#expected to participate in combat in whatever context it appears

[serpentface]

@mouseymagus Yeah that’s semi accurate but not exact.

Most children will be taught riding, textile production, food preparation, agricultural labor practices, and other basic foundational skills regardless of assigned gender. Exceptions are more based in the status of their respective clans (ruling clans outsource their agricultural labor, so textile production takes preeminence there).

This cultural group can be broadly be stated as egalitarian in its conceptualization of gender, with men and women having roughly equal power in society but different expectations. The starkest division of gendered labor is that married women control the ‘domestic’ sphere and (mostly young) men participate in warrior culture, while societal roles for others are either more flexible or entirely context dependent.

Basically a mother is in charge of the land and household and directing the use of its resources, young men (16-40ish) are primarily tasked with defending it and gaining resources, while all others (children regardless of gender, unmarried women, and older men) play supportive roles wherever needed. These supportive roles may be more strictly defined by gender in some contexts than others, the Hill Tribes are not a monolithic cultural group, but the above statement is broadly applicable to all. 

Warrior culture in the contemporary revolves primarily around cattle raiding and combat sports, with other applications being context dependent (some groups practice raiding trade routes, some northern groups in particular are in a defensive position against imperial Wardi territorial aggression along the seaway, and there are many conflicts and rivalries among clans and tribes for territory and resources). 

Unmarried women ARE commonly involved in herding, and as such may be situationally involved in livestock raids (usually as defenders). There don't tend to be any general prescriptions Against women participating in this aspect of warrior culture, but it is simply Expected of young men as their societal role and correct performance of masculinity, whereas for an unmarried (or especially married) woman to take active part in livestock raids is a curiosity.

Men and women are both strongly expected to marry and produce heirs. Unmarried adult women often occupy a unique cultural space, as they can perform more flexible roles (are neither expected to engage in combat like young men or to control the domestic sphere like married women). Spinsters (there's probably a culturally specific word for it but I haven't come up with it yet) as such occupy a gendered space that is considered somewhat nonbinary, not a man but not fully considered a woman in role either. In some contexts this is mildly shameful and a failure to perform expected roles, in others it's a more neutral concept, or positively acknowledged as a unique role within society.

[watching-pictures-move]

Movie Review | Vampire Ecstasy (Sarno, 1973)

As a teenager in Toronto in the 2000s whose parents had Rogers Cable, one of the key drivers of my horror fandom was a channel called Scream. Launched in 2001, this was a channel that specialized in horror films, and provided me with an opportunity to catch such classics of the genre as Evil Dead II and Blood Feast (although I did not appreciate the latter at the time). On one hand, my budding cinephilia was nourished through whatever Criterions I could get my hands on at the public library, which lent itself to a kind of curation. On the other hand, my interest in horror was fed through a more omnivorous approach, as I would devour whatever movies I managed to catch this channel during its regular generous free preview periods during the month of October. (Looking back, I feel a bit of guilt around this, as the channel rebranded to a more milquetoast iteration known as Dusk in 2009, and then ceased operations in 2012. Were people like me to blame? I can only atone by buying an ill-advised amount of Blu-rays to support companies selling horror titles going forward.) Even though I was cursed with certain ideas around "good taste" at the time, I recognized this channel for the boon that it was to my cinephilia.

Those ideas however led me to squander the channel that was one up from Scream, Drive-In Classics, which specialized in exploitation movies. (Amusingly, after Drive-In Classics ended operations, it was replaced by the Sundance Channel, which is about as far as you can get in terms of programming.) Before my tastes had become sophisticated and/or debased enough, I naturally assumed what was shown on this channel was a heap of garbage and didn't spend a lot of time watching it, although every once in a while curiosity would get the better of me and I'd hit the channel up button to see what was on. During one of these televisual excursions, I stumbled across a scene of some kind of strange ritual, characterized by boobs and bongo music. Despite being relatively prudish as a teenager, I was transfixed for reasons that were beyond me at the time (okay, that's a lie), and watched with rapt attention for a few minutes with the sound really low only to quickly change the channel before anybody else came in the room. That scene was from a movie called Vampire Ecstasy (AKA The Devil's Plaything), which for years held a great deal of psychic weight over me yet I'd found it hard to come across a copy and had never seen mentioned in my internet circles during all these years (it doesn't even have a Wikipedia page). But now, through the miracle of Tubi and the Film Movement Blu-ray label, I found it was available to stream in a beautiful HD transfer, so after many years, I was able to finally sate my curiosity.

Sometimes you see a bit of a movie out of context and develop an idea of what the movie's like that's completely divorced from the real thing. For years, I'd imagined Weird Science had some wacky extended chase where the heroes escape from an evil pimp played by Bill Paxton, wearing his yellow suit from Predator 2. When I finally watched it last year, I realized I'd extrapolated much of that entirely from the "malaka" scene and had actually only seen the first few minutes. Other times, as in here, you see a part of the movie that proves to be entirely representative of the whole thing. Vampire Ecstasy has many, many, many scenes of nude female characters conducting some kind of weird sex ritual in a dungeon, set to bongo music. Some of these scenes involve marital aids, like dick-shaped candles and wooden cones, as well as the occasional dude, but others merely involve them writhing to the bongo music. (There is occasional gyrating as well. What is the difference between writhing and gyrating, you ask? Well, I'm not a man of science, but I would wager that the direction and intensity of the oscillations plays a role in distinguishing the two.) Now, I'm not against any of this in principle, but the movie runs an hour and forty-three minutes long, and these sequences ensure you feel every second of that runtime. (It's also unclear whether the bongo music is diegetic, as other characters seemingly hear the bongos, yet nobody is ever seen playing them. Such are the mysteries of Vampire Ecstasy.)

However, the movie does offer some of the pleasures you'd expect from a movie called Vampire Ecstasy. One can try to dissect the particulars of the plot, but all one really needs to know is that there are a group of sinister lesbian vampires (the ones conducting the aforementioned bongo rituals) combating a professor of vampire history (or some shit), who may have an incestuous attraction to her brother. Aside from the numerous, numerous nude scenes featuring fairly attractive participants, the movie benefits greatly from being set in a castle near the Bavarian alps, which lends the movie an appropriately chilly atmosphere. Combined with the vaguely German accents of most of the cast and the death metal font of the opening credits, this plays credibly like a Eurosleaze vampire movie, perhaps like one Jean Rollin would have made at the time, so it surprised me that it's directed by a Joe Sarno, an American. Sarno was a prolific director of both softcore and hardcore pornography whose work I'd like to delve further into, as by all accounts, he made some pretty good ones. (During one of my other bouts of interest in Drive-In Classics, I distinctly remember seeing Abigail Lesley is Back in Town appearing on the programming guide, tantalized by the NC-17 rating noted in the movie description but too afraid to be caught actually flipping to the channel.) I suspect Vampire Ecstasy isn't the greatest entry point for his career, and unlike Rollin, he never manages to imbue enough of a sense of threat into the movie, so whatever atmosphere is present never accumulates into dread. As a result, this is hard to recommend as an actual horror movie, but it holds some interest as a curio. Given my interest in clothing, I must note that one of the female characters arrives in a fedora, pinstripe suit and tie, so she immediately became my favourite character. There is also a scene where the heroine's clothes all fall off as she's attacked by bats, in a scene less gruesome yet similarly entertaining as the bat attack in The House by the Cemetery. See, it's not so bad.

[ghoultyrant]

Samus

You know, I’ve never really gotten into the fandom end of Metroid. I rarely read fanfics for the series or anything of that sort. Which always feels weird, because the Metroid series is one of my all-time favorite video game series, and it’s got a plenty good setting for playing around in.

I sometimes think part of it has to do with the mood or atmosphere of the games themselves. A substantial component of fandom is the social portion of things, whereas a big part of the Metroid series is Samus going off to do her thing by herself. I can imagine that an inherent difficulty exists there, where the draw of the Metroid experience is more or less antithetical to a lot of what motivates more typical fandom. Certainly, the series has a lot less fanfic and whatnot than I’d expect for something that sells well and is a pretty big cultural phenomenon and so on, which is part of why I’ve never gotten much into the fandom: there’s just not much fandom to get into.

On the other hand, a more in-my-face component of it is the way people write Samus. Bizarrely enough, the Metroid fandom seems largely unable to write Samus except in the context of a specific continuum: at one extreme, we have Samus The Cold Professional, who kills people she believes to be innocent at the behest of people she believes to be scum and shrugs at the idea that she might have any moral culpability for this. At the other extreme, we have Maternal Feminine Samus, generally fixated on her unwillingness to kill the baby Metroid but occasionally people do things like invent a family for her to have. Either way, the end result generally feels... well, for one thing, it feels extremely removed from the person we see in the actual games.

Maternal Feminine Samus tends to be morbidly amusing to me. People taking this interpretation are generally very obviously deriving it from the opening in Super Metroid establishing that she couldn’t bring herself to kill a newborn that had latched onto her as its mother...

... and completely ignoring that her follow-up response was to shove the thing in a jar and pass it off to a bunch of scientists.

Like yeah, Samus clearly has a conscience, but the idea that the baby Metroid awakened her latent maternal instincts or something like that is just hilariously wrong.

Samus The Cold Professional was vaguely understandable as the other extreme back when Super Metroid was the last release -and to be entirely fair, it seems to me to have become less common after Metroid Prime and Metroid Fusion came along- inasmuch as Samus was enough of a cipher it wasn’t completely impossible she was in that vicinity, but the baby Metroid situation once again makes it fairly questionable. If Samus is someone who can kill basically anyone without guilt, even when they have names and faces and family and all those other humanizing things, why would she hesitate to kill the last of an alien race of life-sucking monsters her paycheck is tied to killing?

I’m not sure I’ve ever seen fanfic write a happy middle ground. More importantly, I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a Metroid fanfic avoid that dichotomy in the first place.

Of course, this is a Metroid-specific manifestation of a broader fictional trend I’ve observed; that media routinely feels a need with female characters who break from traditional femininity to either assure the audience they are for sure Traditionally Feminine Beneath The Surface, or to have them out-man the men and be stone-cold monsters with not an ounce of stereotypical feminine behavior to them. (eg suggesting in complete seriousness using children as suicide bombers, even though even Stereotypical Manly Men would be unlikely to countenance such a plan without really strong situational pressures)

And in turn this is a manifestation of the broader cultural wrestling with the transition from women being assumed to be stay-at-home-moms to participating in realms that were traditionally Manly Men Jobs, and the attendant difficulties of disentangling what expectations were rooted in what realities, and which of those realities are still true vs which ones are not. Samus just happens to be a good lens for working through these problems, since she’s doing Manly Space Dude Combat With Guns And Shit while happening to be female and with her female-ness never really emphasized. (Except in Other M, but this whole thing is part of why it was reviled, above and beyond all the ways in which its story was an incoherent mess told badly; it went out of its way to make a big deal out of Samus’ femininity, not only with the in-universe story but with its goddamn camera work)

Which is actually tied pretty deeply into why it frustrates me that people don’t seem able to write Samus as who she appears to be, but rather write her in a manner that’s fundamentally reactionary to the whole A Woman In A Stereotypically Masculine Role thing. A big part of the appeal of Samus is that who and what she is isn’t tied up in her ~femininity~ just because she happens to be female. The reactionary writing, whether it falls too far toward trying to reject femininity or assert that everything’s okay because even though she’s a killer for hire she still loves her children or whatever the author believes to be an essential feminine quality, is fundamentally taking things in the wrong direction for wrestling with this particular issue.

I honestly don’t get why this particular piece is apparently so hard for so many people.

[cryptodictation]

The package of measures satisfied our exporters

In his statement, “TIM and exporters of proposals prepared measures with the participation of our troops Presidential Economic measures announced by the tribunal was satisfied our exporters take place in the pack,” said Turkey Exporters Assembly (TIM) Chairman Ismail Shot, continued as follows:

“Stock financing support to exporters to delay the April, May and June payments of SGK premiums for 6 months, to provide additional financing support to the banks for a minimum of 3 months and to provide additional financing support when necessary, to maintain capacity utilization rates in the temporary slowdown in exports, Credit The issues included in the measure package, such as increasing the Garanti Fund limit from 25 billion lira to 50 billion lira, and minimum wage support, will contribute significantly to the Turkish economy.

The state's announcement of a support package is extremely important in the face of the current economic developments and difficulties. I think that the economic size of the package will increase with the multiplier effect. Therefore, I think the economic impact of this support package of around 100 billion TL will have an effect of 300 to 350 billion TL.

Each support package has a multiplier effect, so it will have 3 or 4 effects on 1. As long as banks and financial institutions are sensitive about liquidity. This package will enable our country to be more alive and ready to stand against the new conditions that will occur during the periods when the world will go through this crisis.

AGENDA

The state should be like this: 100 billion funds were allocated to the coronavirus

As it is known, our country takes the necessary precautions by taking all necessary precautions by taking the threat of coronavirus seriously, which has gained the title of “Global epidemic” from the very first moment. In this context, we would like to thank to our Ministers, our Ministries, our Scientific Committee and our relevant institutions for their “Transparent” and “Rational” policies.

International markets have spread the virus to show that serious problems in supply from countries as Turkey “safe harbor supplier” our position, we can assume the role of a regional and global suppliers we express at every opportunity. In the upcoming period, we will continue to work intensively on the subject in line with the demands of our exporters, so that our exports are not affected by this negative picture in the world.

As the field barriers of exports, we are ready to fulfill whatever our state expects from us in this process. “

PLAY 00:00

President Erdoğan: We are commissioning a 100 billion lira resource set

The Coronavirus Combat Guidance Meeting, held at the Çankaya Presidential Palace, chaired by President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, has ended. President Erdoğan made statements after the meeting. Government announces 100 billion pounds 'Economic Stability Shield' package

PLAY 01:11

President Erdoğan: We can limit the time to stay at home for 3 weeks

The Coronavirus Combat Guidance Meeting, held at the Çankaya Presidential Palace, chaired by President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, has ended. President Erdoğan made statements after the meeting. Erdogan said, “The best method of protection is the measures that everyone will take on their own. If we observe the precautionary measures together, we can limit the duration of the stay to 3 weeks. '

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[meeedeee]

Final Fantasy FXV: Thoughts RSS FEED OF POST WRITTEN BY FOZMEADOWS

When I first heard that FFXV was going to break with franchise tradition by having an all-male central team, I was more than a little surprised. Final Fantasy has always been distinguished as much by its memorable – and central – female characters as by any other element; which is why, somewhat paradoxically, I never felt particularly angry about the switch, either. As a whole, video games are still male-dominated in a way that frequently sets my teeth on edge, but Final Fantasy has a strong line of credit with me: whatever my thoughts on the state of gaming as an industry – and while criticism of Square Enix’s decision in this context is nonetheless valid – I felt I could still attempt the game itself.

Thus far, at roughly eight hours in – which is, I’m aware, not very far at all – I’m enjoying myself immensely, though possibly not in a way that was intended. And in order to satisfactorily explain why that is, I first need to say a little about my history with the franchise.

The first Final Fantasy I ever played was VIII, which always made me something of an oddity among my friends: unlike everyone who started the series at VII or earlier, I had no established sense of how the combat system ought to work, and so took the VIII model, which was a widely-hated departure from canon, as my yardstick for the series. This meant I was not only frustrated by the traditional setup used in VII and IX, but irritated by the more cartoonish character designs. Which isn’t to say that I disliked either game, exactly: just that they were always less beloved to me than VIII and, later on, X and XII, whose advanced graphics and combat systems more closely resembled what VIII had been trying – with, admittedly, more ambition than success – to achieve.

Even now, XII remains my favourite Final Fantasy. The writing and voice acting were both incredible, and even though Vaan, rather than Ashe, was the POV character, I loved the departure from canon that made him a non-romantic participant in her narrative. By contrast, XIII was a clusterfuck, so much so that I quickly set it aside as unplayable: the writing was naff, the voice acting melodramatic (with the single exception of Sazh), the premise confused and the combat frustratingly garbled. I couldn’t understand how the best aspects of XII had been so thoroughly disregarded, and as such, I never bothered with the sequel, which makes XV the first new Final Fantasy I’ve played since 2010.

Aesthetically, then, XV is paying a great deal of homage to my favourite games in the series – VIII and XII – which predisposes me to love it. The opening premise of an invading empire and a missing heir to the throne is evocative of both Galbadia and Archadia, with Noctis’s early quest to recover lost weapons from ancient tombs running a close parallel to Ashe’s quest in XII. The fact that Noctis, Prompto, Ignis and Gladio spend the game driving around in a sports car might seem ridiculous on the surface, especially if you’ve got a preference for the airships of VII, IX and XII, but only if you’ve forgotten the convertibles and jeeps of VIII, where driving on the worldmap was also a feature, and where fancy cars were a staple of the more dramatic cutscenes.

In fact, there’s always been something of a roadtrip vibe to a lot of the Final Fantasy games, and not only in terms of the main party journeying thither and yon across multiple fictional worlds. The many flashbacks to Lord Braska’s pilgrimage in X show him broing it up with Auron and Jecht (to whom Gladio bears more than a superficial physical and vocal resemblance), while their decision to sphere-capture their adventures is a clear forerunner to Prompto’s photography. VIII didn’t lack for female characters, but the initial SEED test features a grumpily all-male party, with Squall, Zell and Seifer forced into a temporary alliance. Squall and Zell were always something of an odd pair, but delightfully so, and their dynamic has been revived – and, I’d argue, improved – in the byplay between Noctis and Prompto. Likewise, Ignis’s dry drawl and dryer expression are more than a little reminiscent of Balthier, though his dutiful priorities make him a closer equivalent to Auron and Basch.

In other words, the four protagonists of XV are themselves a homage to the male relationships of previous Final Fantasy games, and quite clearly so. Together, they interact much as you’d expect of a quartet of twentysomething men, joking and snarking at each other in equal measure. The writing and voice acting aren’t as good as XII, but they’re nowhere near the abysmal mess of XIII. I’d peg them as being on par with X: naff at times, but somehow endearingly so, and overall engaging. Granted, the background plot is complex – it helps to have watched the prequel movie, Kingsglaive, and there’s also an accompanying anime series – but part of what makes the quartet watchable is how clearly established their friendship is: we’re getting to know the characters by how they know each other.

As far as the gameplay and levelling systems go, I’ve got no complaints thus far. Even without being able to run through the full tutorial for fighting – my version kept glitching when it came to learning how to warp – I’ve still found it intuitive to use. It’s a dissimilar combat system to most FF games, in that it’s not turn-based, but neither is it as blindingly fast-paced or poorly-designed as the system used in XIII, and the ability to warp to targets makes for some engaging tactical options. It helps that I’ve just come off a huge Dragon Age: Inquisition jag: my preferred approach to combat in both games can best be described as “running in headfirst with a large sword and hitting things until they fall down,” with magic and projectile weapons left on auto until or unless I’m specifically forced to use them. Players who favour different tactics might have more complaints to level here, but for my purposes, it works just fine.

But what I’m really loving about XV is the extent to which – I assume unintentionally – it’s both hilarious and heavily queercoded.

I’ll deal with the latter first, because it’s arguably the more contentious point. Let me be clear: I’m not for one second giving Square Enix props for deliberately creating queer representation here, because I don’t think for a second that it’s what they actually meant to do – or at least, if they’re trying to muddle vaguely in that direction, then they haven’t had the guts to confirm it. Culturally, the lines we draw been homosocial and homosexual behaviour tend to be as historically arbitrary as they are fiercely policed, with any overlap subject to argument on both sides. But cultural differences is, I suspect, a large part of why XV reads the way it does: the game is originally Japanese, and in trying to cater to both Japanese and Western masculine ideals, Square Enix has wandered into what plays as a rather spectacularly queer compromise.

First and most obviously, there’s the wardrobe issue. Clearly, the all-black leather aesthetic is meant to look Manly and Cool and Deeply Heterosexual In A Traditionally Masculine Way, and if the designs were simple, functional and militaristic, then that would probably work, even given the youth and beauty of the characters (more of which shortly). But Final Fantasy, like a great many Japanese properties, is famous for its distinctive clothing designs, which means the characters look less like soldiers and more like scene kids en route to a metal concert. Specifically: Noctis and Prompto look like they shop at Hot Topic, Ignis is wearing Cuban heeled boots, driving gloves and seme glasses (seriously) and Gladio consistently looks like he’s posing for a Grindr photo. Like. I’m aware that he’s meant to be the most hypermasculine  straight male self-identification fantasy of the four, what with the scar and the tattoos and the devastatingly Japanese mullet, but generally speaking, ripped guys in open leather shirts and tight leather pants are more visually reminiscent of Mardi Gras than the military. I’m just saying.

The fact that you can customise their outfits (to a degree), and that picking a new wardrobe changes their stats, isn’t a new development: in fact, it’s something the franchise first introduced with dress spheres in the all-female X-2, which makes its presence in the all-male XV a subtly pleasing symmetry. And yet it runs up against a standard of masculine gaming: changing your armour is one thing, because armour is Manly, but changing your clothes – which, stat bonuses or not, is what we’re functionally talking about – is something else entirely. It’s a truly strange demarcation, because there are plenty of instances where video game characters change outfits of their own accord, in cutscenes or for plot-specific purposes, or where the change represents a specific, all-over upgrade. But the option to alter the appearance of male characters for largely aesthetic reasons – to change how they look to you, the player, in clothes that are recognisably modern and fashionable – is not, I suspect, a common feature of games aimed at heterosexual men, nor is the in-game implication of the characters toting around a bunch of fancy matching outfits a particularly straight-coded thing.

And, okay. Even though we queer folk often telegraph our identities through fashion, there’s a degree of reductive stereotype inherent in judging sexuality on the basis of clothing choice, and if that were the only issue here, I wouldn’t have brought it up. (Except, of course, to point out the truly delightful ridiculousness of watching four goth boys run around the countryside in full club gear, often while complaining about the temperature. It’s like they’re headed for Glastonbury with monsters.) But the queercoding of XV is a package deal: it’s not just the clothes, but the clothes in combination with the characters themselves, the dialogue they’re given, and the way the four of them occupy the game.

Specifically: Final Fantasy is a gaming franchise that’s well aware, historically speaking, of its very large female fanbase. Even though the majority of the games have male protagonists, they’ve traditionally been designed for a straight female gaze – and more, I would argue, a teenage female gaze, given that the characters are usually in their teens or very early twenties – in line with aesthetics more Japanese than Western. Former heroes like Cloud, Squall, Zidane, Tidus and Vaan might be formidable warriors in-game, but they’re never beefed up: they’re overwhelmingly built lean, with much longer, more stylised hair than you typically see on masculine Western characters. They wear jewellery – often visible in their base character designs, and not just as a hidden accessory slot – and offhand, aside from various weird lines around Cloud crossdressing in VII, I can’t think of any real instances of sexism or misogyny from those characters that aren’t actively shut down. In fact, the number of female characters in the earlier games ensures that, in addition to any love interests, the leading men also have platonic female friends – something that’s still damnably unusual in most forms of media, let alone in video games.

All of which, thus far, holds true in XV, too: Princess Lunafreya, Noctis’s intended bride, is his childhood friend, as is Gladio’s sister, Iris. When the game begins, Noctis and his friends are travelling to meet Lunafreya before their (politically arranged) wedding; when everything goes awry because betrayal and empire, they’re forced to regroup and end up hanging out with Iris, who has escaped to the city of Lesallum. That’s where I’m up to so far, and what immediately stands out to me, as someone who spent a not inconsiderable portion of their adolescence and early twenties hanging around single straight guys, is the fact that the quartet barely ever talk about women at all. And the thing is, I can see why it’s been done! Final Fantasy has a heavy female fanbase, and in any case, they’re not the sort of games where the male soldiers sit around reminiscing about sexual conquests. But contextually, because of the way the game is presented – four friends driving and talking shit in real time, mocking each other, while initially on the way to see one of them married – the lack of talk about sex or romance of any kind is jarring.

Which isn’t to say the subject of women never comes up at all; it’s just that, when it does, the overwhelming impression is of dialogue written with a female audience in mind, but without any awareness of the queercoding implications of its delivery by these particular male characters. This means, for instance, that there’s a scene where the boys find a magazine article about Lunafreya’s wedding dress, and all of them start cooing about how beautiful it will be; Ignis notes that the dress is bespoke, designed by Vivienne Westwood, and Prompto starts enthusing about how pretty Lunafreya will look in it. In Hammerhead, the buxom mechanic Cindy, whose character design is clearly meant to please the straight male players, is someone who, in real life, you’d expect a bunch of straight boys on an ostensible stag trip to talk about. Except that they never do; and instead, the one time there’s a reference made to Gladio “chatting someone up,” it turns out to be a grumpily endearing scientist who wants you to go catch some frogs as penance for interrupting her research.

And then there’s Noctis taking a tour of Lestallum with Iris. Throughout this mini-quest, you’re given a set of binary conversational options to either encourage Iris in her enthusiasm for the town, or to disapprove. Then, at the end, she coyly suggests that being on the tour was almost like a date – an assertion you can either play off lightly, or outright deny: pointedly, there is no option to agree. If you deny, she laughs and says “you could at least play along for once,” suggesting that Iris knows Noctis isn’t interested in her and is willing to tease him about it – an odd thing to include, if you don’t want the audience to wonder about his preferences.

A little earlier in the game, Prompto asks Noctis what he ought to take more photos of: apart from declining, the only options are “me” (meaning Noctis), Ignis or Gladio. Again, there’s a gameworld logic to this – the photos are ultimately viewed by the player, who gets to pick which character they want to record the most – but in terms of the impact in setting, this is not an outstandingly heterosexual moment. Very possibly, there exists a group of straight bros whose designated photographer is happy asking, “Hey bro, which of our friends do you want to see more in pictures?” in an established No Homo way, and if so, more power to them. But if you want to find a context where that sort of exchange is an everyday thing, then look no further than the queer regions of Instagram. (Plus, it’s kind of conspicuous how often Prompto, when assessing the day’s photos, comments on how good Gladio the Perpetually Shirtless looks.)

And then there’s the occasional quirks of dialogue and voice acting: choices that, again, would be minor on their own, but which collectively become suggestive of something specific. Early on, Cor sends Gladio, Prompto and Ignis to make a distraction at a military blockade while he and Noctis sneak inside: the gambit is successful, and when the group reunites afterwards, Gladio says cheerfully, “The Niffs couldn’t keep their eyes off us!”. To which Ignis quips, in reference to Noctis and Cor’s arrival, “You spared us their attentions.” Offhand, I can think of about a dozen different ways to word that exchange that don’t remotely brush up against innuendo, and which are far more colloquially and contextually apt besides. The eyes/attentions combo is the kind of thing you’d expect a pair of femme fatales to say after seducing the guards and knocking them out in an action movie. (The fact that we don’t actually witness the initial distraction only adds to its ambiguity.) And yet, this is what they’ve gone with.

Other examples are smaller, but they all add up. Whenever you find new ingredients for Ignis to cook with, he stops to announce, with particular vocal flamboyance, that he’s just thought up a new recipe (exclamation mark!), and whips out a notebook to jot it down. (“I’ll taste test for ya,” Gladio says, in a playfully growling tone that always seems to have one eye on the bedroom.) And then there’s Prompto, who I’m inclined to think of as a confused bisexual puppy, whose voice turns dreamily fanboyish when discussing Cor’s exploits, and who gets just as excited on receiving Cor’s praise as he does at the prospect of seeing Lunafreya in her pretty wedding dress.

Put this all together, then, and what you have are a bunch of young men who are, by Western standards, more pretty than handsome, dressed in fashionable clothes and accessories that are more evocative of queer or queer-friendly subcultures than not, and who care enough about their appearance to have multiple outfits on hand at any given time. (You can, if you’re willing to sacrifice an accessory slot to aesthetics, buy hair gel for them to use.) These men are knowledgeable about fashion, have a platonic concern for the women they encounter, are constantly photographing one another for each other, have zero comments to make about the stupidly hot female mechanic unless they’re praising her competence, and whose idea of “chatting someone up” apparently means “talking to the grumpy frog lady about the local wildlife population”. This isn’t me leaping to conclusions, here: in the immortal words of Buffy Summers, I took a tiny step and there conclusions were.

All of which is a way of saying that, thus far, I’m delighted with Final Fantasy XV, though not in the ways I’d expected. The characters and setting are a homage to my favourite games in the series, and while I worried the absence of female characters would grate on me, our quartet of bumbling chocobros is stupidly endearing. At this point, Noctis is functionally useless as a prince: even when he’s recognised, the local yokels have no qualms about asking him to take their deliveries or run their errands, and while random sidequests are an RPG staple, they’re usually somewhat tailored to the protagonist’s perceived status. In FFXV, everything is rendered hilarious by the fact that Noctis is a prince, and is seen as a prince, and is still being asked to catch frogs in a swamp and grab shit from some random marketeer’s broken van.

(He’s also gloriously introverted: in dealing with people, his responses usually vary from monosyllabic to resigned disinterest, but when you come across a stray cat in need of feeding – a tiny sidequest that’s a deliberate throwback to Squall doing likewise in VIII – he talks to it at greater length and with more enthusiasm than he otherwise displays with anyone.)

As far as I’m concerned, FFXV is a magic road trip with a bunch of queer boys who have their wardrobes together, but not their shit. I can identify. And so, I suspect, can everyone else who’s fallen into the trashpile of this visually beautiful, thematically mishmash game. I honestly don’t care about the random anachronisms, like the fact that they’re carrying smartphones and fighting magic robots, but still using paper maps and newspapers, to say nothing of using a fucking dog as a messenger for vital correspondence through a warzone – or rather, I do care, but only because the clear discontinuity of it somehow plays as a feature instead of a bug. The entire thing ought to be ridiculous, and it kind of is, but pleasingly so, like a cat in a Halloween costume. The characters don’t take each other seriously, which frees the player up to do likewise – to laugh with them, rather than at them. And frankly, I’ll take that over XIII’s self-important melodrama any day of the week.

  from shattersnipe: malcontent & rainbows http://ift.tt/2mJ436t via IFTTT