melodicdragon97 - Tumblr blog

[melodicdragon97]

writers and artists will go “this isn’t good enough.” my brother in christ, you’re creating something new out of nothing and expressing yourself creatively. your productivity and unrealistic standards of perfection do not define you or the worth of your art. you’re doing great.

[melodicdragon97]

Zelda’s always there for him when he has flashbacks.

(Sorry folks, coming back from a year-long hiatus with a sad one.)

[melodicdragon97]

When people say acephobia doesn’t happen in the queer community😒

[melodicdragon97]

i feel like i'm in at a lonely table for one here... but i don't want any SU continuity to be a prequel. and i think some people who want a prequel, haven't really thought through what that would look like.

either a war prequel or a rose quartz prequel would end up as a huge downer. the steven/post-steven era is the only one that has any HOPE for the vast majority of the characters.

idk. i feel like if you really want flashbacks, there's nothing STOPPING a post-SU future series (whether an anthology series or a new main character) from having flashbacks. maybe pearl's the main character for an episode, and its mostly her telling old war stories. maybe bismuth and garnet finally have that beta raid flashback.

but if you set it in the past, definitively, then its going to be a bummer. because all the characters end up corrupted, shattered, deeply traumatized, or fleeing to homeworld. nobody feels like a winner right after the war. not a single character.

most gems are only beginning to heal from it now.

SU, thematically, has always focused on the possibility of hope and change. that's only possible in the future, not the past.

you want lore? you can have that in an anthology or post-future series. there is nothing stopping peridot or the diamonds from having a "explaining gem origins and religion" ep. you want action sequences? again, pearl can narrative war flashbacks, or we can even set an anthology episode in the past proper. or have a new conflict!

personally, i don't see a reason to set it only in the past. that's just an unnecessary limit on the stories you're able to tell.

[melodicdragon97]

This is a gift from my dearest pal Mari based on a convo we had and I need you all to look at it bc it's so fucking funny (posted with permission ofc💙)

[melodicdragon97]

just the idea about Pearl being good friends with Trucy is so magical

[melodicdragon97]

"Incredible. If I wasn't laughing... I'd weep."

-Klavier Gavin

Ace Attorney: Apollo Justice

AA 4 AJ

[melodicdragon97]

Jeez some of these details like Wendy's mom being dead and Waddles potentially dying are depressing.

The Dipper one especially. That recontextualizes so much about how him and Mabel acted around the end of the series.

No wonder Dip latched onto authority figures so much and wanted to stay with Ford. He was afraid that when he came home, his parents would be divorced.

But where Dipper looked for replacement parents in other adult figures in an attempt to find stability, Mabel clung to whatever stability/reliable family she already had, Dipper. Mable wasn't looking for replacement parents because Dipper essentially filled that role for her, a dependable, reliable family member who would always be there to get her out of trouble. But Mabel couldn't be that person for Dipper in return, so Dipper looked elsewhere for that stability and found it in Ford.

So when the possibility of Dipper not going home came up, Mabel panicked because she would be losing that stability and would return to fighting parents without anyone to depend on.

Mabel handing over the rift makes a lot more sense now. Endless Summer for her equals Endless Stability.

[melodicdragon97]

Nobody really talks about how warped your mind becomes after coping with years of abuse.

Even after the abuse is finally over and you're in a safe place, your brain has been trained to detect abuse even when there is none. It's always gathering little hints and pieces from the words of loved ones and skewing them to fit into the only thing its known: insults. Taking them out of context and twisting them to fit the abusive narrative it's used to dealing with. Maybe that's its way of lessening the impact of the insults, idk. But the problem is: there ARE no insults.

It's scary how much sense your brain can make out of stringing these bits and pieces of true words and actions along a false narrative. And because of the abuse you suffered, it just makes sense to you, so it's easy for you to believe, even if it's "from" a person who is a trusted friend. You're used to being betrayed by people you trust, no matter how good they've been to you beforehand. You're used to abuse. It's the only thing you've ever experienced, so it's the only thing your brain has come to expect.

It's horrible. And you just accept these bad thoughts, because these bad thoughts have been true about your true abuser and their impact on you. These bad thoughts make total sense. You don't even realize that your friend's words could be innocent or come from a place of love. If those words are vague enough, your mind fills in the blanks.

It makes genuine friendships feel like torture because you read too much into everything they say or do. You're lying in wait for them to become abusive to you, no matter how great your friendship is.

It fucking sucks.

[melodicdragon97]

meant for this to be a study of urbosa’s face, ended up being a value study, i’m not complaining :P

[melodicdragon97]

Mini comic Post-TotK Link wakes up after the great battle against the demon king, and he doesn't wake up alone. I've been wanting to make this mini comic for a while now after making an art of this same situation. For me this is canon, and no one can convince me otherwise XD

[melodicdragon97]

Ocarina of Time, Body Autonomy and Adoption

Bit of a hint for my next project, but I've been doing a lot of research into the nature and portrayal of adoption in media versus how institutions affect adoptees in reality.

It's not going to be confined to the context of Legend of Zelda and instead looking at media written by adoptees, by adoptive parents, and by the media landscape as a whole, so this is more just a silly post musing about Link for fun.

Link in multiple iterations of the series is an adoptee. Wind Waker, Link to the Past, Ocarina of Time, and possibly Twilight Princess--to name a few--all make this pretty explicit and direct.

WW Link is under the care of his grandmother (via kinship adoption if we were to compare it to the real world institutions)

LTTP Link is under the care of his uncle.

TP Link's village is also extremely small and tight knit. From how we see the younger children treated where it's expected by all the older people there that they provide care and attention to everyone, Link was probably raised by someone there as the whole village gives collective care. Rusl perhaps?

But I think the most interesting is in Ocarina of Time's portrayal, especially when you factor in the matter of Link being a Hylian.

The game focuses a fair bit of narrative attention to the feelings of lost bodily autonomy and incongruence Link experiences in his adult body. But adding in an examination from an adoptee lens adds another layer to this since Link was taken under the care of the Great Deku Tree following his mother's passing.

He's led to believe he's a Kokiri, a people that doesn't age and lives with child-like bodies for most of their lifespan. So imagine Link's feelings not just when he's magically robbed of 7 years of his life and experiences this body change, but learning the fact that he's in fact an adoptee and has an entirely different heritage separate from those of his peers.

Furthermore, the Great Deku Tree knew this and raised him as a Kokiri but not connecting him to any of his heritage. Link was also a small child and there's also the prophecies the Tree saw of him, which is still in many ways dehumanizing to Link in how the Tree makes these choices.

You can really think of a lot of the subtext behind the return to Kokiri woods through an adoption lens in Link's bodily autonomy as well as the matter of his birth parents. When Link returns to Kokiri forest, it's swarming with monsters. The buildings there aren't sized to accommodate his body.

A lot of the feelings Link would be experiencing at this point in the story also tie a great deal to learning that he's not a Kokiri in the first place and that his birth mother passed in bringing him to his home.

A home he had to then leave behind soon after the Deku Tree's passing. The perspective of adoption isn't explored in-game nor are Link's birth parents ever really brought into focus, but you can see how understanding Link as he is adopted can help you understand or gain a new appreciation for the game.

Please don't laugh at me, but the reason I even thought of all of this was because I've been reading about the models of adoption and I thought it'd be nice for Ganondorf to give a lecture about the importance of centering the adoptee in conversations because of many of the misconceptions surrounding adoption.

Zelda as a series textually isn't really concerned with adoption, but it is useful in the way that adoption and characters as orphans are extremely prevalent in media.

It's also important to consider that while very common, the adopted characters themselves often aren't imagined as adoptees, so a lot of the dissonance in how adoption is portrayed in media often won't line up with how it affects real people.

The research is still in progress, but I'm looking forward to the finished thing and figured it'd be cool to make a post about it in the context of Zelda.

[melodicdragon97]

Let me start by saying I love the Zelda franchise. I'm a casual gamer, and I haven't beaten every single game in the series (I haven't finished Zelda 2 and I haven't started Oracle of Ages, and I haven't played most of the spinoffs).

When Breath of the Wild came out, it instantly became tied with Twilight Princess as my favorite Zelda game. BotW was a breath of fresh air (pun intended) and I loved how I could play the game at my own pace, and I loved the freedom to explore wherever I wanted from the start. I thought the story was great and the gameplay was unique. The dungeons fell a bit short (they were short and easy, and the bosses kinda sucked), but they were creative, and I loved the champions enough that beating their bosses felt satisfying, if only since it avenged my old friends. Its themes of finally getting closure from the past while helping in the present was handled beautifully, and the final memory brought me to tears.

When Tears of the Kingdom was announced, I was HYPED. I was so excited to see Ganondorf's return and the consequences that would have on the world in this new story. I was wondering how they would handle reusing the same map, especially with the new abilities (Recall was what I was most excited for since it had so much potential to use in puzzles). But the more I saw of TotK regarding its map and game mechanics, the less interested I became.

I thought we would be able to keep the shrines as warp points on the surface (and the focus of the game would be on exploring the Depths and the Sky). Instead, all traces of the BotW's story were lost. No Shiekah tech, no towers, no (Shiekah) shrines. Ok, fine, it's whatever. But that meant you were required to explore the SAME overworld the SAME WAY as you did in BotW: finding dragons tears (finding memories), finding/beating Zonai shrines (finding/beating Sheikah shrines), and finding lookout towers to gain a map of the area (climbing the Shiekah towers). Why? What's the point of all of that in the same overworld, when the focus SHOULD be on making the Depths and Skies interesting instead?

The skies were too segmented and barely had anything in them. The depths were mostly empty aside from enemies and DLC armor from BotW (which makes most of the amiibo useless, btw. Also, THEY GOT RID OF WOLF LINK. I WILL NOT FORGIVE THEM. Lol), and finding the Lightroots as the priority made it tedious to explore. The caves on the surface were so small that they hardly mattered unless you wanted to hunt all the frogs.

I thought the dungeons would be more unique from each other this time around, maybe play on different types of gimmicks or themes. Instead, it's just more of the same gimmick that BotW had: find a few terminals and then beat the boss.

Since TotK is a sequel, I thought its story would be in real time, directly driving the gameplay. Instead, the story takes place forever in the past, and ultimately has no bearing on the plot outside of Zelda's location, AND the exact same story gets replayed after every dungeon you beat. I understood it the first time, thanks.

The ancestors in the past story don't really mean anything to me because they're...nobody. I don't even think they had names. They didn't do anything to make themselves stand out from their descendants, or even have a connection with their descendants aside from being their ancestors. But I digress.

In terms of reusing the world, I thought the old ruins (like the ranch ruins in BotW) would have been rebuilt, or a few new towns would have been added, but INSTEAD it's just the same old world with added monster camps and Lookout Landing and maybe another town that was so forgettable that I don't even remember it.

Ok, so it wasn't what I expected. That doesn't make it bad, right?

Well, I gave it a chance I just really didn't care for the building mechanics. The fusion mechanic is great, but I still feel like I'm cheesing my way through the game instead of actually solving puzzles the way they were intended. I feel like I'm just brute forcing my way through the game, and that doesn't make me feel clever or smart the way older games used to when I'd figure out a unique puzzle.

Oh well. Some games just aren't meant for some people. I still had fun just exploring and messing with Koroks, and I liked that I could have more horses (but they left out the ancient bridle and saddle from the BotW DLC =( )

So now that they've dropped trailers for Echoes of Wisdom, I thought: this is it, they're going to do something different. And we're playing as Zelda!! Zelda has so many cool abilities!!

But instead, the new gimmick in the game is....a rod. That anyone can use. Using Zelda's powers in a game where you play as Zelda? NOPE. Just give her a weapon Link could use, except now we don't have Link's sword/shield or arsenal of other items. We're just a powerless girl with a duplication wand.

Ok, ok, it can't be as bare-bones as that.

The world should be unique and encourage you to explore and navigate the different terrains, right? NOPE, just summon a million beds and climb over everything.

Open world games can be fun, but when you have NO LIMITS then it becomes boring. There's no thought or challenge or maze or puzzles in order to progress; you can easily use the mechanic to build your own solution to every single problem from the start. And building your own solution means relying on knowledge you already have; it doesn't require you to learn how to problem-solve, the way puzzles are meant to. Usually, in this case, I'd WANT to progress in order to see what will happen in the story. But we all know that the Zelda team doesn't gaf about the story, at least not anymore. So what's the point?

Just echo a cucco to fly over gaps, or summon a few objects as a staircase to climb up ledges. Using these echoes in dungeons has the potential to make things fun, but in the overworld? I just don't see the appeal of cheesing your way through every obstacle. And I already had my fill of going wherever I wanted in BotW and TotK. Making the overworld an actual world worth navigating would be NEW at this point.

I feel like EoW should be a short little spinoff game or something. At least then I wouldn't feel so disappointed in a main series game. I'll check it out for the story alone, but if TotK's story is anything to go on, I'm sure EoW's story will be lacking as well.

I'm not dropping out of the fandom just yet. But I feel like they're really cashing in on BotW's success by making every game a worse knockoff of it. They're using playable Zelda as a dirty tactic to win over fans like me who have wanted to play as Zelda with her established abilities.

[melodicdragon97]

"I'm Apollo Justice, and I'm fine!"

[melodicdragon97]

goated mechanic

[melodicdragon97]

KOSA PASSES SENATE 7/30/24

Kosa has unfortunately passed the Senate on a 91-3 vote. I want this to be clear, It’s not going into effect, it still has to get to the House but I believe there will be a break for the month of August which gives us A WHOLE MONTH!! to call your HOUSE representatives and tell them to vote NO on Kosa. It’s not over yet, it barley JUST passed the Senate now because so many people told their senators and representatives that they didn’t want KOSA. We can do it again, PLEASE do not panic and give up!! I know it’s scary I’m very scared right now myself but if we go silent that’s how it’s going to pass the House and get signed to the president. Let’s try to stop that from happening!!!

Call your house representatives!!!!there is more opposition in the House, we can stop it. BLOW UP THEIR PHONES!!

[melodicdragon97]