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I ended up deciding to draw Makeshift's symbol rather than trying to describe it in-thread.

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Trying to get back into the swing of running this Quest, with some art.

My original goal with drawing Sabrina was to actually get into What Sabrina Looks Like, as I've never had a natural opportunity to have her self-describe. I changed my definition of 'depicting Sabrina' halfway through because of my ongoing inability to draw humans in a way that is Appealing And Human; depicting her through Caras' eyes lets me say 'if that looks weird and wrong to you, that's Working As Intended!'

The other bits will make sense... later.

[ghoultyrant]

Walking Wins: A Pedestrian Story

Something I've been struck by repeatedly over the years is how, in living all over the US, it's extremely common for people to default so heavily to 'use car to get to destination' that they pretty clearly preemptively dismiss other options without thought.

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I once lived in an apartment complex that had a pool at the office out front, and had its dumpster placed even closer to the complex's entrance. I was living as far back as was possible in this complex, waaay in back.

Have a very simplified drawing:

Much of the time I lived in this apartment complex, I walked my trash to the dumpster. (When I first moved in, all other tenants loaded their trash into their trunk and drove to the dumpster) There were several interesting things that happened with this I might talk about another time, but the point of this post is that one day a funny thing happened: I came out my door with my trash exactly as the apartment across from me had its door open, the mother living there herding her gaggle of kids to her SUV, carrying pool toys. The mother very conspicuously noticed me before returning her attention to her kids: this will be relevant in a minute.

The nature of the layout was such that we walked out to the road in parallel, arriving at the blacktop simultaneously. I pulled ahead here, as of course she had to unlock her SUV, load her kids and pool toys in, get everyone buckled up, close the doors, start the vehicle and pull out. By the time she caught up to me, I was already past the entrance to the cul-de-sac, and of course she passed me...

... except a detail I didn't draw in because I no longer recall the exact positions is that this complex had the highest, most absurd speedbumps I have ever seen in my life. (They were almost as high as my knee) They were absolutely miserable to drive over, and there were a lot of them: her SUV would pull ahead of me, but then hit a speedbump and painfully crawl over it while I caught up and then pulled ahead.

For reference, I was slow. I was very, very sick at the time, and that particular day I did not feel up to running or even jogging: I was simply walking at a sluggish, exhausted pace. The speedbumps were simply that effective at their job.

Finally, she got past the final speedbump and pulled way ahead, no chance of me catching up!... and pulled into the office parking lot, and proceeded to start unloading her kids and their pool toys. She was still in the middle of that when my geriatric walk got past her SUV, and she watched me go past, giving me a very funny look.

A few weeks later, the coincidence repeated itself: I came out with my trash as she came out with her kids. This time, her kids were carrying the pool toys, and they simply walked to the pool. This time, they were 5-10 feet ahead of me by the time they got to the office parking lot, and just walked right in with minimal fuss.

And now I understood the look she had been giving me that first time.

[ghoultyrant]

Finally drew Scuttlers and the Hauler (Which I'd wanted done years ago...) plus a new figure that... probably won't be relevant for a few updates.

[ghoultyrant]

'Sometime this week' I said, and then immediately drew not only the map but also another map besides.

[ghoultyrant]

Ocarina of Time: The War a Decade Ago

One aspect of Ocarina of Time was always pretty neat to me, but also something I didn't feel a need to bring up in fandom circles for decades because I thought it was so obvious there was no point to discussion because obviously everybody had already noticed it themselves, right?

But over the years evidence accumulated that it... wasn't actually Something Everyone Knew? I'd see videos or posts talking about 'secret' aspects of Ocarina of Time's writing that didn't mention it at all, people praising the writing's maturity and nuance that never addressed the topic, and of course Ocarina of Time fanfic conspicuously didn't mention it, even though fandom is often fond of filling in this kind of implication with a detailed story imagining what precisely might have happened.

So then I spent several years trying to figure out how to talk about it without sounding like I think everyone is dumb for not noticing this thing I found extremely obvious, gave up because a lot of crap was going on with my life anyway, and then finally recently arrived at giving the backstory I just wrote out for context.

So what's this Weird Secret Nobody Talks About?

Well, it's right there in the title of course: that Ocarina of Time tells us a war happened about a decade ago, and actually has a lot of clues as to the nature of that war if you pay attention, even though we only get a handful of bits directly addressing said war.

The most direct bit is why I spent decades assuming Everyone Knew: if you've beaten Ocarina of Time -if you got even around halfway through it- you have in fact definitely seen the most explicit reference to this war: when you clear the Forest Temple and the Great Deku Tree Sprout goes 'yeah, you're not a Kokiri', he explains that Link's mother fled soldiers chasing her into the Lost Woods and asked the Great Deku Tree to take her child as she was dying. (Presumably from injuries the soldiers inflicted on her in the pursuit)

(I've always wondered how other people 'fill in' for this that it apparently doesn't get other people assuming a war was happening)

This then connects to a lot of other bits to imply things: for example, Darunia mentions that the King of Hyrule is his Sworn Brother. He doesn't say why this is so, what the King of Hyrule did to earn this honor, but you might notice that Darunia declares Link to be a Sworn Brother upon killing the Dodongo King and so making Dodongo Cavern safe for Gorons to get food from: this suggests that Sworn Brother is earned for doing something greatly beneficial to a Goron, very possibly specifically in a martial capacity.

Which kind of suggests that the King of Hyrule and Darunia had battlefield experiences where the King of Hyrule saved Darunia's life or some such. And Link's backstory seems to indicate there was a war ten-ish years ago... hmm.

Also notable is that there's a number of allusions to the idea that the Gorons and Zora weren't always allies to Hylians, and in fact even to this day they're pretty reclusive: Zora's Domain is designed to only be accessible to Zora, Hyrule's royal family, and people who can prove a connection to the royal family. Death Mountain is locked off to the general public, with Link having to use Zelda's letter to get permission to go up it ie he needs royal authority to get through. (And Darunia hiding in his room is refusing to open the door until a royal messenger of Hyrule shows up) It seems like both peoples only recently got on good terms with Hylians, and are mostly trusting the royal family in specific.

Then there's the state of Hyrule Field itself. When Link is a child, the land is haunted by the restless dead: Stalchildren come out to attack relentlessly when the sun is down. Ocarina of Time (and indeed the Zelda series more broadly) pretty clearly ascribes to the 'the dead do not rest easy when they die having been wronged or having died brutally' model of the undead, with ghosts haunting graveyards, Adult Link's version of Hyrule Castle Town being a scorched wreck filled with zombies, the Shadow Temple being literally haunted and presented as being where all the royal family's metaphorical skeletons are stuffed into the metaphorical closet, etc, so this infinite legion of nighttime Stalchildren seems to imply a lot of people died horrifically in Hyrule Field not terribly long ago.

Conspicuously, 7 years later, the Stalchildren are gone. There's Big Poes and intermittently a smaller Poe will pop out of nowhere to attack Link, and Hyrule Castle Town is a zombie-infested wreck, but in spite of Gannondorf's reign being very explicitly very brutal the Stalchildren haven't stuck around. This is itself consistent with the restless dead model, where generally the dead do eventually rest easy without necessarily needing an exorcism or some such.

So there's an implication here that not too long ago -ten years ago, say- a cataclysmic war occurred that got a lot of people killed very brutally.

In turn, it seems like the current King of Hyrule probably was a big driver of the war ending in a peaceful manner: the Zora trust him, Darunia trusts him, and his key failing within Ocarina of Time is trying to make nice with another population that the Hylians have bad blood with (The Gerudo) and blowing off his daughter when she says the current Gerudo leader is a very bad man who shouldn't be trusted. It's easy to draw a throughline here, where Zelda's father tried to make nice with the Goron and Zora even though they were ancestral enemies, and it worked so well that of course he's repeating this tactic with the Gerudo.

The fact that the Shadow Temple shows us that the Hyrule royal family has a lot of skeletons in its closet also gives obvious possible reasons for Hyrule's neighbors mistrusting them. It's easy to imagine that Zelda's grandfather, and that man's father, and so on, were probably warmongers or otherwise not particularly pleasant rulers, with a history of waging war on their neighbors or otherwise being pretty awful to them, and the Zora and Gorons and Gerudo are wary of the possibility of this happening again.

The fact that Link's mother was probably on the run from Hylian soldiers (We don't get told their species, but if they weren't Hylians the usual thing would be to explicitly say they were Goron soldiers or whoever) is also suggestive of the nature of the war of ten years ago: it probably wasn't a war fought firmly on the lines of species. Probably Hylians were fighting among themselves, a civil war of some kind! Maybe Zelda's father couped his own father precisely over the man's aforementioned probable habits as a ruler, or maybe it was a 'grassroots' rebellion of peasants against the king's oppressive rule; I'm not aware of any particularly strong hints as to the likely details of this piece. But a civil war of some kind seems very likely.

As a kid, I found it fascinating how this game heavily implied a horrifically brutal war and a complex and un-'nice' history between all the current Good Buddy species, all without ever directly depicting it and doing so in a way where an adult watching their kid play would probably never pick up this info being communicated.

As an adult, I'm confused as to why I can't find evidence of other people picking up on these implications.

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Another new face for Sabrina. I'd intended to just describe them, but found drawing a bit easier in this case.

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Another new face, but seen sooner.

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'Forward planning'? In my Quest? Don't be absurd.

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More art for the Quest, of a creature I've had in mind for years. So many years. Stupid Nightmare Apartment-induced hiatus...

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More art for the Quest, after... way too long.

Still have a backlog of things to get to for it...

[ghoultyrant]

Anime Sakura vs Manga Sakura

I first got into Naruto the way a lot of English-language fans very clearly did: by virtue of the anime starting to run in my region. More specifically, I got into it partway through the first Toonami airing of the Wave Country Arc -which, for those who don't know (or don't remember), lead to the anime looping back to the beginning as soon as that arc concluded while localization worked on getting the following episodes localized.

I was sufficiently hooked that this wasn't really enough for me, particularly once the anime got back to the episodes I'd already seen, so I checked out fanfic, became aware the series' original form was a manga, and started reading that. This confluence of events resulted in me becoming aware of something I suspect a lot of fans never notice:

That the anime actually changes a lot of early scenes.

Some of this is actually quite appreciated. For example, in the manga Naruto's classmates don't exist in the first chapter: Sakura and Sasuke don't exist until it's time for team assignments in the second chapter, and the rest of Naruto's classmates don't exist until they show up in the Chunin Exams -this is why Naruto breaks the fourth wall and gives an intro for each of them when they show up there, even in the anime where we actually saw them all in the very first episode. The anime adding them in to the beginning is nice!

By a similar token, the manga actually skips the fight between Tenten and Temari, so jarringly I actually had to double-check and make sure I wasn't missing a chapter somehow; the anime giving us the actual fight in detail is also appreciated!

Other changes are sort of random-feeling if you're not familiar with the tendency for anime adaptations to overtake the manga they're rendering in animated form, but understandable if you are familiar with this point: for example, there's an entire episode dedicated to Naruto having a Wacky Adventure in trying to get to the Chunin Exams' final stage on time, involving silliness like running from an entire stampede, which... has no relevancy to the larger plot because it's an anime-only filler episode to stall for time, not based on anything from the manga.

And then there's how Sakura gets changed.

This is kind of weird to describe, because the anime doesn't cut anything or completely rewrite any scenes: it only ever adds bits. The problem is, the bits that are added are... problematic. Consistently, up until about her Chunin Exam fight scenes. But since it is only addition, I'm going to start from just describing Manga Sakura, then explain the changes.

In the manga, Sakura starts essentially exactly as she does in the anime; she doesn't like Naruto, she's pursuing Sasuke... the only 'difference' is that of course Ino doesn't exist until the Chunin Exams and so the whole Ino/Sakura rivalry thing doesn't come up.

However, in short order Sakura starts changing her mind about Naruto; she attempts to confess to Sasuke, it doesn't work out, and she finds the rejection a fairly unpleasant experience and then connects this pretty immediately to her own rather harsh rejections of Naruto's requests for dates and resolves to not be such a jerk to him in future.

And she does in fact stick to that for... at least everything I read. (I've yet to get fully through the Shinobi World War Arc, so I suppose it's possible she goes back on her word somewhere past there)

This is how Manga Sakura goes overall; she starts as a bit of a shallow, thoughtlessly cruel person who isn't really taking this whole 'life and death battles as a ninja' thing adequately seriously, but tends to be quick to engage in introspection, resolve to change such behaviors, and then stick out this resolution; the Sakura we see in the Chunin Exams is something of a culmination of how Sakura has been progressing this whole time.

Anime Sakura still has these moments, but... they get undercut. The date thing is the bit I still vividly remember: Anime Sakura makes her resolution to not be so cruel to Naruto-

-and Naruto immediately shows up, asks for a date, and Sakura punches him out and goes 'never mind' about her resolution.

There's a lot of moments like this with Anime Sakura: 15-45 seconds of content added to otherwise-faithful-to-the-manga scenes where said added content is 'comedy' moments that horribly undercut Sakura's character development. Taken seriously, they make her into an incredibly unpleasant person who intentionally rejects opportunities to become less unpleasant; it's little wonder that so many of the fanfics I saw in the early days really did not like Sakura.

Once the Chunin Exam starts these added bits of unpleasantness stop occurring, but after so long seeing Anime Sakura do things like make resolutions and immediately break them, I imagine lots of viewers found Sakura's Big Resolutions and Major Character Development difficult to take as intended; if I'd not read the manga, I know I would've been expecting these moments to not really stick.

The whole thing is particularly frustrating for how easy it is to overlook; if I'd not been experiencing the manga and anime near-simultaneously, I never would have realized these quick bits of character assassination were anime-only additions. And if you go look at a wiki or the like, you're not going to trivially learn this info, unlike how basically everyone knows that the Anime Filler Arcs are, in fact, the Anime Filler Arcs.

So I've long suspected lots of people are unaware that Sakura comes across very differently in the early anime vs the early manga.

[ghoultyrant]

Beachballs: a jellyfish story

Once upon a time, I spent a month at a beach on the Texas coast in the 'off-season' of that beach. My initial response to being there was to be kind of baffled as to why it was the 'off-season': it was sunny, a nice temperature, and all-around nice!

A week in, storms arrived. Brutal, oppressive storms, with torrential rain and high winds. And they kept going continuously for days, where a 'nice' day was one where the looming clouds weren't raining right this second and the wind was only moderately strong. (But the sky was still blotted out by the clouds all day long, and it still did rain on and off)

So that pretty straightforwardly explained why the of-season was, in fact, the off-season.

More interesting than all that was that one night the storms were particularly intense and I woke up in the morning to lots of jellyfish having been washed ashore by the waves: I'd previously read about jellyfish being beached, but I'd never seen it personally, and to my surprise these jellyfish largely didn't resemble what books and TV had depicted of jellyfish lying flat on the ground, dehydrated and clearly dead. There were a few like that, but most of them were actually curled up into a ball shape, mouth firmly shut, seawater trapped inside their skin. The contrast was pretty stark, because the live ones glowed a bit, while the dead ones had their internal lights inactive.

(I'd provide a picture, but this was over a decade ago, and I couldn't have taken one at the time anyway. I really wanted to, but didn't have the ability at the time)

My first thought was to figure maybe the jellyfish had gotten lucky; I already knew jellyfish don't have a brain per se, and everything I'd ever seen talk about jellyfish presented them as very passive... but the ratios made me doubtful. If it was luck, why did the living beachball jellyfish outnumber the flat dead jellyfish something like 10 to 1? That's awfully consistent for 'luck'.

After a couple hours of seeing the jellyfish continue to survive on the beach, I got curious; I had what I'm going to call a bucket (It wasn't a bucket, but explaining what it was would be a lengthy distraction), and I decided to scoop up some of these jellyfish and try to dump them back in the ocean, see if I could rescue them. (Partially because jellyfish are one of those animals nobody reacts to with It's Cute Or Something So I Feel Bad For It When It Suffers: if I didn't save these jellyfish, there was basically no chance somebody else would do it)

I very stupidly started by just walking out until the water was waist-deep and dumped them out right next to me; I didn't get stung, but I did immediately decide to not repeat that.

Even so, the result was interesting: the jellyfish immediately opened up and began pumping, orienting away from the beach, out to the open ocean. This was very striking: I'd read about jellyfish pumping to adjust their depth, but my science books and shows had never suggested a jellyfish might be capable of deliberate horizontal movement. And the fact that I dumped out 6 jellyfish at once and they all immediately oriented correctly made it difficult to believe they were picking a direction at random: they were picking the correct direction somehow.

This was promising enough -and I had nothing better to do anyway- that I took on the longer journey of taking jellyfish out to a nearby rock jetty to dump them out: once again, the jellyfish stayed curled up in a ball while they were in my bucket (Even the ones that were completely submerged by the water that was getting into the bucket), but immediately after they hit the seawater they opened up and began frantically pumping away, this time from the jetty. I did this jetty trip three times in total, and all 18~ of those jellyfish reliably made the correct decision in those conditions.

(By the third jetty trip, I was too tired to keep going, even though I kind of wanted to keep at it. By the time I had the energy plus time available, the remaining beached jellyfish had all gone flat and dark, dead. Alas)

So that was all fascinating and raised a lot of questions about jellyfish intelligence, senses, etc, not to mention made me heavily doubt the default Passive Filter Feeder characterization all my science materials had told me.

(Incidentally, I tried digging into if modern science documented this behavior in the over-a-decade since my original experience, but as far as I can tell, no: as of July 15, 2024, this appears to still be an undocumented behavior. All I can find is the same ol' same ol' stuff about helpless filter feeders washing helplessly up on beaches and dying with no attempt to stave off their oncoming deaths.)

[ghoultyrant]

'Big Bird' is one of the nicknames I use for a very large raptor that I ended up having an unexpected series of interactions with the first time I was homeless. Other nicknames include 'Murder Bird' and 'Hate Bird', though I mostly used those early in our interactions, for reasons that will likely be obvious in the telling.

So I should back up and expand on this 'first time I was homeless' remark; yeah, I spent a few years being homeless. And am homeless again right now, actually, which is a big part of what reminded me of Big Bird. (I meant to tell this story years ago, but kept forgetting) Anyway, the first time I was homeless I spent several years in California, trying to get back into housing; I'm not going to dwell too much on this 'was homeless' thing in this post, but I can't really talk about my interactions with Big Bird if I completely avoid talking about being homeless, so... it's now mentioned.

Anyway, I moved about California while homeless for various reasons, and my habit was to find a wilderness-y place for me to set up a tent for me to sleep in at night. This was of course so I could sleep somewhere without people getting on my case about being on their property or whatever, but in daylight hours I'd leave and go about my Daily Homeless Business, packing up my tent and taking it with me. Most of these wilderness-y places weren't really all that wilderness-y (Undeveloped land with plants growing on it isn't really wilderness), but in this particular case I was setting up in a very large field more or less at the edge of the city, bounded by a raised highway in one direction and a series of houses that had no ground route to the field in another direction; people from a nearby mobile home park would do a certain amount of hiking through the area for fun, but it was a strange space that was right on top of plenty of human infrastructure and yet sufficiently ignored by humans it was one of the most 'wild' places I ever saw in California.

Which brings us to Big Bird.

Big Bird was probably a golden eagle. I'm not any kind of bird expert and didn't think to even try to determine her species until sometime after I left her area, but out of the big predatory birds that the internet tells me live in the area of California this occurred in, the golden eagle is the only one that is large enough to match the bird I saw (There's a reason Big Bird is my preferred nickname for her) where pictures don't have me immediately going 'no, absolutely not that'. (For example, bald eagles are also in California, but Big Bird did not have the white collar, among other distinctive features bald eagles have) It is, however, entirely possible that Big Bird was an impressively large hawk of some kind, or some bird not expected to be found in California, or whatever; among other points, I never actually got to see Big Bird up close. I'm similarly only guessing she was female based on her sheer size and the fact that golden eagles skew towards the females being much larger than the males; at the time, I actually figured she was male, being a giant ignoramus about most raptors and thus unaware they often skew towards the girls being the big ones.

Whatever the case, Big Bird had staked out a sizable chunk of this field as her territory, and when I showed up, she Did Not Like Me. This was not actually obvious to me right away -for one thing, when I first showed up to her field, I was focused on looking for a place to set up a tent while tired after a long day and so she wasn't exactly my primary focus- but even on that very first day I noticed her as a very large bird who did not just get left behind as I walked. It was only later I became certain this was intentional on her part, but I did immediately notice that she twice took off from a power pole she was perched on to fly to another one somewhere ahead of me; I just initially sort of figured it was a weird coincidence, where she happened to travel ahead of me for her own reasons. Y'know, twice.

This belief of mine took only a couple of days to die, though; Big Bird would basically always meet me at the edge of her territory if possible (I sometimes took a path that went under the raised highway, placing me abruptly much deeper inside her territory than if I took the long way around), stare at me, fly ahead to another power pole once I was past her, and resume the staring, repeating as necessary to stare at me from in front of me. She'd also sometimes vocalize at me, though not often. (Which is consistent with the internet telling me golden eagles tend to be completely silent) So it was pretty obvious her attention was in fact on me, and it seemed likely she wanted me to know it; I never did think of an alternate possibility for why she was so specifically insistent on being in front of me, anyway.

Once I became confident about all this, I of course became a lot more concretely nervous that maybe I'd manage to provoke this bird into actually making an attack on me... but my tent site deep in her territory was amazingly good, probably the best camp site I ever had while homeless in California, and it had access to a good park, and a good public library, and a grocery store, and... there were not really any alternate places to make camp at night, not that were similarly safe and similarly close to all the things I wanted to be near. So I just kept an eye on her anytime I was in her territory so I'd know if she decided to make an attack run, and basically just hoped it wouldn't come to that in the first place.

(After a few weeks of this, if you'd given me the tools to draw a line out there and told me to draw the edge of her territory, I'd probably have gotten it very close to right; she was really consistent about landing nearby as soon as I crossed the invisible line demarcating what she considered to be hers. Sometimes she'd be elsewhere and take a bit to arrive, and a few times she never showed up at all where I can only assume she was asleep or something, but the majority of days she was incredibly consistent)

Time did not dull Big Bird's hatred for me, to be clear. No matter how many weeks passed, there was no point where she resigned herself to my ongoing intrusion. And in retrospect, I was very right to be nervous; in trying to see if I could figure out her species, I learned that golden eagles will in fact at times kill larger animals like coyotes or young deer by virtue of slamming their talons into their victim's skull, killing them instantly. At the time I was just thinking in terms of 'she might put out an eye', not wondering if she might actually be able to kill me.

Then an interesting thing happened. See, part of what was excellent about my camp site was that I was huddling my tent right into an apparently-dead, hunched-over, gnarled tree. (I don't know the species, but it reminded me of tumbleweed in general shape) This provided cover against wind, made the brutal California sun slightly slower to start roasting me in the morning, and made the tent basically invisible to people who went jogging in the larger wilderness-y area, as well as people on the raised highway, and even the people in the raised houses. And the thing is, I ended up using the tree as an impromptu toilet a fair amount; the camp site was sufficiently isolated, and aspects of my health sufficiently poor, that I couldn't always go in an actual public restroom the way I preferred, and so semi-regularly was grudgingly forced to use the tree as the least-worst option out there.

And after half a year or so of doing this, the tree un-died. First its branches got less droopy. Then it started growing leaves. Then more leaves. Then WAY more leaves. Then it finally started producing some kind of fruit. (I'm not sure what it was. Something brown and fuzzy-looking. I never took a close look at them and didn't actually realize until much later that they must be some kind of fruit)

That was all interesting on its own -I'd genuinely thought the tree was dead and never going to do anything ever again- but after a few weeks of the tree being Not Dead, my Great Campsite became actually kind of annoying because a horde of some manner of rodent made the area its home. Initially I was kind of mystified; it took me probably two weeks to realize they were probably eating the fruits the tree was growing. (The tree in fact intermittently dropped its fruits on the ground; the rodents didn't need to climb the tree or anything)

And then Big Bird stopped hating me.

Once again, I didn't actually immediately realize that was what was going on; I actually spent a week or so wondering if Big Bird had died, or maybe migrated, because I just stopped seeing her. But then I realized she was about, but just flying around a lot more, and more prone to flying off toward the farther end of her territory when I was on her turf, where historically I would only see her over there when I was on approach and still many minutes from setting foot on her territory. And even when she did land on a power pole nearby me, she only rarely looked my way, and certainly no longer did the thing of stalking me and staring at me from in front of me continuously. So apparently she no longer hated me?

Indeed, eventually other birds showed up in her turf. For the first year I was camping there, I never saw any birds in the area except Big Bird; it made it really easy to track her behavior, because there weren't other birds for me to confuse with her. So I was really surprised to be seeing 6 or so birds all wheeling about in Big Bird's territory, clearly doing Social Bird Things together. (I'm guessing Big Bird had suitors and that's why she was tolerating these birds; for one thing, they were all smaller than her. For another, after a month or so the bird conventions stopped and it went back to Just Big Bird being in her territory, plus occasionally a smaller bird that never came near me, who I assume is the lucky guy she picked. But, again, not a bird expert, etc)

So this was all fascinating by itself, raising questions for me about what Big Bird was thinking; did she credit me with her territory improving? Because that's what happened,  even though I'd done so completely on accident, and you don't need to understand why cause and effect are connected to draw a connection between them regardless. It's possible she just stopped caring about an intruder because her territory got nicer and so she was less stressed in general, I suppose...

... but this takes us to my Final Memorable Interaction with Big Bird.

See, I said the area was pretty 'wild', and one of the aspects of that I neglected to mention sooner is that it had a coyote pack running about it. I largely wasn't concerned -coyotes generally don't attack adult humans- especially because when I would hear them at night they were basically always really far away. It was sometimes uncomfortable an experience -one time I clearly overheard them taking down something near enough for me to hear flesh tear and the thing's dying shriek- but I never really felt in danger.

Until one evening I was taking the long way into Big Bird's territory, and three coyotes were visibly stalking me in the long grass. (I should emphasize that 'three coyotes' was not actually all the coyotes stalking me, just the ones I saw in that moment. They were moving through the grass without really disturbing it; the three I could see were visible because they were stepping out into the lower, more intermittent portion of the tall grass) It would be an exaggeration to say I was fearing for my life, but I was definitely ready to use my backpack as an impromptu club and start beating coyotes to death if they came after me, and was in fact thinking about if I should pull out anything that might work better as a weapon-

-when Big Bird landed on the pole ahead of me and glared her raptor glare down toward us.

Now, my first thought was actually 'oh come on, I thought you stopped hating me', as the angle was such that it was plausible she was aiming her raptor glare at me, in exactly her classic manner. (I'm also something of a pessimist by nature, for that matter) But then, to my surprise, the coyotes slunk away into the grass. At first I thought they were just being sneaky, maybe intending to attack me once my guard was down or something, but then they stopped stalking and began fleeing; I could clearly see (and hear) at least five trails of shifting tall grass as they want directly away from Big Bird's territory at roughly full coyote speed.

And then Big Bird took off and circled above that general area, making the occasional cry, completely ignoring me as I continued walking to my campsite.

And I realized that

A: the coyote pack had not been coincidentally staying far from my camp site all these months, they were scared of Big Bird and staying away from her turf

and B: Big Bird apparently now liked me enough to fly in for the express purpose of telling a bunch of coyotes that they don't get to eat her Lucky Human unless they've decided they don't like living anymore.

That Big Bird had decided she liked me enough to risk such a confrontation remains absolutely fascinating to me to this day, especially as she started out so clearly resenting my intrusion and trying to broadcast 'get off my land', and especially also since we never once interacted in what I'd call a direct manner; I never directly gave her food or anything of the sort, and in fact I'd be surprised if she was ever closer than 15 feet away from me. (I don't know how tall, specifically, the power poles she glared at me from were, and I don't think she ever got closer than sitting atop one of those)

[ghoultyrant]

An interesting thought I had just now; I've noticed female authors of Naruto fanfic are more prone to significantly engaging with the bloodlines and family techniques aspects of Naruto canon in a substantive way than male authors...

... and it occurred to me this might be due to it resonating with their reality once you pull focus away from the fantastical combat framework.

Thing is, the 'working dad, stay-at-home mom' style of family construction actually has heavy matrilineal legacies of skills being passed down. Mom has daughters, those daughters apprentice under her for years learning techniques their mother was taught by her mother, who was taught by her mother, and so on into the misty past. It's just these techniques are...

"Pie-baking-no-jutsu, type 36: blueberry."

"Secret technique: how to wash all the grease off this one pan type that my mother's friends swear is impossible to get the grease out of entirely."

Including very direct parallels as far as stuff like 'somebody dies before they pass on their knowledge, and so useful techniques are lost until someone recreates them'.

Even the 'everybody knows people do this, but not everybody gets taught how to replicate it' aspects are surprisingly similar; in America at least, if you're not a daughter having family techniques passed down, you probably don't know how to cook and don't know how to get started learning. Cookbooks are a publicly-available resource, but are largely written for people who know how to cook already; if you weren't inculcated with this stuff by family, a cookbook is full of code phrases you can only guess at, and doesn't bother to explicitly tell you that you'll need to adjust stuff like 'time in oven' based on your region and equipment. (A recipe that works perfectly for you can require adjustment if you move elsewhere, due to differences in humidity, atmospheric pressure, etc; a daughter apprenticed by her female relatives probably learns these principles as part of that, so a cookbook expects to not need to explicate them)

It's a funny thought, but I am genuinely wondering if this is actually a component to this trend.

[ghoultyrant]

Corpse Bride

Corpse Bride is a movie where I always liked the visuals and concept more than the execution; rewatching the movie as an adult has made it easier to articulate why I don't like the story, but hasn't really changed that impression from my childhood -or more accurately it's exacerbated it more than anything else, as stuff I hadn't caught or failed to properly contextualize as a child feeds right back into it.

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Lord Barkis -the villain of the story- is almost impressive in how total the movie's mishandling of him is. At essentially every step the movie relies on contrivance and coincidence, ignoring perfect opportunities to have him actually do things; when Victor goes off to practice his vows and through sheer blind chance stumbles into Emily's death site, the movie could have had it be Barkis talking Victor into going somewhere quiet to practice his vows, with Barkis intending to murder Victor to get him out of the way; in such a case, it would be natural that Victor would end up where Emily died, because it would just be Barkis falling back on a location he's previously had success at literally getting away with murder in, said murder being of Emily. This would make Barkis and Emily both returning to this region at basically the same time natural instead of blind coincidence, provide an actual reason for Victor to end up in a position to accidentally propose to Emily instead of Random Blind Wandering happening to do so through sheer chance, and crucially it would actually have Barkis be actively villainous and antagonistic to Victor; in the actual movie we got, Barkis shows up for no clear reason, conveniently for Barkis Victor vanishes and is seen in the arms of another woman, and Barkis steps gracefully into this opportunity sheer blind chance has presented to him -the movie never attempts to suggest he had an actual plan, even though it's clear we're supposed to look askance upon him showing up for Victoria's wedding, and this would neatly solve this omission, among myriad other benefits.

In general, while the movie clearly wants us to think of Barkis as a horrible slimy person, it spends a shockingly long portion of the movie with him just being kind of randomly present for no clear reason and doing things for no particular reason. It takes until quite late in events for Barkis to have crimes meaningfully pinned on him worse than 'seems to have an epic case of Resting Bitch Face'. Even once it does finally start to really pin Actual Bad Behavior on him, it... does so clunkily and often nonsensically, where sure he's doing unpleasant things, but it's often confusing how a given Actual Bad Thing is supposed to make sense for him to want to do and make sense for him to expect to work out -him trying to push to marry Victoria so he can get the family's money (That they don't have, but he's unaware of this) is yeah Not Nice, but since he doesn't try to murder Victor or anything of the sort, this is just him hoping Victor will in fact stay away long enough to pull this off.

And once it's time for the movie to have Lord Barkis brought to justice, it of course fumbles things for no clear reason -once Emily recognizes him and we see the dead are all offended by his actions and ready to form a lynch mob, we get the dead Elder inexplicably asserting out of nowhere that the dead must abide by 'the laws' of the living (Never mind that the dead coming to the surface to attend Emily and Victor's wedding is a giant violation of any such notion), which is somehow enough to get the dead to back off, at which point Lord Barkis drinks the goblet of poison Victor was supposed to drink, not because anybody tricked him into doing so or anything, but because the movie wants Lord Barkis to die.

And then the undead lynch mob goes after him, because he's dead I guess; this entire sequence of events is wholly unnatural and contrived, like basically everything involving Lord Barkis being on-screen, and it's wildly unnecessary.

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The final conclusion of 'Victor and Victoria getting married is a happy ending', displacing the Emily/Victor romance plot, is incredibly fucked.

The first problem is that Victor and Victoria have as their principle problem that their parents are awful people, with this marriage being clearly just the latest example of their parents forcing them to do something they don't actually want to do. Victoria is being sold by her parents to get money, Victor is being sold by his parents to get a title, and their marriage will forever exist in the awful shadow of both sets of parents. That's not a happy ending; Victor marrying Emily and escaping to the land of the dead could be a happy ending for him and Emily (Though Victoria would be very much left in the lurch by default, since the default assumption is she gets forcibly married to Lord Barkis and then murdered), but 'Victor and Victoria marry' leaves them trapped under the thumbs of their parents.

Related to this is that the story mishandles the issue of affirming the genuineness of their feelings for each other. When a story wants two people to be set up for marriage against their will but still end up falling for each other, the two default scenarios are to either have the would-be couple meet without knowing the other person is their prospective partner so we can see that they do in fact spontaneously get along as a wholly natural thing, or alternatively it's to have the couple committed to hating each other, so that when they ultimately start going 'actually, we rather like each other' we can be reasonably certain this is a natural feeling since it sprung up in spite of their overt intentions. With Victor and Victoria, though, their relationship has cast over it the question of whether they're really fond of each other, or if they're both just so used to buckling under pressure and trying to make the best of whatever their parents are making them do that they are actively working to convince themselves that this is fine; Victoria in particular explicitly talks about wanting a marriage based on love, where it's all too possible that Victor and Victoria are talking themselves into the idea that they love each other not out of genuine fondness but just to try to make Victoria feel less bad about being forced into a loveless marriage. ("Well, we aren't marrying each other because of love, but if we're married and ultimately happen to love each other, that's close enough, right?")

Then there's the issue of the movie's attempts at interpersonal connections; put simply, Victor and Emily spend more time with each other and have stronger evidence within that time of getting along well. The movie has Victor bond over the piano with both Victoria and Emily, but where Emily and Victor are able to spontaneously engage in cooperative piano playing, riffing on each other's tunes and ultimately producing something harmonious, Victoria would like to play the piano but doesn't know how thanks to her controlling mother; Victor and Victoria get a moment of empathy where they commiserate in how awful their respective parents are, while Victor and Emily have a skill and interest in common that ends up showing a less obvious synergy between the two exists. And where the piano scene is basically the only time Victor and Victoria get a connection at all, for Victor and Emily the time in the land of the dead is full of such moments. (In spite of Victor shrieking and trying desperately to get out of the situation, even!)

The movie attempts to suggest that Victor marrying Emily would be wrong because she's dead, plus because her marrying him would be replicating the crime that scarred her so of being denied her marriage, but these both fall very, very flat. (In addition to doing nothing to address the whole 'Victor and Victoria marrying is a Bad End for both of them' issue)

The deadness issue falls flat because Corpse Bride's setting is one in which death is not the end, and in fact seems to be a pretty positive experience by default; Mayhew is the bluntest, most direct example of this principle in action, where Victor is immediately trying to console Mayhew now that he's dead and Mayhew waves it off because he actually feels a lot better now that he's dead. (His deadly cough is gone) But it's very much the default, where the dead are a relaxed and cheerful bunch and it seems that once you're dead you're just immortal and can have fun with your unlife. The worst you can say is that being dead means generally being unattractive and sometimes inconvenienced by things like a limb getting caught on something and being lost, and the dead themselves don't lament any of this (Emily could have complained about having 'lost her beauty' or something, but such a notion is never raised as a possibility by anyone) so it's difficult to take it seriously. You could argue that Victor shouldn't rush to his death because he can't take it back and he'll always end up in the grave with Emily someday, but acting like dying for Emily is some great sacrifice doesn't work in the setting -especially since, as noted earlier, it would get him away from his awful parents.

The 'replicating the crime' issue falls flat because the context is completely different. Emily thought she was making off with someone she loved under the cover of darkness because her father had forbidden the romance; what was stolen from her was the promise of Forbidden Love, something she actually wanted in spite of surrounding disapproval. Victoria and Victor, meanwhile, are set to be married because their parents are shoving their heads together and screaming "NOW KISS!!", where Victoria explicitly wants to marry for love and Victor expresses not-far-off sentiments in interactions with his parents. (Pointing out he's never even met this girl, which his mother considers to be a good thing -she clearly thinks no woman in her right mind would like him on his own merits) If Victor and Victoria had met, been forbidden to marry, tried to sneak off together, and then we got Victor accidentally proposing to Emily, then sure, she'd be inflicting upon Victoria roughly what she suffered and was traumatized by. But that's not what's happening.

This isn't even getting into the classist metaphor undertones where the dead are largely treated as being literally regular folks as contrasted with the living characters being primarily composed of monied individuals; in this context, the Moral Of The Story is 'don't marry people much poorer than you, even if you love them'. Which. Um.

At this point it makes perfect sense to me that Corpse Bride fanfic defaults so heavily to pairing up Victor and Emily -it really is the less fucked couple to cheer on.

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So yeah. I like the visuals and audio, and there are moments of the writing I do like, but... as a kid I didn't like the story, and as an adult I actually dislike the story more. (The weird classism undertone went entirely over my head as a kid)

[ghoultyrant]

Self-fulfailing prophecy

No, I didn't misspell 'self-fulfilling'.

'Self-fulfailing prophecy' is a term I use in my head a lot in regards to video game design and storytelling intentionality to encapsulate a phenomenon whereby the creator(s) believing something to be true of their work directly leads to the work lacking that quality.

In a video game design context, you'll see devs convinced that, say, the mechanics of their game are such that swords are the best weapon type and axes the worst, whereby they proceed to give axes extra advantages and preemptively nerf swords with specialized counters and less access to cool bonuses on the swords. Often, even if their initial belief was right-ish (Which is far from guaranteed), the collective result of their efforts to counteract the intrinsic advantage they consider to exist results in the final state of the game being the exact opposite of their beliefs anyway: in this example, axes end up the best weapon and swords the worst. This kind of thing sometimes persists several games in a row, where you can tell the devs are so convinced of this belief that instead of making Game 1 where axes are king and going 'whoops' and course-correcting, instead Game 2 and Game 3 just stack on still more advantages to axes and still more nerfs to swords.

In a storytelling context, you get creators deciding that, for example, some character is a Heroic Good Person, and having decided this is so they stop scrutinizing whether they're really depicting a Heroic Good Person. Particularly common is deciding that some character is an Unsympathetic Evil Monster With No Redeeming Value, and as a direct result simply not noticing that they've actually written a complete human being in a crappy situation who, understandably, is unhappy with how awful their situation is, where their unpleasant behavior really comes across as, y'know, not evil.

Even aside morality per se, this kind of thing crops up pretty readily; a creator intends a character to be 'likable', so they don't stop and think about how the behavior they're depicting fits into its context, and suddenly what's intended to be an affable and friendly individual ends up coming across as callous or mocking because they keep up their friendly routine in circumstances it's pretty inappropriate for.

I often get the impression most people are more willing to 'meet in the middle' than I am, when it comes to characterization and so on, where they see the signals a character is meant to be X, so they read them as X unless the narrative is particularly dissonant on that point. I've never been able to make myself do that, though; you can't 'meet in the middle' on game design. If the devs made axes godly and swords garbage, no amount of respecting the devs' intentions is going to make those facts stop being true -not unless you hack the game to make them true.

And honestly, this applies just as well to storytelling; if you're reading a character the intended way by filling in with things that were absolutely not intended by the creator(s), that's in some sense the storytelling version of a romhack: you're changing things to make them work in spite of the creator(s)'s intentions.

The original material is still a self-fulfailing prophecy.