#jinx has committed atrocities and no one can be mad at her because she is baby | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

lunalemures · 9 months

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Okay, let's work through this together. As I mentioned in my previous tags, I want to analyze what the media that have influenced me the most are about, what I adore about them, isolate those themes, and apply them to my story.

NieR is defined by finding who we are through the bonds we make with each other. It's a story about love and connection and the drastic ends we will go through for the people we love, and how we fall apart without them. It speaks to the futility of desperately trying to conform to the role assigned to you. Most importantly, it speaks to a cycle of violence that we are conditioned into, and that the only way to break that cycle is to deny the purpose and role others have given to us and live for each other, and through this futures are both created and ended.

FFXIV—or to be specific: the story of the ancients, the part I'm attached to—talks about a race of ancient people who have lost everything, including themselves, and desperately want to return to what once was, to regain their loved ones, to earn peace and happiness back. There's a certain tragedy in their existence, where they lose themselves and their purpose over millennia of mourning and silence. It speaks to how grief and loss warp and distort us, causing us to do terrible things in the name of what we lost. It is, to be frank and a bit cliche, a story of the process of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. Throughout Shadowbringers, the unsundered are absolutely in a state of bargaining, desperately trying to get the past back, and there might also be a good degree of depression that we don't see on screen, but we see them in their moments of acceptance and we feel their loss as they surrender to their fate.

Arcane, similarly, is a tale of loss, grief, and trauma. The characters lose everything in a conflict that's far beyond them, and they change through the years without each other, irreversibly warped, and haunted by what they lost. Different characters deal with this in different ways. Powder has become a completely different person, driven by the need for survival and the trauma of loss. She's stuck in the past, haunted by those she lost, isolated from others, and driven mad as a result. Vi is desperate to get her sister back, frustrated and angry over what was done to her and her family, but she struggles to accept the ways her and Jinx have changed. However, she forges new bonds and works towards the future. Ekko has accepted the loss of his former bonds and is creating a new future with others through fostering new bonds and striving for change. They've all lost and are either stuck in the cycle of violence or trying to break it.

Bloodborne is also about an endless cycle and trying to break free of it: The Hunt happens over and over again. You die and come back over and over again. Time progresses. The night begins, deepens, and reaches it's climax. Then begins all over again. Everything in the city fights against you, aims to claw into you and drag your corpse further into the cycle and commit horrible atrocities to prevent you from escaping the cycle. There's a certain futility of breaking out of the cycle, and a hopelessness of things returning to normal. This one doesn't emphasize the importance of bonding with others like the others do, but there is nonetheless a theme of being stuck in a cycle of tragedy, trauma, and (if you look deeper) loss.

However, it's worth mentioning the gameplay of Bloodborne, which stands in stark contrast to it's story. The gameplay also features a cycle of death, rebirth, struggle, death, rebirth, struggle, etc. It beats you down, shows no mercy, and, as mentioned before, does anything it can to keep you in that cycle of struggle, death, and rebirth. The gameplay, however, contrasts with its story because eventually you overcome the struggle, break the cycle, you win through your own determination, stubbornness, and skill. You enter a new cycle, then you break that one, too. There are videos online about how Bloodborne helped people out of dark times because, after defeating that boss that has killed you thirty times, you win, you find that the struggle is not in vain, that you can overcome it as well as your other struggles. So if anything, Bloodborne is also a story about how we are trapped in a cycle of loss and trauma and grief, but that one day we can break the cycle through our own strength. Not only this, but, according to the story, by breaking the cycle of the roles given to us, we "ascend" to a "higher" existence.

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From all of that, I can identify the following themes of media that have affected me personally:

we exist in a cycle of violence, trauma, grief, and death

this cycle exists because we persist in playing futile roles given to us by others

to break the cycle, we must defy the roles prescribed to us and connect with each other

we are defined by our bonds with each other, and through these bonds we find new meaning and a future

I think this gives me a lot to think about for the direction I want to take for my stories. I'm going to spend a bit working on this. These are the themes that matter to me, that changed me, so they deserve to be told in my stories.

#mochi rambles

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