I can't really say I have A Favourite. The 4 Hobbits are just!! my babies. Legolas is SO COOL (also Orlando Bloom has 100% influenced my view of him, sorry). My girlies Éowyn and Galadriel, Gandalf my beloved. I just love them all hehe.

This may be a bit of a cop-out answer, but rather than a favourite plotline, I am just so so in love with the underlying themes. Some of my favs:

-> All the different types of friendship and love portrayed:

Sam and Frodo - how they rely on each other, and have genuine pure love for one another, and constantly acknowledge it! The whole Samwise The Brave scene, and of course the Mountain of Doom climb 😭😭 | Gimli and Legolas - how despite of centuries of prejudice and hatred between Hobbits and Elves, they form a beautiful bond and fight side by side as friends!!! | Aragorn and Arwen "I would rather share one lifetime with you than face all the ages of this world alone" | Boromir and Aragorn - how Aragorn cares and honours him to the very end, and never blames him for being corrupted by the ring, "my captain my king" | MERYY AND PIPPIN MY MOST BELOVEDS | the general friendship and self-sacrifice displayed by the fellowship for Frodo and the other hobbits throughout the whole journey

-> The parallels with war and its ugliness; The effects of the corruption by the ring and how different characters react to it:

The last scene when the 4 of them return to The Shire. The movies and books differ a lot, but both are incredible portrayals of how war is never quite over; how it changes you forever; how your home changes as well | Again, that scene with Pippin in the Gondor court in contrast with Sam's speech "There is some good in this world, Mr. Frodo" from the Two Towers. I just !!! yeah | How Saruman gave in to fear and power vs Gandalf and Aragorn who refused power in fear of being corrupted | How Smeagol was shown no compassion for his condition, for which he had very little control of, aside from Frodo, who understood exactly how the Ring operated and was afraid of facing the same fate

-> All the gender/stereotype subversions

Éowyn my beloved!!! How determined she was to prove she was as capable as any man, and SERVED | Galadriel and her immense power and presence | How no one had faith in 4 little Hobbits, and yet they were the ones who saved them all and changed the world forever - "My friends, you bow to no one" (i am tearing up as I write this) | How Radagast was mocked and cast aside, treated as lesser, ONLY TO BE RIGHT ABOUT EVERYTHING!!! ; and how him and Gandalf, "lesser/minor wizards" turned out to be LIKE THAT in comparison to Saruman | the huge pressure put on Frodo, a little halfling, to go and do the most difficult task of all - something something the true heroes were the outcasts and how wonderful it was to see those who had actual power and means to aid them and put their faith in them

-> Anytime Merry and Pippin interact or make an appearance; LEMBAS; Po-tay-toes

There is A LOT MORE but I'm stopping myself here. I just adore LOTR so so much. Me and my friends are huge fans of the series, and it was one of the earliest thing we bonded over when we met, so it has an extra special meaning to me 💙💫

#sorry for taking this long - i wanted to make this as complete as possible!!#feel free to drop by and send me aaallll of your thoughts on lotr!!! it's one of my fav things ever!!!#lotr #lord of the rings #darya answers

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ambalambs · 2 months

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Back with another Miko question! I know Miko is a bard but does he like to play for others or does he play mostly for himself? What's his favorite instrument to play, can he play more than one? Do you have a playlist or any certain songs that you could see him playing (or playing a FFXIV version of, e.g. replacing names of places or gods with ones from XIV?)

Okay so this one is a bit complicated for me to answer I think cuz this is kinda a topic about Miko I get a little nervous about lol music is a huge part of his character and I always get a little worried I make this part of him a little dumb. But alas I'm just gonna, as they say, yolo this so enjoy lol

But yes yes yes! Miko loves playing for people! He will play for the sheer entertainment to get people into the music and dance or he'll just play to keep someone company. He doesnt mind and he's usually pretty good on judging the situation and what is appropriate. but he does also play for himself, yes. especially if he is a bit down, but he'll mostly just play cuz he can and its something to do and he likes it. he also hums a lot which might drive some people nuts but at least its pretty lol

His best instrument is his voice, of course xD but no really his favorite is the violin! I see miko being strangely skilled at picking up just about any instrument tbh. all he needs to do is listen and watch someone play it for a moment and he can easily just fall right in and follow along. like the morin khuur from the steppe i just see him having gone big eye zoomies on the people playing those at the time cuz he'd never seen them before and was itching to give them a try lol (tbh im kinda thinking his music skill is probably something he inherited from his azem. that guy was probably coming up with insane songbird concepts and shoving them at hythlodaeus and the poor guy would have to tell him to chill out lol) but miko leans more towards string instruments like the violin, harp, guitar. something about the quickness of the fingers and the violin having a bow tickles him cuz he also wields a bow in battle lol but he's always down to playing anything given the opportunity. but yeah okay this is long winded but if miko has to pick one instrument as his go to its a violin and his voice.

which okay now as for songs im gonna drop some links here and pray they dont break. i do have a playlist for him but its a mess of inspirations and random songs that just make me think of him and i feel kinda weird linking it so im just gonna pick out a few that are big inspirations for him. which first off miko has huge celtic violin/fiddle vibes so if youre ever curious what miko would just play offhand just look up any of that xD

a song that ive always felt is very HIM since the very beginning has been Andrew's Song by End of Silence. i can just always picture him singing something like this for some reason about his journey. it also kinda sounds like a younger miko, perhaps arr time when he's just starting off, which i like lol

next i kinda find lindsey stirling's violin style to be a big inspiration for him especially Between Twilight. this one is especially something he'd play on the violin just to play. not to perform or anything but just the natural miko music, if that makes sense lol

as for when playing other instruments i basically see him being like this and this where he can just basically use the whole instrument to make any kind of song or just play anything with ease. also really love the idea of him being so quick with a lot of them like that xD

now this is where i get a little embarrassed cuz i do actually have a singing voice claim for miko and its that peter hollens guy on youtube. which has the range and very disney prince-esque sound to it. i'll link his version of Sleepsong here for quick reference cuz i do really like that song as like an example of a lullaby his real mom wouldve sang to him when he was little. also speaking of lullabies with mom i like imagining The Song from Song of the Sea as basically what baby miko singing with his mom would be like lol

now as for some songs that i just especially associate with him as a little bonus here i think this version of Into the Unknown would basically be miko's pre-shadowbringers song he'd sing at the exarch if ffxiv was a musical LOL and then for rage miko (because he does have a deep anger in him i mean what wol doesnt? lol) definitely Burn by 2WEI. and lastly, just gonna toss this one out there too, but i really like this version of The Musician as like basically something maybe his Azem and Hydaelyn would sing to him as a prayer i dunno lol

but okay *wheezes* i hope that covers enough lol now im gonna hide in the shadows again >_>;

#omg pls you dont have to listen to all those links i got kinda carried away lol #but ive thought a lot about miko and his music #and just how much its ingrained in his very being #i really hope all those links work tho and the readmore works prays!!#anyway ty again for asking ;3;#miko jinjahl

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springbloggy · 10 months

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Springys guide to finding new songs (spongs)

I was inspired by @pastamansta's post on finding new movies and according to my last fm account I have 24,576 scrobbles which is quite a bit. So I will give some tips on how to find new stuff as well as general tips to listening to music. Note I am more of a songs guy than an album/disography guy but I will try to give tips for that kinda stuff too.

Finding new music

Spotify

Most of my music discoveries come from spotify, so I will list tips for that first.

First, don't limit yourself to discover weekly/that weird AI DJ thing they have now. Find some more playlists to listen to! Here's ones I have saved on my discover folder, for example.

As you can see, not only do I have spotify's Discover Weekly, but I also have three based on record labels, one based on a random radio station I once found, two reddit ones (rip reddit), and one based on a music review website I like.

There's also websites that can hook into your spotify account and make your music discovery more interesting.

Skilley is a website that has sadly locked a lot of their functions behind a paywall over the years. But the functions that are still free are very good, most importantly, the search function to find new songs based on old favorites.

Obscurify is a website that checks how obscure your tastes are, then recommends a few songs based on your tastes. Pretty fun.

Radionewify is a website that claims to find new songs you haven't heard yet based on your tastes. I think its pretty accurate.

Sort your music is what I use for my discovery playlists. I like to first make things alphabetical, use sort your music to make each alphabetical playlist go from most energetic song to least, then save it all in one big playlist. Because I'm too organized for my own good.

Spotify dedup finds duplicate songs in your playlists so you never have to listen to a duplicate song ever again.

I also suggest making one playlist for your "top favorite songs" to add and remove from over time. This has helped tremendously in my discovering.

(Online) radio stations

Sometimes old school is cool! If you don't know where to start listening to radio, see if you can listen to your local college's radio station. Somehow, colleges tend to have the best stuff.

But if that isn't an option, online radio stations are your next bet. There's a ton of databases where you can search and gain a ton based on your favorite genres. A lot of them are local radio stations!

I curated a bookmarked folder of some databases/stations, so I will list some links of ones I checked out and can confirm have good stuff.

Now you may wonder "why not iheartradio/siriusxm"? I can't tell you to not listen to those, since I tend to default to iheartradio when I am doing chores and I am unsure what to listen to, but their selection tends to be extremely limited compared to the indie stations you can find online. Plus they are huge companies, so it's good to branch out and listen to the smaller stations.

Listen to some stations! You may find some songs you love, or at least have an interesting experience by the end of the day.

Youtube/Xite music

What the hell is xite music, you may ask. Well my friends xite is...vevo's app on roku. Why they renamed their app is anyone's guess. Besides iheart, when I am cleaning, and don't know what to listen to, I default to Xite and have found some good stuff from it. They tend to repeat a lot of the same songs, a ton, but also come out with the occasional surprise.

TV Shows + the shazam app

TV series writers know their BOPS. I found so many songs off of shows it's insane. Even my guilty pleasure America's got Talent got me some bops. Rarest event of all 4 of these those.

Listening Tips

Don't be afraid to admit you no longer like a song/artist/genre

As I get older, I realize I like a lot of songs/genres/artists a lot less than I did when I was younger, and that's ok! For example, I used to be really into vaporwave during 2018 - 2019, but now I can't stand most of it. I wonder why I liked it a lot of the time! There's still some vaporwave songs I still cherish, but most of it is not for me, and that's okay!

2. Don't be afraid of getting outside your comfort zone

Initially, I stuck to only indie/alternative/pop music, but decided to branch out to other genres I knew very little of and found myself surprised by how much I either liked what I found or how much influence those genres had onto other genres. Try to find music from different eras and different genres, you may like what you hear, or at least learn more about the music you do like from the experience.

3. Don't be afraid to take "music breaks"

It's okay to not listen to new music for a little while to relisten to old favorites or listen to things that aren't music such as podcasts, youtube videos, tv series, or nothing at all! Sometimes I have troubles with this mindset myself, but I found taking music breaks makes me more excited to find new music later on rather than feeling like I have to like it's my "job".

4. Spice up listening to albums to make it more fun

When discovering new albums or relisting to old favorites, find ways to spice it up to make it fun and invigorating each time. My favorite things to do are take walks, do chores, or mute a movie or tv series and see how that album syncs to what's on screen. I found it a lot more fun to listen to albums this way than to scroll mindlessly online and listen to them. Plus it helps add more perspective to the activity your doing while your listening, especially if its a movie/TV series. I am not sure how, but it helps me find little details or figure out weak spots in movies.

5. Don't be afraid of being a "songs guy" like me.

I love songs more than full discographies most of the time, and that's ok. If you find discographies tiring like I do, don't feel left out because everyone's doing tier lists and stuff. Instead share your favorite songs with others, talk about them, and maybe if you have enough songs that share an artist, then try to see if their discography is worth it. If you decide you like their hits more than their whole, that's okay! At least you gave it a decent chance, and hey, maybe some of their fans might agree.

So there you have it. Feel free to ask me if you have questions. I will try my best to answer, usually I am not this wordy, but I like songs lol.

#music #music discovery #guide #springy thoughts #yeah #q #long post #life tip

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insertive-not-assertive · 2 years

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Do you have any Advice on Changeling the lost?

make your changeling as sick as possible

jk jk sorry dude im not sure what you mean like, advice for the game in general? ive never played ctl so i guess all i can offer is what ive heard and read?

ok so, play the most recent version of the game (2e i think its called) because its better, but also take it with a grain of salt. everyone ive heard from so far improvises on the game and makes homebrews, and theres so much creative room in this game that its perfect for exploring what the fuck ever you like in a ttrpg.

its even the kind of game you could just spend time making shit up for yourself if you dont want to/cant play it, as ive been doing.

like i said ive never played so idk about the finer mechanics of gameplay and whats balanced and whats not, but when it comes to character creation i REALLY encourage you to dig into ur imagination and bring out a magic creature you wanna be or youd wanna make an oc out of

what kinda changeling do you wanna be/play as? what made your character that way? what do they do after they escape Arcadia?

check out seemings/kiths/courts and then mess that dude UP, give them sick powers and weaknesses

you can be kithless lmao, some people are just too nebulous to categorize

the courts all have a different emotion for how they deal with being a changeling. you dont have to pick a court, but if u do id say to ask your character what being in that court means to them.

oh also if youre making up a Fae, try to make it as fucked up and cool as possible. theyre so weird and monstrous at times. i just picked my changelings keeper from the ones already made (because hes awful in a great way) but i think itd be cool if more people made their own?

ppl have explained this better than me, but the thing that changelings have that fae will almost never have is the support of other changelings. fae are so concerned with themselves they cant understand banding together to live like changelings do (which makes them still human). so i wanna say keep in mind that the best weapon changelings have against fae is ironically the power of bonds (motleys, freeholds, and courts) this is the heart of the game imo.

im bullshitting my way thru this here, i dont know how much you know about ctl already, but i can point you towards the stuff ive found these last two weeks ive been fixated on it, if you wanna look at all that stuff? you can skip all that junk i said above and just go thru this stuff. its kinda dead out there but still good:

one of the forums!

a forum post with a bunch of supplementary material!

codex site that i havent rly explored yet but its probably excellent

this guy made character sheets for almost every white wolf game

book 1e(quality might vary)

book 2e

theres other books but i havent found them yet! like winter masques!

@qm-vox's essays about seemings and courts and changeling stuff!!! link to their summer court post because thats my favorite one obviously

im always hesitant to recommend reddit to anyone, but i like reading the whitewolfrpg subreddit to read other ppls takes on ctl sometimes x]

i dont like video essays or watching ppl play ttrpgs, but if you do i guess i recommend that if you wanna hear more about it? im sure theres stuff on youtube

read the white wolf wiki if you want, but just know the info there is a little scattered and hard to put together. i started reading the books bc i wanted to put it together

sorry if you wanted to know something specific? i can only vaguely point you in a direction! im still learning abt all the finer points of this game myself

#thats a lot of bullshit words. basically go crazy #get weird #stats are hard #docasks #ctl #ill double check the links later i mighta mixed them up #this post was twice as long as it is now i tried to trim it down so its not a wall of text #theres so many important concepts!!!!!!!#changeling the lost

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articlesofnote · 1 year

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a true original

so I spend a lot of time thinking, just letting the brain do its thing while it spends whatever effort it needs to spend on keeping my heart beating and operating my sweat glands and whatever. and, wow, do I want to go back and redo that first paragraph, but I won't, for reasons which may (or may not) become clear. y'see, just a minute ago I watched a youtube (id: aCZ1CFRwhQI) which is from some internet guy talking about The Wire. the Algorithm knows that I like The Wire, so I guess that's why I got this one. it's a li'l eight-minute video precis about this one shot, where the camera pulls back and there's a shit-ton of cans on a roof. it was an ok video! it had some new information for me, about one of the showrunner's philosophy about how the camera should work, and a new way (to me) of articulating that philosophy: the idea of "what the camera knows." but, the analysis of the shot itself was pretty thin sauce. the guy who made the video also got some characters names wrong! which is Very Irritating for a pedant like me. so I'm thinking about this video, and my reaction to it. i'm thinking, particularly, about whether it is possible - and if possible, desirable - to contribute actually original perspectives into the world. i feel that, yes, it's possible but really fucking challenging, because there's a lot of people saying a lot of things about a lot of stuff. and yes, it's desirable, because otherwise nothing ever changes, and culture becomes more and more homogeneous as everybody comments on the comments on the comments on... the comments on some cultural artifact that represented an Original Perspective on Something. and homogeneity is bad! I think! i'm pretty sure? but, also, for something to be commentary it has to exist in such a way that some audience somewhere can understand it; they have to have enough of the contextual pieces already that they can see the connection that the commentary is trying to make. something actually original would definitionally be impossible to understand, since nobody would have a frame of reference for it, so whatever else it might be, it would be bad commentary. so, this video. am I the audience? maybe - I watched it, I thought it was ok, I got something out of it. probably an ok use of eight-ish minutes. i've wasted time in much dumber ways. but i feel like the only response I have to something like that is to make another video being like "here's MY take on that shot" - and it would have basically 99% of its DNA in common with the video it was a response to. it hardly feels like I could contribute something meaningful. and those are two concepts I didn't expect to find linked in my mind - that Meaningfulness is so closely synonymous with Originality that I'll just use the one when I've been talking about the other. so, okay, what I care about is meaning... and, christ, that sounds so goddamn banal when I actually write it out. like, no shit I care about meaning? on the other hand, though, why feel bad about just saying that? like i've committed a faux-pas or something. where the hell did these rules in my mind come from? i guess, you know, cliche is bad... didn't realize I'd internalized that so strongly! which brings us back to that first paragraph - i feel like what I wrote is some weird-ass way to try and acknowledge that the Cartesian mind-body dualism is horseshit, in my own words - i.e. to actually contribute an original expression! about a thought that matters to me! that is, to acknowledge and express something that I find meaningful, albeit in an obscure way. and my IMMEDIATE and NEARLY OVERWHELMING instinct was "do not, should not, cannot write this, delete now, bad" - and i'm fighting that instinct AGAIN, thinking about actually posting this - so like, damn, thank you random youtuber for making a kinda mediocre video about something I like, so I could have some feelings about it, then have some feelings about the feelings, then write about the feelings about the feelings in this tumblr post. thank you, in other words, for helping me feel okay about saying something original EDIT: also, lmao, the beta editor had a bug and wouldn’t let me post this at first

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uncledrifter · 2 years

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hi there! i saw your post about eris morn and i've been meaning to do some fanart of her recently but i really don't want to fall under that trap of white-washing her, and this is a genuine question but what ethnicity do you see eris as? i want to make sure i get it right

okay wait I'm going to stop you there.

I think something must have gotten lost here because I really don't think that there is a "right" ethnicity to draw eris morn as. Her origins have been left intentionally ambiguous by Bungie, something that they have done with many other guardians as well. Whether or not this is a good move in terms of storytelling and representation is a conversation that I don't feel well equipped to have, so forgive me if I gloss over that aspect of this.

Its not uncommon for people to see a character that looks like them and then make content for that character which is informed by their own culture. This is one of the really cool things about fandom - getting to see different interpretations of a character from new perspectives and learning about other people's cultures through their art and headcanons is a GOOD thing*.

*(as long as the race of a character does not matter to their story, and you are not taking away representation from another group. Which in regards to Eris Morn and most Destiny 2 characters, I think is the case.)

However I am a white person and I do not have that kind of attachment to the character, so the idea of sitting here pondering Eris Morn's race based of off nothing much other than her physical features makes me feel kinda gross. So I'm not going to do that. I also don't think it matters in this context - whitewashing in fandom has its roots in colorism, which affects people regardless of race or culture.

Lots of people have spoken about colorism in fandom before me and done a very good job of it. I'll provide some links to further reading at the end of this.

Anyway, what I'll do is share some tips that I use myself.

Don't use gifs and other people's images as references. Its very common for both official promo art and fanworks to be doctored in some way. Many of the images being passed around of a character might look like the 'original' but in reality, the image has probably been lightened or filtered already. Whenever you can, collect your own resources straight from in-game screenshots. Youtube videos of cutscenes also work - these are usually not color-corrected.

Don't hide behind limited palettes and bright lighting. This isn't to say that you shouldn't use bright/weird colors in your art, but do be aware of how people's skin actually absorbs light and let that inform your colorwork. The light from Eris Morn's orb is not going to completely wash out her skin, not everyone turns pastel when you put them under a lamp. Luckily most of this falls down to basic color theory, so you can kill two birds with one stone here and get better at art AND avoid whitewashing characters.

Don't give them plastic surgery. Its natural for artists, especially beginner artists, to draw people based on their personal aesthetics of what they find attractive. But you really need to be careful and make sure that your aesthetic preferences don't start overwriting a character's unique features. For example, giving a character a smaller button nose because you don't like the way their naturally big nose looks is… well its racist. look within and work thru some biases if that's where you're at.

Colordrop responsibly. Yes absolutely grab colors from screenshots and other resources, but do be aware of context. Pay attention to the range of midtones, highlights, and shadowed areas on the face. You don't want to pull the lightest skin tone on an image and pick just that one for your canvas - start with a mid range and go from there. Also mind the lighting of the image - if you're drawing eris morn in a dark, creepy hive cave, you don't want to reference that shot of her on Mars, that has the absolute harshest lighting in the game.

But anyway as long as you don't draw her literally pastel, you'll be leagues above the other artworks out there.

Okay here's the links I promised under the cut:

#ask answer #eris morn #you guys sure do love to desaturate a woman #i said i didnt want to write an essay but you asked nicely anon #so you get (1) benefit of the doubt

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dreamhot · 2 years

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Signed up for wattpad in 2014 flash forward to last year and their data breach put my email on the dark web and someone tried to scam me lol

oh we love ourselves a good data breach ... i've found my old passwords on sites that track that sort of shit but luckily i've never gotten into any sort of trouble (save for my first neopets account getting shut down but that was my own dumbass fault for falling for a scammer loool)

gonna answer the other fanfic asks under a cut

Anonymous asked: I remember reading Hermione x Ron fanfics on deviant art when I was like 12 :/ also used to read Percy Jackson fics on Wattpad but we don’t talk about that 🤡

re: the last point - you and dream both, pal

Anonymous asked: its kinda funny for me to think about, i got into fanfic by reading mcyter fics (shout out team crafted). they were reader insert and not shipping but i really have come full circle

when i was into rtah, there was def some fic centred around let's play minecraft, but . i was reading the shipping stuff Oops

Anonymous asked: my first fanfiction experience was in 2014? In YOUTUBE. there were channels that made videos reading fanfictions they've got god knows where and if they were multichapter they would usually upload twice a week or something. Now that I think about it it was weird af cause istg the voices reading couldn't have had more than 15/16 years old and they read some filthy stuff sometimes. I can't even imagine reading shut outloud, let alone RECORD MYSELF DOING IT

yeah like i was def too young to be writing some of the fic i did at like, 16/7, but . that was also an era in which people weren't really disclosing their ages anyway lol BUT PUTTING YOUR VOICE TO IT ...? that's a level of bravery i can't even fathom

Anonymous asked: possibly my first fanfiction experience that i can remember was discovering that the avatar the last airbender wiki had a closely linked sister wiki for fanfic content and i dived into that. it must have been like… 2010/11? I knew about ffnet around the same time thanks to my brother but i’m not sure which actually was in my life first. anyway shoutout to avatar fanon wiki

fanon wikis are so fascinating like either they're enormously helpful and point out a lot of cool content Or they're just ill-kept messes of drama. always seems to be one or the other lmao

Anonymous asked: if we're sharing our fanfic experiences, i will say i used fanfic.net, ao3, wattpad, devientart, and quotev, and fanfiction.net has a special place in my heart. its where ot3s, brotps, lemons, using hate comments as fuel to bake cookies, disclaimers about not owning characters, a/n: breaks in the middle of the story, and songfics with the lyrics taking up half the word count really thrived. times were simpler back then

STOPPP NOT THE A/N BREAKS ... you'd be reading a fic and then it suddenly breaks into a fuckin roleplay dialogue between the author and the characters like WHAT'S GOING ON HERE !! i remember when ff.net purged all the songfic etc and how fucking mad ppl were cos they literally just . deleted shit without warning. they were truly merciless back then

Anonymous asked: my experience with fic platforms is kinda weird because i'm definitely in the "too young to have used ffn regularly" demographic but because english is not my first language and my first fandom was full of people who in general were 10+ years older than me (because after my brother taught me how to pirate stuff i ended up getting into 90s anime), the first fic i ever encountered was in ffn and wattpad became popular and easily accessible to me not long after, so for a while those were my two sites until i became fluent enough in english to engage fandom and moved from there to ao3 without struggling with the lack of content in a language i could read. it's funny because whenever older people talk about the youth (tm) not knowing how things were before ao3 it makes me feel old lmao

that's interesting tho :0 see, the thing is that wattpad and ff.net are still in USE, so it's completely possible that ppl were (or are?) using them while others used ao3 - though it blows my mind why anyone would CHOOSE to use ff.net in the year of our lord 2022

#smile.ask #beedreamss #anon #long post #<- under tha cut

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saal-school-project · 1 year

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Part 5

9th grade

The entirety of 9th grade was online school. Well, actually, we did go to school for like a week, but that was mainly for the exams, so we can ignore the fact that they are not important. And you know how online school is; I don't need to explain much. It was chill. I had a lot of free time, which led me to develop quite a few interests that year.

I got into transformers.

I started getting into Transformers during that time. At first, some clips of Transformers Prime on YouTube were randomly recommended to me (it was exactly this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bZAwYv_N-RQ). " And while searching for it to paste here, I also ended up watching a half-hour essay on Starscream's Wings, and it was mind-blowing, so here's the link to that too, I guess: "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kFYk_ZFpo9A "). I remembered the show back when I was still watching TV; it aired on CN, and honestly, I never really liked the show back then. Then I realized the reason for that was the fact that I remembered absolutely nothing about the decepticons. Perhaps I decided to give the show a shot back then, and it happened to be an episode that Desepticons weren't in, and I decided that "this show is boring; I'm not watching it" and would change the channel whenever I saw it on. I can't think of another explanation. because the autobots in that show are really boring, like, Omg, why are you so boring? I'm going to be honest, as I've admitted so many things already that it's too late to turn back now. I watched the show solely for Starscream (yeah, Transformers do have weird names, but I love them for them, like imagine them being named Michael or something bruh). Have you seen his design? He has built-in heels, he is the skrunkly

To be fair, he looks kinda weird in this pic idk.

The other decepticons were fine too, I guess. Then I checked out other series too, because Transformers is a pretty old franchise, and as a result, there are many different cartoons and spin-offs about it. There is "G1", which stands for generation one. It's a really old cartoon that aired in 1984, but the whole show is basically just an elaborate toy commercial if you consider the fact that the toys came before the show. And oh yeah, they do have toys; thats the best part about transformers, to be honest, and they do actually transform. G1 toys aren't really impressive engineering-wise, but they get better over the years. There is also a spinoff called "Beast Wars," in which robots turn into animals rather than vehicles. There are other shows, comic books, videogames, and life-action movies that fans often like to ignore or denigrate as bayformers) (and we also do not talk about kiss players), etc. but let's get to the good part. If I hadn't stumbled upon Transformers toy reviewing channels (mostly jobby i guess) on YouTube, things would have taken a different turn for me, and I wouldn't be owning any Transformers figures now.

From the start, I liked the character designs; yes, I'm also a character design enthusiast. Human designs can get pretty boring after a while; but with robots, you can have all different shapes, sizes, and colors, which is great if you want to make unique and memorable designs (I guess with humans, you can have unique clothing, but whatever!). The idea of robots transforming into vehicles was an excellent touch too; this way you wouldn't just slap on random shapes and hope for the best but instead figure out a way where the vehicle parts would go to form an astechnically pleasing robot, and the vehicle form should reflect the robot's personality too and even on its own be recognizable—we all recognize the Optimus Prime truck, right? All of that on its own impressed me, but what absolutely blew my mind away was this.

(Please politely ignore fact that it turns into a gun)

Yes, that robot indeed transformes into this.

(Here's another link if you want to watch it transform: https://youtu.be/_EvBRGjaXHM)

Never once did I think this level of engineering was possible. It's like black magic. Incomprehensible. I want to transform it myself to understand how it works better, but oh god, the prices are just... well, there are a few things to know about transformer figure collecting. There are official toys. Hasbro (American-based) and Takartomy (Japanese-based) companies own the Transformers franchise, or something like that. I'm not fact-checking. These are both, like, toy companies? Hasbro also owns Monopoly, so imagine stuff like that. The one I showed you above is a masterpiece figure, and the number comes from how many figures there were before in that toy line, so they just basically enumerated them. That above is mp36 (as in Masterpice and the 36th figure), and the character's name is Megatron. That figure is one of my favorites, and I would buy it if I had the money.

Masterpiece figures aim to recreate the characters' G1 appearance as faithfully as is physically possible while being able to transform and be posable at the same time. There is "mpm" too; it stands for "masterpiece movie," which is just life-action versions of the characters (live-action movie). Transformers have completely different designs thanks to the director of those movies, Michael Bay, which is where the name Bayformers comes from. Needless to say, all of the masterpiece figures are hella expensive; their prices usually vary depending on the size of the character, but no, it's expensive; there is no cheap masterpiece unless you buy knockoffs, which goes into the unofficial third-party market that I will get to in a bit.

Then theres Hasbro; now Hasbro makes relatively cheaper toys targeted at children currently consuming the myriad of Transformers content out there as opposed to Takaraatomy making collectible figures for people who back in the day grew up with G1, so they are now grown adults and can afford those steep prices. These toys come in three classes: leader class, voyager class, and deluxe class, with deluxe being the cheapest and smallest and leader being the biggest and most expensive of the bunch. I personally own 1 leader class, 1 deluxe class, and 4 voyager class figures.

Here’s some of my figures:

My first and favorite figure is this one. His name is Skyhammer.

I got more but I dont have pictures of them.

Honestly how i got these figures has a story on its own as toy stores rarely sell them due to their prices being too high. I got most of these second hand.

Those were the official figures. and then there are third-party figures. the meat of the topic. It's basically just companies other than Takara and Hasbro making figures, and their legality is kind of questionable as it borders on intellectual theft because they own the copyrights for the Transformers franchise. but that doesn't really concern us. Another thing about third-party services is that what you get can drastically vary in quality; it could be an amazing figure or it could be really bad. You can't really be sure until you personally hold it in your hands, but Toy Rewiev channels have got you covered. Don't worry. Third parties are usually for official masterpiece-class figure quality, but they are a little cheaper. Then there are knockoffs. Knockoffs are just knockoffs; they literally just copy the official figures engineering and just remove the Aoutobot/Decepticon logo or something like that and sell it for cheaper. These companies are often Chinese for some reason, and the engineering can be more mind-blowing than the officials. Saddly, I don't own any third-party figures; I was so close to buying one, though. But, uh, I don't know about buying something that expensive overseas; I didn't want my package to get stuck in customs, so I decided against it.

There are also non-transforming transformer figures; it's just an articulating robot mode. They do this because it's more aesthetically pleasing. There is a term called kibble, which refers to pieces that have no clear purpose in one mode but are there only because they are part of another mode.

Usually shellformers suffers from this the most. Look at all those penguin parts in the robot mode. Making those parts removable is an option, but that would be partsforming. No one likes partsforming.

some of the kibble is accurate to the character's appearance on TV, it is part of the character's design. but they are not; there are extra parts that stick out, and then there is less than excellent kibble management.

Oh god look at this things backpack.

So if the figure doesn't transform, they can just focus on making it more accurate and posable; it's just an action figure. And, oh yeah, most of the time, the fact that a figure transforms can hinder its poseability. and I think poseability is very important. and a non-transformable Transformers figure is just... meaningless? Like, why are you taking away the best part? I personally wouldn't buy one.

GUNDAMS

Now you can't be in the Transformers fandom for too long before you inevitably hear about Gundams too, and vice versa. They are very similar, minus the transformation, and the robots are way bigger and more pilotable now. They are both old anime that aired around the 1980s, and they are both about giant robots. The best part of both of them is the merchandise.

Gundam merchandise is now available in the form of model kits. They come in pieces. You cut the pieces out of the sheet of plastic with a pair of side cutters before you assembled them like Legos. In the end, you have an action figure of a robot. and they are more customizable than transformers; you can paint them and add details as you like as you build them, unlike transformers.

But I prefer transformers over gundams because you can only build a gundam once (technically, you can disassemble it and build it again, but thats a pain), whereas you can transform transformers as many times as you like. Gundams are also more fragile; I learned that the hard way when I broke my first gundam the day after I finished building it. but then I got another one. Here are some pictures of my Gundams.

Here’s my gundams. Well there is only two of them:

My beloved first gundam, high grade beyond global. Don’t ask why that pose. This is like, the last picture I took of him before I accidently broke his leg.

I like this picture. He’s standing on one of my many journals.

Gundam model kits also have classes like Transformers toys do, but they are called grades from small to big: SD grade (basically just chibi). high grade (mine are both high grades, so they are small). real grade (real grade is small like high grade but way more detailed) Master grade (bigger) perfect grade (even bigger)

This is enough, right? I mean, I've got more things to talk about; we barely scratched the surface. I could go on, but I feel kind of tired now. sooooooo goodbye?

#this one is really long #transformers figures #gundam model kits #forgot to mention I yoinked half of the images from internet

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