#But that's the most common group and it's also thematically accurate

[phoenixcatch7]

Okay but it's super interesting how

Din = Power = Ganondorf

Naryu = Wisdom = Zelda

Farore = Courage = Link.

Because Din, in the hylian creation myth, created the physical world. Naryu then created the laws - gravity, time, etc. And Farore finally created life - plants and people.

Din created the body, naryu the mind, Farore the soul.

And the triforce and its wielders so perfectly reflect that.

Ganon is physical power, he is big and intimidating and he breaks things. He is cunning and determined, but that's not what he focuses on. He is might makes right.

Zelda is wisdom and cleverness. She is stall tactics and information and team work. She is a powerful mage with a spine of steel, but that's not how she'll win. She is the pen being mightier than the sword.

Link is courage and persistence. He is the wild card sneaking behind enemy ranks, always moving, plunging into terrifying situations head first. He's a phenomenal fighter with a keen wit, but that's not what will get him through his challenges. He is bravery not being the absence of fear but the triumph over it.

They sit in perfect parallels to each other.

And ganon is reborn through his body - his resurrection is immortality. No matter how low he is cast, as long as he has a body he can claw his way back. He can cling to his power, build it ever higher.

Zelda is reborn through the magic of her bloodline. It's the accumulated knowledge handed down for generations, the unique power she must master, the skills she must develop to survive and get her kingdom out the other side intact. Even her name, the knowledge of herself, is handed down from all the way from the very first. Her ancestors knowledge of her future presence, her stability, is what gives her the edge.

Link is reborn in spirit. He is not bound by flesh or blood. Just like his wanderlust soul he can reappear in any time or place. His variation, his unpredictability, is exactly how he fights. It's what makes him so hard to pin down.

Ganons need to build strength means he can't chase after link. Links impulsiveness means zelda can outwit him. Zeldas stationary predictability means she's an easy target for ganon.

But the other direction?

Fire melts ice, ice redirects lightning, lightning burns fire.

And that's the very essence of the triforce.

[the-mic-drop]

Building Link in BG3- Ranger

Ok, this Link is more thematically fitting, but as a recreation of him it's less accurate. Also I don't have as good a grasp of the Ranger class, so this one is likely more flawed.

Hero of the Wild

This is the Link we play as, the wild child, the serial arsonist, the pun maestro. The amnesiac that saved Hyrule on instinct.

Background

Race: Half Elf (Wood Half Elf)

Background: Outlander

Race stays the same, but this Link is no knight, this is him in his second life. Living in the wilderness, exploring the countryside, traveling the land.

Abilities

Strength: 17 (+3)

Dexterity: 16 (+3)

Constitution: 13 (+1)

Intelligence: 8 (-1)

Wisdom: 10 (0)

Charisma: 10 (0)

Str, Dex, Con, and Wis stay the same, but we switch Int and Cha because this Link is the more animated and less... bright version.

Class & Levels

Class: Ranger

Proficiencies: Nature, Animal Handling, Perception

Favored Enemy: Ranger Knight

Natural Explorer: Wasteland Wanderer: Cold

Nature because duh, Animal Handling because he can ride anything with a natural seat, and Perception because he's used to being on the lookout for danger. Ranger Knight because that's really what he is. You get proficiency in History which makes no sense, but you also gain proficiency in heavy armor which makes plenty of sense, so it evens out. Wasteland Wanderer: Cold because freezing temperatures is the most common environmental danger you can come across in Hyrule.

Level 2

Fighting Style: Archery

Spells: Hunter's Mark, Goodberry

Archery because it's the most appropriate choice, Hunter's Mark because of BotW's targeting mechanic, and Goodberry because of the metric tons of apples Link tends to carry with him at all times. The fact that this Link can use spells at all is a big reason as to why this build doesn't sit right with me, but I digress.

Level 3

Subclass: Hunter

Spell: Ensnaring Strike (Ranged)

Hunter's Prey: Any

Hunter fits because whenever we play as Link, he's always searching for something and usually has to fight something big and legendary before getting it. Unless the big legendary thing is what he was looking for. Ensnaring Strike is an equivalent to stun locking in my mind. As for Hunter's Prey, you have three choices and they're all equally fine for Link. Colossus Slayer gives you extra damage to enemies not at full health. Giant Killer lets you use a reaction to attack an attacking creature that's large or larger. Horde Breaker lets you attack multiple targets if they're standing close enough to each other. They all make sense and I leave this one to you.

Level 4

Feat: Shield Master

Although the Ranger class is typically Dex-focused and Link is a capable archer, our hero is more likely to get up close and personal. So we'll go with the same policy as the Fighter build; max out Str with Ethel and Oblodra so you don't need to use a feat on Ability Improvement. Unlike the Fighter class we only get 3 feats, so we can't give him all the weapon-type feats, so take Shield Master and keep this Link with a classic sword & shield kit. With a longbow for range, of course.

Level 5

Spell: Cure Wounds

This one is just a stand-in for Link's meals and that one(?) time he cured a group with his competent cooking.

Level 6

Favored Enemy: Sanctified Stalker

Natural Explorer: Wasteland Wanderer: Hot

Sanctified Stalker doesn't make much sense outside of how he's always going on quests with god-level involvement. Another Wasteland Wanderer for the Gerudo Desert and Death Mountain.

Level 7

Spell: Lesser Restoration

Defensive Tactics: Multiattack Defense

Lesser Restoration has the same rationale as Cure Wounds. Multiattack Defense is because Link only takes hits one at a time. Enemies can't just wail on you, and now Faerun's dastards have the same issue now.

Level 8

Feat: Durable

Another returning feat from his Fighter build. Link doesn't need much time to recover. Except that one time it took a century, but that's an outlier.

Level 9

Spell: Lightning Arrow

Shock arrows.

Level 10

Favored Enemy: Bounty Hunter

Natural Explorer: Wasteland Wanderer: Poison

Bounty Hunter is just the last remaining choice that makes any sense for Link. This Wasteland Wanderer doesn't make a ton of sense because of how relatively scarce wetlands are in Hyrule, but all the eldritch goop that's been sapping his vitality over the years must make normal poison a cakewalk.

Level 11

Spell: Conjure Barrage

There's... I had a reason for this right? Oh yeah! The bows that let you shoot 3 or 5 arrows at once. Sidenote, Level 11 gives you Whirlwind Attack which is essentially a spin attack. If for no other reason, this makes Ranger Link make sense.

Level 12

Feat: Sharpshooter/Great Weapon Master

We've all had to shoot at something way above us, right? And aiming your bow is tougher than swinging a sword around, so Sharpshooter works on both levels! If that doesn't gel with you, GWM is a classic.

Ultimately, while Fighter Link is easier to play, Ranger Link is more accurate to the Link we know and gives him a couple signature Link things that can make it a unique challenge.

[purgemarchlockdown]

New Apple

(Also Known as: Nott Broke, I am now writing the WKTD-Amane Cross Analysis. This is also the Trans Amane Momose Thesis)

(CWs: Cults, Child Abuse, Child Death, Body Horror, Homophobia, Transphobia.)

(Spoilers for We Know The Devil and Milgram.)

I am a unrepentant fan of the Visual Novel We Know The Devil. I love it dearly, I think it's one of the best Things ever made.

I am also a...fan, to say the least, of Amane Momose. I think about her every day. And as a result I've thought about these two things together a lot. I think there's a lot of thematically cohesion that can be derived from putting the two together.

Since this is Milgram Focused, I'm going to put an explanation for what the plot of WKTD is first before continuing.

WKTD is a 2015 VN about Three Bad Kids at a Christian Summer Camp who are sent to meet The Devil one day in a cabin in the woods. This game is about Queer Religious Horror and has great prose and you should play it-

Now, there are already comparisons that can be drawn to Amane's cult and the game's main premise, but let's discuss each of the three kids first.

No Prince For The Princesses

Starting with Jupiter. Jupiter is the tomboyish good kid of the bunch or, more accurately, tries her best to be the good kid to minimal success.

Laughing off a head injury isn't all that Jupiter's good at; she has the best grades in class, and coaches make her starter on whatever team has the most pressing need for someone who can do sports. She's a perfect role model, except for how she always misses the winning goal and she always blanks on the last question. She leads when no one else wants to, which is always.

Jupiter can keep up until right when it matters the most. It's here where I mention Jupiter snaps a hairband against her wrist, a common tactic used as an alternative to self-harm.

Her place in the dysfunctional group of problem kids becoming clear as her issues with being the perfect good kid and her immense self-hate and loathing start to seep through. Jupiter struggles under this weight of expectations and pleasing others but tries to pretend she an:

Neptune: ascetic monk at not giving a shit.

To her own detriment, she hangs out with the Worst Group in the Camp of Worst Kids just so she can get them to stay away from her. If they just like her enough then they won't bother her. Even if she personally dislikes them and how they act.

Not that she...enjoys acting like this. She's disgusted by the idea of the Counselor liking her. Because:

Jupiter: He likes people he can make a little uncomfortable and won't give any trouble about it.

Though as Venus says, that's exactly why he likes their group.

Jupiter is someone who's resigned to reality being like this. To being considered a bad kid even though she tried so hard. Sure it's unfair and people have tried a lot less than her but:

Jupiter: You can still get better at this, if you try, you know?

Even I can say "I'm sorry" Even I have hope I swear! I'm going to be a good girl now! That's it!

Anyway, Jupiter Kisses Girls. She Likes Women. She's a Lesbian. She has a Seven Minutes in Heaven Scene with Neptune where they Kiss-

That kiss having a lot of relevance to how (specifically) a t1 Amane attempts to approach certain taboo ideas and concepts.

Jupiter: It's not real if we don't say it out loud, right?

Amane tends to talk around things in T1. It's not immediately noticeable but it's prevalent in a lot of her speak. Specifically when taboo ideas come into play. Instead of saying anything directly she talks around it.

(Apostle and Death)

Amane: Okay! I’m kind, so I shall forgive you. That’s nice, isn’t it? If my parents were in my place, you would have been lectured for another hour.

This is my favorite example, as Amane is just calling her parents unkind here. But, Amane isn't really good at talking around things. In the same VD, when faced with the knoweldge that she's being underestimated she immdieatly talks about her genuine feelings about being treated like a child, and being talked down to because of it. Being very forward and open about her own emotions.

Outside of that we have instances of her showing interest in things that are believed to be taboo, or at least in things discouraged by her community.

(20/06/27, Amane’s Birthday)

Amane: I don’t need it. I’ll gratefully accept your well-wishes, but I don’t eat things like that. Also…… Shidou-san, I can’t say I’m especially fond of the way you assume that all children will love frivolous things like this. Shidou: ………… Is that so… I apologise. I’m sure everyone else will be happy to eat it, so don’t worry about it. Sorry for intruding. Amane: ………… ……cake……

She even disrespects the blue flag in Purge March, the flag representing "discarding vulgarity"

Considering both how a lot of the generally aesthetics of Magic and Purge March seem to be considered frivolous. And her being forbidden to go to an amusement park.

T1Q5:When you go to an amusement park, what do you like to ride? A: That is a place I should not go to.

I think we can infer that these things are consider vulgar and wanting them anyway. She wants something outside of what she has. Something that she tries to Hide in her interrogations. (Interrogations)

T1Q3: If you were allowed to do anything, what would you want to do? Nothing really. I am not lacking anything.

T1Q17: What would you do if the world ends tomorrow? If everything ends? Then, I might do all sorts of things I have never done before.

(Put a pin in these interros, we are Going to come back to them.)

It's wrong to want such a thing, she knows this well. That's why she doesn't say it out loud. It's not real until she does. No one can punish her for it if she doesn't say anything.

Except...they Do. Same with Jupiter, people who didn't try as hard to get into the "proper, good girl" summer scouts got in when Jupiter didn't. Amane studies so hard and yet she only gets a 83% when Kotoko is tutoring her.

(20/06/18)

Kotoko: There, I’ve finished marking. 83%. How do I put it… Even though you act like this, it’s not like you’re super brilliant at studying or anything, huh.

She just blanks at the last question.

Misses the winning goal.

Something about Her is...inherently holding them back from this illustrious standard of being a good girl. It's just, impossible for her to be one. She knows this herself.

Only if, only if, only if I could be a good girl

And even though she tries, she Can't do anything to change that. In the same way that no matter how hard Jupiter tries, people instinctively understand that she's something Other somehow. The both of them being harmed over and over again in an attempt to live up to ideals that they will...never be able to live up to.

The system of We Know The Devil works like this, you choose two kids and leave one behind each hour. Leave one behind enough and they become the devil. The worst kid out of all of them.

Jupiter does her best but her best is never going to be enough. So if she gets excluded enough times...

Even the best kid has the devil inside her.

Jupiter wants to touch, to hit, to pull.

Venus: I wish I could be meaner. I wish I could be so much meaner.

She's never going to be able to make up for this incessant greedy Want.

Her hairband snaps here, she can't keep the devil away for much longer, and she knows it.

Jupiter: You know, I actually liked when the captain talked about how heaven was on merit; as long as you do good things, maybe you can one day be good�� Jupiter: But then they said we don’t believe that anymore and it’s only what’s in your heart that matters. Jupiter: Just when I think I got it right, they changed it. Jupiter: I can try hard, but I think… Jupiter: God knows my heart isn’t really in it. And that was my only shot, right?

Amane considers love a showcase of mercy,

T2Q9: What does love mean to you? A: To spread mercy with no limits.

And considers her punishments love.

T2Q2: Do you believe you were loved? A: Very much deeply.

I suppose when you think about it, trying to beat the devil out of someone is mercy.

But, you can't really do anything about it if someone does want the devil.

Jupiter: It's wrong to want such a thing, you know that, don't you? So don't do it. I still know that much.

In each color ending, the devil gets destroyed. The devil only getting one moment for whatever they wanted.

For revenge, for love, for "please take me back."

One Singular Moment to live as they are before having it burnt out of them.

...Someone had to have opened that door at the end of Purge March

(Milgram T1 Glitched Character Voicelines)

Amane: Ahh! I'm so sorry...! I'm sorry...! I'm sorry for breaking the rules!

Lukewarm, I Spit You Out

We have more bad kids to go through, so let's talk Neptune.

Neptune is, to be blunt, a self-proclaimed bitch. She doesn't act like she's supposed to belong her which is exactly why she belongs here. She uses profanities, sneaks alcohol into the camp, and the summary of this game calls her a mean girl. Though this meanness of hers betrays a certain amount of care and worry for her group, or, at least they like to think of it that way:

Neptune is very kind or possibly super mean and hates us. But that's okay. She's really funny.

This kindness of hers comes out in many ways. She's concerned for Jupiter, trying to get her to actually give a shit about herself, especially when she does so much work.

Neptune: I mean like, aren't you doing fine? Neptune: Aren't you trying harder than literally everyone else here? Neptune: You're so chill about everyone's bullshit it makes me so mad and then you won't extend even the slightest of that chill to yourself and that makes me EVEN SO MADDER. Neptune: Can't you just be a little less…good?

And wants Venus to get out of his egg, to let himself be a bit of a bitch, and stop apologizing for himself when he is doing nothing wrong.

Neptune: Wait, I got it. I dare you to not say sorry for the rest of the night. Jupiter: Oh my god. Venus: I can do that! Jupiter: …can he though? Neptune: No it's perfect. Neptune: It'll fix something annoying, and this will make everyone's life easier, and all of us win. Venus: Is it really annoying? Neptune: You shouldn't have to apologize for things you don't need to apologize for.

Neptune deeply cares about the people around her, it just comes out as harsh words and actions. She wants to make Jupiter's life a living hell so that she's forced to say that it hurts.

Neptune: People are supposed to get hurt by things. It's fucked up to not. It's not good for you.

Though, as Venus calls out, the way Neptune acts doesn't fully come from self-confidence.

Venus: ...your problem Neptune is. Venus: You think being mean is more honest. Venus: But you're just as bad as Jupiter. Venus: And me.

Neptune, like the other two, deeply hates herself. Like Jupiter she has a consistent "tell" that shows she's the devil. She throws up this black ichor-like substance. Poison really. The only thing she can say. She's a bad kid through and through.

Now, Amane is self-proclaimed annoying.

Es: Regardless of whether you’re a child or an adult… you are beyond annoying. Amane: Oh, my. I am honored by your praise. Es: As I said. Amane: (giggles)

She takes Real Pride in being, a little shit to people.

20/06/03

Fuuta: ……huh? What’s your problem? You’re just leaving all your meat? What a weird kid. Amane: You say that, but you’re not eating all of your food either. ……are you not able to eat your vegetables? Even though you’re an adult. Fuuta: Huh, what, so you’re just eating grass? What are you, a rabbit or something? Since you’re just a brat, you should be eating your meat properly. You won’t grow if you don’t. Amane: ……you make some really funny jokes, don’t you, Fuuta-san.

This behavior is mostly present in T1, mostly cause T1 is Amane's testing period. She's trying to see what she can get away with. These behaviors disappearing by T2 because she learns that she can't get away with much. Introducing us to a less playful, more angry and genuinely despairing Amane. (Of Blessedness and Punishment)

Amane: This is unforgivable! I won’t forgive you! (screams)

That isn't to say Amane doesn't genuinely want to help out though, even with her more aggressive attitude. In fact she goes out of her way to "help" Fuuta and responds to Yuno's questions and worries honestly and patiently.

(23/06/27, Amane’s Birthday)

Yuno: By the way, Amane. Have you ever wished you were never born? I’ve thankfully lived a pretty fun life so far, so haven’t really. But you seem to be struggling with something. So I kinda wondered if you thought like that. Amane: ……I don’t think that. Being born into this world is the first miracle any person experiences, and is something to celebrate. Even if after birth I was put through trial after trial, the value of that will never disappear.

Amane is kind, genuinely so. She helps the cat, she tries her best to "guide" people back to the better path. The problem is, is that her want to help gets tied up in her community and her worldview. Causing more harm than she would like, it's almost like she can only spit out doctrine when that isn't the case.

Amane: Hm. Is that so? Are the prisoners who weren’t forgiven feeling lost right now? Maybe they need our faith as well.

Outside of that, Amane is rather opinionated, she tries to keep it down but it seeps out anyway. She's expressed numerous times her frustration with being treated like a child (ie: being treated like she has no rights of her own.) And expresses that openly and bluntly.

(20/06/13)

Shidou: I…… I just don’t understand. If everything about MILGRAM is true…… why did a child like you have to become a murderer? Just imagining what sort of circumstances must have led to that, it makes me so sad…… Amane: ……*sigh*. Is that right. I don’t think I’m going to get along with you, Shidou-san.I don’t agree with the fact you refuse to acknowledge that I have my own free will, and that I should be held accountable for my actions, just because I’m a child. I may have only been alive for 12 years, but all the choices I’ve made, even if they weren’t the best ones, were entirely my own. What point is there in you getting sad when I have no regrets myself?

It's easy to call her annoying or petulant for this, especially when Shidou (seemingly) is just concerned for how how a child is in prison of murders. And again she Does act annoying on purpose.

But Shidou is being actively patronizing and forcing his view of Amane Onto her. When Amane rebukes this, instead of apologizing or reevaluating he dismisses what she says. Something that deeply frustrates her.

Neptune: I'm an evil bad slut right? I'm a bitch and a flirt. Neptune: I'm a bitch because I let people know when they walk over me. Neptune: I'm a flirt because boys keep talking at me. Neptune: And this is somehow my problem, because they can't get over themselves and leave me alone? Neptune: How is that fair? Why should I get hurt by that? It makes me so mad! Neptune: Why would I be anything but MAD about all this stupid obnoxious BULLSHIT.

You’re sorry? I don’t care! Please, go ahead and die already Remember MY cries, MY repents, MY words of “I’m sorry” that I said to you?

Amane cares a lot about being treated Properly, about the people around her being treated Properly. She can't really...accept injustice. She broke one of her cult's doctrines because she wanted wrap up what was probably a Small Wound at worst judging by the state of the cat. She's not going to waver just because the people around her believe otherwise.

Amane: ……I’m fine. I don’t know what you’ve done or what it is you’re worried about, but I think if there’s something you believe in, you should stay true to it. It’s not something that should waver just because other people said something. I personally don’t plan on changing my own beliefs even if I’m told I’m wrong either……

Amane believes in the idea that people can get better, and wants to see people get better even if she can't. She's going to help even if she has to be Violent to do so.

Neptune: You asked me to come out. So I'm coming out. The door opens and it's her but it's not her She grabs Venus and crushes him against the wall like he's a little doll.

Amane: Don’t you think it’s a good opportunity to be reborn? If, right now, you could shake off those around you trying to drag you down to depravity, and could change––

When Neptune's the devil she forcibly tries to turn the other two kids into the devil alongside with her. She knows this whole situation is a nightmare and wants to force the two into accepting who they really are, even if it meant hurting them.

Why should they be the ones to suffer when their trying so hard to be good? Why should they be suffering when they already ARE good?

Neptune: Doesn't it feel unfair? You're already good, so why do you have to try so hard to be good? It makes me mad. They want you to prove you're good. But you're already so good. What is that? Why do they do that?

We must not give into them, they are the ones that should be judged

Why does She need to prove that she's righteous when the people around her can break the same rules she does and get away with no consequences?

I don’t need it any more, if you’re going to break your vow Here and now, it’s my turn to tear you apart

It's just so Unfair. Why is she the one getting hurt for no good reason? Why was the cat the one who got hurt for something that wasn't even its fault? It's just not right. None of this is right.

Neptune: Does that kid look happy to you? Well I guess we have different opinions and you will have to stop me from making him into what he is trying very hard not to be.

Help Me God, I'm In Love

We have one more kid to go through.

Venus is known for being very much a doormat, and very easy to push around. A small detail when their sitting down to listen to the Bonfire Captain's story is that Venus tries his best not to take up space.

Venus sits with his legs crossed, taking up as little space as he can, which is at most not very much.

And As mentioned before he constantly apologizes for himself, even when it isn't even his fault. That dare Neptune gives him? He immdieatly fails it, the sorry is an instinct, he does it automatically.

Though even then, Venus is known to be...a bit of a little shit. Maybe even quite Mean. He has a bite to his words and can be extremely judgemental. Not that he seems to notice .

Jupiter: Do you think he notices how much of a jerk he is sometimes? Neptune: I wish.

Amane: An arts university, though…… Does that mean you’re good at drawing, then? It may be a bit rude to say, but that’s rather unexpected.

(I Love how Amane implies that she thought Mikoto was too boring to be an artist. Incredible.)

Not only that but he's strongly opinionated, often surprising the people around him with them and how pointed and critical he can be. The people around him being so used to how shy and docile he seems.

Jupiter: Why not you. You're safe. You're like a puppy. You're harmless. Venus: …did you lose your nerve? Jupiter: Except when you talk.

He doesn't mean to be mean on purpose, he doesn't even like being mean, but it just comes out of him. He can't stop himself. He's so angry and bitter about certain things that his real feelings bleed out of him.

Neptune: Wow Venus I'm ALMOST impressed. Neptune: You are, deep down, kind of a little shit. Venus: I didn't mean it in a mean way. I wasn't teasing. Neptune: That's so much worse, Venus. Venus: I guess I just don't get it? Venus: I don't like being mean and I don't want to be mean so I try really hard not to be mean. Venus: I don't get any of the 'just kidding' because it's not just kidding.

But Venus is easy to pick on, he smiles weirdly, he tries his best to avoid causing too much conflict, and the idea that Venus is "not like the other boys" get floated around pretty early depending on what interactions you chose, and Jupiter and Neptune discuss this their 10AM interaction:

Neptune: Are you seriously worried about him? Jupiter: Maybe. A little. Jupiter: He's weird. Not in a bad way, necessarily? Jupiter: But maybe in a bad way, possibly. Jupiter: Sometimes I don't even know what he is.

Jackalope: That isn’t even really Amane Momose anymore. You’ve awakened something much bigger.

There's something....different about Venus, like Jupiter and Neptune before him. Everyone can tell, and thus treats him differently for it but he's just not exactly sure what that...Is.

And it's so Frustrating.

Venus: …I don't know what's wrong with me.

Venus: But I can't. Not when it comes to this. Jupiter: What is "this"? Venus: Whatever they want out of me that's not fixing radios. Venus: To be tougher? To grow up? To-what's that?

He's jealous, so deeply jealous of Jupiter and Neptune and he doesn't even know why.

Venus: I'm mad about a lot of things I guess. Jupiter: Liar Jupiter: You're not mad. Jupiter: You're jealous. Jupiter: Why are you so jealous. Jupiter: It's flattering. But it's weird. Venus: I don't know.

Muu: ……hey, are you listening to me? What are you staring at……? Amane: I’m not staring at anything. Muu: Liar, you definitely are……

Amane: ……cake……

He wants...something from them, he doesn't know what but it's something important to him. Something that would make him feel like he's himself and not...whatever he is. It's not even like he necessarily minds being different. He doesn't even think he can be anything else.

Venus: I know I'm bad at getting anyone to like me and I'm weird and everyone else can deal even though I can't, but I can't. Venus: I'm just going to be like this. I'm not going to be any different. Jupiter: You're asking to get beat up. Venus: I don't care.

T2Q20: How do you feel about you not being like everyone else? A: Nevertheless I was born as myself, so I'm happy.

This deep want appears in Everything he does. Everything he does is to somehow get that Thing he Wants the Most. He can attribute it to something else but everyone can tell he wants Something.

Neptune: Venus, your problem is that you are very nice. But you want something. And you think being nice is going to give it to you. But it never will. And until you figure out what it is you want. Every kindness of yours will be full of that want.

Amane: Ah, I am looking forward to it! Seeing whether your judgement will align with that of these higher standards! If that is the case, maybe Milgram would be the right world for us to live in, rather than the outside world!

Milgram relies on your judgement, isn’t that right? In that case, you could become the mediator for a far more righteous world!!

That isn't to say he Isn't afraid of being found out. Of having the kind of person he is being revealed. In a game of truth or dare he chooses dare because:

Venus: I mean, it's kinda like Jupiter said? Truth is embarrassing and dares could get you hurt. Getting hurt is way less scary.

But then the contradiction of this gets pointed out to him, people can be embarrassing with dares as well. It's easy to hurt and embarrass someone.

I've already mentioned that Amane hides...a lot, she tends to talk around things and use double meanings and what not. But she also doesn't want to seem frivolous or wasteful. She wants to stay seeming mature and smart and pure. Being immature is dangerous to her, another reason for people to view her as useless and weak. Another reason to get hurt.

She isn't that. She can prove it. She's not greedy or materialistic.

Venus: I don't want to be strong. I don't want to be that sort of person at all.

She doesn't want anything.

Venus: I want them within me and without me. All through and about me. I want feathers in my lungs and eyes on my skin. I want my heart to see and my lungs to fly.

Nothing at all.

T1Q17: What would you do if the world ends tomorrow? If everything ends? Then, I might do all sorts of things I have never done before.

This is when I reveal Venus is Trans.

Venus is Trans! She uses She/Her, I've been using He/Him for her previously to reveal she's trans like how the VN reveals she's trans.

Venus wants to reveal the truth, to be seen as she is, to have:

That wing to see the truth and that eye to lay it bare.

She wants to be honest and live as herself. To really Be Her. When she becomes the devil she says it's nobody's fault but hers. She wants this. She wants this so much.

She's not doing it cause she was forced or coerced she did it cause she Wanted To. She wanted to do it so badly. She does it with such glee it's honestly terrifying. She killed out of hate and duty and Enjoyed It.

The devil is lonely. We kicked out the devil and it must miss us. It keeps begging to be let back, to let it in.

And Amane Did.

Smoke and Honey

Amane Momose is undeniably monster-coded.

Jackalope: That isn’t even really Amane Momose anymore. You’ve awakened something much bigger.

Amane: Right now, I am both Amane Momose and I am not. I am speaking on behalf of our faith.

Amane: Yes. It is only natural for a person(/human) to apologize to another for breaking a promise. Es: … Amane: Why are you looking so doubtful? Are you not human?

This happy pinky promise hurts to break

There's so much to discuss that if I did do it in detail we would get so set off track very badly, but Amane Momose is Other. She's the Other, she's not human. She's never Been Human. Atleast not by the standards of her cult.

In the Milgram Cat Symbolism, Cats has been highly associated with sin. Yuno portrays her cat self as the most honest but also sinful version of herself. Kazui does the same. Amane being the cat, implicates her as a sinful force in the world. Something dangerous and terrifying that needs to be destroyed.

Amane Momose, somehow, is a threat to normal human existence (at least in the existence of the cult.) She's too opinionated, too dedicated, too Bad of a kid. Having her exist at all as she is, is a threat. She doesn't Want to stop being herself, she's supposed to want to stop. Humans aren't supposed to act like she acts. What if that stubbornness was directed at something against the cult?

Adults also hate perfect kids who love the world so much they can't stop themselves from saving it.

We Need to Destory The Devil No Matter What or Who it is. To choose someone to act as the scapegoat, the worst girl, the one kid too weird, too strange, too threatening.

What does Amane do? She's already a liability, just a child, useless and unhelpful. What if she was destructive? Better to teach her now to be better, right?

It's not like she isn't destructive, it's true. She does harm. Horrible harm actually. I completely understand wanting to restrain her for those reasons.

But, she had One Moment, and it was ripped away from her.

Jupiter: If I taste what it's like, I know, there's no way I'll be happy being human ever again.

I Wonder what else is left for her now.

[hoteltips]

Types of Hotel Rooms: How to Classify, Manage, and Market Your Inventory Effectively

Introduction

The hospitality industry thrives on personalization—and one of the most important ways to meet guest needs is through well-defined room offerings. Understanding the different types of hotel rooms helps hotels deliver tailored experiences, set clear guest expectations, and maintain pricing integrity.

Today’s travelers expect clarity and value when booking. Whether they’re traveling solo for business or with family on vacation, room classification affects their decision-making. For hoteliers, room categorization is critical not only for guest satisfaction but also for operational efficiency. Supported by the right hotel management software, accurate room type setup can streamline inventory control, rate management, and multi-channel distribution.

Why Room Classification Is Essential

Every hotel has a unique inventory layout—rooms vary in size, view, amenities, and even purpose. Creating a structure for room types helps you:

Offer tiered pricing and upsell opportunities

Market rooms more effectively across OTAs and your own website

Avoid overbooking and misallocation

Deliver personalized service based on room type and guest profile

Room classification is not just for back-office organization—it plays a key role in guest-facing marketing, booking conversions, and brand positioning.

Types of Hotel Rooms: A Complete Breakdown

Let’s look at the most common room types found across hotels, along with some specialized variations:

1. Single Room

Designed for one person, this room typically features a single bed, basic furnishings, and a private bathroom. Ideal for short business stays or budget travelers.

2. Double Room

Fitted with either one double bed or two twin beds, double rooms cater to couples or friends traveling together. Hotels often offer flexible configurations (e.g., king/double-double) to maximize occupancy.

3. Queen and King Rooms

Queen rooms come with a queen-size bed—spacious but economical. King rooms, on the other hand, offer additional luxury with a king-sized bed and sometimes extra space for a desk or lounge chair. Both are common in mid-scale and upscale hotels.

4. Twin Room

Features two separate single beds. Great for siblings, business colleagues, or group travelers who prefer individual sleeping arrangements.

5. Studio Room

A hybrid between a hotel room and a small apartment, studios typically feature a bedroom, living space, and a kitchenette. Perfect for extended-stay guests or corporate clients.

6. Suite

A suite usually includes separate rooms—a bedroom and a living area—and enhanced amenities like a minibar, workspace, or upgraded bathroom. Some suites also offer balconies or in-room dining spaces, catering to luxury or long-stay guests.

7. Executive or Business Room

These rooms are tailored for corporate travelers and often include features such as ergonomic workstations, enhanced Wi-Fi, and access to business lounges or meeting spaces.

8. Family Room

Designed for multi-person stays, family rooms often include a combination of beds (e.g., one queen + bunk beds) and extra space for children’s needs.

9. Accessible Room

Compliant with ADA or other local accessibility standards, these rooms include roll-in showers, lowered fixtures, wider doorways, and other features to support guests with disabilities.

10. Thematic and Specialty Rooms

Some hotels offer uniquely styled rooms (e.g., romantic suites, artist-themed spaces, pet-friendly zones) that cater to niche markets or elevate the brand’s identity.

Managing Room Types Efficiently with Hotel Management Software

Having defined room types is one thing—but managing them across bookings, rates, and platforms requires precision. This is where a modern hotel management software system becomes indispensable. With it, hoteliers can:

Set dynamic rates for each room type based on demand, season, and occupancy

Update room descriptions and images across OTAs instantly

Prevent overbooking or duplicate assignments

Track performance per room category (ADR, occupancy, revenue)

Coordinate with housekeeping and maintenance for room readiness

Room types are integrated into your reservation system, revenue strategy, and guest communications—making centralized management critical.

Conclusion

Knowing the different types of hotel rooms and managing them with precision is foundational to delivering excellent guest experiences and maximizing profit. From basic singles to elaborate suites, each room category should serve a specific audience and align with your hotel’s overall service strategy.

And with the support of robust hotel management software, hoteliers can ensure every room is booked, priced, and presented to its full potential—no matter how many channels or guests they serve.

[flowersio]

Data Analysis for Qualitative Research: A Comprehensive Guide

Data analysis for qualitative research plays a crucial role in helping researchers interpret, understand, and gain insights from non-numeric data. Unlike quantitative research, which deals with numerical data, qualitative research is focused on exploring meanings, concepts, experiences, and social phenomena. The goal is to uncover deeper understanding from subjective data such as interviews, focus groups, open-ended surveys, and even observations.

In this guide, we will explore the key aspects of qualitative data analysis, its techniques, and its importance in research. Let’s dive into it!

What is Qualitative Data Analysis?

Qualitative data analysis involves systematically examining and interpreting non-numeric data to understand patterns, themes, and meanings within the data set. The data analyzed is often text-based, though it can also include images, videos, or audio recordings. Unlike quantitative research, which seeks to test hypotheses and predict outcomes through statistical methods, qualitative research aims to explore the richness of human experience and the context in which it occurs.

The analysis process helps researchers identify recurring patterns or themes that provide insight into the subject being studied. For instance, in a study about customer satisfaction, qualitative data might reveal emotional responses, personal stories, and reasons behind specific opinions that cannot be captured through numerical data alone.

The Importance of Qualitative Data Analysis

Rich Insights into Human Behavior: Qualitative data analysis allows researchers to dive deeper into human emotions, motivations, and perspectives. By analyzing text-based data such as interviews or open-ended surveys, researchers can explore the nuances of how people think, feel, and behave in different situations.

Contextual Understanding: One of the strengths of qualitative analysis is that it allows for a more detailed understanding of the context surrounding a phenomenon. For instance, in social science research, it’s crucial to understand the social, cultural, and environmental factors that influence individuals’ actions or decisions.

Flexibility in Approach: Qualitative analysis is highly adaptable. Researchers can modify their approaches as they uncover new insights or refine their understanding of the data. This flexibility is key when working with complex, dynamic phenomena that are difficult to capture with rigid quantitative tools.

Methods of Qualitative Data Analysis

There are several methods researchers can use to analyze qualitative data, each suited to different research objectives. Let’s explore some common methods:

1. Thematic Analysis

Thematic analysis is one of the most commonly used methods of qualitative data analysis. It involves identifying, analyzing, and reporting patterns (or “themes”) within the data. Themes are recurring ideas, concepts, or phenomena that offer insight into the research question.

The process usually involves:

Familiarizing with the data: Reading and re-reading the data to get a good sense of the content.

Coding: Creating initial codes that summarize parts of the data.

Theme development: Grouping related codes into broader themes.

Reviewing themes: Refining the themes to ensure they accurately represent the data.

Defining and naming themes: Providing clear definitions and names for the identified themes.

2. Grounded Theory

Grounded theory is a method that aims to generate a theory from the data itself, rather than testing an existing theory. Researchers use grounded theory to explore phenomena in-depth and develop a conceptual framework grounded in the data. The process includes:

Open coding: Breaking the data down into manageable chunks and categorizing them.

Axial coding: Relating codes to one another to identify patterns.

Selective coding: Identifying core themes and concepts that explain the data.

Grounded theory is highly systematic and involves iterative rounds of data collection and analysis, allowing the theory to evolve as more data is gathered.

3. Content Analysis

Content analysis involves systematically analyzing the content of qualitative data, such as text or media, by categorizing it into predefined themes. This method is particularly useful when analyzing large volumes of textual data. It can be both qualitative and quantitative, depending on how researchers handle the coding process.

4. Narrative Analysis

Narrative analysis is focused on understanding the stories that people tell. Researchers analyze personal accounts, interviews, or life histories to understand how individuals make sense of their experiences. This method emphasizes the structure of the narrative and the social context in which it is told.

5. Discourse Analysis

Discourse analysis is the study of language use and communication. It explores how language shapes social reality and can help reveal power dynamics, social norms, and ideologies within the data. Researchers often use this method to analyze how people express opinions, construct meaning, and negotiate social relationships through language.

Steps in Qualitative Data Analysis

Data Preparation: The first step is transcribing or organizing the raw data. This may involve transcribing interviews or focus group discussions and ensuring the data is in a usable format.

Coding: Researchers begin coding the data by breaking it down into smaller units of meaning. This is often done manually or with the help of software like NVivo or ATLAS.ti. Codes are keywords or phrases that represent the content of the data.

Identifying Themes: Once the data is coded, researchers group the codes into themes or categories that provide insights into the research question.

Data Interpretation: The final step is interpreting the themes and drawing conclusions from the data. This might involve comparing themes, highlighting patterns, and linking the findings to the research questions or broader theory.

Reporting Findings: The results of qualitative analysis are typically presented in a narrative format, supported by direct quotes from the data. The researcher might also use visual aids, like diagrams or models, to present their findings.

Challenges in Qualitative Data Analysis

While qualitative data analysis offers rich insights, it comes with its challenges:

Subjectivity: Researchers must acknowledge and manage their own biases during analysis. Their interpretations may influence how the data is understood.

Complexity: Qualitative analysis can be time-consuming, especially when dealing with large volumes of data.

Lack of Standardization: Unlike quantitative methods, qualitative analysis doesn’t follow a set formula, which can make it difficult to replicate or compare studies.

Conclusion

Qualitative data analysis is an invaluable tool for understanding the complexities of human experiences and social phenomena. By employing various techniques such as thematic analysis, grounded theory, and content analysis, researchers can draw meaningful insights from rich, non-numeric data. Despite the challenges, such as subjectivity and complexity, qualitative research provides an in-depth and holistic view of the research topic, offering findings that quantitative methods often cannot.

For researchers and analysts, mastering qualitative data analysis is essential to uncover the deep, rich, and diverse insights that drive innovation and inform decision-making.

[honourablejester]

One of the things that fascinates me, thematically, about wizards in D&D is the consciousness of their interactions with magic. They learn their craft by study, by conscious thought. And they choose their school, too, by conscious thought. When you make a wizard, you choose what elements of magic they choose to prioritise. What draws them, what repels them, what do they rely on, what do they seek out. The choice of school is as much a characterisation detail as anything else. It’s not just a case of learning spells by rote out of a book (well, no, it can be, but that’s probably a discussion in and of itself). Wizards are the class where you can dig in and get nerdy. There’s magical theory up in this joint.

The eight schools in themselves are also an interest mesh of themes and rationalisations, and that makes sense from a Doylist perspectives, because the game designers are choosing schools and effects outside the game, but it also works from a Watsonian perspective, because these are in-universe classifications based on what wizards assume is how magic works. All the spells are tied to a school, and thus the eight-school classification system, even if there are wizards who aren’t. And with any system of classification, there are arguments. Which is, of course, the fun of it.

So. With that in mind. Eight schools. Abjuration. Conjuration. Divination. Enchantment. Evocation. Illusion. Necromancy. Transmutation. Some essay questions slash thought experiments slash personality quizzes for student wizards in a D&D world, focusing on the classification of magic:

If you were choosing (or have chosen) a school of magic to specialise in, what would it be?

What do you think is the overriding purpose of your school of magic?

What element of your school of magic excites you the most?

What is one common derogatory misconception about your school that makes you angry?

What’s one spell of your school that you think should belong to another school? Explain your reasoning.

What’s one spell of a different school that you think should belong to yours? Explain your reasoning.

What would you consider the school of magic most diametrically opposed to your own? Explain your reasoning.

What would you consider the school of magic most similar to your own? Explain your reasoning.

Name one area of overlap or potential overlap between your school of magic and each of the other seven.

Name one area of conflict or potential conflict between your school and each of the other seven.

Which other school of magic would you consider it necessary of have a good understanding of in order to better study your own?

If you were grouping the eight schools into subgroups, what would the groups be, which schools would they include, and why?

Do you consider the purpose of magic to be useful or to be extraordinary? Which schools do you think best match each outlook?

What do you consider the primary ethical concerns with your school of magic? What would you consider the primary ethical concerns with each of the other schools?

Which school of magic do you find most difficult or unpleasant to work with? Why?

Which school of magic do you find easiest and most reassuring to work with? Why?

What is one question about the workings of each school of magic that keeps you up at night?

Do you think that magic should be divided into schools at all? If you think that it should, do you think that the eight schools currently agreed upon are the most accurate choices, or do you believe that they should be rearranged or replaced?

Do you believe that rigid classification aids or hinders the understanding of magic as a whole? Explain your reasoning.

Do you think that a spell should be considered part of a school of magic based on its effect, or based on the methods or rationale that created it, or based on some other criteria?

Is there a school of magic that you considered to be particularly badly defined? Is there a school that you consider particularly well defined? Do you consider this a clarifying factor or a limiting one?

Which school of magic do you most want to disassemble to base parts and understand the workings of? Is this the same school you are happiest using, or a different one?

What is your favourite spell that you have learned of? Is that spell of your own school or a different one?

What is one spell of your least liked school of magic that you consider worthwhile, and why?

What is one spell that you think should never have been invented, and why?

And, finally, just for fun and so everyone knows where we all stand: which school of magic do you find the adherents of most annoying? Not necessarily the school you think shouldn’t exist, but the one where when you meet a wizard of that school, you kneejerk want to punch them in the face, just because?

[eternalglitch]

Some advice on how to write a long form fic and actually stick with it / survive.

In writing communities, you will hear that there are two main types of writers. Planners/pantsers or architects/gardeners are some of the common names for the types, but basically either you make meticulous notes and plan the entire story out before starting, or you start with an idea and make it up as you go. (Pantsing comes from the phrase "by the seat of your pants".)

Note that these aren't black and white categories; MOST writers will fall in between, but that's normal with most types of things. I started out with a pantser/gardener inclination; I had a cool idea and I posted the first chapter with NO idea where I was going next.

What I learned in that decade of writing was that this will not get you through long pieces of work in a satisfying way. Character arcs are hard to get right, thematical consistency and payoff can happen but it's more luck and chance than your actual skill as a writer. There's always a few geniuses that can do it, but I do not recommend trying to stick to this method alone.

I fall significantly more in between these as a more mature writer after trying and failing at gardening alone. When I posted Like Father Like Son, I went and typed out one bullet point for each chapter I thought I would write. There were 13 planned chapters, so obviously this plan was not accurate – except I have remained true to almost all of the general plot points I had written down in January 2020 at the current time of September 2022. I just expanded on the plot by a significant amount.

As I got used to the tone and got more inspired, I came up with the idea to utilize arcs to break the story down farther. I decided 6 arcs felt right, with a vague idea of what each one would entail, and as I started each arc I would go back in and bullet point what I thought each chapter would be like in more detail. Things still had room to change and grow once I saw where each arc took me, but it is much less daunting to plan 7 chapters at a time instead of 40. It still gave me time to change the little things and have fun seeing where each chapter took me, but it also never left me stranded with no idea where I was trying to swim.

Once I hit the big climax / turning point, which is in Chapter 21: Flatline, I changed tactics a little. I've kept a doc where I write out scenes that I was too excited to wait for, and had accumulated about 20 different little scenes with no order. I put them all on sticky notes and grouped them until I got a clear path, and then I went and solidified the last three arcs in order to get character arcs and themes tied off in a satisfactory way. I had given myself enough time to really think about what I wanted to do, and now that I knew where I currently stood it felt effortless to fill out.

Now. Planning advice aside, how do you actually write a long fic? You will need two main things.

Stamina. This is a skill in and of itself, and unless you have completed at least a novel-length story before, you are new to it! This muscle isn't developed! The best way to throw yourself into training it would be challenging NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) in either November or July. In thirty days, you have to write 50k which pans out to 1,667 words a day. I have challenged and won it twice. I totally pantsed both times, which means I think both novels I wrote are severely lacking in quality, but they absolutely trained me to think on my feet and just push through writer's block. It's grueling and at times painful, but the feeling of crossing the 50k mark on November 30th? That's why I've stuck with writing. Genuinely it is worth doing at least once, you WILL become a better writer even if that piece of work itself is a mess.

Find something you are wildly excited to write in every single chapter. Yes, every single one. You tend to start a story very excited about a few select scenes, but when I start a chapter I try and find at least part of it that I am SO excited to type. This will give you energy and I think people can tell when you actually are enjoying writing rather than slogging through it. Bored of the chapter you're writing? Back to the drawing board, there IS a better way to get from points A to C. Even one chapter I wasn't interested in in between two I loved could make me procrastinate for months instead of just enjoying getting back into the writing.

[gayofthefae]

Most seasons of Stranger Things could have ended there if they cut out the final little cliffhangers and been a great, fine show, but the more I think about it, the more it’s clear thematically they were always going to continue.

I’m thinking about specifically the seasons with the most closure: 1 and 2. These endings were both some level of sweet and felt like they had closure. But they have one distinct commonality. They both completely disregard the hero’s journey, which would be incredibly ironic to end there when you think about how important concepts like that are to the characters themselves. They’re happy endings, yes, but in a way that implies things can return to normal after major trauma like that.

The hero’s journey is that you will go on your adventure and return home, but things will never truly be the same as you are not the same person you were before. So, though it’s sweet on the surface, the season 1 and 2 endings never really made sense with the goal of accurate trauma representation through monster allegories we saw in the show. If you dug a little deeper, you would have seen it as inconsistent.

This is also why I’m so excited for season 5 and that they have taken it this far.

Of course El would need to start making girl friends and figure out who she is independently! Of course Will would feel like life is moving on with out him and the original plan is changing because of what they’ve all gone through and the people who have joined them! Of course Mike would be struggling to balance the relationships in his life that are no longer just the original party always hanging out in one group setting!

Of course there are real world repercussions of their trauma symptoms that interfere with their fairytale happy endings. Because Stranger Things was never supposed to be a fairytale. It’s supposed to be a hero’s journey. At the end of a hero’s journey, you don’t run away into the sunset. You never do. You find peace.

But at the end of seasons 1 and 2, they ran off into the sunset. Which is nice. But looking back since they’ve continued, it makes complete sense why they couldn’t and clearly never meant to do that. Because it just doesn’t fit. It’s like a mix of genres. Yes, it is a happy ending, and yes, it is wrong. Both can be true. Because they are representing real people and real trauma through an exaggerated, supernatural lens. Real trauma symptoms.

They talk about puberty in season 3 and the symbolism of that but I think really what it is - what this weird, hard line between season 2 and 3 seems to be - is that all that trauma caught up to them. They tried to go back to normal. And they couldn’t. They get swept up by the supernatural again but what we see in those first few episodes of seasons 3 and 4 is that their “nerdiness” isn’t the reason they can’t be “normal” anymore. Their experiences prevent them from going back to even the way they were before. Because that’s how it works. 

And that’s the entire message of the show. To not try so hard to be “normal”. But now it’s extending not just to social norms but also to our own definitions of “normal” or staying inside the boxes we’ve made for ourselves that hinder our growth. Every time we define our lives as anything and expect permanence from that definition, it’s a hinderance.

So I am very excited at all the directions the writers are showing they’ve known to go down this whole time. El isn’t running off into the sunset with a savior, she’s becoming independent from the men in her life. Will won’t just be granted safety but happiness, because that was never too much to ask. 

And so many more (there are a lot of characters. I will typically just go for my faves/the ones I’ve already analyzed the most for examples)

[impostoradult]

Media Market Research (and why its undermining all the things you love)

Trying to understand what is dysfunctional about Hollywood is an epic task, and the answers are like the stars – arguably infinite. Hollywood is dysfunctional for literally more reasons than I could count.

But market research plays a fairly heavy role in its dysfunction (IMO) and the time has finally come for me to add my professional two cents about this issue. (This rant of mine has been building for a while, FYI. Hence why it is so...comprehensive. There is a tl;dr section towards the bottom, if you want the high level summary)

*** For the last 4+ years I’ve worked in the field of market research, almost exclusively with major media makers like Warner Bros., NBCU, AMC/BBCA, Viacom, FOX (before Disney acquired them), A+E, etc. (this past year I quit the job where I was doing this work for a variety of reasons, many of which will become clear as you keep reading, but I am still listed as a consultant on the company website):   https://www.kresnickaresearch.com/who/ (Rachel)

And just for comparison, here is a Halloween selfie I took 4 years ago and posted on my blog, so you can see I am who I say I am. 

I know a fair amount about how market research on major media franchises is conducted and how it influences production, and a lot of these choices can also be at least somewhat tied back to the massive flaws in the market research industry and its impact. *** First, at the highest level, you need to understand market research in general is not well-conducted much of the time. Even the people doing a reasonably good job at it are VERY limited in doing it well because of financial constraints (clients don’t want to spend more than they have to), time constraints (clients want everything done as fast as humanely possible) and just the inherent problems within the industry that are decades old and difficult to fix. For example, all market research ‘screens’ participants to make sure they qualify to participate (whether it is a mass survey, a focus group, a one-on-one interview, etc.). So, we screen people based on demographics like race, gender, age, household income, to get representative samples. But people are also screened based on their consumption habits. You don’t want to bring someone into a focus group about reality TV if they don’t watch reality TV. They aren’t going to have anything useful to say. 

However, a lot of the people who participate in market research have made a ‘side-gig’ out of it and they know how to finesse the process. Basically, they’ve learned how to lie to get into studies that they aren’t a good match for because most market research is paid, and they want the money. So, a lot of TV and film market research is being done on people who don’t actually (or at least don’t regularly) watch those shows or movies or whatever but have learned how to lie well enough in these screening processes to make it through. And because of the aforementioned time and money issue, clients don’t want to spend the time or money to actually find GOOD participants. They just accept that as an inevitable part of the market research process and decide not to let it bother them too much. So, a fair number of the people representing YOU as a media consumer are people who may not be watching Supernatural (for example) at all or who watch a rerun occasionally on TNT but haven’t been watching consistently or with ANY amount of investment whatsoever. You can see why that creates very skewed data. But that’s just the tip of the skewed iceberg. *** Second, media market research is conducted in line with the norms of market research more broadly, and this is a huge problem because media is a very atypical product. How people engage with media is far more complex and in depth than how they engage with a pair of jeans, a car, or a coffee maker. There are only so many things that matter to people when it comes to liking or not liking a coffee maker, for example. Is it easy/intuitive to use? How much space does it take it on my counter? How expensive is it? Does it brew the coffee well? Maybe does it match my décor/kitchen aesthetic? Can I make my preferred brand of coffee in it? The things you as a consumer are going to care about when it comes to a coffee maker are limited, fairly easy to anticipate in advance, and also easy to interpret (usually). How people mentally and emotionally approach MEDIA? Whole other universe of thing. Infinitely more complex. And yet it is studied (more or less) as if it is also a coffee maker. This is one of the many reasons I decided to leave the media market research field despite my desire to have some ability to positively influence the process. As so often seems to be the case, I fought the law and the law won. I could never make the other people I worked with in the industry understand that the questions they were asking were not all that useful a lot of the time and they weren’t getting to the heart of the matter. They were just following industry standards because they didn’t know any better and none of them want to admit they don’t REALLY know what they’re doing. Which leads me to point 3. *** Most of the people doing this research don’t have any expertise in media or storytelling specifically. They are typically trained as social scientists in the fields of psychology, anthropology, sociology, or math/statistics. And many of them do not have any kind of specialization or education in media/storytelling beyond the English classes they took in high school and the one Media Studies course they took as an elective in college. Most of them have a very unsophisticated understanding of narrative structure, thematics, tropes, subtext, etc. They mainly think in terms of genres at the VERY broadest level. Also, not infrequently, they don’t watch or have much knowledge of the shows they are supposed to be doing research on, beyond what they’ve read on IMDb or Wikipedia or what is generally common knowledge. Unless they by chance happen to watch the shows themselves (which often they don’t) they often know very little about the shows they are crafting these questions about. Again, partly because they think it is like the coffee maker, and you don’t need to understand it in any depth to research it. (I know this must sound insane to you as avid media consumers, but that is the general attitude among those who do market research) There is such a lack of sophistication in how people in the business side of the industry understand media and storytelling. Most of them are either MBAs or social scientists and their training has not prepared them to examine fictional works with the kind of depth that people in the Humanities (who are specifically trained to study texts) have. Somehow, despite the fact that the Humanities is all about understanding texts, that is the one discipline they make almost no use of in the business side of Hollywood. And boy howdy does it show. *** Point 4 – average consumers CANNOT ARTICULATE WHY THEY LIKE THINGS. Particularly media things. I know this sounds condescending, but it is my honest observation. It is unbelievably hard to get people to have enough self-awareness to explain why they actually like things, especially things as mentally and emotionally complex as media. What typically happens when you ask people why they like a TV show or movie, for example? They will tell you what they most NOTICE about the TV show or movie, or what is distinctive to them about it (which may or may not have anything to do with what they actually LIKE about it). They will say things like “I like the genre”, “I think it’s funny”, “The car chases are exciting”, “I want to see the detective solve the puzzle.” Sometimes you can get them to talk about what they find relatable about it, if you push them a little. But often they leave it at either the level of literal identity (young black woman), basic personality traits (she’s a social butterfly and so am I) or situations they’ve personally experienced (I relate to this story of a man losing his father to cancer because I lost a close family member to cancer). But the vast, vast, vast majority of them can’t go to the deeper level of: a) Why X representation of a young black woman feels accurate/authentic/relatable and Y representation doesn’t b) Why it matters to me that X,Y,Z aspects of my personality, identity, experience get reflected in media whereas I don’t really care about seeing A,B,C aspects of my personality, identity, or experience reflected in media c) How and why they are relating to characters when they can’t see the literal connection between their identity/experience and the character’s identity/experience. (For example, many people have argued that women often relate to Dean Winchester because a lot of his struggles and past negative experiences are more stereotypical of women – being forced to raise a younger sibling on behalf of an actual parent, being seen and treated as beautiful/sexually desirable but vacuous/unintelligent, his body being treated as an instrument for a more powerful group to quite literally possess, etc. Part of the reason Supernatural has always been such a mystery/problem for the CW and Warner Bros is they could never crack the code at this level. Never.) Part of the reason they can’t crack these codes is average people CANNOT give you that kind of feedback in a survey or a focus group, or even an in-depth interview (much of the time). They just don’t have the self-awareness or the vocabulary to get it at that level. Let alone asking them to articulate why Game of Thrones is compelling to them in an era where wealth disparity is creating a ruling class that is fundamentally incompetent at maintaining a just/functional society, which is especially concerning at this particular moment, given the existential threat we face due to climate change. And the truth is, that IS part of what people – even average people – are responding to in Game of Thrones. But what they’ll tell you when you do market research on it is: they like the dragons, they like the violence, they relate to Tyrion Lannister being a smart mouth, maybe they’ll say they like the moral ambiguity of many of the conflicts (if they are more sophisticated than average). But the ‘Dean Winchester is heavily female coded despite his veneer of ultra-masculinity’ or the ‘Game of Thrones is a prescient metaphor for the current political dynamics and fissures of modern western society’ is the level you ACTUALLY need to get to. And most market research can’t get you that because the people ASKING the questions don’t know what to ask to get to this level, and most of the respondents couldn’t give you the answers even IF you were asking them the right questions (which usually you are not) And I’m not saying average people are dumb because they can’t do this. But it requires practice, it requires giving the matter a great deal of in-depth thought, and most people just don’t care enough about it to do that while taking a market research survey. (I know this is going to feel counter-intuitive to people on Tumblr. But you have to remember, you are NOT average media consumers. You are highly atypical media consumers who have far more self-awareness and a much more sophisticated engagement with media than the average person watching TV. If you didn’t, you probably wouldn’t be here talking about it in the first place) Point 4.1 – People also lie/misrepresent their own experiences to market researchers because they want to maintain certain self-narratives. You have no idea how many people would get disqualified from our surveys for saying they watched less than 5 hours of TV a week. And sure, that might actually be true for a few of them. But if you watch TV with any regularity at all (which most people in modern America do) you probably watch more than 5 hours a week. The problem is, people think it makes them sound lazy to say they watch 15-20 hours a week, even though that’s about 2-3 hours a day (which actually isn’t THAT high). People lie and misrepresent their behaviors, thoughts and feelings because it can be socially uncomfortable to admit you do what you actually do or feel how you actually feel, even in the context of an anonymous survey, let alone a focus group or a one-on-one interview. People want to make themselves look good to THEMSELVES and to the researchers asking them questions. But that makes the market research data on media (and lots of other things) very questionable. For example, one finding we saw more than once in the surveys I was involved in conducting was people would radically downplay how much the romance elements of a story mattered to them, even large portions of female respondents. When we would ask people in surveys what parts of the story they were most invested in, romances ALWAYS came out among the lowest ranked elements. And yet, any passing familiarity with fandom would tell you that finding is just WRONG. It’s wrong. People are just flat out lying about how much that matters to them because of the negative connotations we have around being invested in romance. And never mind the issue of erotic/sexual content. (I don’t mean sexual identity here, I mean sexy content). The only people who will occasionally cop to wanting the erotic fan service is young men (and even they are hesitant to do so in market research) and women frequently REFUSE to admit that stuff in market research, or they radically downplay how much it matters to them and in what ways. There is still so much stigma towards women expressing sexuality in that way. Not to mention, you have to fight tooth and nail to even include question about erotic/sexual content because oftentimes the clients don’t even want to go there at all, partly because it is awkward for everyone involved to sit around crafting market research questions to interrogate what makes people hot and bothered. That’s socially awkward for the researchers doing the research and the businesspeople who have to sit in rooms and listen to presentations about why more women find Spock sexier than Kirk. (Which was a real thing that happened with the original Star Trek, and the network couldn’t figure out why) Aside from people not have enough deeper level self-awareness to get at what they really like about media content, they also will lie or misrepresent certain things to you because they are trying to maintain certain self-narratives and are socially performing that version of themselves to researchers. *** Point 5 – Qualitative data is way more useful for understanding people’s relationships to media. However, quantitative data is way more valued and relied upon both due to larger market research industry standards and because quantitative data is just seen as harder/more factual than qualitative data. A lot of media market research involves gathering both qualitative and quantitative data and reporting jointly on both. (Sometimes you only do one or the other, depending on your objectives, but doing both is considered ‘standard’ and higher quality). However, quantitative data is heavily prioritized in reporting and when there is a conflict between what they see in qualitative versus quantitative data, the quant data is usually relied upon to be the more accurate of the two. This is understandable to an extent, because quantitative surveys usually involve responses from a couple thousand participants, whereas qualitative data involves typically a few dozen participants at most, depending on whether you did focus groups, individual interviews, or ‘diaries’/ethnography. The larger sample is considered more reliable and more reflective of ‘the audience’ as a whole. However, quantitative surveys usually have the flattest, least nuanced data, and they can only ever reflect what questions and choices people in the survey were given. In something like focus groups or individual interviews or ethnographies, you still structure what you ask people, but they can go “off script.” They can say things you never anticipated (as a researcher) and can explain themselves and their answers with more depth. In a survey, participants can only “say” what they survey lets them say based on the questions and question responses that are pre-baked for them. And as I’ve already explained, a lot of times these quantitative surveys are written by people with no expertise in media, fiction, or textual analysis, and so they often are asking very basic, not very useful questions. In sum, the data that is the most relied upon is the least informative, least nuanced data. It is also the MOST likely to reflect the responses of people who don’t actually qualify for the research but have become good at scamming the system to make extra money. With qualitative research, they are usually a little more careful screening people (poorly qualified participants still make it through, but not as often as with mass surveys, where I suspect a good 35% of participants, at least, probably do not actually qualify for the research and are just working the system). 

Most commonly, when market research gets reported to business decision-makers, it highlights the quantitative data, and uses the qualitative data to simply ‘color in’ the quantitative data. Give it a face, so to speak. Qualitative data is usually supplemental to quant data and used more to make the reports ‘fun’ and ‘warm’ because graphs and charts and stats by themselves are boring to look at in a meeting. (I’m not making this up, I can’t tell you how many times I was told to make adjustments on how things were reported on because they didn’t want to bore people in the meeting). (Sub-point – it is also worth noting that you can’t report on anything that doesn’t fit easily on a power point slide and isn’t easily digestible to any random person who might pick it up and read it. The amount of times I was told to simplify points and dumb things down so it could be made ‘digestible’ for a business audience, I can’t even tell you. It was soul crushing and another reason I stopped doing this job full time. I had to make things VERY dumb for these business audiences, which often meant losing a lot of the point I was actually trying to make) Point 5.1 – Because of the way that representative sampling works, quantitative data can be very misleading, particularly in understanding audience/fandom sentiments about media. As I’m sure most of you know, sampling is typically designed to be representative of the population, broadly speaking. So, unless a media company is specifically out to understand LGBTQ consumers or Hispanic/Latinx consumers, it will typically sample using census data as a template and represent populations that way. Roughly 50/50 male/female. Roughly even numbers in different age brackets, roughly representative samplings of the racial make-up of the country, etc. (FYI, they do often include a non-binary option in the gender category these days, but it usually ends up being like 5 people out of 2000, which is not enough of a sample to get statistical significance for them as a distinct group)   There is a good reason to do this, even when a show or movie has a disproportionately female audience, or young audience. Because they need enough sample in all of the “breaks” (gender, race, age, household income, etc.) to be able to make statistically sound statements about each subgroup. If you only have 35 African American people in your sample of 1000, you can’t make any statistically sound statements about that African American cohort. The sample is just too small. So, they force minimums/quotas in a lot of the samples, to ensure they can make statistically sound statements about all the subgroups they care about. They use ratings data to understand what their audience make up actually is. (Which also has major failings, but I’ll leave that alone for the minute) With market research, they are not usually looking to proportionately represent their audience, or their fandom; they are looking to have data they can break in the ways they want to break it and still have statistically significant subgroups represented. But that means that when you report on the data as a whole sample – which you often do – it can be very skewed towards groups who don’t make up as large a portion of the show’s actual audience, or even if they do, they don’t tend to be the most invested, loyal, active fans. Men get weighted equally to women, even when women make up 65% of the audience, and 80% of the active fandom. Granted, they DO break the data by gender, and race, and age, etc. and if there are major differences in how women versus men respond, or younger people versus older people, they want to know that...sometimes. But here’s where things get complex. So, if you are doing a sample of Supernatural viewers. And you do the standard (US census-based) sampling on a group of 2000 respondents (a pretty normal sample size in market research). ~1000 are going to be female. But with something they call “interlocking quotas” the female sample is going to be representative of the other groupings to a degree. So, the female sample will have roughly equal numbers of all the age brackets (13-17, 18-24, 25-34, etc.). And it will have roughly 10% non-heterosexual respondents, and so on. They do this to ensure that these breaks aren’t too conflated with each other. (For example, if your female sample is mostly younger and your male sample is mostly older, how do you know whether it is the gender or the age that is creating differences in their responses? You don’t. So, you have to make sure that all the individual breaks (gender, race, age) have a good mix of the other breaks within them, so groups aren’t getting conflated) But what that means is, Supernatural, whose core fandom is (at a conservative guess) 65% younger, queer, women, gets represented in a lot of statistical market research sampling as maybe 50-100 people, in a 2000-person survey. 50-100 people can barely move the needle on anything in a 2000-person survey. Furthermore, usually in the analysis of data like this, you don’t go beyond looking at 2 breaks simultaneously. So you may look at young female respondents as a group, or high income male respondents, or older white respondents, but you rarely do more than 2 breaks combined. And the reason for that is, by the time you get down to 3 breaks or more (young, Hispanic, women) you usually don’t have enough sample to make statistically significant claims. (It also just takes longer to do those analyses and as I explained in the beginning, they are always rushing this stuff). To do several breaks at a time you’d have to get MUCH larger samples, and that’s too expensive for them. And again, I want to stress, this type of sampling isn’t intended to sinisterly erase anyone. Kind of the opposite. It is intended to make sure most groups have enough representation in the data that you can make sound claims about them on the subgroup level. The problem is that it can create a very skewed sense of their overall audience sentiment when they take the data at ‘face value’ so to speak, and don’t weight segments based on viewership proportion, or fandom engagement, etc. Point 5.2 – Which leads me to my next point, which is that fandom activity that doesn’t have a dollar amount attached to it doesn’t make you a ‘valuable’ segment in their minds. One of the breaks they ALWAYS ask for in data like this is high income people, and people who spend a lot of MONEY on their media consumption. And they do prioritize those people’s responses and data quite a bit.   And guess what – young women aren’t usually high-income earners, and although some of them are high spenders on media, high spending on media and media related merch skews toward higher income people just because they HAVE more disposable income. Older white men are usually the highest income earners (absolutely no surprise) and they are more likely in a lot of cases to report spending a lot on the media they care about. Having expendable income makes you more important in the eyes of people doing market research than if you’ve spent every day for the last 10 years blogging excessively about Supernatural. They don’t (really) care about how much you care. They care about how much money you can generate for them. And given that young audiences don’t watch TV live anymore, and they give all their (minimal) expendable income to Netflix and Hulu, you with your Supernatural blog and your 101 essays about Destiel is all but meaningless to many of them (from a business standpoint) Now, some of them kind of understand that online fandom matters to the degree that fandom spreads. Fandom creates fandom. But if the fandom you are helping to create is other young, queer women with minimal income who only watch Supernatural via Netflix, well, that’s of very limited value to them as well. I don’t want to suggest they don’t care about you at ALL. Nor do I want to suggest that the “they” we are talking about is even a cohesive “they.” Different people in the industry have different approaches to thinking about fandom, consumer engagement and strategy, market research and how it ought to be understood/used, and so on. They aren’t a monolith. BUT, they are, at the end of the day, a business trying to make money. And they are never going to place the value of your blogging ahead of the concrete income you can generate for them. (Also, highly related to my point about people lying, men are more likely to SAY they have higher incomes than they do, because it’s an ego thing for them. And women are more likely to downplay how much money they spend on ‘frivolous’ things like fandom because of the social judgement involved. Some of the money gender disparity you see in media market research is real, but some of it is being generated by the gender norms people are falsely enacting in market research– men being breadwinners, women wanting to avoid the stereotype of being frivolous with money) *** In sum/tl;dr: Point 1 – Market research in general is not well conducted because of a variety of constraints including time, money, and the historical norms of how the industry operates (e.g., there being a large subsection of almost professionalized respondents who know how to game the system for the financial incentives) Point 2 – Media is a highly atypical kind of product being studied more or less as if it were equivalent to a coffeemaker or a pair of jeans. Point 3 – Most of the people studying media consumption in the market research field have no expertise or background in media, film, narrative, storytelling, etc. They are primarily people who were trained as social scientists and statisticians, and they aren’t well equipped to research media properties and people’s deeper emotional attachment and meaning-making processes related to media properties. Point 4(etc.) – Average consumers typically don’t have enough self-awareness or the vocabulary to explain the deep, underlying reasons they like pieces of media. Furthermore, when participating in market research, people lie and misrepresent their thoughts, behaviors, and emotional responses for a variety of reasons including social awkwardness and preserving certain self-narratives like “I’m above caring about dumb, low-brow things like romance.” Point 5 (etc.) – Quantitative data is treated as way more meaningful, valuable, and ‘accurate’ than qualitative data, and this is a particular problem with media market research because of how varied and complex people’s reactions to media can be. Also, the nature of statistical sampling, and how it is done, can massively misrepresent audience sentiments toward media and fail to apprehend deeper fandom sentiments and dynamics. There is also a strong bias towards the responses of high income/high spending segments, which tend to be older and male and white. Side but important point – Research reports are written to be as entertaining and digestible as possible, which sounds nice in theory, but in practice it often means you lose much of the substance you are trying to communicate for the sake of not boring people or making them feel stupid/out of their depth. (Because god forbid you make some high-level corporate suit feel stupid) *** What can be done about this? Well, the most primary thing I would recommend is for you to participate in market research, particularly if you are American (there’s a lot of American bias in researching these properties, even when they have large international fanbases). However, some international market research is done and I recommend looking into local resources for participation, where ever you are. If you are American, there are now several market research apps you can download to your smart phone and participate in paid market research through (typically paid via PayPal). Things like dscout and Surveys On the Go. And I know there are more. You should also look into becoming panelists for focus groups, particularly if you live near a large metropolitan area (another bias in market research). Just Google it and you should be able to figure it out fairly easily. Again, it is PAID, and your perspective will carry a lot more weight when it is communicated via a focus group or a dscout project, versus when it is shouted on Twitter. However, that’s merely a Band-Aid on the bigger issue, which I consider to be the fact that businesspeople think the Humanities is garbage, even when they make their living off it. There is virtually no respect for the expertise of fictional textual analysis, or how it could help Hollywood make better content. And I don’t know what the fix is for that. I spent 4 years of my life trying to get these people to understand what the Humanities has to offer them, and I got shouted down and dismissed so many times I stopped banging my head against that wall. I gave up. They don’t listen, mostly because conceding to the value of deep-reading textual analysis as a way to make better content would threaten the whole system of how they do business. And I mean that literally. So many people’s jobs, from the market researchers to the corporate strategists to the marketing departments to the writers/creatives to the C-level executives, would have to radically shift both their thinking and their modes of business operation and the inertia of ‘that’s the way it’s always been done’ is JUST SO POWERFUL. I have no earthly idea how to stop that train, let alone shift it to an entirely different track. BTW, if you want the deeper level of analysis of why I can’t stop rewatching Moneyball now that it’s been added to Netflix, the above paragraph should give you a good hint

[autisminfiction]

Thoughts on My Little Pony: A New Generation

The show My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic is special to me for it’s portrayal of autistic coded characters, and I’d argue it was a pivotal phenomenon in autistic culture. It has since completed it’s run, and the pilot for it’s successor just aired yesterday in the form of the movie My Little Pony: A New Generation. Let’s make it clear from that from get go it’s apparent that this show is not going to be as significant to the autistic community as the previous show was as all it’s characters have less autistic traits than those in the original show. We’ve had our time in the limelight, so it’s fine that now the focus is placed on a different, but I’m still going to miss what we had.

It makes sense that this show is different from the previous one in this regard, as thematically this show focuses on cross-group relational problems rather than in-group ones like the previous show, which is more of a concern for neurotypicals than it is for autistic people since they have a much stronger in-group bias. We can see this change in theme from the first scene, where we see Sunny Starscout, the new lead who kinda feels like a neurotypical version of Twilight Sparkle, interprets Twilight Sparkle as being sent to make friends more as a diplomatic mission between pony races that a personal assignment to develop her social skills. Sunny longs to befriend other pony races (unicorns and pegasi, since shes’s an earth pony) and is only ostracized because such beliefs are considered to be heterodox in her community, contrasting with Twilight who never say the point in pursuing friendship with anyone. While intelligent, well-educated, and a little bit geeky, she lacks Twilight’s intensity while maintaining a social intuition that Twilight lacks, and so on.

There is one character though appears to be neurodivergent, if not autistic coded. That is Izzy Moonbow, the unicorn who Sunny befriends. What intrigues me about Izzy Moonbow is that despite being the comic relief she may actually be the most complex character in the movie, with her deeper character appearing almost as an inversion of her superficial presentation. For example, she appears oblivious to her surroundings, but proves to often be the first to come up with a practical solution from their environment, while bubbly she was socially isolated, and while her descriptions of other pony’s “luminescence” (aura) suggests a New Age archetype, she actually contrasts with other unicorns in the show in that she is NOT superstitious. In particular, she also initially appeared to be the opposite of autistic, but it was later shown that she finds it difficult to relate to her peers because she processes the world around her in a different way then they do.

Izzy Moonbow does not appear to be autistic coded as she has been shown to be quite responsive to the emotions of other ponies. There was at least one gag where she directly reacted to another pony’s facial expression, and she appears to describe other’s emotional states and personalities using can colorful metaphors. However, she also demonstrates limited understanding of what is appropriate behavior in various social contexts, so maybe autism is more plausible than it initially appears. One wonders if maybe her descriptions of luminescence is not a metaphor, but her attempting to describe how she experiences the emotions of others, which she is unable to describe in the way neurotypicals do because she doesn’t experience them in the same way.

Let’s get to the essence of her character. Officially her gimmick is that she likes crafts. However, her crafts are shown to be of remarkable mechanical complexity. She is not just an artist, but a tinker, and the only reason that aspect is masked is because her presentation is more feminine than the stereotype of this archetype. The tinker archetype is closely associated fictional depictions of autism, often under the guise of being more interested in machines than people. That description certainly doesn’t apply to Izzy, but it also isn’t an accurate description of autism, and in many depictions of the autistic tinker they are shown as emphasizing with machines as a result of being rejected by their organic peers despite longing to be accepted by them. Izzy is a bit a different, instead desiring to show her contraptions to friends she never had, but there is still a common thread of social desire persisting after rejection.

There is another link between the tinker archetype and autism that also applies to Izzy. The tinker is highly intelligent, but they find it difficult to express this intelligence through words, and instead demonstrate it through their ability to work with their hands. This certainly applies to some autistic people, though others are the opposite. As for Izzy, her comments tend to confuse others, but she has shown to be very competent at solving problems when she can go straight to using her hooves and horn, such as when she created a bridge from a tree while the rest of the group was complaining about being unable to cross a chasm. I think this is most of all what gets to the essence of Izzy’s character. She does not see the world like others do, but it cannot be denied that her perspective if just as valid because she proves it is through what she does.

Many people have compared Izzy Moonglow to Pinkie Pie, both being social comic characters who are very obviously neurodivergent, but I find Izzy Moonglow to be a much more realistic depiction of someoen who is neurogivergent, while Pinkie Pie is more just a comic character without depth. Both would be difficult to label with any real-world disorder, but while the reason for Pinkie Pie is because there simply is nothing beneath the surface connecting her diverse behaviors, with Izzy it’s because she’s meant to be a individual with personal depth rather than checking of a list of traits. I also wonder if some of the difficulty in identifying what is going on comes from the path that she has a very feminine presentation, but her way of processing things has traditionally been associated with males, and thus sexism in the psychiatric community would lead to them failing to identify her underlying thought processes. That’s certainly the case for many autistic women, and it could very well extend to someone like Izzy.

That’s all my thoughts about how autism and neurodiversity relate to this incarnation of My Little Pony for now. There is going to be a full series following the movie, so I’m looking forward to watching it, and particularly seeing more of Izzy. Depending on how she’s portrayed in episodes I may even decide to give her an actual profile. As for now though, I just think it’s really interesting how both Izzy Moonglow and Twilight Sparkle are purple unicorns who can ambiguously be interpreted as being autistic, but have completely different personalities. Izzy is breaking new ground, as while Twilight Sparkle’s personality was pretty common for fictional depictions of autistic males prior to her being a female instance of it, Izzy’s is one that hasn’t been depicted much at all, and I wonder if any autistic girls relate to her in a way they haven’t related to characters before. So even while the show has a whole is less neurodiversity focused then the previous one, it still has something in it for us, and that can be enough.

[scifimagpie]

This article's title comes from the worshippers Demeter, Persephone, and Hades, a secretive Hellenic religious group who formed an understanding of the year's cycle from the actions of the gods. Hades (with Zeus' permission, allegedly) kidnapped Demeter and Zeus' daughter Persephone, brought her to the Underworld, and made her his equally-powerful queen and wife, there to reign over the riches of Earth and the multitudes of the dead. Her mother Demeter was unaware of the plan, and mourned her daughter's disappearance. The earth and harvest goddess allowed nothing to grow or bloom while she mourned, and unfortunately, humanity began to suffer and die. 

That meant no sacrifices - which was a big problem for the gods of Olympus. Eventually, Demeter solved the case of her missing daughter - and approached the culprit. But Hades, lovelorn for his new queen, could not bear to lose her forever. A famished Persephone accepted a handful of pomegranate seeds during her sojourn below the ground, and in doing so, bound herself to the underworld forever. This left Persephone torn between two people she loved, both longing for her in seemingly incompatible ways.

Zeus, seen as the rule-maker and judge of his divine family, settled that Persephone would remain with Hades for a quarter, third, or half of the year (accounts vary), and spend the rest above ground, with her mother. Demeter was content with this, but each year, when her daughter left to spend time with her husband, Demeter returned to mourning and would not allow the natural world to flourish.

 Behold: I am not dead, I rise again - though not in spring, as might be expected, but in winter, a time when my mind is sometimes more fruitful and active than in the warm, exciting seasons. 

It's been a second plague year, and as if that weren't enough to deal with, my personal life has been - well - full of ups and downs. I've spent most of the year hunkered over my computer, working on publishing and releasing actual books, working on my mental health to actually improve the damned thing, and trying to get in quality time with friends. The delight of a new relationship has also occupied many happy hours. Unfortunately, all of that has been on the background of a major personal upheaval within my family - and the long and short of it is, it annihilated my blog posting scheduled hopes.

But, as the snow and cold return in autumn, so too did I return to my creative projects - but also to Alexandre Dumas' The Count of Monte Cristo. Long-time readers of the blog and followers of my own media will be aware that I adore this book, and have read it several times - but after a nasty mental health breakdown a few years ago, I developed the common malady of reading anxiety. However, my male partner suggested recently that I take up a familiar and beloved book. On a whim, I indulged him, and found myself immediately captivated and delighted by the Robin Buss translation that I had not touched in many years. In a few words, then, if my writing voice is pretentious as hell, you can blame the best 19th century Black author I've read. 

But of course, my thirst for endless cultural analysis and commentary remains unabated, and so, in the dark of the night, I found my way to a video in my queue that was potentially thematically resonant for an upcoming Call of Cthulhu 7th edition game I plan to run for my local TTRPG (tabletop roleplay game) group. Inspired by the imminent game and the turn of my thoughts lately, my next posts will be about a moral panic video about Dark Academia, but also about the intriguing quandary of villain narratives. I also want to write (or more accurately, finish) a series of posts I've made about various writing techniques, including the applicability and utility of writing for and playing in TTRPG games to writing fiction. 

This November, I will also be continuing revisions on the coauthored romance novel I helped write last year, as well as trying to finish book 5 (and possibly 6?) of The Meaning Wars series. If that sounds like a lot, it probably is, so we'll see how far I get. I'm not setting especially hard deadlines, but I'd like to have the writing series out throughout the winter, book 5 out by December (or January), and Book 6, out in February or so. That means the anthology of The Meaning Wars won't be out by December 1st, as I'd hoped - but you can still grab the two most recent books, which are currently Kindle exclusives! (It's for marketing reasons, not borne out of any love for BezosMart.)

The books are a soft reboot of the series, so you can read from the very start, or you can pick up things from book 3 onward! They're about 40K apiece, or about 100-odd pages in paperback equivalency. 

They’re queer, anti-colonialist, anti-capitalist space opera tales - and the second book is a beach episode. 

The Meaning Wars - book 3 of The Meaning Wars 

On the way to a new wormhole-building gig, Crystal and her husband Jai fight over the future of their family. But the safe haven of their base is paradise compared to Pluto. Recovering from her imprisonment, Sarah and her cousin Toby try to scrape their lives back together and stay out of trouble on the icy planetoid. Rebel leader Patience Ngouabi's actions have triggered a growing insurrection on the colony planet of Indus, and the shock waves have reached even the Solar system's worlds. Both Crystal and Sarah will have to decide between uneasy peace and constant danger - if they get to choose at all. Content advisory: this book contains references to abuse, sexual scenes, torture, and mental health issues. Reader discretion is advised.

Poe's Outlaws - book 4 of The Meaning Wars

Leaving her abusive husband, Crystal finds herself desperately in need of a vacation. She heads off to Nirvana, a resort planet far from the Solar System. Craving company - and wanting to save an old friend from the Human Conglomerate's unjust judiciary system - she invites Sarah, her cousin Toby, and Sarah's mentor Paulo to join her at the resort. Paulo calls on a former partner, but his arrival - and the job he offers - throw Crystal and Sarah's new lives into chaos. Temptation and a stunning revelation bewilder Crystal. Meanwhile, Sarah decides on a risky rescue mission that puts her ideals to the test. It's time to put up or shut up - because a revolutionary icon needs their help.

If you're glad I'm back, and you want to support me, then grab my books, hit me up on social media, or reply to this post. How are you handling the second year of COVID? Were there things you hoped to do, and didn't, or hoped to do, and did? Any plans for year 3? Your questions, comments, and contact are a huge motivation for me, so I'd love to know what my community - tiny, but very treasured - is up to.

***Michelle Browne is a sci fi/fantasy writer and editor. She lives in Lethbridge, AB with her partners-in-crime and their cats. Her days revolve around freelance editing, knitting, jewelry, and learning too much. She is currently working on other people’s manuscripts, the next books in her series, and drinking as much tea as humanly possible.Find her all over the internet: * 

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Ko-fi

[angelsndragons]

WHO IS BARONESS ANASTASIA DEVORAK

AKA: PORTIA’S ROUTE IS AWESOME AND Y’ALL DON’T APPRECIATE HER.

DISCLAIMER: SPOILERS FOR PORTIA’S ROUTE

So, let me get this out of the way first: I am something of a sucker for tarot cards. I'm not someone who thinks they tell the future or whatever; instead, they help a reader get a different perspective on a situation. They tell stories. Worried about this move? The Fool card reminds you that life is always changing and that it is okay to mourn the loss of what came before. Trouble with your romantic partner? The Empress asks if you are letting yourself be in the relationship, existing and experiencing it. I have fun with these cards of mine, gaining a different angle to view my questions and situations from.

As you can probably tell, I love The Arcana Game. Its storytelling and character writing are top-notch. But what I love most about it, what actually got me into the game in the first place, is the devs' in depth knowledge of tarot, the major arcana, and the fool's journey. These people get it on a fundamental level. My friend started posting screenshots and explaining the characters, their stories, and their roles. Asra the Magician, Nadia the High Priestess, Muriel the Hermit, Julian the Hanged Man, Lucio the Devil, Portia the Star, and you, the MC, the Fool. As my friend continued through their chosen routes, again and again I was struck by just how thematically resonate and appropriate each character's assignment was and how the assignments even factored into their relationships with each other and their route endings.

So, before we get into Portia, Tasya and their deal, we need to take a step back. As I know not every Arcana fan has a background in tarot, we're going to start by defining some terms. 

TAROT TERMS

Upright and Reversed: It is important to note that each term in tarot is not necessarily good or bad. Some people don't bother reading reversed cards at all or some individual decks refuse to do so. Why? Well reversed simply means that the energy associated with a particular card is stuck. That is all it means. Something is blocking that particular domain or whatever and needs to be resolved.

The devs of the Arcana game are using this definition for the story structure. As you get closer to a reversed end, you will note the increasing desperation, hopelessness, and the growing idea that you cannot change or go back in the Reversed endings. You are stuck and have to deal with the worst aspects of each character's assigned card. Asra cares for nothing beyond his immediate little world, Julian is stuck and can't see a way out so he wallows and does nothing, and Nadia rejects the High Priestess and the subconscious world for the materialistic power and control offered by the Devil. Whereas the closer you get to the Upright ending, the more you see a sense of movement and change as the challenges strengthen the MC, their LI, and the people around you both. That is what the Fool's Journey is all about.

Now let's talk about the cards' relationships to each other. In tarot, cards can have one of three relationships with each other: neutral, opposing, and reinforcing.

Neutral: these cards do not oppose or reinforce each other. Their place in a reading is dependent on other cards and the question posed.

Reinforcing: These are cards which reinforce each other and deal in similar domains. They get along, so to speak. If you see reinforcing pairs or triplets in a reading, the deck is basically screaming at you about the issues they represent. For example, the High Priestess reinforces the Hanged Man in their shared domain of potentiality. The Hanged Man is waiting for something unknown or perhaps a revelation, both of which the High Priestess guards. Now is not the time to act, they say in a reading together. Now is the time to wait and let the potential grow into the kinetic.

Opposing: Opposing cards are tricky because there are two major groups of opposition: balanced pair or antagonism. A balanced pair is basically when two cards form a yin-yang relationship while antagonistic cards have no common ground and deal in opposite domains. The difference between a balanced pair and an antagonistic one is often in whether one card can use the energy of another or not. 

For example, the Magician and the High Priestess form a balanced pair. She is the guardian of the subconscious and potential of the unknown world, which the Magician needs in order to act. In turn, the Magician brings that potentiality into the real, material world and makes something of it. The Magician needs the High Priestess just as she needs him. They balance one another. In contrast, the Magician and the Hanged Man are antagonistic cards. The Hanged Man's whole ideology is wrapped up in waiting, in letting go, in allowing things to happen to you. “Victory through surrender” is one interpretation I've seen and it is fairly accurate. In contrast, the Magician is all about doing. He knows what he wants, knows how to get it, and will not let anyone stand in his way. He does not wait, he acts now, strikes hard, and damn the consequences. The Hanged Man suspends action, the Magician acts. There is no balance here, no place where they can work together.

From the examples above, I hope you can see why I look at the game, its relationships, and plot through a tarot reader's eyes. Asra and Julian's problematic relationship, Nadia and Asra's friendship and easy working relationship, and Nadia and Julian's whole deal with the murder are all appropriate for what their cards stand for. This branches out to all the other characters, by the by, including Lucio and the Devil. Muriel and Asra get along because their cards reinforce each other; the Hermit is all about knowing your own power and what you want while the Magician is about getting it.

So, finally, after all that, let's talk Portia.

THE STAR

Portia is the Arcana Game's Star. In tarot, the Star is

Beacon of hope and inspiration

Clarity

Truth 

However, importantly, the Star card is not a card of action. It is a card of seeing and knowing. That’s why getting Portia to act on her truths and speak her mind is key to her Upright Ending, knowing is not enough.

In her route, we can see that Portia fulfills all these criteria. In fact, her whole route can be summed up by her line:

Portia has been badly burned by secrets and lies, the ones people have given to/kept from her and the ones that she keeps and tells. 

We start her route with the following secrets, which she has been desperate to tell someone, anyone:

Julian Devorak is her brother

She can read and write

She came to the palace explicitly to clear her brother 

Nadia has been asleep for years and has awoken with no memory

She has written Nadia's sisters and invited them to the ball

Her insecurities regarding her place in the world

All the lower level palace gossip about the count, the other servants, and the courtiers which indicate that something is amiss

She cannot remember the shipwreck which killed her entire family save Julian

Over the course of her route, not only do these secrets come out but Portia begins pursuing the truth in other areas of her life. She loves detective novels, pulls the secret of the dungeons from Volta, learns more about Julian's work than even he knows, and becomes more confident and honest about her feelings towards the MC.

Portia inspires those around her to be and do better. Her dedication to Julian, for example, leads to Nadia growing closer with Nasmira and her siblings. She inspires great loyalty from the palace staff despite her relatively new appointment. Julian, who spends basically every other route trying to get hanged, is inspired to fight against the charges because of Portia's belief in him. Hell, even Volta gets a few moments peace from her curse thanks to Portia and Mazelinka's soup. 

Of all the characters, Portia is the one who sees things, and others, most clearly. She makes the connection between the MC’s missing memories and Nadia's.

She connects the ghost to Lucio, her brother, and the plague. Also, notably, Julian’s handwriting is so bad, most people can’t read it.

She knows everyone in the palace and what makes them tick.

She calls out Valerius, Vulgora, and Vlastomil at the trial and nails them all to the coliseum doors ala Martin Luther.

Portia just knows.

With all this in mind, let us return to the central question (yay): Who is Anastasia Devorak?

Tasya Devorak is the Moon.

THE MOON

Oh, wait, you want me to explain? Okay, sure.

Earlier we talked about opposing and reinforcing cards. The Star has three primary opponents: the Devil, the Tower, and the Moon.

Need more? Fine.

Portia has already confronted the Devil via Lucio and tried to punch him out.

Twice.

She fought Vulgora in Julian's trial.

The only opponent left to reveal is the Moon. Just for funsies, let's see what it represents:

Secrecy

Illusion, both self delusions and people putting on illusions

Confusion

Fear

While a characteristic of the physical moon, it should be noted that the moon's light drowns out the surrounding stars, obscuring them from view. It is also associated with water and tides.

Still need me to explain?

Fine. Let's go over Tasya's appearances with a fine tooth comb. We're all nerds here, it's cool.

The chief question that has to be answered is also the most obvious: why hasn't Tasya shown up in the other routes? Arguably, it is pretty simple: Portia's route is the only one where Portia reveals herself to Vesuvia and declares herself Julian's sister. This indicates to me that Tasya is here specifically for Portia, as does the evil lady's attitude towards Julian, which is dismissive at best and manipulative at worst. For all we know she has been lurking in the other routes under the assumption that Portia is dead.

Now, you may be asking, what the hell does she want with Portia? What could Portia offer her? Oh I don't know, an in with the ruling countess, an in with the two most powerful mages in the city, and knowledge of the entire court structure and all the secrets within it? Which Tasya gets? Oh, that was a rhetorical question? My bad.

Back to Tasya and how she links up with the Moon card:

Refuses to answer questions/Keeps secrets

This is the big one

There are so many questions she just dodges

How did you survive?

Where have you been?

What have you been doing?

Why haven't you contacted the siblings before now?

No, seriously, Julian DEVORAK was a famous, well respected doctor before and during the plague.

No, seriously, Vesuvia’s been actively looking for a DR. DEVORAK for the last Three Freaking Years, lady

No, seriously, the story of the shipwrecked kids being protected by salt seals wasn't enough of a clue for you????

Keeps Portia in the dark vis a vis her family and who they were

Okay this is cheating but where the fuck has Mazelinka been?

No, seriously, where is she, we didn't even get a reference to her when Julian was acquitted and we know she lives in the poorer parts of town 

How the fuck do you know about the ritual, the fact that the MC died, and that Asra is the one who did it?

I am not kidding, there is nothing in her backstory which indicates she should know any of this. Portia has explicitly been kept away from this plot thread until now.

Refuses to cite her sources

Seriously, most of these questions are so easy to answer that the fact that she doesn’t answer them and gets away with it is suspicious as hell.

Lying/presenting a false version of herself

The necklace (it ain’t hers or it’s far newer than she’s telling Portia)

It's not her house but she has her wine stores there?

All the gilt that follows her everywhere, aka fool's gold

She wears blue in contrast to the Devorak red

Her entire performance in the Underwater Room

Manipulating/Confusing/Frightening people

She just so happens to know Valerius and Vlastomil's weak spots and just so happens to own the one thing each of them would want

Isolating Portia

Refusing to let MC speak

Compares Portia to the mother (Tasya’s sister-in-law) she doesn't remember to create a bond

Swoops in to save Julian at the last moment, putting both siblings in her debt

Isolating Julian (dude’s been free for a week and this sounds like the first real conversation they’ve had about everything, Julian’s been working with Tasya on the canal issue)

Asking for Nadia's "approval" twice, once with definitely shady results- the bribe to free Julian, and once we are still waiting on- dealing with the canals

Trying to ingratiate herself with MC after having difficulty at the house

Somehow gets nearly the entire fucking court to attend her pre-masq ball

Water/Moon imagery

Bright clear day until she shows up then storm clouds gather quickly

Rain starts the instant Julian is declared innocent and her deals with Valerius and Vlastomil are cemented

The rain is so heavy you and Portia are:

The rain hasn’t let up once in a week

She works on/with the canals and flooded areas of Vesuvia

She owns a merchant fleet

Her entire family dies in a freak shipwreck in a freak storm after her brother refuses to join said merchant fleet

The bath salts she gives Portia 

The Underwater Room. Holy hell the Underwater Room. 

This line after her party:

I have to give Tasya credit. She manages to squeak by three different characters with great BS detectors: Portia, Julian, and Nadia all seem content to just let Tasya into their lives without questioning or vetting her. However, there is one character who might see through Tasya's bull: The Fool. Let me draw your attention to the Fool card:

Notice the light prongs. 

Now look at the light which peeks out during these important Tasya scenes:

They are identical.

The Fool (meaning you bc I assume I am not the only one hissing and spitting nails at this lady during her scenes) is the only one to see through this illusion even a little. This is because the Fool's Journey is to travel through and integrate all the cards’ lessons.

Okay, so now hopefully I have convinced you that Tasya Devorak is Portia's Moon and will have to be overcome for Portia to get to her ending, whichever end that may be. Whether Portia fully overcomes or falls into acting like her aunt is a matter of upright versus reversed. But I am about to go one step further. Buckle up homies because we are going back to the beginning:

WHO IS ANASTASIA DEVORAK?

Anastasia Devorak is the representative of the Moon Arcana. In the same way that Portia represents the Star and Asra partners with the Magician, Tasya will have to represent the Moon.

Yes yes I hear your objections.

"Navra is the Moon card!!!!!!!!!"

"Wtf are you smoking??"

I hear you, chickies. And I don't smoke, benadryl sends me on a trip, can't smoke anything with that kind of sensitivity. Here's the thing. Nadia's bad route demonstrates that a person can shift their Arcana representation. She moves from the High Priestess to become the Devil. Additionally, you the MC became the Fool through magical shenanigans. There’s evidence that Lucio started as the Fool’s representative and later became the Devil’s (which is a discussion for another time). The point is that people can move between Arcana and as such, the reverse can also be true, the Arcana can choose new representatives or have multiple representatives at a time.

So. Nadia’s family. They’re fairly minor characters in the grand scheme things, beyond Nadia’s route, of course. Unlike, say, Morga, who is expanded significantly in both Lucio and Muriel’s routes, Nadia’s siblings and parents basically remain background characters. They’re colorful, they’re pretty, they’re important to the backstory but they don’t directly impact the plot beyond being available to take on roles in the ritual. Much of the fandom has already come to the conclusion that they are placeholder characters in the Arcana, that we would be willing to replace them if someone better suited to a card came along or the story replaced them for the ritual.

With that in mind, let’s look at how Nadia’s siblings impact Portia. We’ll go from most important to least.

Nazali - Nazali is easily the sibling with the closest ties to Portia, save Nadia herself. Not only did Nazali train Julian as a doctor but they also taught Portia how to read, write, and care for Nadia while she was in her coma. Both Portia and Julian are fond of Nazali and they seem to get along really well with the Devorak siblings.

Nasmira - I rank Nasmira this high because she’s actually been involved with Portia’s route. She is present in Portia’s cottage when Portia confesses her secrets to Nadia, she assists with and participates in the seance which clears Portia’s brother, and Nasmira assists Nadia with calming the Vesuvians when Julian is arrested.

Nahara - has a backstory tale with Portia. They met each other on-board Mazelinka’s ship and Nahara taught Portia how to fight with a quarterstaff. Additionally, Nahara looks after Portia during the pirate fight. When Nahara shows up in the route, Portia still visibly has a bit of a crush on her.

Natiqa - Has interacted with Portia in two scenes, both of which emphasize the ladies’ mischief making shenanigans together.

Nafizah - Portia is captivated by her pet turtle and she seemingly plays along with Portia and Natiqa poking fun at the turtle.

Navra - Has one or two lines with Portia about the market.

All of this brings me to:

THE UNDERSEA ROOM AND THE THEORY

Well, we finally made it, everyone. This is the big one. Why do I think that Navra is doomed and Tasya will be fully cemented as the Moon? I mean, besides everything else I’ve said which clearly creates a giant screaming arrow that Tasya is the Moon?

So, the Undersea Room. I’ve already pointed out a few things about this but just to reiterate, look at who’s here:

We then have a conversation with Julian about food and freedom, then we get Natiqa spiking the punch and this with Navra and Asra:

D’aww. Well, it would be cute but something is definitely off. The player feels it as the seconds go by. This book is Death, Julian is alive, nothing dramatic has happened yet. Then we get this with Nadia:

I don’t know about you but that is a HUGE red flag to me. Nadia Not Knowing what’s going on in her own palace is always a recipe for trouble.

And then we get Tasya and the wine. Experienced players are freaking the fuck out right now because this is starting to look eerily similar to a certain ritual that shall not be named. She starts talking and we get this:

Wine snob Valerius reacts badly to Tasya’s wine when he explicitly liked it earlier in the story. Yeah, that’s not a red flag at all.

Then we come to the culmination of the book and Tasya so far:

Now let’s stop and think about this. Why the hell is Tasya spilling these particular beans at this particular moment? Yes, she’s a Devorak and Devoraks are known for their drama, fine. But she immediately blows the place to kingdom come after this. Literally. This lady has refused to tell anyone anything until now and here she is, revealing she knows exactly what went down three years ago and why.

Well. She’s just revealed that Asra is a necromancer. And then put him in a situation with a lot of dead bodies. And the last time we saw Navra was when she was right there with him. Oh, and we don’t know where Julian is. And in game we don’t know about his healing mark. And he has to meet the Hanged Man to push the plot forward.

At its worst, the Moon sows fear and confusion.

What better way is there to split the good guys than to force Asra to refuse to save Nadia’s sister or Portia’s brother? In the immediate panic and confusion after the explosion, are any of our friends who’ve lost someone going to take his no for an answer?

The Devil has been mysteriously quiet for chapters now. Lucio too. And now Tasya has fucked their Masquerade plans to hell and back. Were you wondering how the devs were going to tie that madness to Portia, the one character who had nothing to do with the previous Devil shenanigans? Worry no more, folks.

So, what’s next?

In the immediate future, we’re going to deal with Julian, Navra, and a ton of other people’s deaths. There is a possibility that Nadia is out of commission for a little while, adding to the chaos and confusion. Asra and Nadia will likely be at loggerheads. Portia is going to break with Julian, at least for a little while, because he kept such an important truth from her. She is going to feel helpless and alone and unsure of what to do. Why does everyone I love lie to me, she will ask. It won’t be her darkest hour, that awaits her in the Moon Chapter, but it will be close. Temperance is all about finding balance and coming together, which will happen only when the Devil makes his appearance.

tl;dr: PORTIA’S ROUTE HAS ALWAYS BEEN INTERESTING, WELL-SEEDED, AND GROUNDED IN HER CHARACTER, Y’ALL JUST NEED TO GROW A BRAIN CELL.

[littleeyesofpallas]

Bleach - Name Games

Not a family by name or blood, but a kind of found family. (at least the way they were originally presented)  This time I’m tackling the Visored! And while I’m at it I want to address some of the broader thematic elements going on with their original character designs.  Buckle up, this is a long one... 

Hirako(平子) Shinji(真子)

Shinji’s name is actually kinda of a false start to this one.  His names read as “Flat-Child“ and “Real-Child“ but that’s keeping in mind that -ko(子) for “child” is actually just a really common suffix for names, and not one generally used to ascribe literal meaning.  (Typically because of its diminutive implications it denotes a female given name, but it applies neutrally to family names, and even generally is not uncommon in male names.)  So his name kind reads as “Flat Reality“ or “Flat Truth.“

But this one isn’t actually about the meaning of the words, it’s a different kind of name game.  As we all remember, when Hirako introduces himself to Ichigo’s class at Karakura High during his original entrance at the start of the Arrancar Arc, he writes his name on the board mirrored and mentions how he’s “good at doing things backwards.”  At the time it was a reference to him being a hollow (Remember that when Ichigo’s inner hollow was given a chapter cover, his “name” was Ichigo’s but written mirrored) and would later influence his zanpakutou, Sakanade(逆撫)

As an aside here, Sakanade(逆撫) has been kind of erroneously translated as “counter stroke” in English, which is technically accurate as a literal translation but is kind of needlessly vague; For one the word “Stroke” here specifically refers to the act of stroking as in petting, patting, or smoothing over, and not something like a sword stroke; secondly the “counter” here should read more obviously as “reverse,” “opposite,” or “inverted.”

Moreover, Sakanade(逆撫で) is an actual verb already, so it doesn’t actually need to be broken down in the first place.  The word actually means exactly what it sounds like as well as having a colloquial use as, “rub the wrong way.”  Yes, other than just meaning to literally “pet in the opposite direction” (as with petting a cat or dog from tail to head) it means “to irritate” or “to annoy,” (which the former action invariably does) and that is an apt description of Sakanade’s powers.

Anyway...  About Hirako’s name not being about the meaning: the joke is that whether you write the name forward or backwards 平子真子 -vs-  子真子平, you still get Shinji(真子) out of it.  As in, his name is still legible both forwards and backwards.  Plus both kanji, 平 and 真 have horizontal symmetry, so they don’t change when mirrored..

⸻⸻⸻⸻⸻⸻⸻⸻⸻

Okay... let’s do an easier one...

Sarugaki(猿柿) Hiyori(ひよ里)

My personal favorite Visored, has a nice straight forward name Saru(猿) as I’m sure anyone amply familiar with anime knows means “Monkey” and the Gaki(柿) is the word for the fruit “Persimmon.”  The image of a monkey in a persimmon tree references an old folktale present in various east-asian cultures about a greedy monkey who cheats other animals before eventually receiving its comeuppance at the hands of the animals it has wronged.  In this case it’s reflective of Hiyori’s general image, sandles, track suit, decidedly tomboyish and unladylike; the “mountain monkey” is a poor, rural character type in Japan, not dissimilar to the American hillbilly of the Appalachia.

In that same vein, the name Hiyori(ひよ里) has a peculiar rural slant to it, in that it uses hiragana in place of the first component.  The ri(里) is a common place indicator in surnames meaning “village” or “hamlet” but like many Japanese surnames that reference landmarks like -kawa(川)“-river,” “-yama”(山)-mountain,” and “-da”(田)”-field,” the important part isn’t actually the locale but the descriptor preceding it; Which mountain?  Which river?  Which field?  Which village?  In the case of Hiyori, it’s not clear...  The fact that the village she appears to be named after doesn’t have a kanji again lends to this impression that, like the peasants of Soul Society’s Rukongai, the person who named her didn’t know how to read or write kanji.

⸻⸻⸻⸻⸻⸻⸻⸻⸻ 

Muguruma(六車) Kensei(拳西)

I think this one has gotten pretty good visibility in the fandom already because of the relation with Hisagi Shuuhei.  The eventual explanation of Hisagi’s 69 tattoo would be that it was copied directly from Kensei’s, and that Kensei’s comes from a mix of his name Muguruma, and the fact that he was captain of the Gotei 13’s 9th squad. (Personally I don’t like this explanation, and I think there’s pretty reasonable cause to assume this was a later decision and not a part of Kensei’s original conception or design.)  But the reason behind that being Muguruma(六車) Mu(六) which is the Japanese numeral “6″ and Guruma(車) meaning “wagon” and later updated to mean “car.”  In the Turn Back the Pendulum sidestory, this name is played upon in how Kubo styled Kensei’s 9th squad as a Bousouzoku(暴走族) the term for a Japanese biker gang (although they often include sports cars), where the “Six Car” reading becomes emblematic of his gang.

There’s a lot about the Bousouzoku that is culturally specific to Japan, but much of the familiar American cliches do actually carry over.  One distinct aspect of how the Bousouzoku opperate however, is that they are predominantly a youth culture phenomenon, as any wide spread, organized criminal activity among adults quickly steps on the toes of the much better established Yakuza scene.  For this reason it is very rare for Bousouzoku to persist in direct group activity into their adult years, although often bikers become easy recruitment targets for Yakuza.

Kensei(拳西) is actually an odd one for me.  It’s both super straight forward yet somehow together really obtuse.  Ken(拳) for “Fist” and sei(西) for “West;“ both are pretty singular in their meaning, so it’s not like there’s any uncertainty to what each one means, but I can’t make heads or tails of the two together.  For one,  Ken(拳) is usually something you’d see put on the end of a compound, and when it’s used that way it tends to denote a kind of martial arts style or technique.  It might still be meant to read as “Western Fist” or essentially “Western [style] Fist” and Kubo just liked the sound of Kensei over Seiken.  It might be a reference to the fact that Kensei’s original design was largely reminiscent of a kind of military look and feel, with a combat knife for a zanpakutou, short hair, combat boots, and pants that look like they could be part of military fatigues. (the tank top sorta throws the look off, though.)  But this was a theme that was dropped by the time the Visored got reincorporated into the story after their long absence.

⸻⸻⸻⸻⸻⸻⸻⸻⸻

Yadoumaru(矢胴丸) Risa(リサ)

...is another odd one.  Her surname, Yadoumaru(矢胴丸)  has pretty clear implications, Ya(矢) means “arrow” and dou(胴) means “hull” as in the part of a ship, and maru(丸) doesn’t actually have an explicit meaning.  The kanji does generally mean “round” or “whole” both in reference to a circle, but it is most notably a suffix used in naming both naval ships, and frequently boys.  Given the rest of the name the imagery seems clear, Yadoumaru(矢胴丸) is meant to read as “Arrow-Hull Ship.“*  And although the uniform has heavy ties to school girl aesthetics and fetishism (which in turn link to her preoccupation with adult books) the tie here actually seems to be to the origins of the Japanese school girl uniform as a modification of the European naval uniforms introduced to Japan in the 1800s.

*edit: I’m an idiot.  A Yadou(胴丸) is the sleeveless chest plate and skirt piece in traditional samurai armor, which also carries over into kendo sports armor.

Adding to this, the name RISA (sometimes romanized as LISA) being written in katakana and not kanji or even hiragana works together with the naval associations would seem to imply she’s of mixed birth?  Possibly the daughter of a foreign naval officer stationed in Japan, hence a Western name and a ship as a surname?  In fact, most Japanese ships would be named after some mythical figure or indeed named like a person, so the literal descriptor of “Arrow-hull” actually sounds like what someone would call a ship they didn’t know the name of, tacking “-maru” on to the end.

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Let me also take a moment here to complain about the fact that Kubo originally wrote Rabu(ラヴ) and Roozu(ローズ) as katakana, pretty clearly denoting them as the English words LOVE and ROSE and while those seem pretty implicitly like nicknames it also implied in conjunction with their designs that they were both foreigners.  So the fact that he retconned them to being nicknames based on more conventionally Japanese when he decided to make them previously SoulSociety shinigami names bugs me...  But that being said

Aikawa(愛川) Rabu(羅武)

Man, what is it with Kubo and black people and “love” gimmicks?  Zomarri’s Amor, and PePe’s The Love, Love’s whole thing...  The name Aikawa(愛川) means “Love River,” and Kubo’s clever shorehorning of kanji into the phonetics for Rabu that he’d already used for the nickname Love use  Ra(羅) for “silk,” but specifically a thin or sheer kind, and bu(武) for “warrior”/”soldier.“  The associations with sheer silk and negligee seem very intentional, so his name really is basically “flowing love, [sexy] silk soldier.“  And that’s it, it’s actually super straight forward.  I dunno why he looks like an unemployed slacker, in a tracksuit and sneakers, lounging around reading manga, though.

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Otouribashi(鳳橋) Roujuurou(楼十郎)

This might be my favorite as far as name games within the Visored.  The given name Roujuurou(楼十郎) means “Watchertower 10 Son;” Rou(郎) being an exceedingly common suffix in boys names meaning “son.” (this is incidentally how anyone with a rudimentary familiarity with Japanese knew for certain Yuushirou(四楓院) was a boy at first glance, where as a bunch of other people thought he was a girl.  In case any of you were around certain fandom circles for that whole drama...  More on him later though, because he’s got a fun name too.)  It’s not super clear if the arrangement here denotes the “Son of the 10th Watchtower [family],” or the “10th Son of the Watchtower [family].”

The surname Otouribashi(鳳橋) is a great little work of poeticism, where Outouri(鳳) is the Japanese name of the Chinese Feng(鳳) which in the most colloquial sense could be translated as “Phoenix,” but there’s a little more to it than that...

See, the Feng is itself the male half of the mated pair of mythical birds together called the Feng-Huang(鳳凰).  The Japanese pronunciation Outori is actually directly taken from Ou(王) meaning “King” and Tori(鳥) meaning “bird.”  The mythical Feng-huang is in fact king of birds, but more broadly represents a union of yin and yang, and is a common visual element of Chinese weddings evoking harmony.  As a part of this theme of unity it is said to share features of many different birds, and also of the 5 fundamentally opposed colors associated with Chinese daoism and fengshui: Red, Blue/Green, Black, White, and Yellow.  This particular feature has been tweaked over time to depict the Feng-huang as more broadly multicolored, and associated with the rainbow.  (it’s also the basis of the Pokemon Ho-oh, if that wasn’t apparent)  For a number of different mythological similarities, the Feng-huang have become erroneously thought of as “the Chinese phoenix,” but I’m not going to get into all that here...

So, getting back to the name, Bashi(橋) means “Bridge.”  The, again false equivalence based, but more easily understood translation of Otouribashi(鳳橋) thus being “Phoenix Bridge.”  But what is shaped like a bridge and directly associated with the Feng?  A rainbow.  His family name is just a really fanciful and kind of poetic reference to a rainbow.  In conjunction with the “Watchtower” referenced in the name Roujuurou(楼十郎) I’m tempted to take to the meaning of “10th [Floor of the] Watchtower Son” as it implies a high floor, and in the common mythological motif of rainbows as actual physical structures, a high tower would be the sensible entry point to a rainbow bridge. 

Also this is why he has a bird mask.

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Kuna(久南) Mashiro(白)

Let me just come right out and say that I haven’t got a damn clue on this one.  Mashiro(白) means “White.” Ku(久) means “long time,” na(南) means “South.”  She dresses like a super sentai character, specifically one of the original Himitsu Sentei Goranger team, and her mask is a nod to Kamen Rider, with its antenna and big round bug-eyes.  I don’t really see a connection with the name and the tokusatsu theme though.

Small aside, Tokusatsu is a genre of Japanese TV and film that was originally named for its emphasis on special effects like camera tricks and editing in post, used most noticeably in children’s shows like Super Sentai and Kamen Rider.  That distinction became less and less relevant as special effects became more widespread, and so it is now used mostly to refer to live-action costumed super hero shows.

Super Sentai is btw the source material for the American franchise, Power Rangers, from which Saban Entertainment originally bought the footage that they would cut together with their own original footage, and later from which they would buy the costumes in order to shoot their own shows from scratch.

Also of note is that Ishinomori Shoutarou, author of the original Cyborg 009, was also the original show creator of Kamen Rider and Super Sentai.  His work created the transforming(henshin) hero, the body suit and helmet aesthetic, and the heroic billowing scarf, effectively inventing the Japanese superhero almost single-handed.

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Ushouda(有昭田) Hachigen(鉢玄)  

Another funky one...  “[To] Exist [in] a Shining Field” might be the best way to read Ushouda(有昭田)?  Its really the U(有) that gives me trouble here, as it just means “Exist”/”Existance.”  And Hachigen(鉢玄) seems to read Hachi(鉢) meaning “bowl” and Gen(玄) meaning “deep,” “mysterious” and in certain contexts “occult.”  I’m not sure if that “deep” is really a physical deepness or just a sort of “profoundness” that would fall more in line with “mysterious” and “occult.”

Either way I think the general meaning is actually pretty clear, “bowls of rice from a shining field” evoke an image of kind of mythical field of magical produce, eating from which grants a kind of magical quality and sustenance.  In other words, his name is saying that Hachi is such a huge guy and so gifted at magic because he ate a lot of food that grants magic power.

I have no idea why he has the tux or the shaved hair though.  Stage magician?  Fancy gourmand?  But again then why the shaved head and the cross bones?  And Kubo did eventually come up with for him is strangely Balinese looking?  It seems reminiscent of Barong, king of spirits; A benevolent lion/bear monster that defends mankind from Rangda, the demon queen and master of blackmagic.  But apart from the superficial appearance and broad ties to magic, there’s not a lot really tying the two together.

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It’s hard not to just go off on all the weird little design choices, and loose ends, dropped plot points, and retcon’d details that surround the Visored in Bleach.  They really were just such a great concept utterly wasted by terrible pacing and some truly confusing priorities as far as publication goes, eithe ron Kubo’s part, editorial, or both...  But that’s a story for another time...

[kemetic-dreams]

Nduli: The most popular dance among Kamba teenagers. It is a condition that any boy attending an Nduli session must be circumcised, for it is in the Nduli dance that one may choose a partner for life. Kisanga: This is a thanks-giving dance for all ages, both young and old. It is performed only when the village has had a good harvest. During the celebration a white goat is slaughtered, its blood poured under the Kitutu Tree, and its meat left near the tree for Mulungu (God). Mwasa:  The Mwasa dance involved two drums, one small and one large, and was found in northern Kitui. While not primarily used for dancing, Mwasa served as an accompaniment while elders enjoyed uki beer. Mwasa is a relatively new drum beat, which comes from a combination of Nzumari from the Giriama (one of the 'Nine Tribes' of the Mijikenda) and original Kamba Ngoma. It came into existence during the Second World War, when Giriama and Kamba soldiers served together in the colonial army.

                         Kamba Mwasa dance Songs The Kamba have many kinds of songs; and each type has a name. The songs included: mbathi sya kivalo; myali (general social commentary and scathing attacks [nzeo] against miscreants); lullabies; and songs for circumcisions, marriages, work, and hunts (uthiani). Circumcision songs had many names: ngakali (or kakali) and undiu. Unmarried girls sang maio ("mourning" songs) at a newly married girl's home to "mourn" losing their colleague. While thatching, threshing or digging, people commonly worked to the rhythms of songs.   Mbathi sya kivalo were wathi songs accompanied by dance and, often, instrumental music. These songs differed according to the dance steps and drums used. Songs accompanied by instruments included kyaa, ngutha, mbalya, kuli, mbeni, kilumi and ngulukulu. Unaccompanied songs included nzai, kithakyo, musya, kilamu, mukungo, kilui, kileve, mawese and mbalu.   Myali (singular mwali) were sung at wathis - big ceremonies with singing, dancing, and socializing. Myali were neither accompanied by musical instruments nor danced to in Machakos and Kitui Central. At the wathi, myali were sung during interludes between dances. They were also sung at weddings, after work, or simply for leisure. They were composed and sung throughout the year, even when wathi was out of season. Though every Kamba might sing myali, few composed them. The mwali composer (ngui) would sing a recent composition, sometimes on request [...]   Though wathis are not held in most of Ukambani, myali are still sung in small informal groups. The ngui and mbasa interviewed during this research reported that ngui were no longer composing new myali. More thorough research is needed to reveal whether these customs have survived in some parts of Ukambani.   Traditionally, myali covered events, experiences and attitudes of the Kamba - conserving traditions and defending customary mores. Besides entertaining, mwali also conveyed the Kamba's aspirations, hopes and fears. The language in myali was highly figurative with many metaphors, similes, and innuendos using imagery common to the people and their surroundings. Multiple themes were portrayed easily since one word or phrase could have several meanings at different levels. Thematically, myali were remarkably eclectic; each mwali dealt with multiple themes simultaneously. In rapid fire, the apparent focus shifted abruptly, though - through hidden references - major themes continually resurfaced. This made myali difficult to understand because certain words or phrases could be taken literally with deeper meanings eluding casual listeners. People were challenged to decipher the meanings of the things, places and persons alluded to. These disguised references made myali both difficult and popular; they were often codes understood by an intended few. By choosing words or occurrences known to few people, a ngui could conceal many ideas and messages, though he sang publicly.   Myali extolled exceptional feats by individuals or groups and denounced deviant actions or behaviour, especially in nzeo ("to slice off"), a subclass of myali. Nzeo helped Kamba society discipline wrongdoers, rogues, and social misfits. Society, with its many eyes, swiftly exposed villainous behaviour. The culprits were named, and quickly, in the regular form provided by wathi. Traditionally, the Kamba were not at all reluctant to name publicly any wrongdoer. And everyone dreaded the scorn and wrath that ensued such public exposures. Once sung, people would remember and sing those nzeo long afterwards during wathi and while relaxing, walking, or working, especially when in earshot of the culprit. Psychologically, the peer-group pressure was immense; and people feared committing any transgression that might inspire a ngui to sing a nzeo against them.   With sharp satire - currently an under used skill - myali seriously criticized society. For example, a torrent of myali condemned colonial oppression and exploitation. Myali helped mobilize people against the colonialists, though previous researchers have largely overlooked this function. Since myali was a major device for Kamba society to maintain its cohesion, discipline, and moral fibre, the colonialists' prohibition of wathi - the main fora for myali - struck a vital blow to the Kamba's ability to resist military and cultural domination, eg., orders to burn their traditional adornments and clothing.   A novice ngui emulated older ngui and learned from their compositions. The budding ngui would compose a mwali and sing it to himself and his friends outside the wathi before being officially introduced at a wathi. A new ngui had to be recognized by elders and prominent ngui who would endorse him at the wathi.   Since they received no formal training in the art of composing, the ngui's knack for composition was seen as divinely inspired. People much esteemed their ngii. If a ngui sang a mwali portending evil befalling someone, society believed this would eventually happen.   The ngui respected and mentioned each other in their compositions, thereby recognizing each other's talents and demonstrating professional solidarity. Occasionally, ngui competed against each other. Each ngui was listened to individually. They insulted one another, calling each other names and pointing out their faults as a person and a ngui. They used subtle words only their age mates understood. But this was just a mock rivalry rarely extending beyond the wathi.   A ngui's competence and artistic creativity was measured by how accurately he portrayed events, occasions or deeds. Originality and imaginative use of the language proved his artistic ability. By ingeniously manipulating the language, a ngui became distinguished. Though composition of a mwali was usually inspired by a specific event, the mwali also referred to other events the ngui had observed or heard about.   Each ngui chose one or more men (mbasa) to help him sing. He composed a mwali on his own, sometimes isolating himself for days, depending on how quickly the mwali was formed. Then he called his mbasa and sang the song repeatedly until they memorized it later, the ngui and his mbasa attended the wathi and sang the new composition. A mbasa never composed or altered myali; they only sang with their ngui. A mbasa accompanied the ngui at all his performances. He carried the ngui's stool and skin and any gifts received. After singing at a function (eg., a wedding or feast), the ngui and his mbasa were fed kituma, a specially prepared chicken.

  Wathi was the most significant social occasion among the Kamba before colonialism. During a wathi, people gathered, sang and danced in the kituto or kinyaka, a specially cleared piece of land between two or three villages. People mingled at the wathi; and many youths met their future spouses. Wathi was organized by nthele selected by older men and women. Wathi happened during the dry season and was forbidden during planting, weeding and harvesting times. At the wathi, both individuals and groups sang with or without musical instruments, usually drums. Many types of drums were used for different dances.

  Different villages sometimes held dance competitions. Charms and magic were used to win the competitions, supposedly by lessening the opponents' vigour in dancing or by successfully deflecting an opponent's jinx.   Between January and March, wathi wa muvingusyo (song of knocking) occurred. This kind of wathi happened at night. It started at the homesteads with youths singing loudly while gathering their friends and moving from village to village. Being free to wander at night, young men serenaded outside girls' huts. A girl's father would tell the group: "Stop clamouring, leave the compound." This signalled that he would allow his daughter to go with them. If he said nothing, the youths would wait patiently, later leaving without her, but reluctantly. After many youths joined the procession, they went to the kituto or any open space nearby where the wathi continued till dawn.

  After the harvest and circumcisions, wathi was at its peak. Dancing was specifically for the young. A man could dance until his children were adolescents; afterwards he could only watch. Married women, especially those who had borne more than two children, were usually spectators, not dancers. Each participant at the wathi had a wathi-name given by his peers. After marriage, women's wathi-names were dropped, though men kept theirs.   For the wathi, young men and women adorned themselves with different ornaments collectively called mathaa, eg., masango, mavuo, masoa, milia, ndini, syuma, ndulo, nganyange, mamile, mbangili, ikuli and imaba.                      Kamba women drummers

Hunting songs: The following hunting song is called Uthiani. After a successful hunt (or raid), the hunters or warriors received a bull - the "unity" (muamba) bull - to eat. "Due to relishing heart and eating bone marrow, I was broken. Mwania's father's [cattle] were raided with a pronged stick. Iii iiii mmmmm. Though I might fail, I'll try to touch the breasts of the coward's wife. Yes! Unity and co-operation were destroyed due to relishing heart and eating bone marrow. Mwania's father's [cattle] were rustled with a pronged stick. Iii iiii mmmmmmm. I'll hunt deep into the forest till I find them at Makala's digging up roots for the baby. I don't want people saying I feared elephants. Quiver-carrier, if you fear elephants and yet have no wife, with what will you buy her? You fear elephants though they have not adorned themselves with masango [a type of necklace]. Bang! Kisove's hunt in Mbitini! [spoken]"

Lullabies: Women sang or sometimes just hummed short lullabies over and over again to restless or crying babies. The following is called "Rain". "Every worldly thing rejoices about rain. It is the mother of all the things God created. Lululu, baby sleep. Lululu, baby stop crying, rain is coming. Lululu, baby stop crying, rain is coming." Wedding songs: This wedding song is entitled "Leave your friends, forget the dances!". A soloist sings each line twice, and the chorus repeats it twice. "Moses, you are now married. You should know, you are now an elder. Forget your old companions. Moses, you have done a good thing for us. You need to know, you are now an elder. Forget your old companions. Stop going to the dances you went to. Stop going to the movies like you did before. Aggy! Aggy is married. Know that you are now a wife. Leave your former friends. Forget the dances you used to attend. Know that you are now a wife. Mutiswa! Mutiswa has "gone up". Fetchers of firewood have increased. The community has grown. Mambwa has slept. The community [of young unmarried women] is now one less." Work songs :This song, entitled "To Gatundu to see Kenyatta", was sung as a solo to provide a rhythm for road-building, which was a form of forced labour imposed by the British."Iii hep!Have you heard?Let's go to Gatundu to see Kenyatta. The people from Kithini never built a shop. Yes, have you heard?The following, called "Don't forget me!", is also sung by a soloist, and accompanied the tiring task of grinding grain."Nzakyo, you will get me arrested.Nzakyo, Mbuvi's son! Yes, you will get me arrested.Tell me what is on your mind. I'm crying.As I open and close my eyes, tears just pour out.Now, I am getting ready to travel like the governor's plane, the plane destined for Mwanza. Now, I am getting ready to travel like the governor's plane, the plane destined for Mwanza."

[doshmanziari]

Economy and Thematic Structure: Symphony of the Night's Level Design

[N.B.: This piece was originally featured on Gamasutra. I was inspired to post it here too after watching the Boss Keys YouTube video on Symphony of the Night’s world design and finding the analysis shallow and unoriginal.]

"Why is Castlevania: Symphony of the Night good?" is a question that's been asked countless times over the years since the game's release on the PlayStation in 1997. People seem almost desperate to know the answer to this in the wake of similarly modeled but less acclaimed titles such as Aria of Sorrow and Order of Ecclesia. It seems that no matter how many explicative lists are written, Symphony of the Night (hereafter shortened to SotN or Symphony) is representative of an unplaceable magic; thus, its staying power. That's the typical narrative, anyway. As someone who does think that Symphony is indeed good, I have my own answers -- answers that I think stand out from the usual enumerations -- to that question. I'll attempt to lay some of them out here.

The most common thing you're bound to hear in support of SotN's quality is its maximalism: that the game is so stuffed and gilded with "pointless" details that one comes to adoringly approach it as a curious, jewel-like creature. It's a trait that's perhaps more valued now than ever before, as mainstream game development has become a monstrous, multi-million-dollar endeavor that discourages strangeness and obtuse secrecy partly for fear of lacking recuperative sales. As worn out as it is, this is a good point. Symphony expresses a sort of creative freedom that's all the more reinforced by Koji Igarashi's comments in this video from 2015 -- a freedom that came from the purgatorial point in time in which the game was made, when Konami's direction for the series was vague. What we got was a game made by a small group of people who had little resistance to including every trifle, even if that trifle's inclusion meant several more hours of work.

I'll come right out and say that Symphony's castle is my object of interest as a player and a critic. I've always been entranced by how a wide range of elements -- the backgrounds' incredible rendering, the variety of colorful monsters, Michiru Yamane's indispensable score, and more -- came together to make the castle have a life force that felt like it existed beyond the constraints of a television screen. So what's sort of interesting, in the context of this discussion, is that SotN's castle isn't really maximalist in look or layout. It's certainly eclectic, if you're comparing one of its sectors to another, but it's not defined by excess, and to call it "sprawling" is only half-accurate. In fact, as the series progressed with the return of Igarashi as producer on 2002's Harmony of Dissonance, there came to be a sort of inverse maximalism, relative to SotN, at play in the overall scheme of things. All of the rococo stuff that intertwined with the mechanics (e.g., a familiar spirit being able to tell you where hidden rooms were) got whittled down; meanwhile, the game worlds grew in quantitative size, culminating in 2006's Portrait of Ruin that boasted a 1000% (hey: that's bigger than 200.6%!) completion rate.

"Economy" and "focus" are words you'll pretty much never hear spoken in reference to SotN, but they're nonetheless, and perhaps surprisingly, good words to use when trying to explain what makes its castle stand out from the other so-called Igavanias. I'm going to be speaking in somewhat broad terms here just to avoid getting too entrenched in specifics, but I'm also going to try to avoid cherry-picking comparative material. After all, it's not as if Symphony's qualities were entirely unrecognizable in its progeny. The point I want to make here isn't that SotN is perfect, or that everything went to hell after 1997. I'd rather like to say that Symphony's level design, in general, has a clarity and consistency that never resurfaced with the same potency in the series since its release.

Let's first take a look at the Royal Chapel. This is one of my favorite places in Symphony, and a great example of the qualities I mentioned. Now look at Harmony of Dissonance's equivalent: the coupled Corridor in the Air and Chapel of a Heretic. The difference here is striking. Although there are parallels between the two (for example, the Chapel of a Heretic has several halls that are modeled on those jutting out from the Royal Chapel's towers; note the windows' shape), the Royal Chapel has a cleanliness, even a linearity, to its organization. It's easy to follow with the eye, and there's no mistaking that the navigational theme, starting from the bottom, is ascent. And this sense isn't just something selectively derived from the perspective of seeing the whole map at once. For one, you've got the longest continuous staircase in the game; for another, there's a central tower that's allowed to rise as tall as it wants without any horizontal redirections, and a couple of also unbroken shorter towers thereafter. This ascensional theme is also bolstered by the progression of environmental details you can see beyond the Royal Chapel's borders. A hilly coniferous forest gradually gives way to an indigo sky and a stream of clouds, with the forest now a distant sight.

So, we've got an environment here that directs our movement along a specific main route, and it's complemented by the theme of escalating verticality. When we come to Harmony's Corridor in the Air, though, it's difficult to figure out what the layout is trying to communicate. The spaces are visually unified but structurally disorganized. It's as if the level design is trying to pull off a bunch of stuff at once at the expense of letting any of it develop. Although disorganization can be interesting (and there are arguably other ways, outside of this essay's range, to interpret Harmony's castle), in this case the environment is missing the narrative of progression that's part of what makes the Royal Chapel such a pleasure to go through. A bit of focus is brought in with the Chapel of Heretic, if only because there are no branching paths, but its appearance seems to ask more than ever for a comparison to the Royal Chapel, and it can't favorably compare. You're undeniably ascending, but the majority of the rooms you're traversing are horizontal, and this dulls the actual feeling of ascending.

The top of the Chapel of a Heretic -- that large room with the long staircase -- brings to mind another subject, due to its parallel to the Royal Chapel's staircase, and this is the use of a room as a dramatic device with fulfilled, or unfulfilled, implications. The Royal Chapel's staircase is interesting because it's a dramatic structure (extensive, singular, complemented by richly ornamented recesses, and the way in which you're properly introduced to the Royal Chapel) involved with the navigational theme of descent that produces a sense of anticipation (e.g., "This staircase is so long; I wonder what it's leading to"); and this is fulfilled in the form of the gorgeous chapel sidelined by stained-glass windows and terminating in an altar. In elementary terms, the Royal Chapel's staircase displays a set-up/payoff dynamic.

Rather than compare this to the Chapel of a Heretic's staircase, though, I'd like to pit it against Portrait of Ruin's Great Stairway, whose namesake is a pair of chambers containing long staircases. Comparisons to the Royal Chapel here are perhaps most apt because the Great Stairway's stairs are similarly staffed by Corner/Hill Guards and also have overhanging ledges with collectible items. The problem the Great Stairway runs into is that neither staircase offers anything aside from sheer size and those aforementioned call-backs. The chambers' opposing extremities lead to nondescript transitional rooms with no major or minor drama beyond, and each is side by side, which only calls attention to how similarly structured both chambers are. This is especially bad because these chambers are the largest rooms in the castle (as demonstrated by the game's map), on top of locationally representing its "heart", and yet the take-away is that the designers were more concerned with filling space via copy-pasting than with having the architecture be engaged in any sort of dialogue with itself.

Something else I'd like to talk about is how generous Symphony is with giving its places breathing room. Breathing room is important because it allows environments to better develop on their own terms, helps to thematically distinguish areas, and assists in our ability to mentally organize them individually and in relation to the entire game world (something that is its own form of entertainment). This is a trait that ties back into the visual lucidness of the Royal Chapel's layout. It's illuminating to compare Symphony's map with that of Dawn of Sorrow. It becomes clear here what I'm talking about with breathing room: Dawn's map appears to be on a mission to cover as much space as possible (so much so that the bit of negative space on the top left feels like an oversight), but when we look at Symphony's, it's not too much of a leap to estimate that nearly half of the map is negative space.

This isn't a detail that's only appreciated in the abstraction of a map, either. If we review Dawn of Sorrow's Dark Chapel, we can pick out points of visual continuity and hierarchical structure. For instance, the second boss' room (Malphas) is stacked directly atop the first boss' room (Dmitrii) with the shared visual element of the organ, and Malphas' room is headlined by a corridor that follows the three rooms' progression from the "underworld" to the "heavens." We might also note that the belfry rightly sits at the Chapel's highest point and is situated above a visually unified and equally wide pair of rooms. But the Chapel's upper body is so compressed that architectural decisions such as these fall flat; the literal compression becomes an expressive compression that isn't particularly relevant to the environment. The fact that I, as the player, am in that top corridor, suspended above the distant mountains, is something that's really only communicated by the background. In action, entering the corridor feels abrupt -- I've only ascended two "rooms"' worth (represented by a single square on the map), relative to Dmitrii's room -- and this abruptness is reinforced by looking at the map and seeing how awkwardly squished the corridor's supporting columns are against the roof of Malphas' room.

Does Symphony have no compressed environments? Absolutely not! Let's be attentive here, though. Its castle's two most compressed places, by far, are the Colosseum and the Catacombs. If there is any criticism to be made of this pair in terms of how their parts interlock, it is perhaps the immediate transitions between the bed of lava in the Catacombs' natural halls and its built rooms' foundations. But beyond this slip-up, these are successful instances of compression because that trait feels thematically relevant. It works for the Colosseum both because it renders the macro-structure's hard symmetry as even more explicit, and its smushed quality recalls the cramped quarters of an actual colosseum's hypogeum. Similarly, the Catacombs' compression works because it reinforces the area's claustrophobic associations, and the overall thrust of the environment -- strongly horizontal, and never higher than two "rooms" -- really drives home the sense that this truly is the castle's bedrock.

"Compression", in this context, can also refer to how sectioned an environment is. To this day, in my opinion, Symphony feels like the 2D explorative Castlevania with the largest scope, and I'm more or less convinced that feeling is partly, yet intimately, supported by its castle having relatively more rooms that are allowed to expand to larger extents without transitional splits, as indicated on the map by a lighter or broken line within a room's border. This perhaps sounds counterintuitive; we might rather suppose that more rooms equates to a larger scope. But this isn't necessarily true. The dimensional quality of a space's entirety is not solely communicated by the quantity of its partitions; it's also how willing it is to give us the time and room to dwell on that specific space before it switches to something else. Look at Symphony's map again and notice how the Outer Wall is mostly one vertical block; how the Clock Tower and the Long Library are two large chunks bookending a minority of smaller bits; how the Castle Keep is a big L-shape with a rectangular cluster to its right; or how the Underground Caverns largely are three horizontal rooms and three vertical rooms. In fact, the trend of building subsidiary spaces around dramatically primary spaces is Symphony's rule -- not the exception!

By the time of Harmony of Dissonance, this trend had already become a scarcity; and although things did improve irregularly (Aria of Sorrow is perhaps the closest a title produced by Igarashi ever came to matching Symphony's spatial dynamism), it's a trend that could not be more alien to 2008's Order of Ecclesia. It's curious that the only follow-up to Symphony which did not aggressively slenderize, straighten, and divide its castle's parts was 2001's Circle of the Moon, handled by the Kobe branch of Konami, and I don't think it's a coincidence that, of the GBA and DS Castlevania titles, its castle's scope is the most substantial. One part of me wants to say that things developed as they did because of a vastness of variables: evolving teams, tighter deadlines, an absent concern for the emphases of this article, and so on. Another part of me wants to say that the obsessive-compulsive leanings of these games became guiding principles; which is to say, the toning down of big rooms and the emphatic sectioning came about because it made grinding easier. It's hard to not side with this interpretation when there are moments such as a hall in Ecclesia that's split down the middle for seemingly no other reason than because the hall is long and each section has a different set of enemies.

I want to elaborate on the comment above about "straightening", because it probably isn't clear what I mean (and even if it is, it's worth picking at). When I refer to a castle's parts, or rooms, as "straight", it's a way of saying that their border-lines unite to make a shape that's either a square or rectangle. This is the standard, no matter which Castlevania, starting at Symphony and ending at Ecclesia, we're talking about; yet, like other things we've examined in this article, it's a standard with degrees of prevalence. Scan this map of Symphony's castle I've edited so that all of its irregular rooms -- fourteen total -- are marked by a green star (note how nine are of the primary/large variety, increasing their significance). Now scan this similarly edited map of Harmony's castle. Upon KCET's return as the series' developers, the number of irregular rooms shrank to four, and two were based upon a couple of rooms from Symphony: the Royal Chapel's stairway, and the Marble Gallery's basement chamber. After Harmony, the only map allowing irregular rooms was Aria of Sorrow, with a whopping single room at the castle's pinnacle.

It is again curious that KCEK's Circle of the Moon stands so decisively apart from these other titles: its castle has nearly forty irregular rooms. There's no way to know how Circle's developers approached designing the castle, but the presence of such a dramatically quantifiable characteristic suggests some kind of approach that differed from KCET's developers. How else do we account for that contrast? All things considered, it's my opinion that Symphony's castle is the most dynamic, thanks in large part to how thematically distinguished its areas are; but if we're talking about the varied usage of pure geometric space, Circle comes out on top. You might be wondering where I'm going with any of this, and in response I'd like to quote from a write-up I did of Circle back in 2012: ". . . it’s easy to overlook how a game’s boundaries affect our experience of its places, perhaps because a boundary is treated as the line where the level design ends. But a boundary is really a continuation of the level design. Though it may not be interactive with one’s avatar, it does interact with the enclosed content. It organizes the extent of our movement, and its geometry feeds into all those ineffably subtle reactions we have to the spirit of a place."

What else can be said? A lot, actually! We could discuss how frequently room-types are reused; how precisely and visually segregated an environment's districts are and its link to thematic articulation; or the rough interactive textures that Symphony's inverted castle affords, in spite of how "lazy" the procedure was to create the inverted castle. But I'm satisfied with breaking things off here and saving those ideas for future analyses or -- something that interests me more -- the input of readers. What do you think? Does any of this help you to understand Symphony of the Night in a new light? Have you been thinking these thoughts all along? Do some of the interpretations seem conceptually strained?

Thanks to Revned, Edsword, mephea, TerraEsperZ, Wileee, and Zeric for their hard work on screenshot-mapping Symphony of the Night's castle.

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[bacchanta]

Not BL-decoding sexuality in Banana Fish

Disclaimer:

I do not intend this to be a commentary on Banana Fish. Nor will I call it a review of the story-if anything, it's probably closest to a review of my response to the story. It is subjective, sentimental, and inconsistent. It is negative, but-alas do I find it SO important to highlight this-it is by no means a negative opinion on Yoshida Akimi and her deeply touching, aesthetically exhilarating masterpiece. I love this story, but it is precisely because of this, that I also find it crucial to decode some of the seemingly less reasonable (or evem dangerous) response it incites within me--just so that I may love it without fearing the peril of being misguided.

Now let's begin.

I first heard of Banana Fish when the anime project was announced in summer. There was an argument going on on my newsfeed, and from someone whom, as far as I knew, barely argued openly about anything at all. It was rather vehemently and somewhat indignantly pointed out that, some blogger, by labelling Banana Fish with the loose term 'BL', was doing it an egregious injustice, and that the two main characters, Ash and Eiji, are 'friends', (very firmly) NOT lovers.

Knowing nothing about the story then, I found the argument both baffling and discomforting-even homophobic. It seemed along the line of other common 'unconscious/internalized homophobia' in fiction, such as the over-used 'straight by default but gay for someone' trope. How can being lovers by any means lessen a relationship? And, even if BL is nowadays better used more cautiously to refer to the very specific genre of boys' love, is it that much of a big deal that another story involving (but not focused on) two male characters being in love with each other is referred to as BL?

I did not think of this until I've finished the entire series very recently. What scared me was that I did not only understand that argument for the first time, but, still deep in my BF-PTSD, found that sentiment even a bit agreeable than it seemed.

Perhaps it all boils down to: why do some people find it unacceptable to think of Ash and Eiji's relationship as physical?

The answer is simple: because then it will be more difficult to rise above all the other physical relationships depicted in the story.

It's a story about a victim of sexual abuse of the worst kind. It depicts sexual abuse with ruthless explicity and painful straightforward-ness. There's zero romanticization (and in this it already differs from the yaoi genre-the latter focused more on sexual fantasies and thus granted more allowance with their depiction of power dynamics in sex, not always what we'd call 'healthy' irl), not only on the level of plot but also on the very superficial level of visual representation-the abusers, Marvin, Dino, Fox, etc. are all physically grotesque, and that leaves little to no space for romanticization. Banana Fish does an absolutly perfect job in getting its message through-sexual abuse is painful and grotesque and there is nothing romantic about it. Never.

Further complication arises, however, when sexual abuse is intertwined with other themes that consist the core of the story. It's not only a story about a victim standing up against his abusers; it's also a story about the under-privileged against the richest and most powerful, the young against the old, the rebellious against the established, the isolated justice against the organized evil. It's not only manifested on Ash; Yue-Leung's arc fits all the above themes just as well. Even Eiji's escape from his unsuccessful athletic career (and the suppressed society back home, as Ibe mentions at one point) and his subsequent participation in this surrealisitc adventure may be read as a rebellion against his own society, which is constantly referred to as an antithesis of America. It's in the background, but to the wider Japanese readers it may have meta-textual significance-but that's mere speculation.

It's about rebellion, and rebellion against sexual abusers needs to be integrated into the extended motif. Sexual abuse does not only sit remotely in the narrative past in Ash's childhood memory. It comes to the surface, many, many times, but its essence remains consistent. Even the abusers are the same. Those who abused Ash when he was a kid want to or indeed do abuse him again when he is 17.

Here we have the boundary between paedophilia and homosexuality seriously blurred. We can't tell if Marvin is a paedophile or a homosexual or both, just as we can't tell about Dino, or about that gay bar owner/human trafficker whose name I don't recall atm.

When Marvin first appeared in ep1 we see him harassing Ash with thinly-veiled obscene innuendos. In ep2 we first see Skipper telling Eiji that 1) Marvin's gay and 2) he prefers blonde. It's not until later in ep2, when the tapes are being played (a highly disturbing and excellently performed scene), that we learn that Marvin is actually a paedophile. But it does not require us to contrast the later information with the earlier--Marvin has a fetish for people like Ash. That he is gay, that he prefers blonde, and that he prefers kids are but three ways of directing his sexual desire towards Ash. It's three steps of narrowing it down to our protagonist. 'Gay' is offered as a part of the information because it refers to a minority (and thus effectively narrows down the subject matter). If Marvin is a Humbert-Humbert, I doubt if Skipper will have said, 'He's heterosexual and he prefers blonde'. As much as we are unwilling to admit, heterosexual is still default in many contexts (more so in the time when Banana Fish was originally created), and that's precisely why only homosexuality merits the importance to be mentioned. Yet as a result of this economy of expression, homosexuality is associated with paedophilia.

What is a big relief to me is that they did not put in that scene with the gay bar owner's husband. For those who have only watched the anime--that human trafficker who raped Ash many times and is overtly paedophilic is not only a gay bar owner but also married to another man. Again it's not about narrative plausibility--a paedophile can totally also be married and own a gay bar--the problem is that all these information are unified to enhance one single image of one specific character--he is gay, he is married, he is a paedophile and a human trafficker, and he raped kids. I by no means suggest that this association is by any means intended--that will be a very serious and terrible accusation--but the economy of narrative means that, at that point in the story, there is simply not enough space nor necessity to discuss in detail how homosexuality and paedophilia are unrelated.

Dino is more complicated--he certainly has paedophilic acts, but we also see him sleeping with Yue-Leung and intending to sleep with Eiji, who by that point is 19 and physically different from pre-puberty kids victimized by paedophiles. His intimate contact with Ash (again highly disturbing) seems to suggest that he is obssessed with Ash regardless of his age. Homosexual intercourse is for the character of Dino less about information but about thematic unity--his dominance is manifested as the old over the young, the rich and powerful over the powerless, the established over the isolated. Here homosexual intercourse is not only associated with paedophilia--it's integrated into a more general evil of hierarchical dominance. This dominance and its non-consensual nature becomes all the more clear when Ash mentions that he once loved a girl at the age of 14.

There are many other sexual representation in the story--Fox, the prisoners, or even Hua-Leung to his half-brother Yue-Leung. If anything, their similarity is that they are all non-consensual, disturbingly and purely erotic, and involving significant age- and power gaps. It is age gaps that we feel most directly as part of the motif of dominance and rebellion--in other words, it's the young-old contrast that has thematic significance (as opposed to child-adult, which as a theme cannot extend from Ash's childhood into the narrative present) but age gap is relative, unlike the more fixed definition of child, adult, or paedophile.

Now back to Eiji and Ash. As a contrast to the darker side of grown-ups, their interactions are presented in such a way that it contrasts the sexual and abusive nature of Ash's encounters with many others. We never see deliberate physical contact between them; their beds are separate; even when they have to have physical contact, it's by no means erotic. Same can be said of another (among the few) positive relationship--that between Yue-Leung and Blanca. Blanca is overtly straight, and the comical depiction of Yue-Leung framing him with feigned homosexual contact between the two puts the possibility safely out of the picture. In a sense, all the positive relationships in the story are more about emotional mutual dependence (as positive relationships should be, one may argue).

It need not mean that it strictly excludes sexual contact, but, because of the established antitheses of the story, the emotional needs to be contrasted with the sexual just as the young needs to be contrasted with the old, and the victims need to be contrasted with the abusers. It's sexual abuse that Ash meets, so it's emotional comfort that he seeks. if it's not a story about sexual abuse, it will not have had the need to strictly exclude sexual contact from most of the positive relationships depicted. Opposites are not the most accurate way to understand the world but remains a powerful way to present it. Yet when artistic need demands so, some things simply have to be grouped into the 'positive' and their opposite the 'negative' to achieve the effect.

I will, perhaps, remain repulsed by any sexual depiction of the relationship between Ash and Eiji. I don't know if there are others who share the same sentiment, but it's perhaps better to remind oneself that it has more to do with the story's thematic presentation rather than intentional and detrimental stereotypes.