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misc-obeyme · 11 days

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-🐆 You know I think that's exactly why it's taking them so long to release the new season, because they have to much plot holes to cover. Is it the whole Lilith thing again? Eh, let's not get into that subject. What made sense to me, probably just my mind filling in the blanks, is that MC eventually, gradually regained some memories, a bit at a time, while the brothers remained sort of like a constant memory that is a core one (I hope I am making sense). It could be also that Solomon used some magic to help MC stabilize memory wise. Or just shown pictures on his DDD. A lot of plot things in this game (especially implied sex scenes, for obvious reasons) are left blank. Usually they aren't that important but in this case they are! So hopefully they do explain deeper in the new season. Also the term "time soup" sort of made sense to me, since I stand by the theory that time cannot be linear as we think it is. So if mc, from their present, went back to the past, mc brought all the memories and experiences with them. Meaning, the past is "changed" but not really. Just like it was changed in season 1 in og where mc was killed, but not really. So the time soup thing started wayyyyy back in the lore. Because if, they went back to the past, in a linear timeline, I think it would have left much less effect on the brothers and on the way everything unfolded. For example, the whole Cocytus journey. Mc presumably had an affect on the brothers even back in the celestial realm (I was just re-reading season 3 of og where mc ate Solomon's sandwich and was sent back in time) so Lucifer would have been locked up in Cocytus either way, but what did release him from the shackles? Did the brothers go after him even without mc? Did he still had his outburst against Diavolo? Was it that it is a time soup and mc was destined, in the this world logic, to hurtle back in time to this specific point and help the brothers, who know them but not really, who have a pact with them but not really? Also, in hard lessons, what the hell did Solomon made the brothers do to repay him for breaking them free from the curse that changed their personalities? Did he make them take a pact with him??? If that's true, I am mortified, really. See, I can ramble for more, but I don't feel bad about it lol, though you of course don't have to either! I don't only request your rambles, now I demand them, it matches my own!

I'll just go and watch dr who, my head is hazy, at least that show makes more sense with time travel If you watch it too, did you see the episode with Jinxx?? It was SO good.

I mean, they sure do have a lot of plot to resolve in the upcoming season! I don't know how far in advance they plan the story, but it feels very disjointed most of the time lol.

MC's memory issues never really registered for me, tbh. I always interpreted it as an MC who still has all those memories from OG? I was under the impression that they changed some of the story in the first lesson of NB, but I never went back and replayed it. So I told NB at the beginning that I knew the brothers and I guess that left out the part about MC having lost their memory? Or perhaps I just forgot about it???

I just always played it as MC remembered everything from the start, so I haven't really considered that part of the story too much. But I think the idea that MC's memories slowly come back makes sense. Or that Solomon filled them in, since there's plenty of time where they're living together for him to do that. It seems odd that they wouldn't at least mention either of these things, though, even if they didn't show it happening.

I don't have a problem with the "time soup" theory in a more general sense. I've read about theories where time is not linear in our actual reality. I just don't like it as a storytelling mechanic. Lesson 16 really confused me. I didn't realize what had happened until I read it again and until I had seen other people's thoughts on it. MC went back in time, but then one MC just disappears? It made no sense to me.

The issue I have with the time travel stuff is that it's a mess to figure out. I think it's good that people can kind of work it out in a way that makes sense to them, but nobody's idea of the time travel shenanigans in this game are the same. Everybody's interpretation has been different from what I've seen. They never established any rules for their time travel, so it's just confusing.

Hmm. Okay, so here's how I think about it. In this case, the time travel is part of magic. And when you have magic in a story, you have to make up the rules for it yourself. My experience has been that if you're going to use magic as a plot device, you have to set out specific rules for how it works. Otherwise, just about anything could happen. That's the part I don't like. The rules aren't clearly defined, they're just soup and that means nothing to me.

They could say time is not linear. They could say that in the original version of the past, MC wasn't there and that means anything could have happened. Maybe the events were similar to what they were when MC was there. But they could have been completely different. Maybe Lucifer didn't even end up in Cocytus at all. It's impossible to say what happened in the original version of that timeline.

Then MC goes to the past and changes things. No matter how careful MC is, their presence alters the past irrevocably. And Solomon is there, too, so potentially altering things even more.

Okay, I could accept all that. But having everybody in the past feel that there's something special about MC's guest room? Having glimpses and memories of a future they couldn't possibly have any knowledge of? This is the part that makes no sense. Does this mean that those characters all had those same memories in the original version of the past, the one where MC didn't show up? If time is a soup, does that mean that all these characters are experiencing all those timelines simultaneously and can have memories of all of them all the time whether MC is present or not?

If that's the case, how come the characters didn't have any memories of MC in OG? Season three hinted that MC may have impacted them in the Celestial Realm, but those memories never manifested before that incident. If time is a soup, shouldn't they have had those memories of MC from the very start?

My issue is that they just threw this in there because they're trying to explain away what they've already done. It doesn't feel like they went into this story with any of these intentions (and like to be fair they probably didn't).

I just feel like they could have explained the time travel in a way that meshed better with the story we already had.

And you know while I don't think Solomon made them make pacts with him, I can see him suggesting it! I suspect they'd have been like um no not on your life buddy lol. I love him so much.

OH BOY well, anyway, you demanded rambles, so here it is lol!!! This is just me getting WAY too into these details. I don't usually do this because in the end, it doesn't really matter! I'm willing to overlook this stuff because I love the characters so much. And I also very much believe that everyone should interpret the story in the way that makes the most sense for them! This is just my personal opinion, I think everybody's opinion and interpretation is valid!

I've definitely seen stories that handle time travel much better. I never did get into Dr Who, but I have heard good things!

#there's plenty that this story has issues with #this is just one of the bigger ones imo #obey me #obey me nightbringer #🐆 anon #misc answers

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manonamora-if-reviews · 9 months

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GONCHAROV 2073 by sweetfish

============= Links

Play the game See other reviews of the game See other games by sweetfish

============= Synopsis

but it’s worth it, right? it’s going to be worth it. because tonight is the red carpet premiere of the debut film by artificial intelligence application MATTEO, model JWHJ-0715, and six thousand people are going to attend. and you’re going to override it. an interactive fiction piece about cinema, technology of the future, and doing outrageous shit with your friends.

============= Other Info

Goncharov 2073 is a Tape Window piece, submitted to the Goncharov Game Jam.

Status: Completed Genre: Unreality, Sci-Fi, Thriller

CW: Home invasion, violence of law enforcement, mild drug use, animated text.

============= Playthrough

First Played: Dec 2022 Last Played: 3-Sept-2023 Playtime: around 15min Rating: 4 /5 Thoughts: If Paul Verhoeven was in on the meme...

============= Review

Goncharov 2073 is a fairly short stylistic linear piece with one small choice, set in a not-so-far and not-so-implausible future, in which Goncharov is a movie written by an AI, rather than the illusive and very human Matteo JWHJ0715. At the movie premiere, you and a group of activists will try to derail the event as a protest. Will you truly succeed?

Spoilers ahead. It is recommended to play the game first. The review is based on my understanding/reading of the story.

Following Kon - not their real name - you oversea the smooth running of a project started months prior. Due to the significance of the event, the first ever screening of an AI generated movie, it is of the upmost importance things go the way they should. One small mistake and it will mean the end of the team. Things often go haywire on sabotage missions, and it is never when you think it might...

While the entry might seem to follow tropes of sabotage missions, delivering the tension at every turn, having the blasé handler, or things not going quite as planned, it is not much of the story or the meme that is most noteworthy, but the messages behind it. It should not be this surprising, with the author's other games often having quite a bit to say or critique about the state of things.

In the past years, there have been increasing talk about Artificial Intelligence and its use in different industry. Recently (as of this review), it has been found that Entertainment Companies have been looking into rendering the likeness of background actors and using AIs to render them in the final project (without needing them on set). The use of AI software to render text or visuals is becoming more common, even going as a replacement for employees. It feels a bit hard to remove this topical aspect from the story of this game: an AI has written this movie, an AI is controlling the likeness of a (probably) dead Martin Scorcese...

The onus is not really put on the AI here - it is just a tool (and not a reliable or great one at that, if the comments about the movie are to be trusted*). The game takes a hit at the companies behind it, the ones using the tool, the ones actually profiting in this endeavour. *or that could just be making fun of the meme, whose lore is often contradictory.

In-game, the rules around AI use regarding using the likeness of someone cannot be done without their consent, a fair system... if it wasn't an op-out one. The rules don't seem to apply to people who died before the system was put in place - ruling impending - which explains the presence of a holographic Martin Scorcese at the premiere. Still, you have a sense that regardless of the legality of the tool, those company would try to find a way to use it anyway...

The criticism goes even clearer with the reveal of the activists' manifesto: the technological advancement is not the problem, capital endeavours are - butchering, making almost a mockery of creativity with their generated "work".

On the other hand, the game does not shy away from critiquing the actions of the activist group, showing that the sabotage of the premiere would not only shed more light on the movie, but ensuring its popularity at the box office - people who might not have cared about would come in flock out of spite. Activism is hard: there is no one way of doing things, actions can backfire, and you could be going against organism so large your actions might not even make waves or get you quite a bit of retaliation. Replaying the game to see the different option of that choice may hammer on this aspect...

With its title reminiscing of the Blade Runner sequel title, or its dark and gritty UI (a bit à-la Metal Gear Solid - very very cool), and the messages above, the game gave me vibes of Paul Verhoeven movies.

#GONCHAROV 2073 #sweetfish #complete #interactive fiction #review #2022 #goncharov #unreality #sci-fi #thriller #tape window

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faroreswinds · 1 year

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Some Totk thoughts on spoilers.

The intro is such a lore dump, but at least far more interesting than BotW. However, man they just tell you a shit ton right off the bat.

That said, the tutorial is kinda slow and not as good. It's pretty linear, and I preferred the old king versus.... the first old king?

It's hard to take Rauru seriously when all I hear is Dimitri.

Also, sometimes the world seem too... bright. Like painfully bright and ugly. What happened? Was botw this way too?

How in the WORLD did Ganondorf manage to see Rauru's secret stone from so far away?????

It's weird how... disconnected this feels to botw, while also feeling just like more botw.

The Depths aren't really that interesting.

I HATE Ultrahand. But I love strapping rockets to Koroks.

The writing for this game kinda blows. It feels so.... I can't explain it, like a bad saturday morning cartoon?

Zelink shippers will love this one though.

#totk-spoilers

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foxingpeculiar · 1 year

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So I’ve been like neck-deep in Elden Ring lore since it came out and I’m fascinated by something.

I got bored a couple of years ago and started writing a lore doc for the Dark Souls trilogy. Really diving into it—I’m still picking at the DS3 section (kinda ran out of steam and never finished that part; really I wanna redo that whole section) and it’s already like 200 pages. And it’s not that it wasn’t kind of challenging to organize, but there’s a linearity to those games—a logical skeleton of progression on which to hang all the esoteric muscle tissue of explanation, y’know?

But in trying to think about how to do the same thing for Elden Ring, I keep having trouble. Like do you organize it by region and who you encounter there? Do you talk about the history and the major players (Marika/Radagon, Godfrey, the demigods) and THEN go through the current story of the game by region, exploring the members of each faction and their individual stories? Do you go through the six endings and explain the storylines involved in each one? A secret fourth thing I haven’t thought of?

Regardless of how you do it, any such document would have to be insanely cross-referential to make any sense. Take Ranni’s questline. It’s so woven through so many other different parts of the story, you have to explain so many other things (the Nocturnal cities, Radan’s whole deal, the Night of the Black Knives, which means also Godwyn, Marika/Radagon, the Numen, etc), when do you talk about that? How do you put all that together in a coherent way? And you can’t like, set up all that stuff first, cos you run into the same problem in reverse—you need to understand Ranni to understand a lot of those things. And all of it is like that. It’s hard to isolate and explain any one bit of it.

The game is rich with narrative, positively fucking bursting with it: distinct characters with individual psychological motivations, complex enmeshment of distinct cause and effect that reflects those characterizations—this is a very story heavy game. But beyond even that typical FromSoft obscurity where the actual plot is hidden in what would normally be lore, this one does something with storytelling structure. There IS that cause-and-effect chronology to it, but that’s not how the presentation is arranged—the best way I can currently explain it is that it’s taking advantage of the open-world format in creating a story that’s discovered in space, not time (I’m working on refining that language). Something that 1) would be really difficult to achieve in any other medium, and 2) makes it very difficult to translate into something like a written summary that is, by the nature of language, linear.

#personal #video games #elden ring #from software #narratology #academic shit

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nagirambles · 1 year

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The idea that Carla is looking into alternate universes as well as her universe's future is fascinating and I think it would've made a lot of sense. It could've explained why her future-seeing ability is so spotty - she's seeing bits and pieces from a literally uncountable amount of universes, so maybe her brain can't process it all or is just trying to protect itself from overload. (It would also tie into Edens Zero's lore, which started relying super heavily on alt universes recently)

Yes, that's a cool thought! I do feel Mashima plays it too safe with Carla in FT by making her not do anything or tell anyone about the visions she sees. I mean, I get that's it's spotty, shocking, and a little hard to explain, but she puts it into words well enough in narration. People are always annoyed by Carla keeping her future sight to herself, especially after bragging about learning how to look well into them before Tenrou.

I feel that does Carla some disservice, but I think mashima was just hesitant to go about the actual future-foresight concept back then. It would make FT so messy on top of the already-present magic, you know? (And it's also why I find it interesting how Rebecca looks like human form Carla and also has a future-related power in a way, and Rebecca's powers are very fully utilized in EZ.)

Mashima is exploring the idea of different worlds in 100yq, and I do wonder how Carla's sight powers can factor into that. There hasn't been anything up till now, since Carla's powers are mostly used to give us scary foreshadows like in Tenrou and GMG, instead of any real developments. She never makes genuine use of her visions, and though that gives her a contrast to Shagotte, it does feel like a missed opportunity.

I do like Carla's powers being so spotty, despite everything. It kept the FT story linear. I do wish it could be used in comedic or less serious context, though, like maybe it would be funny to have a scenario where she sees an adult Wendy holding a child, and being so baffled about it until they make it to Edolas and she breaths a sigh of relief realizing it's just Edo Wendy carrying Greige, you know? There'd be fun shenanigans.

#it's an ask #fairy tail #carla #it's a headcanon #i'm reaching

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jackiebrackettt · 2 years

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reasons the time traveller is ran:

putting under cut bc it's a lil long lol anyway tftsmp spoilers ahead !! also pls don't start discourse on this post o(-(

meta stuff outof the way first ^_^ - karl and ranboo were working together on the story so one of ranboo's characters playing a bigger part makes sense and alsooo it's been said that ran was supposed to have a bigger role + it's implied he'll be coming back (now from what we've seen of the otherside it could be due to that? but also why ran specifically when.. yeah. Things I Will Get Into Later On)

FUCK guys this is hard my brain just does not work lineraryly. sorry i'm trying hold on

i think overall some of the reasons why it could be cranboo are why it's actually ran if that makes sense? i think a lot of ccranboo's hints are trying to say things about endermen as a whole and how that fits into how cranboo is

(this is like... not me trying to discredit the ranboo is the time traveller theories i've had this thought that ranboo is trying to show us the nature of other endermen and how that connects to ranboo's philosophy for a while. so that's bleeding into this theory and it might not always be clear bc it's just so ingrained in my understanding of ranboo's lore that i forget it's also just a theory. sorry ajdj)

so ranboo and dream have this connection but so do ranbob and dream kinda - if dream and dreamxd are also connected then "endermen being connected to dreamxd and therefore dream" kinda makes ran as the time traveller work too right? i know that's a point ppl are using for cranboo being the time traveller so i'm not explaining it further

plus the whole indesciveness: again, i think ccranboo was kinda implying that's an endermen trait as a whole so ran being indescicive and losing himself to the memory loss works in that sense!

ran having some understanding of what karl can do but that being after his own linear time (or he's broken free from whatever dreamxd did to him/when dreamxd "got rid of him" he just dropped him in the pit era) ran "it doesn't matter who wins this place is going down anyway" could have been through similar time travel situations as karl and knows that these things end in tragedy. if he's been going through this for a while, he's potentially gained some sense of apathy + since he knows he won't stick around doesn't really care how ominous he sounds bc if anyone figures out there's something Off about him he'll just go back to the inbetween/otherside anyway

but yes, ran recognising himself in karl whether he was still a time traveller or not, makes the "see you soon" make a lot of sense! if he's still a time traveller he could be under the impression that at Some Point dreamxd hires someone else on and they'll work together. if he's not, he could know about the otherside having access to the memories and could be referencing that... or he's hoping karl will piece things together and figure out it used to be him and come after him for more info. who fucking knows not me i'm just throwing theories to the wind ^_^

this is all i have right now so i'll just give it you now if you have questions feel free to ask bc god knows i did not explain this all that well at all o(-(

#brackett.liveblogs.

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shihalyfie · 3 years

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Adventure and 02′s production philosophy and its impact on the storywriting (or: “a series made with love is best understood with love”)

It’s hard to really judge a series too much by its production details, but Adventure and 02′s staff has been very open about discussing background and production to the point we’re able to involve it in discussions. In fact, to a certain degree, we’ve gotten rather reliant on said production notes to explain too many things that weren’t clearly depicted or stated in the series -- I’ve spent a fair share of time complaining about how frustratingly subtle this series is -- and you see a lot of strange conspiracy theories or myths about production that circulate in all sorts of different directions. Undeniably, it’s a series that spoke to a ton of people, but there are still so many things that have perplexed people over the last two decades, and when you ask someone “what’s good about this series?”, people struggle to say it in clear words, often only able to resort to a rather oversimplified explanation like “the character development is good” (but what is character development, anyway?). A lot of times, some small things that initially don’t seem to track have led to some pretty wild, far-reaching fanbase-endorsed theories, when in fact the actual reality of the situation is much more mundane.

I think, in general, the best way to “understand” Adventure and 02 is simply to have an open mind about everything in regards to it. This is something I can only say because we currently have more than enough evidence, given production testimony, that this is the kind of series that was made with that kind of philosophy -- I will not shy away from the fact that there are things in this world that are made maliciously, meant to “one-up” the audience or using half-baked explanations as a way to cover up the fact that it wasn’t well thought-through. But in the case of Adventure and 02 specifically, almost everything we have heard about it is to the contrary, and, in practice, I find one can get much more out of the series by adjusting one’s mindset to think about what they’re looking out for and not, because once you have, the beauty of the series opens itself up even in places you’re not looking for it.

Let’s talk a little about the production philosophy behind Adventure and 02 and how it shaped a series that left such an impact on so many kids, and what we can learn from it!

“Something important that we wanted to tell the kids who were watching”

The two most important figures to know when it comes to Adventure and 02 production are its producer, Seki Hiromi (who would eventually go on to produce Tamers and Frontier as well, along with being supervising consultant on Kizuna), and its director, Kakudou Hiroyuki. I would say that both of these figures are probably the most influential people in shaping the series as we know it, but in different ways -- Kakudou was the one most responsible for building the world of Adventure and 02 and setting up the standard for having all sorts of background worldbuilding details that weren’t shown in the series, whereas Seki was the one who pushed for them to include family backgrounds and things that ought to be relatable to the average kid, so that they could empathize with the problems shown on screen.

Both of them had different ways of going at it, which is all for the better because it allowed the story to be enriched from both sides, but the common thread between the two was that they wanted to use this opportunity to “show the kids important things”:

Kakudou is the kind of person I would say is very “media literate” -- he was very well-read in books and well-versed in cinema, not just Japanese but also internationally, and also very in-tune with the Internet by the standards of a director in 1999. (Part of the reason we know so much about Digimon production now is that he still keeps up with everything on social media and throws in a few comments here and there.) His comments on the final episode of Adventure include a list of all of the things he credited for inspiring him during this series, and he later stated that he had a goal of conveying all of those “interesting things” to the kids watching, so that they could also find it interesting. So in other words, Adventure and 02 were basically his love letter to everything in media that he’d come to appreciate.

Seki was the one who pushed for humans to be involved in the series so that the audience could empathize with them, and for all of the “real world worldbuilding” like the kids’ family backgrounds. She’s also functionally responsible for the base premise of 02 at all, having been thoroughly alarmed by the story of a young boy skipping grades into university (to the point this plotline resurfaced a whole 20 years later in Kizuna). It can be said that the heavy “human drama” elements and family background emphasis continuing into Tamers and Frontier are probably her doing, and in terms of Kizuna, she also was responsible for personally vetting the dialogue to keep the kids in character, and it was said that it came off like she loved the characters as if they were her own children.

The result is that, firstly, Adventure and 02 is a series that is very well-thought through. Ridiculously well thought-through, in both background lore and character backgrounds and mentality. So many surface-level criticisms of Adventure and 02 come with an accusation that the writers were “lazy” or “did a writing cop-out”, but we actually have more evidence that the Adventure and 02 staff thought out so many details in the background that they kept forgetting that they hadn’t actually told the audience about it yet. (No, seriously, there’s a thread of official staff repeatedly forgetting that they may not have actually outright mentioned one of the background details they’d planned out in advance.) Even despite all of the extra information we’ve gotten since in the drama CDs and Animation Chronicle and such, it seems there’s still way more information that was planned out that we still haven’t learned about, and it’s presumably why there are so many little things that are too consistent to be coincidental and yet were still never actually stated. It may have been awful at communicating those details well, but those details were most definitely there, and both series have a shocking amount of consistency in adhering to them.

The second is that not only did the producer and director want to convey those important things, they also encouraged the rest of the staff to do it too:

One of the concepts behind the prior series was for us to pack in as many interesting things that we’d seen, heard about, or read about as we could into it, so for 02, we thought, what else could we put in beyond even that?, and so we looked over what we needed to have, and put in all the things we could so that they wouldn’t be left out, and the story became a multi-layered one, overlapping and accelerating. It was to the point that, after we’d gone through 02‘s story, the scriptwriters told me that they’d worn everything they had out to the ground.

So in other words, Adventure and 02 were basically a sort of potluck where they encouraged everyone on staff to come up with interesting things that they wanted to show the kids, and throw it all in -- and it’s presumably why the second half of 02 is so “crowded” (more on this later), because you had everything from all of the writers on staff adding another thing into the potluck, until everyone could get it out of their system. Yoshimura Genki, one of 02′s head writers, said outright that she used the famous 02 episode 23 to convey her concerns about some very real and horrible things happening to kids at the time, and it’s easy to imagine that all of the other writers and staff members were given similar encouragement to do so. Even the (in)famous 02 episode 13 was something originally created from Kakudou seeing Dagomon, thinking he was really cool and wanting to make an episode about him, and remembering that Konaka was good at Lovecraft and basically going “he’s gonna love this, we should get him to do an episode.” In fact, it’s said many times that a huge attitude behind production was to “not be ashamed of anything” and try whatever they wanted.

Which means that the result is a series that isn’t actually all that well-organized in plot or structure -- 02′s plot writing is of course an infamous pile of knots, but even those who are willing to be a bit more critical of Adventure often point out that its plot is simply more linear, being basically a video game-esque boss rush of “evil enemy, followed by even more evil enemy”. Most people do not watch Adventure or 02 for the actual plot writing. What they do watch it for is all of this stuff mentioned above -- that all of these different people on staff were given the question “what do you want to say to this audience of kids?” and took the opportunity to say something fun or meaningful. And, hence, why it’s best to understand Adventure and 02 not necessarily by the minutiae of its plot, but rather, “what was this series trying to say?”

Writing the series as it went along, under massive constraints

In general, Japanese anime is produced as it goes along -- even the character writing is subject to change depending on the voice actors’ performance (this was cited for Adventure specifically, but it’s well-known common practice for non-adaptation anime in general). That said, Adventure didn’t even have a guarantee of how long it was going to be at first -- it was generally expected that it’d be a one-year series (like most Toei series), but they weren’t even sure about it. This resulted in a very “loose mindset”, in which they decided to basically wing it, and the only thing determined for sure was that the epilogue (that we now know as the 02 epilogue) was going to be at the end of it.

As I mentioned above, scrutinizing the plot of Adventure too closely reveals that it’s not actually that coherent of a narrative, just more linear -- and, even by official admission, Hikari wasn’t planned to be the eighth child at first nor was the Tokyo arc of episodes planned to be that long, and yet this entire section is one of the most famous parts of Adventure. A lot of the best parts of Adventure and 02 seem to be the result of sheer accident...

...Or was it accident? Can you say that “going in with a positive mindset and a desire to do something meaningful” is accident? Even if you didn’t plan things out from the beginning, if you go into everything with an attitude of wanting to make the best out of something and make the best out of opportunities you see and hear about, is that really an accident? Couldn’t you perhaps say that this kind of thing is why Adventure and 02 hit so well with people to begin with?

By the time we get to 02, 02 started off as a very different series from the get-go, and it’s always struck me as very odd that people act like 02 was tacked on and didn’t have nearly the exact same staff. It was Kakudou himself who petitioned for 02 to start off with a light atmosphere, and the series itself was fundamentally meant to be addressing the new concepts of “relationships” instead of Adventure’s “self-assertion”, and explore concepts that hadn’t been covered in Adventure. The reason 02 is so different from Adventure is exactly because the staff didn’t want to rehash things for another year, and instead wanted to take the opportunity to cover stuff Adventure didn’t. And the fact that 02 is lighter than Adventure at first, but quickly gets darker, is also by design:

The story had gotten rather heavy by the time of Digimon Adventure, so we decided to make it come off as brighter. And then, it actually ended up getting even heavier somewhere down the line, but there was no way we could just avoid depicting important life problems.

Which is also a similar sentiment reflected by Seki herself, when thinking about how her suggested plotline ended up making the story darker:

An overly intelligent child, prone to falling into loneliness, cut off from his friends and family, and with a Digimon slowly coming and staying close to him…I remember that kind of image forming. We were supposed to have been aiming to have them going to the Digital World with the mood of a picnic, but the fact it didn’t end up so easy for them may have been my fault…or so I remember thinking as I reflected on it.

02 didn’t get dark for the sheer sake of getting dark, and in fact it’s not like the staff necessarily wanted it to get that way, but there were so many meaningful things that they wanted to tell the audience of kids that they allowed it to. It’s also kind of odd how the fanbase has this idea of there somehow being staff conflicts or people bickering in order to produce 02, but there’s no indication of this at all -- at most, 02 unusually had two head writers instead of one, Yoshimura Genki and Maekawa Atsushi, but it was even said that they had a clear division of roles, with Yoshimura on the “villains” side and Maekawa on the “protagonists” side, and there’s no sign of conflict.

(A lot of people also tend to give more credit to Yoshimura since the villains are some of the most masterfully crafted part of both Adventure or 02, but this is still somewhat reductive; Maekawa is very open about the fact that he was rather inexperienced during 02′s production, and considering the fact that the 02 protagonists aren’t nearly as underdeveloped as the fanbase claims they are, and Maekawa would later go on to write a PreCure entry that basically saved the franchise and a very well-acclaimed Super Sentai entry, both with many parallels to 02, his role should not be discounted, especially since 02 is often liked by its fanbase for the duality between both its lighter and darker sides.)

So we had the staff basically on a roll of throwing in everything important they wanted to say to the kids, both “fun” and “meaningful”, and then, two things impacted the way it ended: firstly, they weren’t allowed to go with their initial proposal for the final enemy because it was too gory, and secondly, the decision was made midway through that they would not be making a third Adventure series, and would have to end more quickly than expected.

I think, whenever you hear stories of “we were originally going to do this but couldn’t,” people generally tend to assume that they should have done the original plan (especially if the original plan was particularly gory or brutal, because everyone loves to think that edgy is better), but, perhaps fittingly for a series that’s about not drowning in past regrets of “what should have been” and learning to move on, the staff has never really shown any indications of really, thoroughly regretting any of the decisions they made for 02, even if the second half came out messy. If you look at that original proposal they had for 02′s final enemy, in which it would be an enemy “reduced to an idea”, it certainly explains a lot about why BelialVamdemon was defeated by the power of sheer positivity in the final ending -- obviously that would make a lot more sense with a conceptual embodiment of malice, instead of a returning enemy from the prior series -- but at the same time, that loss of that concept led to the creation of Oikawa, Archnemon, and Mummymon, which have consistently been praised as one of the most compelling parts of 02 and its finale, and Yoshimura herself even gushed about the concepts they got. So it’s not “we couldn’t do what we wanted,” it’s more “we couldn’t do what we initially wanted and made something out of it, arguably an even better something in certain ways.”

And as for the lack of the third Adventure series, all indications point to the fact that this was something by personal choice of the staff, not by higher-up mandate -- not that I enjoy speculating about other people I don’t know, but if you actually follow what Kakudou has said about his work on Adventure and 02, and the fact that he considers his later work on X-Evolution to functionally be getting everything else out of his system (even saying that he liked Bandai doing a lot of the work for him), Kakudou doesn’t seem to want to be the main leader of his projects for the most part, mostly seeing Adventure and 02 as the one time he got to dump all of his one-time ideas that he personally wanted to accomplish, and otherwise being satisfied doing episode direction work for others -- testimony as to the handoff between 02 and Tamers consistently depicts him as expressing sentiments similar to “please let me have a break.” (As of this writing, he still does work for Toei, but has never been lead director on a full series since.) Kakudou didn’t like having to deal with a bunch of increasingly canon-contradictory works because, as an infamously detail-oriented and consistent person, dealing with that kind of thing didn’t really seem to agree with him, and moreover it’s understandable that he (and the other staff) would feel that it was better to end it there instead of overstaying its welcome and stretching things out.

Certainly, when you look at the second half of 02, its plot is “crowded” in nearly every direction (not as incomprehensible as people like to claim it is, but definitely going in a lot of places at once). The infamous 02 epilogue is probably the biggest example of the disparity between staff thought and how it came off; remember that it was one of the first things decided about the series at all, meaning that the staff was deliberating over it and under the impression they were building up to it for a whole two years, but when it finally dropped everyone was blindsided and even often made accusations of the staff coming up with it at the last minute while drunk or something (not helped by the staff clearly being so fixated on their own production that they even included details that were completely incomprehensible to anyone not aware of the potential third series plotline). Yet, ever since then, many people who have sat down with it have figured out that it’s not that incomprehensible and that many of the aspects of it make sense on a theoretical level or are foreshadowed in the series -- it’s just that they tacked it onto the end of an excessively crowded finale with no warning and didn’t sufficiently communicate their reasoning for it, requiring people to spend the next 20 years puzzling it out and Kizuna to come around to drop even more clues, and also failed to realize that one of humanity’s most die-on-a-hill issues about media (shipping) would make people a lot more offended than they likely intended. (PreCure has successfully pulled off “adult timeskip” epilogues in recent years, and they’ve all been received well, but the difference is that they actually pad out the episode with a proper lead-up instead of just chucking it in your face right after Oikawa dies.)

And, ultimately, the staff has never shown any signs of having regret over this. Kakudou takes the stance that they were able to close out 02 in a good way, despite all of the circumstances. The rest of the staff, including Seki herself, and overall Toei as a whole, has doubled down further on the latter half of 02′s plot events and the epilogue’s place in canon despite the infamous controversy around it, and I have to say that I do at least understand why they’re like this when you consider the circumstances and their likely feelings on it -- regardless of everything, they’re proud of the work they did on it, and even if not everything went according to original plan, they loved taking the opportunity to use the sandbox to express things they may not have been able to in their other projects, and the epilogue was their baby that they’d been raising for two years. It’s the ultimate question of “satisfying the creators vs. satisfying the audience” -- not to say that I completely agree with the call to be this unaware of how people were going to read this, because it’s not good to blindside your audience or hurt their feelings, but at the same time, it’s said that you will never be able to satisfy an audience at all if you’re not satisfying yourself first. And in the end, despite everything, that something in Adventure and 02, built out of that earnest desire to say something, came across in some ways and touched the hearts of kids all over the world.

So the result was that the Adventure and 02 staff did everything they wanted, got it out of their system, and handed an imperfect but carefully-crafted baton to Seki, who decided that it was a good opportunity to do something completely new, and deliberately picked Tamers’s director Kaizawa on the grounds that he’d had no experience with the series before. Remembering that Seki was on Adventure and 02 and was clearly happy with it, her decision to do something new with Tamers was just that -- to do something new -- and it’s honestly kind of saddening that the series’ respective fanbases treat each other with significantly less respect than their actual creators do, since both series still shared a lot of staff, Kakudou went on to be an episode director for Tamers (and even calls it a “masterpiece”), and Konaka clearly has a lot of respect for his predecessor series as well, with Tamers being its own product made with conscientiousness and a desire to make things meaningful for kids (Kaizawa himself has expressed a lot of strong opinions on this topic). A lot of anti-02 folks have often spread a conspiracy theory that Tamers came out of a “writer revolt” because they hated being “restricted” by 02 and wanted “more freedom” -- but that is completely contrary to the above evidence where 02′s production process arguably gave the writers too much freedom, and Tamers head staff was picked deliberately due to their lack of connection to the prior series so that they could do something conversely new and fresh...

One thing that’s interesting about Kizuna is that its director, Taguchi Tomohisa, has spoken very often about his love for the original series, right down to respecting its ability to cover very serious topics. His recruitment philosophy for the movie also seemed to have “being a fan of the series” as a big plus factor, and he moreover shows a lot of respect for the staff members involved in production, both the people he recruited and the long-timers like Seki. “Being a fan of the series” doesn’t necessarily constitute skill by itself, but there’s a lot of similar sentiments in “let’s make something that shows respect and does something interesting and important” and “let’s make sure the staff gets to do something without regrets” also seem to be pretty huge factors in consideration here, rather similar to the original series...

What this means in terms of understanding the series

I do not think that, just because a creator clearly had good reasoning for putting in what they did, the audience necessarily has to accept that. It may have had good intentions, but "intentions” don’t justify things coming off the way they do, or at least, the 20/20 hindsight can make us all get together and think “if that was your intention, there were probably a million better ways to execute that.” And, as someone writing this blog, there are times I really think “if you could have please just thought a little harder about making those ideas clearer so we wouldn’t have to have these arguments...”

However, I do think there is something illuminating about the idea of “adjusting one’s mindset” in response to the above revelations, and going in with an open mind when trying to get something out of the series for one’s own sake. I mean this truly in the sense of encouraging others to find something interesting and new -- this is not a blog I write expecting people to see things the same way I do, as much as I like encouraging people to look out for things they might have not noticed beforehand.

I started writing for this blog regularly last year (I hadn’t even planned to start regularly doing it) after a rewatch of Adventure and 02 with some friends and some honest discussion about the series after it, and one thing we all agreed to do when we did that rewatch was “we are not going to go in with the intent to criticize it.” That is to say, we decided to throw out all of those sentiments that you have to “admit” everything wrong with any series when even bringing up its name -- which is not to say that we’re glossing over potential criticisms or their validity, just “we’re doing this rewatch to have fun and to enjoy and appreciate things, and that will be our priority going in.” After making that agreement, something really magical happened, and it was that we started catching things without even looking for it, things that had clearly been planned but hidden in the background, or things that were caught by one person in the group watch chat and pointed out to the others, and it turned out that a huge chunk of the “criticisms” we might have originally gone in with actually did have answers, we just hadn’t realized it because we were too brainwashed into the mindset of dismissing things as “well, that part’s just bad writing.”

Of course, we’ve seen bad writing -- it’s not like we were going out of our way to absolve everyone for every mistake -- but that base mindset allowed us to better appreciate things we might have missed earlier that weren’t immediately apparent. I’ve said many times that I don’t think the things I write on here are that huge speculation -- in fact, in writing meta, I often throw out a lot of stuff because I think “yeah that’s too absurd, let’s just stick with the simplest explanation” -- as much as I just thread things that are in the series but are frustratingly subtle, because I’m taking things that seem like throwaway details and going “hm, well, instead of just dropping it the first time like ‘probably bad writing’, let’s maybe look at this one more time and see if there was a reason?” And those reasons present themselves surprisingly easily without even that much effort, and after a while you come to realize: this is a really consistent series!

It’s actually very rare that things outright contradict themselves, because it really does not take long to piece together a rational explanation (because those things are in the series, just buried)! This was a detail-oriented series that had a ridiculous amount of attention paid to it, even if it didn’t communicate that! Whenever I post meta, I often get comments from people who say outright that they’d had the same impressions, they just didn’t know how to put it in words! There’s been multiple cases of people independently coming up with readings of the series that the fanbase historically dismissed as a reach, only for official to come out and confirm they were absolutely correct, and a common thread between all of these is that they were referenced in the series, it’s just that people kept wanting to dismiss them because “there’s no way they’d be that detailed”! A truly contradictory series falls apart when you subject it to higher scrutiny (even when you’re being optimistic about it), but there’s a strange thing about Adventure and 02 in that they actually fit together even more when you look closely -- and, again, things start coming in when you don’t even expect it, just because of your mindset.

I suppose the take-home here with all of this is that a series like this is best understood when you have an open mind and a desire to listen to what it has to say. As I said before: Adventure and 02 (and especially 02) are not series that most people watch for the plot, and, to be honest, it’s clear that plot wasn’t even a priority for all of the staff in the first place as much as it was about conveying important ideas and sentiments. And I’m not going to say whether not prioritizing plot or not is a “good” or “bad” thing -- for some people, that kind of thing is understandably very important, and a series like 02 can be very frustrating to deal with as a result! -- as much as, for those who have a genuine interest in sitting down and understanding these series, I cannot recommend scrutinizing the plot too much simply because it will not get you very far, and, to be honest, whenever I see a lot of analyses of Adventure and 02, I really do often wonder if they actually understand the core of the series and the sentiment and emotion behind it, or whether they’re just doing it on a technical surface level so they can say they did (which is usually partially as a bid to passive-aggressively dunk on later series to prove Adventure is superior). The entire concept of objectivity is a lie in itself, but this is not a series that you can get much out of if you try to evaluate it with that kind of detachment; it’s a series that spoke to you through theme and passion first and foremost, and to receive that message and “enjoy” the series is most effectively done when you detach all of those doubts and approach the series without malice.

(By the way, this is not me claiming I’m inherently a “better” analyst just because I also prefer to use this mentality when approaching it; it’s just that I’m a bit frustrated that this kind of approach is so hard to find, despite Adventure’s popularity, because losing out on the heart causes so much rich potential to get lost. This is also the reason I recommend @analyzingadventure‘s work so much -- I’m so sorry about tagging you for the third time here! -- because they’re as positive about Adventure as I am about 02, and their insight and thought into the series coming from the angle of “appreciating” it with genuine positivity is something I believe is truly valuable in a climate where this is very hard to find.)

And this is what I mean, “to approach it without malice”. I don’t mean that you should go in prepared to never have criticisms of it ever again, nor that you should just absolve everything and assume that everything is fine, but rather that going in with a mindset of “we’re going to look for things to love” instead of “we’re going to ‘look past’ the bad” alone has the magical effect of shifting your entire view of the series, way more than I would say with any other. And, again, that’s only something that can happen when the base product was made with this much sentiment and honesty to begin with, and moreover fighting against the mindset to criticize is tough when we’re dealing with a fanbase that’s acted like being “fair” requires “acknowledging” the faults of everything in the same breath you praise it until the horse is beaten for two decades and everyone’s exhausted. (And then yells at you if you dare criticize anything that’s put on the fanbase’s pedestal.) It’s kind of the question of: should this really be about media criticism and whether it’s “objectively” good or bad, especially since this has been brought up so often for two decades now, or might it be better to think about how to have a more positive experience with something that you may not have had before?

Once you get rid of that mindset of “critical by default”, you start to realize things that the series did knock out of the park, or were exceptional, that got too obscured by the distractions of fixating on its plot -- 02 is a plot mess for sure, but I have never seen any series that is so sincere and earnest about its actual themes and things it wanted to say, and it’s something I love it even more for. And buried under that criticism of everyone not getting “equal attention” from an evolutionary forms perspective is the fact that, from a story perspective, they deliberately went out of their way to make sure everyone gets mostly equal focus, which is something that sticks out especially when you start watching other long-running series that aren’t as good about this, and although it’s not completely perfect by any means, they do a damn good job keeping everyone in the 8- and 6-person groups relevant to the very end, which is pretty impressive! And, in the end, you end up having a much healthier relationship with the series -- again, it’s not glossing over everything to pretend nothing is wrong per se, but rather, you’re able to appreciate it and love it for what it is, instead of constantly feeling like you’re making up for its “mistakes”.

#digimon #digimon adventure #digimon adventure 02 #digimon adventure last evolution kizuna #shihameta

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condorclaw · 3 years

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Why It’s Hard To Understand c!Technoblade

Note: These are my own thoughts and beliefs. This isn’t meant to be hate or critical at all, but rather trying to figure out why Technoblade’s actions are harder for some people to understand. I’m always open to friendly discussion, as some people might have noticed things that I haven’t!

After completion note: This could be slightly hard to read due to my jumbled thoughts, and the sudden realization I had while working on this, but I tried to explain everything as best as I could! This is now not even c!Technoblade critical, but rather Minecraft critical /j

A quick lookover at the cast of the Dream SMP will definitely show how many unique characters there are within the story, and that’s only based on appearances. Diving deeper into each of them, they all have their own morals, backstories, and relationships that drive what they do.

There’s another factor that makes each of them unique too, and that’s how they tell their stories. Some are more reactionary, while others take time to work out their own feelings and thoughts. Imagine it as a scale:

While some characters are more introspective and express their feelings and motivations more through words (ex. Ranboo, Ghostbur), other characters share their own morals through their actions, be them extreme or subtle (ex. Sapnap, Dream). Of course, those aren’t the only two options, with the storytelling being a sliding line where there is a middle ground for some characters to display their own feelings through a combination of words and actions (ex. Jack and Tommy).

Now, this isn’t saying that Ranboo can’t act on his morals, or that Dream can’t use his words (we’ve all seen them do both very well). It’s more so a representation of the storytelling they’re most common with. All the ones who use words to express their feelings have backed it up with actions, and the ones who’ve acted on their thoughts have shared reflections on it with words. One way of storytelling is not better than the other, and it’s rather good to have multiple ways of seeing how characters react to situations through their common/preferred method of expression.

However, when it comes to Technoblade, he exists on the scale in a very weird way.

While he can appear on the scale, he doesn’t exactly fit within the similar boundaries of other characters. He acts, but rarely backs it up with almost any words. When he does use words, while they make sense, there’s too little to connect them to the full extent of what he does.

There’s another character who’s also in the same spot as Techno on the scale: Phil, who does tend to act in the same way Techno does, also having the same explaining gap as Techno.

So why do I understand Phil’s reasoning more than Techno?

It’s because of something else outside of words and actions, just rather character explanation. It’s an overlying trait.

Phil’s overlying trait is that he’s centuries old and has seen loved ones die. With this knowledge, it’s much easier to come to an understanding of where Phil’s own thoughts lie and why he acts the way he does. Of course this trait isn’t applicable to all his actions, but it allows us to bridge gaps between his disconnected actions and come to an understanding of why he might believe in specific ideals and morals.

Overlying traits can change though, Ranboo being an example of this. At the beginning, his trait was memory issues, which caused his feelings to be affected by his condition, and seek out those who he remembered to be good. It’s why he had the memory books, and why they were used to bridge parts of his own thinking and actions. Currently, his overlying trait has shifted to wanting peace. It’s through this why he takes his alliances and friends into consideration when making decisions, because all he wants in the end is the best result for everybody to benefit from.

Techno doesn’t appear to have a current overlying trait that originated from anywhere. “Destroy the government” could possibly be seen as this, but it’s more of an overlying statement than an overlying trait, something that’s rooted in mostly words rather than in a fact. “I’m a person too” could also be it, but that thought is rarely covered, with Techno currently leaning towards a more militaristic and authoritarian mindset.

At this point, there doesn’t seem to be a clear overlying trait for Techno’s character that connects his actions together. Techno rarely goes into his own mindset, rather acting upon what he believes in the moment without exploring it in a coherent way. With characters like him who don’t use their words for solid explanation, visuals are especially important to convey how a character is feeling outside of said words, which Techno tends to do.

Now, this isn’t Techno’s fault in being unable to convey his specific emotions to his audience. IRL limitations are in the way of that, such as cc!Techno streaming very infrequently. With cc!Ranboo, he streams every day, so there’s time for him to introspect and to do what he wants to do in terms of lore. Minecraft is also extremely limited in specific emotions of players, which is why crouching is the closest thing to conveying fear or playfulness, and the arm motion is used for waving or expressing anger.

For c!Techno, facial expressions would be the most useful tool in explaining his internal thoughts, but he can’t show them like how he could in animation or live-action. As seen in the content created by the fans, famous Technoblade scenes will have a wide variety of facial expressions, since that would be the visual focus of his character.

I believe the reason it’s so hard for people for understand Techno as well as they could, is because he doesn’t express his feelings through words or actions, but rather a third category: his expressions, which we are unable to see due to the limitations of the game.

Actions don’t always equal true feelings, and while words are important, they can be inconsistent with how one expresses them.

So while this is the more linear form that we can expect:

In reality, it’s actually more like this:

And with the third category, the previous linear form is rather inaccurate within itself. Yes, this makes things more complicated in terms of working out how each character can portray their own morals and ideals.

But isn’t that what Dream SMP is about? Absolute insanity wrapped in different perspectives that might not be as clear as they seem?

TLDR: Technoblade is hard for me (and possibly many others) to understand due to the most important factor of his storytelling, facial expressions, being limited to nonexistent within the game Dream SMP is set in.

(Thank you so much for reading this if you got this far! I really appreciate it!)

#please read this I am literally such a genius /j #nah just kidding jdjfhfh but I'd really appreciate it if you took a look! I think it might help a lot of people with seeing something new i #terms of conveying story!#dream smp #dsmp #dream smp analysis #dsmp analysis #c!technoblade #c!technoblade analysis #c!techno analysis #my post #I KEEP BANGING THESE OUT IN ONE GO HELP MEEEE

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xenosgirlvents · 3 years

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Hey can I rant to you about how I find the mono-focus on the very much human dominated forces of Chaos as the real bad guy of 40k to be honestly even worse than the Imperiaal focus? You know what I always wanted in 40k? Lizardmen, Alien Ogres, Space Dwarfs, Skaven, and some Vampire Counts to the Necrons’ Tomb Kings. In WHFB only three playable armies were human (five if you count the undead as human) and WHFB had a larger number of independent factions than 40k. Meanwhile in 40k about half of all the armies in the game are Imperial and another large chunk are the equally insufferable legions of Chaos as the two factions circlejerk over who is the more racist and xenophobic. While in FB you had the annoying emphasis on Chaos as the one true threat (which is increasingly being emphasised in 40k including the awful, awful retcons they want to do to the war in heaven where what was supposed to be the xenos equivalent to the horus heresy gets “akshually the real bad guy is chaos lawl” shoved into it), humanity was just a part of the struggle against it or other forces such as Undeath or the Greenskins. Not even the biggest part, with the High Elves, Lizardmen, and Dwarfs all bearing more of the burden than the Empire or Bretonnia. Meanwhile, while theoretically 40k is a setting where non-chaos bad guys are more relevant and more able to defeat Chaos and take over as the one; the non-humans actually do less. Chaos is the only bad guy faction allowed to have permanent wins, to be undefeatable without any asterisks marks and whose fanboys (including GW’s writing team) love to endlessly circlejerk about how opposing Chaos is useless because they’ll get you in the end. And how 40k is really about humanity’s inevitably doomed succumbing to Chaos and how the Chaos Space Marines and Daemons are the destined victors and blah-de-blah. Any time an effective counter to chaos is written about in any other faction’s lore; the Chaos favouratism gets to show with “akshually chaos overcomes this because phhbbbbbt” with eye-rolling descriptions of how Chaos overwhelms say; the Tyranid hive mind by scattering it with the great rift, or how the death guard can infect nurgle, or how actually Tzeentch only pretended to lose to the Eldar or how Slaanesh actually pulled a fast one over the T'au. Nobody is allowed to be more of a threat than the Chaos Space Marines and Daemons even though the former are literally a bunch of spoiled paramilitary stormtroopers salty about the Emperor saying they weren’t allowed to rule over normal humanity like god-kings and the latter have lore that is fifty million variations of “lol inevitable victory”. The Chaos Space Marines are so lacking in numbers, so incapable of large scale cooperation not riven with petty fratricidal personal rivalries, so bereft of a functional logistical train, and are lead by such an insufferable band of edgy cartoon villains that they should honestly be little more than a nuisance that the Imperium only focuses on because of their symbolic threat. An annoyance compared to the much more organised and vastly more numerous and far better at exponentially scaling up power of the Necrons, the Tyranids, or the Orks. One that is carrying out an empty, pointless rivalry sparked largely over a bunch of stormtroopers being furious about not being allowed to be kings. Wouldn’t it be more thematically meaningful and fit better into the cosmic horror that 40k wants to be if Chaos was actually mostly a symbolic threat that would be ignorable if the Imperium wasn’t still spooked over what amounted to an attempted religiously motivated military coup ten thousand years ago and that ultimately; this petty rivalry doesn’t matter? That the bitter hatred over Horus’ coup ultimately is meaningless in the face of the fact that this galaxy, this universe, has never belonged to humanity or anything spawned of it? Khorne may feed off the violence of humanity and many minor xenos species; but Gork and Mork are a far more pure form of warmongering and what we now know as the Greenskins are just the tip of the iceberg compared to what they can really do when the WAAAGH! gets rolling. Nurgle may be an infestation of humanity’s despair and inability to progress but the Tyranids are the cancer that will kill the universe itself. Tzeentch may be clever and ancient as the firstborn of Chaos; but the Necrons have plans stretching back to before even the very idea of Tzeentch came into being. And of course, unlike the Dark Elves; the Druklhari aren’t really a major villain or threat. Vect is just kind of an asshole in his own little corner, not one of the top big bads the way Malekith was. But nah instead we get CHAOSCHAOSCHAOSCHAOSCHAOS coupled with ADB and Reynolds’ bizarre (but in hindsight, given what we’re shown of Chaos; sensible) revelation that actually Chaos is even more racist than the Imperium. It leads to 40k’s central conflict being between Satanist Ethnonationalist AnCaps and TradCath Ethnonationalist Reactionaries. Creepy bloodthirsty edgelords versus Roman bust twitter pfps. None of the other villains are ever allowed to “usurp” Chaos’ place as “the real threat” and any time non-chaotic bad guys get a time to shine, the Chaos writers pitch a fit and force in awful reminders that Chaos is actually the real threat behind everything and can never ever lose. It makes Chaos come off less as an interesting villain and more of a childish edgelord fantasy written by a bunch of kids who go “nuh uh!” everytime they take the L or insinuate that spikelord edgy mcgee is anything less than the coolest bad guy ever made. The fandom makes fun of Abaddon because he textually hasn’t really done much in thirteen tries? Well actually retcon in some outlandishly complicated super duper secret plan so that he and his army of *checks notes* less than one million racist storm troopers in ancap colours are actually totally the greatest threat in the setting and not the vastly more organised Tyranids or more tactically competent Necrons or the more numerous Orks. People still make fun of abaddon because he looks like a goofy mook rather than an awesome overlord (at least Archaon looks like someone you’d immediately figure for as the big bad of a setting; Abaddon looks more like…the real bad guy’s stupid but strong brute muscle enforcer)? Have an entire novel series written to squee about how awesome and cool he is which literally none of the other “big bad” factions’ primary characters have ever gotten. Also I am sick to death of how GW pushes Khorne as the unbeatable poster bad boy of the entire setting over and above even the rest of Chaos. Yeah his aesthetic is simple, marketable, and he’s incredibly easy to write into plots (even if I think there’s never been more interesting takes on Khorne where he’s shown as actually capable of cleverness in the pursuit of maximising mindless death and destruction as we see in Dawn of War 1 and Dawn of War 2 Retribution; where the Khornate villains have an impressively clever scheme even if the end goal is just “kill people”) and you can explain his concept to anyone. Please stop trying to throw him into literally everything and let other bad guys have even a little bit of spotlight. Octarius and Armageddon? Khorne crashes the party. Tzeentch threatens Luna? Well akshually Khorne invades Terra, take that nerds. Where does Khorne even get all these worshippers to yeet themselves into every warzone in existence when he probably offers the least to his followers that most people would want?

So on some points I agree with you, others I disagree, and in some places I understand the general feeling you’re conveying but am not quite so vitriolic.

Yes; I wish 40k as a setting was more akin to WHFB and AoS in that it permitted more factions to matter. 40k is, I agree, so myopic in it’s focus that it becomes frustrating. If the other factions weren’t playable I would understand, certainly, but if you’re going to offer players a chance to invest in the Xenos factions but then just never give them any return on that investment it feels like nothing more than lying to people.

Similarly; I also wish we saw more of a non-Human (and even then more of a non-Chaos Space Marine) component to Chaos. I find it hard to take Chaos seriously as a universal force when, over their supposedly non-linear/infinite period of existence they seem to never have done anything other than obsess over one species who, compared to the majority of other playable species in the game, have been around insanely briefly.

Yes; I do agree that I wish at times Chaos wasn’t used to usurp Xenos threats just to pull the old ‘but Chaos was the true villain all along’, see what you mention about the Hive Mind and the Great Rift, about Chaos usurping Orks on Armageddon etc. etc.

However, I disagree that Chaos is remotely as irritatingly favoured in the lore as the Imperium. Yes, it is true, that it is not infrequently written in vague terms that ‘you are all doomed, Chaos comes for you,’ but, in the majority of cases, this is purely informed, never shown. It is akin to the lines that tell us ‘Aeldari are so smart and elite,’ but then we just get shown them being curbstomped over and over again. We’re ‘told’ Chaos is some great looming threat which will win...but in practise they do only mildly better than Xenos in the lore, with Chaos losing the vast majority of everything they ever do in the lore, just like Xenos. I will admit Chaos has, lately, done *marginally* better in the lore, and that is definitely connected, as you say, to the active focus to make Chaos the ‘big bad’ now, but it is still only marginal.

I do agree that I would prefer not to see Chaos made to eclipse all other threats but my main motivation here is just because in 40k, as you point out, Chaos is never separated from the Imperium. In WHFB and AoS Chaos can take on a plurality of forms and is not just a ‘spikier’ version of the main human faction. For this reason the recent feeling I have had is just that 40k is increasingly becoming a clone of the Horus Heresy which, as someone who likes Xenos, is obviously a disappointment.

I don’t share your very strong disdain for Chaos. For the most part, in 40k’s lore, I feel Chaos is largely akin to Xenos in that we’re all glorified punching bags for Space Marines (you yourself point out Abaddon’s memetic loser status). I concede Chaos does *marginally* better but, at current, that is so inconsequential to me that it doesn’t bother me anywhere near as much as the treatment of Xenos vis-a-vise the Imperium.

My personal take is I think the favouritism as an antagonist, shown to Chaos, is less detrimental to the cause of Xenos agency in the lore than the raging boner GW and BL have for the Imperium and, in particular Space Marines.

I also, in general, think Chaos would benefit from being developed in a more nuanced way. I don’t see them quite as cardboard-cut out as you seem too (not denying many are because BL and GW can’t write non-Imperium characters well mostly) but I think many of them have, and to an extent do also, get treated more nuanced in some of the literature. I do think a big failing here is that Black Library has made *some* efforts to make *some* of the Chaos characters interesting and nuanced but, for some reason, GW tends to just ignore this. Hence Magnus can in his own novels be portrayed as sympathetic due to his loyalty to his people and desire to not persecute Psykers, but then when appearing in a campaign supplement just makes the stock-generic ‘bow before me mortals/I am your doom/all shall fall’ comments with little to no character.

Personally, and this is recognizing as I said above that I do understand some of the points you’re making, I feel like Chaos players and Xenos players, in terms of the lore treating us like crap, have more in common than not. But, again, that’s just my personal opinion!

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dawnblade · 3 years

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Okay hi you're like.

One of the only destiny players I follow, and I enjoy watching your commentary and stuff like that!!

Anyway, my boyfriend in the past month has gotten very into destiny 2 and Im starting to want to play too.

Any tips for a new player? 🥺

lord forgive me for the college thesis ive just written

thank you so much, im glad to hear youve enjoyed what ive had to say about this game!!! so, as for tips:

☆first off, ive heard the starting missions dont do a great job of easing new players into the game, so i think my advice for that would be that after you complete those, if you have any of the purchaseable big expansions (forsaken, shadowkeep, or beyond light), play through their campaigns so you can have a more "on rails" guided experience as you learn

if youre playing the free base game, you might have to set more goals for yourself. you can start by playing strikes, crucible, or gambit, OR you could explore each planet and see what they have going on. (i think to get to new planets you need to increase your power level, so thats a goal to shoot for!)

▪strikes are pve, essentially super short linear self-contained stories. you get matched with two other people and do some light combat with a boss at the end to get loot. its very casual and chill

▪crucible is pvp, you have different modes within the crucible to choose from, which are explained in-game. you can play matches for valor- which is more casual, or glory- which is more competitive

▪gambit is a mix of pve and pvp. your team and the opposing team fight enemies to collect something called motes from them. whichever team collects 100 motes, then summons and defeats the final boss first wins the match!!!

**there are also much harder versions of pvp and pve activities (raids, trials of osiris, grandmaster nightfall strikes, etc) but thats all endgame content and you probably wont get into that stuff until youve spent a good amount of time with the game

if you like checking things off a list, there are things called triumphs, which are basically in-game achievements, so completeing those could be your objective. theres a TON of those to complete, so you definitely wont run out of stuff to do LOL

●○●○

☆weapon and armor drops might be confusing and overwhelming to a new player, so personally i wouldnt worry about them too much until you get some experience with the game and start getting into endgame content. getting something with good perks will really help you out later

when you wanna start grinding for better guns, looking up the best perks for each gun is absolutely recommended

trial and error, licherally just messing around, is also very useful to find something that suits your personal playstyle

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☆the fastest way to up your seasonal rank is to be constantly doing bounties and seasonal challenges

seasonal ranks are mostly just for rewards and include resources and cosmetic items, but also provide some passive gameplay perks that can help you with a seasonal activity or getting better weapon + armor drops

●○●○

☆the fastest way to up your power level is by doing weekly challenges for each activity (strikes, gambit, crucible, etc) and getting powerful gear from them

power level directly affects how hard an activity is going to be. if your power level is too low, enemies will be immune to damage, but if you are just slightly underleveled it can make for a more challenging activity if thats what you want ^_^ otherwise, if your power level is equal to or above whats required, enemy power will scale with you.

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☆try to have a variety of weapon archetypes (like smgs, hand cannons, snipers, etc) and energies (solar, arc, void, and stasis) in your inventory.

there are third-party apps that let you bring and send weapons to storage without having to stop at the main hub world, but sometimes its just easier to be able to quick-swap for different situations.

having a few armor loadouts is useful as well but again, personally i wouldnt worry about armor modding and weapon perks TOO much when youre just starting out

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☆if youre not sharing your account, you should use all three character slots on a warlock, a hunter, and a titan. obviously you dont HAVE to, you can be Oops All Hunters if you want, but ive found its super useful to have an understanding of how each class works, especially for endgame content

●○●○

and finally, this game's campaigns tend to be pretty cool, but the lore is absolutely batshit and i recommend reading lore books and lore tabs and such when you can because they are super interesting. theres so many of them though i dont think its possible to actually read all of it, in which case i HIGHLY recommend watching "My Name Is Byf" on youtube if you want all of that information compiled neatly and explained thoroughly to you. or you can read the wikis or a site called the ishtar collective to learn more about aspects of the lore you might be interested in. the lore stuff you read about is mostly gonna be pick and choose regardless

●○●○

SO, i think thats about all i can think of. i hope none of this was confusing, if you need any clarification id be glad to explain more!!! this game is a lot of fun with friends, so def play it with others when you can ^_^ plus, theres tons of resources for you to learn from, on youtube or reddit or wikis OR asking folks like myself!! a lot of veterans with more experience than me are also very willing to help you out, so totally dont be afraid to ask!!! i hope you have fun with the game!!!

also, if any other folks have some new player tips, do feel free to share!!

#long post /#destiny #stonerstarscream #replies #apologies again for such a long post i tried to format it so its not like a big monotonous block of text LOL #i could talk about this game for a billion years i think

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branchofcinnamon · 3 years

Note

so far as i know (i don't know much ''^^) Damon said ALL gorillaz are family. noodle has said that 2d was like a brother/pet to her asa kid so why would fans think he raised her? I know murdoc has called noodle as his daughter but hasn't he also adopted 2d? And murdoc said Russel is like their big brother. Don't they all see each other the same way??? I am seriously confused :<

So, yes I know Damon has said they’re all like a family. The popular opinion is the band raised Noodle because they met her when she was like 10 years old after she was shipped from Japan (literally in a box) to their studio. They took her in and Murdoc discovered she could play the guitar, so she became part of the band.

I’m not sure if you meant to say why “wouldn’t” fans think he raised her, but in that case the main thing with Noodle is when she was like 13 she got separated from the band, and they didn’t see her again until she was around 20 years old. That’s like, a big chunk of time during an important stage in life. For this reason some fans agree that it hardly means the guys raised her, more like Noodle had to raise herself.

I’m not so sure about Murdoc “adopting” 2D? This is the first I’m hearing of that lol. Murdoc has kidnapped 2D plenty of times if that’s what you meant haha. I don’t think they ever “officially” adopted Noodle or anything either. That doesn’t even sound like something they would do. It was probably more like, “Well I guess we live with this 10-year-old now.”

I think it’s one thing to take all the “interviews” and what the creators say at face value, on the surface sure it’s like they’re all a family, but that doesn’t mean fans still can’t play around with “fanon” ideas if they want to. Gorillaz is not exactly a linear story that is followed like a tv show after all. I always saw it as having room for interpretation. Some people can view it like they’re a tight-knit family, or instead that they're all more like roommates. I personally have a hard time seeing them like a “typical” family because in earlier music videos/shorts they don’t get along very well (2D, Murdoc, and Russel at least). Like I know, families always bicker and stuff too, but it’s hard for me to see for example 2D and Murdoc like “brothers”.

I am by no means an expert on the “lore” either but I think Gorillaz is weird enough that it’s one of those pieces of media that allows for more interpretation by the fans. I could read Damon saying they’re family 100 times but I still can’t look at them and be like “Ah yes… a happy family. 3 brothers and 1 sister.” I’m not really sure how to explain it but that's what I feel.

I assume this ask was brought on because of “2nu”?, like “Why do people ship 2nu if they’re family?” (if not I apologize, but that’s where my mind went when I first read this lol). But just like the lore I think all their relationships are up to interpretation as well. Like, in canon Murdoc is pretty nasty to 2D, but people still ship 2Doc, and I’m sure they have their own reasons/headcanons for it. 2nu is a weird case, but as someone who didn’t “grow up” with the band and instead learned about Gorillaz when they were already in Phase 3 (When Noodle is over 18) I thought they looked cute together, so 15-year old me didn’t waste time shipping them haha. Like I know, I’m sure it’s weird for people who have seen Noodle as a toddler and then see people shipping her with her ""brother"" - I’m sure it would gross me out too. But like I said I had a different experience learning about the band. I didn’t even know their ages for a while when I first got into it - it’s not like they plaster it on top of their heads. At one point I thought 2D and Noodle were the same age haha.

I know it’s a popular opinion for 2nu fans that the time they’re separated and then meet again when she’s older can be like them seeing each other in a different light and their relationship changing. It’s not the worst thing in the world. Something I also like to say is, canonically Noodle is 30 now? She can date who she wants lol.

Anyway… sorry I went on a bit of a tangent there haha, But I hope I make some sense? I’m sure other people will say otherwise but I think it’s okay if you want to see Gorillaz as strictly a family, or if you just see them as bandmates that live together sometimes. It’s all for fun anyway.

#thanks for the ask!#asks #pro 2nu #long post

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elevatorelevenhatesyou · 3 years

Text

Outlast 2 Has Nothing In It

(Credit to PB Horror Gaming for screenshots, since I ain’t playing this shit.)

Spoilers or whatever.

Outlast 2 is a viscerally unpleasant thing to behold, but that's the only point it has going for it as a horror game. The plot makes no sense, there's no theme, nothing is resolved, and the actions of the protagonist make no difference. Also, the gameplay is bad.

Let me get the gameplay thing out of the way since it's the flimsiest of my complaints in part because I haven't actually played the game myself. So I'll begin by qualifying that with the clarification that the gameplay LOOKS bad judging from the several let's plays I've watched of it, all three of which have involved an awful lot of "Where do I go!?" and "What do I do!?" and "I can't see shit!" coming from the hapless boob inflicting the game on themselves for me.

Everyone seems to get lost in this game. It was hard to get REALLY lost in Outlast 1 because it was highly linear and was mostly made of blank corridors. This complimented the design of having a night vision camera as your only source of vision, because having a night vision camera as your only source of vision sucks and you can't see shit, and having your only source of vision suck and you can't see shit is scary. The problem is that Outlast 2 has huge sprawling environments and enemies are everywhere. In Outlast 1 there were only a few places where something was chasing you and you had to find the one spot that would let you get away, like a vent or hole that Chris couldn't fit his fat ass through. Outlast 2 forgets to put light on the things you have to click on though so there's a lot of trial and error and death and frustration, which is usually not good for horror games and atmosphere and all that.

But anyway enough about the gameplay, let's complain about the shit that actually matters.

If you haven't played Outlast 2, here, read the plot synopsis from Wikipedia, it's a more pleasant experience than playing it.

The most important sentence in that synopsis, or rather, the ONLY important sentence, is: "Blake also finds a document revealing that the Murkoff Corporation is the cause for everyone's insanity due to an experimental mind control station hidden deep in the mountains, which is also responsible for the flashes of light."

This document can be missed, by the way, easily in fact. It's really out of the way, and not every player is interested in reading your long lore documents in the first place. This is a shame because that document is the only actual clue to the mystery in the entire game.

So what's really going on here, as explained in some supplementary material that is not part of Outlast 2 at all, as if this is somehow an okay thing to do, is that the Murkoff Corporation from Outlast 1 was doing some freaky experiments up in the mountains and they were microwaving the brains of everybody in a nearby village called Temple Gate for shits and giggles like you do when you're a typical giant evil corporation. Could this game be saying something about big evil corporations and their uncaring exploitation of unknowing citizens? (spoiler: no.) This results in everybody having apocalyptic hallucinations and going batshit bananas in addition to being Christians, and also causes women to believe they're pregnant for some reason.

The game begins when a girl escapes this place but then dies and this attracts the attention of an investigative journalist named Lynn and her husband Blake. They fly in on a helicopter but it crashes when Murkoff's big stupid microwave tower goes off. Protagonist cameraman Blake must then search for his missing wife through the forest and desert and cult village wasteland that is Arizona. As he explores he discovers that the leader of this cult commune habitually rapes all the women of his congregation. Could this game be saying something about supposedly morally upstanding religious people abusing their positions of power to prey on vulnerable people and children? (spoiler: no.)

Throughout the game he has long hallucinations confronting his past in which he witnessed the death of his friend Jessica at the hands of your usual molesting Catholic priest. Could this mysterious past in which a young woman is molested by a priest have some dramatic connection to the current situation where a young woman is molested by a priest? (spoiler: no.)

Lynn gives birth to a phantom baby and then dies, the cult leader sees the baby who he thinks is the Antichrist so he kills himself, his big scary implacable executioner minion lady gets impaled by literally the wrath of God, the cult commit mass suicide because it's the apocalypse, and Blake walks out into the wilderness and gets lost in his hallucination memories of happy childhood times with pre-murder Jessica. The End? Yeah the end. Sure why not.

So, what the FUCK was the point of all that?

What The Fuck Was The Point Of: The Flashbacks

The flashbacks to Blake and Jessica at school don't lead to anything. There is no dramatic twist relationship between the past and the present. The cult leader doesn't turn out to be the priest who molested Jessica, Jessica doesn't turn out to have been related to the Heretic leader, the catholic school they went to didn't turn out to be run by Murkoff Corporation, nothing. These two events are entirely unrelated. Blake doesn't learn anything or go through any character arcs because of the truth that Jessica was murdered rather than killing herself. This doesn't help him at all in the present. It doesn't affect the present situation at all. There aren't even any thematic parallels. An abusive priest/music teacher at this catholic school is molesting a young girl, and this village is being driven insane by a giant mind control radio tower as part of an experiment by an evil mega corporation and this results in an investigative journalist being kidnapped. They don't even have "Religion is bad" as a message in common, because the religion isn't the problem with Temple Gate, the problem is an evil mega corporation is beaming them all crazy.

What The Fuck Was The Point Of: The Cult

Crazy religious cult stuff is just the aesthetic, it's not even the point! There's PLENTY to be said about real world religion being a bad thing. Faith is the perfect system for protecting lies. Organized religion is rife with abuse and terrible regressive politics and ideals. Indoctrination of children is unethical. Outlast 2 doesn't care about that shit, it just has scary christians as a backdrop for the style points. They're just here. The cult has no plans or objectives, they're all just crazy people. They believe that Lynn is the mother of the apocalypse, but they're just wrong. She is, in fact, not that. If you didn't know anything about the previous game and assumed that in Outlast 2 there really was some apocalyptic shit going down, maybe some of this would have had some stakes. Although then the message would have been something about don't let your wife be the mother of the apocalypse? Uhkay.

The more you know about the plot, the less important everything the cult is doing gets. Good writing, that. This is just a stupid backward murder cult doing stupid backward murder cult shit. This wouldn't in itself be a bad thing necessarily; after all being stuck in the midst of a stupid backward murder cult is a fine enough setting for a hectic tense escape from danger type horror survival game. But the cult has nothing to do with any of the characters. I don't give a shit about Blake or Lynn, who the fuck even are they? No one ever draws any lines between the freaky beliefs and practices of the cult to the main characters. The cult and the heretics aren't dark reflections of Blake and Lynn's personality flaws, or reminders of their past traumas in their own undoubtedly fucked up religious upbringings, and even if they were neither Blake nor Lynn overcome those traumas in the story, or even tragically fail to overcome those traumas, because the story isn't even about that.

What The Fuck Was The Point Of: Blake

Blake's actions don't lead to anything. His only objective is to rescue Lynn, which he repeatedly fails to do, and ultimately fails completely because she dies. He almost gets to her in the cult village, but the Heretics get to her first. Blake then goes to the mines where the Heretics are, but the cultists invade and get to her first. Blake doesn't defeat the Heretics, the cultists kill them. Blake doesn't defeat the cultists, they all commit suicide. Blake doesn't defeat the molesty priest from his past, apparently Jessica's death was reported as a suicide and Blake kept quiet about it all these years. Blake doesn't defeat Marta the executioner lady, she just randomly gets stabbed by a falling cross statue in a thunderstorm. Wow, lucky. Everything Blake does is meaningless and nothing would be different if he'd died in the helicopter crash. In fact, everything he does is DOUBLY meaningless because whether he succeeded or failed in rescuing Lynn all of that would have accomplished fuck all to do with the radio towers that were ACTUALLY causing the problem!

What The Fuck Was The Point Of: Val's Gender

So here's just a thing on the side that also bugs me. The Heretics are led by a supremely creepy weirdo named Val. Val is androgenous and makes a lot of inappropriate sexual advances on Blake. In the messy doom orgy scene, Val is covered with mud but otherwise nude and appears to have breasts and a vagina, though the Outlast Wiki says there's also "a small, mutilated penis shape" under there somewhere. Yeah I’ll take your word for it. Knoth the cult leader calls Val a He. When asked what Val's gender is on Twitter, the developers responded with "Val is Val."

So, this game has a transwoman character, and they decided to make that transwoman a rapey psycho death cult leader who's trying to end the world. Outstanding. Outstanding 2.

Yeah I'm pretty sure Val's gender was added to make this character creepier, like how the guys who made Sherlock wanted Jim Moriarty to be totally crazy and weird and unsettling and then they just made him really gay coded. Representation!

What The Fuck Was The Point Of: Lynn

While I'm complaining about feminazi jsw hashtagwoke politicalcorrectness gonemad chalupasupreme gendercommunism, I'm also not a big fan of how Lynn is the instigator of the misfortune by being the one who wanted to come out here to Temple Gate in the first place, and then she gets kidnapped, accused of being the mother of the Antichrist, kidnapped again, worshipped for being the mother of the Antichrist, kidnapped a third time, rescued, then gives birth to the Antichrist, then dies. Yeah that's a real strong female character you've got there, Outlast 2. Her one act of agency happens before the game begins, she's a determined and courageous woman with a heroic career in investigative journalism, and then she is repeatedly brutalized and repeatedly kidnapped, because she's allegedly going to give birth to something bad, all so that she can be the objective of the player character. We don't even get much of a handle on her personality or anything. She's just Your Wife What You Need To Rescue.

What The Fuck Was The Point Of: Outlast 2

There's a lot of gore and gross imagery that makes for good TV when the letsplayer gets really uncomfortable watching Lynn bloodily give birth right into the camera. And that's about it.

The gameplay is bad. You run in terror but after you die for the eleventh time you stop running in terror and instead start running in frustration. Outlast 2 fails as a game, and it fails as horror. The plot makes no sense. It literally requires supplementary material to explain what the fuck was happening. Outlast 2 fails as a mystery because there is no answer. The narrative goes nowhere, nothing matters, nothing is resolved. The wife dies, the protagonist goes catatonic, the bad guys commit suicide or are slain by deus ex machina. The flashbacks to school don't lead to anything and have nothing to do with any of the other events. Outlast 2 fails as a story.

What even, how? Why? Was this made by Weird Christians like Zoo Race? Do they just have motives and thinking patterns that are completely alien to me? Or was it made by multiple teams who weren't working with each other very well and were receiving instructions from someone else with bad ideas like a marketing idiot or dumb executive? Or was it just written by idiots who think themes are for eighth grade book reports? Iunno, no accusations or anything, I haven't researched the devs, I haven't even given them recognition enough to learn what the company is called.

And yet despite Outlast 2 being a shitty pointless gross-out haunted house popcorn ride of a game with nothing to say, it made a bunch of money and tons of people seem to like it for some reason, so I'm sure we'll be getting lots of people trying to emulate it in the future. Outlast 2 fails at being a failure and removing its stink from the gene pool.

Somebody come clean this mess up.

#el11hypost #outlast 2 #gross #transgender representation #weird christians

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tronrpg · 3 years

Text

what are Sirens?

what are Sirens? we just don't know.

but i'm getting ahead of myself.

To my knowledge, there has never been an officially-released Tron pen-and-paper RPG. There certainly would have been a market for it around the original film's release, had it done better at the box office. And assuredly there have been dozens of homebrew splats and rulesets shared between fans and friends over the years. The Fract, in an ideal world, would eventually be a complete RPG system, enough to fill up a corebook and run a game. But in thinking about worldbuilding, I've run into a storytelling problem that, if not unique to the world of Tron, is certainly still a sore-thumb kind of issue.

Tron--that is to say the OG 1982 Grid, the New Grid, and whatever metatextual setting that the Fract takes place in--is neither science fiction nor science fantasy. For those who aren't clear on the delineation between the two, the plainest I can describe it is to say that "Star Trek" is (generally) science fiction, and "Star Wars" is (generally) science fantasy. Science fiction is nominally supposed to adhere to scientific rules or at least bend them to a reasonable degree in order to tell a story. Science Fantasy bends and breaks those rules, sometimes with impunity, because space wizards waving laser swords around speaks for itself.

The setting of Tron, taking place as it does outside the Grid, is a simulacra of a modern-day "real world" as we know it, with science and computers behaving the way we know they normally do. Except for in the Grid itself. We have to assume that both the Old and New Grids were special in some way, or at the very least that Grid-like systems with sentient programs are few and far between; because computer systems and programs as we know them do not behave like they do on either Grid. If they did, why would Flynn have bothered to create a new one if there are Grids within every computer in the world?

And that's where the science fiction of Tron falls down. Stephen Lisberger and Bonnie MacBird were not computer experts, and they wrote the original screenplay during a time when computers were widely known but not widely understood, particularly by the common person. They can be forgiven for leaning hard on the fantasy and spirituality elements that make Tron a work of more consequence than oh, say, Computer Warriors. But by the time Legacy was released, the world was a very different place, and the ubiquity of computers and technology meant that the average person had a basic knowledge of how a computer works and what it can do; and the OG Grid does not fall into those parameters. So it's hard to say that Tron is strictly science fiction, where rules have meanings, or science fantasy where rules are up for grabs, because each of us carry around a real-world analogue to the Grid in our pockets all day and by now we are all pretty sure that Google Chrome does not, in a metaphorical or spiritual sense, fight for us.

(This, incidentally, is where I feel Legacy did the right thing by having Flynn starting from almost-scratch with the New Grid instead of attempting to apply real-world IT logic to the Grid like Tron 2.0. Divorcing the fiction from things like emails and spreadsheets allowed Legacy to retain some of the spirituality and potential of 1982; and inasmuch as Tron 2.0 is a great game that I intend to revisit soon, I find the "real computer" stuff to be kinda cringey.)

And here's where we come around to Sirens, finally. What the hell are they? Aside from being conventionally-attractive female-coded Programs in white vinyl outfits who appear to have largely representational or ritualistic roles in the New Grid, it's not entirely clear what they do or what separates them from a garden-variety Program. We see Gem and the three other Sirens in Legacy, there are a handful of Sirens in Uprising, including Lux, who appears to have been a...battle Siren? Maybe?

When it comes to putting together an RPG, you have to lean on rules. You have to nail things down and say, outside of GM fiat, a dice roll does that and a stat means this and an attack is performed thusly. So in thinking about squishing the world of Tron into an RPG format, which unlike most video games does not contain a single linear storyline; you have to think about making the world digestible and processable by squaring the edges and making definitions. You want the players and the GM to be able to exercise the vastness of their imaginations, but you want to set the parameters of the playing field, or else why have a themed RPG at all?

That's where I started thinking about how Tron's mish-mash of science fiction/fantasy elements make it a unique challenge to format as an RPG setting. Would it be better to emphasize the fantasy theming, or would players prefer a more grounded approach with real-world computer elements? Is it possible to have a balanced approach? How do you color in the missing information about how the Grid and Programs work, the stuff that the original works never really explained? Just what the HELL are Sirens anyway? Is there some sort of unspoken caste system in the Grid? Are there male-presenting Sirens? Can they suit up and play in the Games? Can they all do that synchronized-walking-backwards thing? Do Sirens just show up when Programs are about to compete at something? Why so much eyeshadow? Why does it rain in the Grid? Why did Flynn serve Sam and Quorra a roast suckling pig? Why does Clu 2.0 look more like Lord Farquahd than Jeff Bridges? WHAT HAPPENED TO RAM? IS HE PART OF THE JUNKY RECOGNIZER NOW OR DID HE TURN INTO THE BIT OR WHAT? KEVIN FLYNN, WHERE ARE YOU NOW?

...okay, got that out of my system, thanks for bearing with me. The point is that there are a lot of fill-in-the-blanks when it comes to worldbuilding lore in the Tron universe, and that may be by design. I love Star Wars, but the industry that has been built up over the last 40+ years to make sure every puppet, alien and CGI blob with a nanosecond of screen time has a full backstory and Wookieepedia entry, I find, largely detracts from the magic of the original movies. Not having everything explained adds to Tron's lasting allure. On the other hand, it makes a project like the Fract a product of guesswork and blue-skying.

So let's say I was creating a Tron RPG, like you do. And I wanted to make Sirens a playable class (which I intend to). Based on the information given to us by the canon, which isn't much; I'd say that Sirens are, first and foremost, specialists. They have specific skills that they hone and adhere to and do not deviate from to take on other roles, which makes them in-demand as bodyguards or enforcers but their specialization limits a players' build choices. They are also largely recognized in the Grid as having ritualistic or shamanistic public roles, perhaps representing the link between Programs and Users. (Maybe Dumont was a Siren 1.0. He could have had on a white vinyl singlet under that getup, who knows?) Maybe they're like priestesses or shrine maidens, maybe they take vows like nuns. This might make them like Monks in D&D.

You see how narrowing the possibilities of what Sirens are in order to fit them into an RPG character class box also reduces their potential in canon--but of course canon's not being contradicted here; this is a fan work and is not intended to overwrite the creative work of others. I just hope that if it ever gets completed, it plays enough like the work that inspired it, so that other fans can get the same rush of imagining what it's like to be on the Grid.

#tron #tron 1982 #tronblr #tron lives #tron legacy #rpg #flynn lives #worldbuilding

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musashi · 3 years

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sending u this ask as an opportunity for u to talk to me abt fi!! i love ur thoughts n words on things nd i don't send asks as much bc i don't have. good words to talk to u abt stuff but i rlly enjoy just. ur Passion nd stuff. autistic people r the best at talking abt stuff i stand by that we r just Epic. anyways if u wanna, i'd love to hear more about just... how fi sorta. changes, over the game? like the Little Things that show her starting 2 care abt link more, or becoming more "human"!

i love this whole ask. you’re right autistic folks r sexy as hell idk how the divine powers that be fit so much passion into my tiny body but i’m glad they made the attempt.

ANYWAYS FI. i don’t think i’ve ever actually laid this out because for the most part it is incredibly subtle and requires a lot of filling in gaps yourself, and i think that someone who cares less abt her can probably come away from it with an entirely different interpretation. fi’s development of actual feelings are a very sudden a mysterious thing, and i have a LOT of thoughts about them going in a lot of different directions so forgive me if this answer isn’t particularly linear or coherent. i’m not just gonna talk about her slow burn into feeling things, i’m also gonna talk about... why i think it happens.

we don’t get to learn a lot about sword spirits and how they come into being, other than it takes great power to enchant a sword with a spirit/temper a sword with one inside it. hylia obviously created fi and, presumably, demise created ghirahim, and they are pretty much as opposite as two people can be with their only real characteristic in common being precision, intelligence & otherworldly loyalty to their respective masters.

we thus don’t get to learn how much control the creator of a sword spirit has over what kind of spirit comes of it, if their personalities are organic to their experiences or crafted from the moment they awaken. what i mean by this is like... ghirahim could have been a cold, calculating AI like fi when he was first tempered and gained his dramatics over time, we have no idea how long he’s been alive in comparison to her, if his personality is so much more extroverted because he was allowed a life outside his blade whereas fi was isolated in hers for millennia. or if he just came into creation immediately ready to scream and stick his tongue in ppl’s ears.

i swear to god i’m going somewhere with this. ok. anyways.

fi in the beginning of skyward sword is, i think, how most people remember her--data-interested, icy, and detached. there is a reverence in how she addresses link from the start, even before he formally becomes her wielder, but beyond that she is calculating and precise and rarely wastes words. all of this kinda paints a picture of hylia creating fi, to me--breathing life into the spirit and willing her to be effective, be efficient, be loyal, and be sharp. when you have that image in your head, a lot of how fi operates makes sense--she wasn’t created to have emotions, because emotions get in the way of what her purpose is. hylia made a weapon and a servant, not a friend. it sucks to think about, but that is fi’s purpose.

the game is very careful, however, to show you it’s not that simple from the beginning. because hidden in Ice Queen Fi’s introduction is... a surprising amount of personality.

like this shit, where she straightup just dunks gaepora in the trash because his #Lore is out of date. it’s hysterical because you really do not know if she’s just a) an AI who doesn’t understand when she’s being kinda Rude or b) being snarky On Purpose. and that ambiguity in itself crafts this beautiful air of mystery where you, from the get go, don’t entirely know what to expect of fi all the time.

or this, which she says directly after link hesitates to accept the blade:

this scene, which people who have edgier takes on fi constantly use to paint her as intentionally manipulative, where all i see is... her using emotional validation to calm link down enough for him to take in what’s happening. a really important thing about fi is that she’s paradoxically an empath? she can read auras and detect emotion with extreme precision even if she’s incapable of feeling it herself in the beginning. so she knows everything link is experiencing here, understands that it’s holding him back, and takes care to deconstruct the whirlwind of emotion he’s collapsing under and explain to him why he can and should trust her words.

again this is all in her introductory scene. they write her very specifically to be a seemingly flat character with this... rumbling of something more going on under the surface. so much so that the first time you get to a sacred spring and fi, completely randomly, just starts skating across the water’s surface and speaking ancient poeticisms to you, you don’t question it. you’re not like hey, why is sword alexa doing a little dance? you just accept it as something fi is doing, because fi always feels like she’s at her job, and you don’t know how she acts outside of work, but you kinda feel like maybe you want to.

fi’s affinity for music is another way they insert humanity into an AI without making you think too hard about it. singing and dancing are inherently human, artforms are something we associate with the heart and soul. even teaching a robot to paint is, in itself, an art project crafted by a human hand. but you don’t really... consciously think about that, when you watch her do these things. you just kind of accept that she is this otherworldly thing guiding you. you don’t think about the contrast of this programmed assistant performing music alongside you in a sacred ritual. you’re just kind of like, yeah? i can’t JUST play nayru’s wisdom on my harp, i need someone who can sing and god put a vocaloid in my sword???

throughout the game, fi’s dialogue chains when you summon her don’t change in any meaningful way (besides based on what you’re carrying, where you are, etc) but as you near the end, there are a couple things of note. one that sticks out to me is what she says about one of the mid-game minibosses, who is also an artificial intelligence--

a lot of people laugh abt this line and make jokes about fi being hot for the tall handsome robot pirate and they’re valid. but the thing is, like, from the beginning of her mission, fi knew she’d essentially be dying once the world was saved. and early game fi has no hesitations about her part in things regardless, because, as we know, she wasn’t created to feel things like that. she wasn’t created to fear death, to grow attached to life or anyone in it, or to experience sorrow at the idea of saying goodbye. but this is mid-game fi, who still... never says anything she doesn’t deem entirely necessary, but she says this. for no discernible reason, she says this. it’s an unskippable dialogue option, one they WANT you to see and one that is different when you know where she ends up. admiration is already something you wouldn’t really expect of her, but it’s more than that--she’s longing for her own story to mirror it. by the sand sea, fi has started to realize she doesn’t want to go to sleep.

it’s another one of those moments where you’re kinda like, ‘haha, what, fi?' and then move on. another one of those moments where she kinda does something a little unexpected, but not so unexpected you question it too hard. fi excels at those.

before you go off to fight demise, fi stops you to warn you that it is the final battle, and you cannot return. and when you tell her you’re ready, she says this:

as i’ve said, fi doesn’t waste words. almost always, everything she says is for the purpose of efficiency, and rarely does she offer thoughts without fixed probabilities and ultimate endgoals in mind.

this is a sentiment.

it serves no purpose. it is purely an expression of devotion.

and because of EVERYTHING i’ve mentioned thus far, this line both hits you HARD as significant and foreboding in how suddenly tender it is, AND manages to read as in-character for her to say. because the way they write fi’s humanity is so beneath the surface, so easily missable, so hard for me to even lay out with concrete evidence despite the fact that i’m a person who reads a text dump of all her dialogue before bed every night.

but to me, what lays out fi’s inner workings best is actually her actual goodbye, and... not the moment most people would think, tbh? it’s not her tender farewell that speaks her emotions loudest to me, but the moment right before:

these lines, which would read as perfectly in character if it were early game fi, cut you. her complete and utter flippancy, the way she talks about all you’ve been through together as though it were nothing to her, the absolute coldness here after everything. you as a player feel kind of pathetic when she says this, like you were misguided in growing attached to her and thinking of her as a friend. and you KNOW thats the intended effect, because this is what link looks like:

he takes a moment in that last shot to like. swallow sadness and turn away from her, but even as he’s turning his head, he doesn’t take his eyes off her until the last possible moment. she hurts his feelings! why.

because it’s an act, is why. of COURSE fi loves him. of course she’s grown attached to him, of course she’s happy to have known him, of COURSE they’re friends. but fi was NEVER supposed to feel that way, she was never supposed to have the capability to love, and there’s no calculation she can run to set the uncertainties of that at ease within herself. so those lines up above is her trying her best to reset herself to who she was in the beginning, to snap herself back into the role of an emotionless servant to the goddess, to convince herself--not link--that saying goodbye won’t hurt. she’s trying to cope with something she has no idea was in the cards for her, and that’s why she’s seemingly so cruel for a moment.

all of this becomes apparent when she calls him back moments later and tells him how she really feels. there’s major whiplash because fi herself is Going Thru It. but essentially what’s happening in that moment is she thinks she knows what will hurt the least, but she miscalculates and backpedals and realizes even if saying goodbye hurts, it hurts less than pretending she doesn’t want to.

i think a lot of people overlook that line--“the most precious data i have on record.” fi, who contains multitudes within her. who contains knowledge immeasurable, the thoughts and feelings and stories of thousands. of civilizations, of gods, of countless ages passed. everything she holds within her is dwarfed entirely by what she feels for link, beside link. nothing in her encyclopedic knowledge can even compare to her friendship with him in the significance it has to her. like all things, fi has her own way of communicating her meanings, and this is her way of saying she really, truly loves him.

in addition, she very carefully does this after he abandons the sword, so it’s clear that it’s of her own will, not a part of her purpose as his servant. for this whole cutscene, up until she end, she drops the honourific and calls him just Link.

and while i see a lot of people debate if she truly does ‘feel,’ anything, like... she says it right here, she does. whether or not she was able to feel from the beginning or not, she can feel now. she has trouble putting words to those feelings, or explaining to herself and others where on earth they came from... but she feels now. that cannot be disputed.

happiness that she was able to know him. loyalty she wants to transcend lifetimes. sorrow at the idea of them having to part. gratitude that he took the chance, and did so beside her.

let’s talk about gratitude.

in skyward sword, gratitude is a tangible source of magic. it opposes malice, which as of botw is a reoccurring thing in zelda lore. skyward sword has two items--evil crystals and gratitude crystals--that represent malice and gratitude respectively. while the first isn’t entirely relevant, the second is something you’re actively encouraged to more or less harvest by helping people and basking in their thanks toward you. these feelings of gratitude are so canonically powerful in the zelda universe that they can turn monsters into humans entirely, and the outpouring of energy that event causes makes every monster & hostile creature within all of skyloft turn docile at once.

according to batreaux, the monster in question, this is well-established legend, the idea of gratitude granting humanity to the nonhuman. skyward sword literally said the power of love was canon.

the song that plays over the goodbye, of course, is called fi’s gratitude.

this is just one theory i have on the matter, but... whether hylia intended or foresaw fi to be capable of feeling human emotion or not, i do believe it was gratitude that woke her heart up. whether she was meant to love or not, link’s spirit contained within it enough love for the both of them, enough to touch her soul and rouse her from her cold and emotionless state. as always, through everything, they work in perfect tandem--his passionate heart touches hers as it sleeps, her wisdom holds him steady and level-headed.

when fi says “may we meet again in another life,” she says it like a prayer, because it is one--she knows hylia, knows that hylia loved link’s spirit just as she did, and knows that hylia of all people understands what the sword spirit is going through. and fi also knows that hylia immortalizes those she loves with cycles, with reincarnation, eternal life without the pain of never dying. fi doesn’t have a soul that hylia can bring back from death nor a physical body to revive, but she works with what she can--and so long as link’s spirit breathes anew, he finds fi. in a sunlit grove, with light bearing down on her, safe and warm and always loyal, even as the world rages on outside. fidelis, she was named for--“faithful.”

the fandom doesn’t really talk abt it, but fi is an angel. she’s an angel god sent to watch over one human, and when god said your mission is complete fi faced god and walked backwards into hell. her divine mission is long passed, but it stopped being about what she was fated to do long ago.

fi began to watch over link because he was her master. and fi resolved to stay forever because he was link.

#skyward sword #long post #hand of sorrow #wendy rambles #Anonymous #wendy answers

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