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#that was a disservice to the fascinating worldbuilding and characters
stovepiperat · 2 years
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terror camp ‘22 day 1: an informal reclist
HOW A-FUCKING-BOUT that CAMP huh guys!! Good shit!! Anyway, here’s two (variably) related recs (that weren’t previously mentioned in the server, to the best of my knowledge!) for every TC22 panel. Just because. 
Please click through to AO3 to see full individual taglists, warnings etc. Other half of this post is in progress. Also, you may have noticed that the descriptions get a little bare-bones as the post goes on. This is because I am slapdash and sleepy. Sorry. But please let me know if I need to fix anything, as always!
(Get in contact with the mods at terror.camp to get access to recordings and Discord!!) 
‘There Will Be Poems’: Franklin, The Terror and the Noble Failure Narrative
Principles of Magnetism (a Comedy of Manners) by acaramelmacchiato (Fitzier, 21k)
Less horrific consequences than in canon, but this IS a noble failure narrative, one which, fittingly enough, pivots nimbly around a pastiche of Britishness and features the futility of attempting to reason with Sir John Franklin.
the waiting room by Ias (Fitzier, 10k) 
Maybe the real noble failure narrative was the delirious, calcifying regrets that haunted us along the way. I think there are deeper reasons this fic relates to the theme, but it would be a disservice to its understated angst for me to try and drag it all out and dissect it here.
Imperial Apparitions: Victorian Periodicals and the Search for Franklin (1848-1860)
My Name Is John Franklin And I Like To Fuuuuuuuuuck by Charlotte_Stant (Lady Jane, 1k)
I know the title is... but it’s a Lady Jane character study! I promise! Gosh, speaking of things I love about Terror fandom, EXEfest is so neat.
Three Winters, Four Springs by halotolerant (Fitzier, 50k)
“Han,” I hear you say, “I love psychic wolf sex, but what does it have to do with contemporary British imperialist propaganda takes on the lost Franklin expedition?” Well, that’s a fair question, but there’s some really fascinating worldbuilding specifically relating to the gaps between the filthy, miserable, selfish-surviving reality of expedition life and the memoirs that make mint on it.
Always Simple & Sincere: Protestant Doctrine & Difference In The Franklin Expedition
Like Unto a Man by disenchanted (Hickey/Crozier, 6k)
Crozier has weird psychic powers like in the book, but good. This fic is basically just him lying there and unwillingly astral projecting into Hickey’s sex memories but he is very Protestant about it, somehow.
old habits die hard by MOUSE9000 (Terror lieutenants, 5k) I don’t really want to explain how EXACTLY the modern AU vampire roommates and their ambiguous relationships are kinda Protestant with it, but they are.
The C, the C, the open C: Classics and The Terror
A More Appropriate Hole by chatterleysghostwriter (Hodgson/Dundy, 6k)
Hodglove, Catullus, having an ever-so-slightly anachronistic depressionwank. What more could you need?
Ex Illustri Vagantium Ordine by annecoulmanross (Fitzier, 3k)
Meta-classicism with a touch of everyone’s favorite (Latin footnotes.)
(I’m going to level with you guys 100%: I feel like probably most heavily classics-referencing fics in the fandom are Bridglar, which I don’t really read (just not my thing) and as such that’s just, like. A gap in my knowledge. Sorry, Bridglar, I don’t want to erase you from this narrative! If you want to add your own rec in reblogs, feel free.)
and sang no more: The Fictional and Historical Impact of Traditional Music in The Terror
all seasons, at all hours, and in all places by Gwerfel (3k, Hickey/Tozer) “Rat Catcher’s Daughter” song played for horror. Spooky and crawling.
A delightful God-fearing man by Lilliburlero (3k, Gibson/Irving)
Irving seeks out a songbook, in a delightful romp which also happens to be very well-cited.
Poetic afterlives of the Franklin Expedition
Something different for this one—let’s have a little fanpoetry!
Northwest Passages by kitsuneartemis
Spoon River Anthology, but make it The Terror.
An Arctic Sonnet by hangingfire
Sonnet 130, but make it Fitzier.
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oc-cinematic-universe · 9 months
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explanations for the answers to this post! answers are under the cut both for how lengthy this is going to get and just in case you don't want to know for whatever reason!
there will be a fully animated scene with music and everything - FALSE
while doing a fully animated scene would be really cool, it is not feasible as a single person working on this comic. i've also thought it through and realized, while the story itself is better suited for a movie, having individual scenes be animated when i've worked so hard to fit the story to a webcomic medium would be a huge disservice to the story! it would be cool, but would not have the effect i want! but it is mainly just the fact that it would be too much for me to handle. animated pages will happen, but the animations are small and simple so i can reasonably get them done
the demon has a backstory. this will not come up in comic
the demon was a previous reaper of souls working under the previous god who handled the underworld before death took over. demons are created when reapers are basically fired from their jobs, corrupted into a form that needs to seek out souls for sustenance. while This Demon was one of many to be cast out after death took over and started getting rid of all the dumbasses, it was one of few who managed to actually find a food source of any kind, and one of even fewer to still be around and a threat.
none of this really matters for the plot because nobody cares about this bitch and its main personality trait is being annoying so no one would ever listen to it if it did bother to provide an explanation. death may vaguely bring it up, but i have no plans for him to explain either. it's just not as important as the fact that the demon is here
superhell is real
while the current gods do not know where it came from, an inter-dimensional pocket connected itself to the underworld. with it came an understanding that it is a place to send the worst a universe has to offer. the universe killers, those who even in death cannot be contained and pose a danger to the safety of the universe. so yeah superhell's real and the gods don't know how it got there
The Wizard Maze. Oh God The Wizard Maze.
this is basically the entire premise of chapter 9. the demon uses newfound power to rearrange the school and trap certain people in their game of cat and mouse.
characters have arguments with me personally
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dara has literally already done this!
kid becomes a necromancer out of spite
elowen, the goddess of life, thinks necromancy is bad because she thinks everything should always happen in its natural path and straying from that path will only harm the world. cody thinks this is bullshit and does it anyways!
joe gets a gun
joe tries to shoot his doppleganger in the face!
gods as a species have been thought out in detail. none of it is plot relevant
i think the way the gods function with the world is super fucking cool and interesting and a fascinating bit of worldbuilding but the gods are not the most important characters in the comic, and How they work, like the demon, is not as important as the fact that they're here
a set of pages must be viewed by layering them on top of each other
"must" is a bit of an exaggeration. i only realized after posting i should have changed it to "can". emotions and feelings and the state the characters are in is an incredibly important part of this comic to me, and finding interesting ways to go about showing it is a passion of mine. there will be a point of time where dara can't think clearly at all and is experiencing massive deja vu on top of dissociating in general. while the pages will be readable on their own, the plan is to make it so you are able to overlay parts of pages to get a clearer picture of what's going on in the present and in reality, and not purely what dara's experiencing. because pushing your way through an episode like she's having is *hard* and requires effort to get any kind of grip
NOTE: THERE IS POTENTIAL THAT THE OVERLAID PAGES THING WILL NOT HAPPEN. if i can't manage to pull it off the way i want to, i will have to scrap it and attempt something else. i have back up plans in place already. but i do WANT it to happen and will try my best with it
demon asks god for power. god says "ok", does so, and then leaves
i don't know what else to say about this one man. lonan's just an asshole and doesn't care if this demon kills everyone. yeah sure why the fuck not, take the power, who gives a shit. the demon didn't exactly realize it would have to talk to its former boss to get the power but it worked out in the end didn't it
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After S2E6 of Star Trek: Picard, I was feeling really disappointed and angry about how the writers were so deeply disregarding anything and everything from season 1. We can debate whether season 2 was well-written in its own right (after watching the season finale today, I certainly have Thoughts), but nobody can argue that it was a satisfying continuation of season 1.
Even the characters who got some great development (i.e. Seven of Nine and Picard, unsurprisingly) were fairly divorced from where we saw them in season 1, without the writers ever giving a really satisfying reason for it.
I might, at some point, have the energy to properly go into all of this, but for now, here is how my post-episode-6 rant ended. I feel this ever more strongly tonight.
I really loved season 1. I loved that all the characters were broken in their own ways but still managed to work together towards a goal, I loved how they coaxed each other out of their misery. I really liked the budding relationship between Agnes and Rios. I feel a deep kinship with season 1 Agnes. I thought the themes and worldbuilding were really fascinating, even if the writing didn't always do them (or Agnes, for that matter) justice.
That world and those characters have essentially been my home for the last two years and the stories (and the friends I found through them) got me through some of the darkest moments I've had in my life so far.
It would be one thing if the season 2 writers had said: "Okay, we think season 1 had some glaring flaws. We think it won't hold as the foundation to build two more seasons on top of, so let's find a way to sensibly strip it down to the studs and build out again from there." (I personally would have preferred the approach of "Okay, it's a bit wonky, let's reinforce what's there so it will be strong enough to carry what we're building on top of it", but I didn't honestly expect that to happen.)
If the season 2 writers had taken the characters and looked at them -- really looked at them and where they ended season 1 -- and done even the bare minimum to lead us into where they are in season 2, I would have found that a little sad but been willing to take it as good writing.
Instead, sticking with the metaphor, it feels like the season 2 writers went in like: "Okay. We like the cornerstone of this building (Jean-Luc Picard), but everything else is an unsalvageable mess. Look at it! It looks completely different from everything that came before and doesn't properly pay homage to all these older building styles! So we're going to take a few bricks, chip away at them and put in filler until they work for the new building we want, and then we're going to build something completely new that is much, much closer to the classic buildings all around. If someone complains that it's a disservice to the building we tore down, we can point at the handful of bricks. See? It's the same building! Just better. And also, we need to make sure that all these bits of legacy stonework get a really prominent place and we constantly show them off and talk about them, because that's why people are really here, right? Not this weird newfangled business."
Meanwhile, I'm sitting in the ruins of the house that has sheltered and supported me for two years and am wondering what the fuck I'm supposed to do.
Sure, I still have blueprints and photos and like... a model replica of the house. And I have my little shovel and pile of mortar and I can reconstruct and build it out and fill in the gaps. But most of the people have moved to the new house and are yelling about how much nicer it is over there and how I'm stupid for even appreciating this dilapidated shack of a building that was poorly constructed and mostly held up by the strength of its admittedly pretty bricks.
Fortunately, I know I’m not alone in the rubble. I have my friends, sitting in the ruins with me, and we’re going to rebuild something out of this once the dust has settled.
But the loss is still intense.
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makinggarbo-blog · 1 month
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Magic in Worldbuilding
When working on a world for The Dark Lines based on the mid 1840s Europe I ran into a significant fork in the road. There are 2 possibilities, magic being widely known and used, and magic being superstition. When worldbuilding in the past I've veered towards magic being widely utilized, I've been fascinated by how systems of governance would change if the king could actually be immortal; what would that mean for his sons?
As I design The Dark Lines to be a game of horror I run into the issue of player vs character expectations about the world. If a player sees something magical happen they aren't necessarily sure how their character would react right away. This confusion I think is what diminishes the horror greatly in games like Vampire the Masquerade. After all even a neonate, young by vampire standards, at up to 80 years old has seen much and would have expectations to see the strange and arcane from time to time. The player acting the character should in my opinion not be surprised in character when something grotesquely strange happens. In horror games the most effective moments I think are when the expectation of the characters and players align, that is to say when both are equally faced with the unexpected.
To give an example. In The Dark Lines as it stands where magic is commonplace if faced with a zombie, no matter how horrifying the players could wrongly assume this is a somewhat normal occurrence. That this is within the realm of expectation the issue. This is why I think the thing that does the greatest disservice to Call of Cthulhu is the expectation by players that they'll be facing Cthulhu. That the great old ones not only exist but are inevitably going to appear takes away a lot of the tension.
My attempt to resolve this initially was to divide The Dark Lines into 3 books, the first is the mechanics for the players, the second mechanics for the GM, the third lore for the characters. I think this approach has failed because no matter how try a world of magic is always so distant from the one we live in the stakes have failed to land in playtesting. To go back to the earlier example a zombie in this world as it exists should be a massive sign of dark and terrible things, a mage who has learned the secrets of life and death, a mage who has exited what can reasonably be called human. But to the players a zombie is always a zombie, something familiar and not something to be feared.
The two roads then re-evaluated are to change the theme of the game from one of horror to one of adventure with horror elements and motifs or to change the world from one with commonplace magic to one of secret societies and occult mystery. What road I'll take… I don't know yet, may do both and just write up two versions and see which playtests better but that sounds like a lot of darn work.
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redrobin-detective · 3 years
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?? What did Sam alter the costume to in Memory Blank? I’ve never seen the episode before
So Phantom up to ep 20 aka the first season:
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Then comes the first ep of season 2, Memory Blank in which, tldr, Sam accidentally wishes she never met Danny which Desiree overhears meaning Danny never got his powers. Sam recreates the accident but this time, slaps a logo she made so it's literally fused to his costume without explaining to Danny what she's doing and then trying to pretend after that it had always been there:
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(creepy shot I realize but the whole ep was Sam being invasive and creepy, and not in a creepy goth way, which is so infuriating)
I remember pre-teen me was upset bc I did (and still lowkey do) think the logo was dumb looking and much preferred the sleekness of the plain black/white suit. As an adult looking back I'm pissed at how they treated Sam throughout the episode, making her a bad friend, making her only seem interested in Danny for his powers to the point of making him go through a traumatic, life threatening accident again seemingly for her own gain as not much had seemingly changed in Amity with Danny safe and fully human.
Also the idea of Danny not having his powers with ghost attacks still prevalent is a damn cool idea and could have been explored. What if Amity was a warzone without Phantom, that would be a good reason to give Danny his powers. What if, even human, Danny had become a hunter in his own right and it was HIS choice this time, not a stupid accident, to become half ghost and save his town? Like they could have very easily made the story make sense, highlight Danny's inherent goodness/heroism even without powers, up the stakes and show a good story. Instead the ep is a very clear and ham-fisted attempted to make DP "marketable" and it annoys me 15 years later.
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dani-luminae · 3 years
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Adding on to my previous Auradon’s worldbuilding is both fascinating and bizarre post, 
The fact that this is very obviously a franchise for little kids, and Disney is so desperate to shove every single Disney hero and villain in it for references sake, does a major disservice to the idea of Auradon as “perfect fairy-tale land.”
Because, not all the Disney Villains are obviously maliciously villains. Ones like Maleficent, Jafar, Ursula - yes, sure, they’re evil. Probably didn’t deserve the Isle of the Lost, but yeah, there’s no arguing that they’re evil.
But here’s where the whole “must include every Disney story somehow!” ruins it. Merch books say that Aunt Sarah (an antagonist of Lady and the Tramp) and Amos Slade (the hunter antagonist of The Fox and the Hound) are on the Isle of the Lost. These guys might be a little bad-tempered and a little cranky, but are they outright villains? Hell no. Even little kids look at them and know they’re not on the same level as the bad guys...
So why are they on the Isle of the Lost?
The obvious answer: it’s a children’s franchise and Disney loves name-dropping their characters for recognition’s sake.
But how does it reflect on the world-building? That every single “villain,” no matter how ultimately harmless - even just being bad-tempered! - gets booted to the Isle of the Lost?
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a little introduction!
I’m a firm believer that it is reductive to judge a comic book adaptation based on the extent to which it stays faithful to the source material. Instead, I think it makes way more sense to consider it along two separate axes: how it functions as an adaptation and how well it works as a new, separate project. 
This feels important for a few reasons: adaptations into a new medium are not necessarily meant only to appeal to the audience of the original source material. Fans of the source material and creators alike want movies and tv shows to find purchase with a larger non-comic book reading audience as well. 
With comic book adaptations specifically, comics are a notoriously inaccessible medium. Iconic characters have been around for decades, they often appear across multiple books written by distinct writers simultaneously. Individual plot points regularly get retconned or the entire universe gets reset by the company. This makes comics a) hard to get into and b) hard to follow. Even if you are a comic book fan, based on when and what you’ve read, you might have an entirely different conceptualization of a character than someone else even if both of you are drawing upon the same “canon.” This makes the idea of a “faithful adaptation” especially complicated. Faithful to which iteration of the character exactly? Older comics especially are often wrought with problematic elements from racist, sexist, or homophobic tropes to willful exclusion of marginalized demographics from their storytelling.
Thirdly, fans want to be surprised. If every MCU film was a cut and dry adaptation of a storyline from the comics, there wouldn’t be the culture of speculation and anticipation that currently drives the fandom. 
That’s not to say it’s not worth it to measure comic book movies and tv series up against the comics they’re drawing from. I think part of the fun of superhero fandom culture in particular is that when we look at movies, we are not only seeing them for what they are. By having knowledge of the source material, we also get to analyze them for what they could have been. We get to see the storytelling avenues or characterization or worldbuilding aspects that the filmmakers, for one reason or another, chose not to include and that’s so consistently fascinating. 
All this to say, on this blog I plan to consider adaptions along both axes. A film can be a good movie and a bad adaptation simultaneously. To just consider the way its working in only one of these respects feels like a disservice. 
If that’s something you’re interested in too, feel free to follow! I’d be glad to have you along.
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warsofasoiaf · 5 years
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I loved your Graven Ashe piece. Can I request your thoughts and opinions on the Voices of Nerat and their Scarlet Chorus as well?
Certainly.
The Voices of Nerat seems at first glance to be a bog-standard villain. It/they seems like an unapologetically evil madman cackling as he leads an army of brutal rampaging slaves to subjugate the world to a regime of cruelty. If it were any more generic, the Voices would be twirling their moustaches and stroking white cats as they did so. There is something to it certainly, the Scarlet Chorus openly espouses a social Darwinist model of might makes right, hardly the foundation for solid, coherent administration either for a military or the occupation afterwards. To reduce it simply to that, though, does a disservice to Obsidian’s worldbuilding and the complicated themes that they were looking to explore with this game.
The entire point of the Chorus is that they are an innumerable horde from every place of Kyros’s empire, and every conceivable person can be found in the Chorus. Every region of the continent, every ethnic group, every class, every everything can be found in the Chorus. No matter what you were before, all have a place in the Chorus, all are permitted the initiation, and all are permitted to rise. The only real advancement in the Chorus is based on strength, so if you can kill your boss and lead, then nothing really stops you from doing that. This is a message that has a broad-spectrum appeal, it’s one that plenty of violent mass movements have used as recruitment material. The message is clear: we are just like you, because we are you. The idea of it is to prevent a sense of separation between those of Kyros and those that are not, to prevent a sense and system of identity and tradition outside of Kyros from existing, the way the Unbroken or Vendrian Guard do. There are members of Stalwart and Apex within the Chorus. Kyros’s emprie is one nation, and so are the Scarlet Chorus. You belong.
What you ‘belong’ though is an organization where you are forced to kill the other people that the Chorus capture, then being thrown on the front lines, and you evolve or die. By forcing the prisoners and the conscripts to kill each other, the Chorus removes the sense of a transgression by making the recruits perform one themselves. The ones that survive either already were murderes and killers, the others have been forced to break a seriously transgressive taboo. It breaks the individual by making them murder the people they know, after that they accept the grim tasks before them in a form of the sunk-cost fallacy. They’ve already murdered their families and neighbors, what worse thing could they do? They have no fixtures left in their lives, nothing to stand on, because they killed their own to stay alive. They have to remain with the Chorus and perhaps even rise high in its ranks because they have nothing left to lose. So the Horde continues to throw itself onto the blades of its enemies. Most want to die anyway, and the ones that don’t are the ones who eagerly sought it out. That’s the truly terrible part of the Scarlet Chorus. You do belong.
Where the metaphor falls flat is that there is an identity that someone can cling to that can provide resistance and form outside of the Scarlet Chorus, namely opposing the conduct and actions of the Chorus. The emotional appeal of the Chorus is ultimately shallow, enticing primarily to the small-minded and entitled. The types of people that these movements call to are the ones who think that in their hearts, that they are a superior type of individual, that others are lessers, exploiting the subject’s inherent talent and ability for their own benefit because they lack the ability to thrive on their own. That’s a common refrain among plenty of mass movements, scrub the proper nouns away and they blur to the point of being nigh-impossible to distinguish. That’s not a coincidence, either, the choice was deeply deliberate, designed to invoke these sorts of movements in their examination of evil by showing what makes it so captivating not merely to the deranged, but to those who seem by all means normal. The “banality of evil” as coined by Hannah Arendt illustrates that many of the practitioners of monstrous regimes are “terrifyingly normal,” and that’s Kyros’s empire in a nutshell. Plenty of NPC’s loyal to Kyros exhibit terrible qualities, but plenty are simply normal people, eyes cast down and ears tuned out, unwilling to speak out of fear of reprisal.
The Voices started out the same way most servants to Kyros start out, as a human being who capitulated to Kyros. The Chorus’s initiation rites make perfect sense to the Voices of Nerat, as his first major act was to torture and execute his own family, gaining intelligence and making a powerful statement of intent to Kyros. His exceptional skill at torture and interrogation (an odd combination as torture is a terrible interrogation tool) became his own magical conception, as those who feared him believed he could steal their thoughts, so did he come to actually be able to steal them. The Voices is no longer the man that staked and flayed his family, now it is a mass of thoughts stolen by a ravenous, parasitic entity maintained in a single form by magic. Self-obsessed and power hungry, the Voices is the Chorus writ into a single entity. Both have no fixed identity, both consume endlessly, with people being the most valued resource of all. It ebbs and flows the way the Chorus does. This facet of himself, to his own admission, is also birthed by the thoughts and beliefs of others. He is as much a slave to the magical fuel that furthers him as he is empowered by it. This dichotomy is not quite the same as Ashe, but it is still fascinating from a worldbuilding perspective. 
The Voices isn’t sympathetic, but it is fascinating to see the actions it takes and how they further its own ends. For example, the Voices forbids damage to children, in fact children are to be protected by the Chorus in his demand to Honor and Guard the Young. Nerat permits them to rise to adulthood in care, it’s only once you have reached maturity that all bets are off. It permits children to be raised among the chaos of the Chorus and to see it as normal and natural, and lets them be raised separate from the identities of their conquered kin so that no other competing way of identifying the self remains. Nerat often undermines Kyros’s war efforts, particularly in undermining Ashe and the Disfavored, but he is fanatically devoted to Kyros’s Peace. Why is a mystery, perhaps out of genuine devotion, self-serving gain, or the only means by which an entity like him can thrive. It’s tough to say, but it is a fascinating character arc to witness and observe.
Thanks for the question, Calagon.
SomethingLikeALawyer, Hand of the King
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starryshelf · 6 years
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YOUR FAVOURITE PROMPT FROM PREVIOUS READING CHALLENGES: A BOOK ABOUT AN INTERESTING WOMAN - THE TRAITOR BARU CORMORANT, SETH DICKINSON
I finished this book yesterday and I’m uhhh... still dealing with the aftermath to be honest. It was something else entirely, unlike nothing I’ve read before. The closest comparison I could make would probably be to Game of Thrones, but I think that comparison does The Traitor Baru Cormorant a huge disservice. It’s much better than Game of Thrones.
Baru Cormorant is born on the island nation of Taranoke, to her mother and two fathers. She lives a peaceful, happy life, until the Empire of Masks arrives. The Masquerade brings new social norms, new languages, new science, both diseases and their inoculations, and they thoroughly overwhelm Taranoke without a battle. Baru befriends a Masquerade merchant who encourages her to attend a Masquerade school, where she is identified as a potential political savant. When she turns eighteen, she is sent to be the new Imperial Accountant in the wild and unruly nation of Aurdwynn.
Baru is a fascinating character. She’s incredibly clever and confident, but also terrified and furious. Her whole aim is to destroy the Masquerade from the inside out and she’ll do whatever it takes. And it takes a lot. She’s also secretly gay, which puts her immediately under threat from the Empire of Masks and their dislike of ‘unhygienic mating practices’. To survive in her new role, Baru has to don a whole new mask, and conceal her attraction to the seductive Northern Duchess Tain Hu. 
I don’t want to give too much away, plotwise, because this book thrives on making you think you know what’s coming next and then twisting away from you. Suffice to say that I was absolutely wrapped up in it and more and more invested in the characters. I’ve read a lot of military history books this last year and some of the scenes in this book felt very realistic in that vein. Also, Baru herself really got to me. Her rage is a powerful thing but she’s going to have to compromise a lot to get what she wants, and she’s never quite sure if she should, but does it anyway. I loved the details of the worldbuilding - a world in which same-sex relationships were once common and normal but have been made taboo by the Empire, and where many different cultures seem to have inspired areas. I thought Taranoke was presumably based on the Caribbean or South Pacific, but I could’ve been wrong, and of course the Empire of Masks takes a lot from European empires. 
There’s a sequel coming soon called The Monster Baru Cormorant. I might very well pre-order it, because it’s been a long time since I’ve enjoyed a fantasy book this much.
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trainsinanime · 7 years
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Mirror’s Edge Catalyst
I know it's old, but I really need to vent. So much so that I'm willing to vent even before I'm done playing it, which means everything I'm about to say might turn out to be completely wrong in the last quarter. But still:
Damn, this story sucks. This story sucks so badly, it almost makes me think "the one in the first game wasn't that bad"!
I can't really point to any single thing that is wrong with the story, because there really isn't much to the story at all. It's the barest of bare bones. A really simple bare plot is not a problem, but the great games all manage to have story and personality around the edges. Interesting characters, interesting worldbuilding, something like that.
This game has nothing like that. The characters are all basically just plastic dolls. Describing them as stock characters is doing a disservice to stock characters. They have no personality or definable traits beyond maybe one sentence, or just one word. "Mentor", "Older mentor", "Asshole new kid", "Extremist", "Hacker" and "Rebel without a cause" basically sums it up. All the names would be appropriate for Matrix fanfic OCs. It's impossible to care about any of them at all.
All the dialogue is crap. It flows badly, and several scenes don't seem to go anywhere at all, they're just people glaring at each other for a bit. It's so bad that the Tomb Raider reboot actually feels good in comparison. Yes, it was full of stereotypes like Damsel in Distress (Sam), Zoe from Firefly, generic hacker, generic scottish dude, generic father figure, Gilderoy Lockhart… but they all had more personality and were more interesting to watch than anyone in this game.
World building is another big problem area. The world is defined, but it's just generic cyberpunk, except with the part where it's all bad never shown, just told. It's full of names and terms that get thrown at the viewer but never manage to stick. We're in the city Glass in the country Arcadia surrounded by Greylands and the hacker Plastic wants to connect the Meta-Grid to the Beat in order to stop Reflection from becoming a thing… I think. It just goes on like that.
I'm also not fond of the level design. The original Mirror's Edge had some weird ideas here, with all levels mostly white with one bright primary key color per level, and basically no other color; trees and similar were usually white. It's weird but fascinating and in my opinion effective. For Catalyst, they decided to tone it down. The visual language is still there, but there's more color, more dirt and grime, more realism and less stark contrast. That's disappointing.
It's open world, which sounds great, but I'm not sure it really is. Effectively it's just levels connected by a few defined routes. Since the levels are designed so you'll go through them again and again, they're mostly generic, with very few of the big set pieces that were so important in the original (there are a few big set pieces and they're great). There also seems to be less variation, and you can clearly see where the explorable world ends at all times.
So why do I still play, and why will I play it again tomorrow? Mostly because they actually fixed the running. The running in ME was always fun, but often frustrating because you felt screwed over by the controls. That is no longer the case here; the controls are often more forgiving and allow you to change your mind more. It can still be frustrating when you do a timed challenge or try to climb to a high place, but it feels fair - when you fail, it's always your fault, not the controls.
I also like that they made the combat a bit better and a bit more fun. I still think having combat at all is wrong, especially in the sections where you're locked in a room and have to fight several waves of enemies, but at least it's better than it used to be. Also, there does not seem to be a ship level.
So basically, everything about this game sucks and is worse than the original - except for the actual core gameplay. I could spend hours just running through the city. Very weird and confusing. I think the only real conclusion I have is that the best Mirror's Edge game is still the sidescroller for iOS.
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