#I think it’s a very interesting exploration of how gender affects character design

[st-hedge]

Genderbends are apparently problematic now. I wouldn't do Ganondorf though. I fear those epic tits would just bring more fearless followers.

The concept of fem ww ganon makes my palms sweaty

[greenb0i]

July 2023

It was my britday month and I watched a lot of flims like always. Also yes, barbie is the reason this month is so late. I have a lot of thought that i dont really know how to express.

Flims

Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (2023) Dir. Joaquim Dos Santos, Justin K. Thompson, Kemp Powers

Yes I watched it agine. It still amazing, and i feel like seeing on the big screen adds to the whole thing much more. This is literally the only movie I've seen twice in cinama, and it's so worth it. It weirdly felt quicker to watch, but i think because I knew what i was expecting. But it's still so good. Especially, the ending crdits. I love how they look and how they symobolise every event in the movie. 10/10

Nimona (2023) Dir. Troy Quane, Nick Bruno

I watched this movie hungover and by god it was fucking great. It one of those movie that haven't stop thinking about (at the time of writing this) I just love thinking about the charaters and what they mean to each other, and the theme, and how the movie can explore so much and mean so many different things to different people. I also love the character design as well, and how imo, impove the desgins from the comic. Idk, it just one of those things that make me want to create my own stories 9/10

Words Bubble Up Like Soda Pop (2021) Dir. Kyohei Ishiguro

I remember i started this movie when it came out, got like 20 minents into it and i just wasn't into it. Anyway, I restarted it and ended up sobbing like a baby. Frist things first, i adore the colours, that what drew me to the movie in the first place aswell as how the movie animated. Idk, I'm not an expert, but the way the characters move just looked so nice and smooth . I don't know what extaly affected me, i think it has to with the exploration frist love?? idk. Like i said, im still not compltye sure. 8/10

The Report (2019) Dir. Scott Z. Burns

death2American. But ya i just felt so annoyed watching this movie. The movie itself was good, i like a lot of the acting and felt like they are a very cohersive story, dispit it taking place over a good few years and have a lot of movie parts. But ya, I feel annyed and angry that so about what some of the people did and never face any repercussions to what happened. But overall, heavy but interesting movie (7/10)

In the Heights (2021) Dir. Jon M. Chu

I really like this movie. I remember when it came out, i was so hyped, i just kept watching the first song over and over again. And i still think it is such a good movie, i love most of the song, esaliy abula song. Everything about that whole song was amazing and started crying during it. It just one of those movies that i forget about, but I love rewatching. (8/10)

Barbie (2023) Dir. Greta Gerwig

I really loved this movie. I saw it twice. It just a movie that i found so fun. Like everyone, i love the costume and the sets and just everything thing about the movie. I love the massage behind it, but at the same time, i feel like there is so much more it could say. It's a movie that i feel like i make me want to read more into feminism movement to see why some poeple dislike the movie (not for the stupit reasons, but the valid ones) with what it has to say about gender. Overall, I would say I really like it, and it probably gonna be a movie. I come back to watch over and over again, and my opinion will probably change the move I watch it (7/10)

Books

Biography Of X by Catherine Lacey

I ughh I really like this book. It was just so interesting to read about this fictionalised artist and this alternative version of history. It felt like it could be something that was real, and I think that due to how the well the auther blend and changed history in small or massive ways. It just so good, I love all the character who apper, the obsession of it, the explore of love and unhealthy relationships. God damnit I could write so much about this book, but then ill be spoiling it 4/5

Songs I love

Bug like an angle-Mitski

Rush- Troye Sivan

Malmo-Mook

Pulp-Lime Garden

Wishing Well-Screaming Females

[transmasc-wizard]

hello nciko i am here in your askbox once again but this time to talk to you about my darling KNIVES NGUYEN!!!

okay so knives is a revamp of an OC i had when i was younger named ace. ace was one of my first characters to have any level of Gender Fuckery happening and in hindsight i projected onto him a lot, so even though i abandoned him i wanted to come back and like. rework him. so i changed his name and design and concept and now he's a completely different dude.

so anyway knives as a character is like... a reckless young man who embodies hope and optimism despite the world kicking him down at nearly every opportunity. he believes wholeheartedly in the good of the people around him and the world as a whole, and he's determined to make good things happen, goddammit, no matter what he has to do.

he's a very passionate idealist, and well. i mentioned he's reckless. he has no problems putting himself in danger if it means he'll have the chance to do some good.

he's also reckless in other ways, and by that i mean like. have you ever seen those extreme parkour videos of people running around on rooftops? that's something knives does for fun. it stresses me out to think about but he does. he also loves urban exploration, and just in general running around and poking into things he probably shouldn't.

he's also the type to love getting in fights to prove a point, especially if he's doing so to stand up for someone he sees as not being able to stand up for themself.

something i think a lot about with knives, though, is like... i kinda want to lean into the idea that people view him as being stupid and often put him down for that reason, and as a result he's kinda used to others disregarding what he says, so the people who *don't* put him down he tends to latch onto. the quickest way to earn his affection and friendship is to just. respect him as a person and listen to what he says.

anyway ok i don't know how to end this but i will say. if i do write up knives's actual story for nanowrimo. it's going to center a lot around knives trying to find out the truth behind a cult of immortals (maybe vampires?? hm) living underneath his city. knives is gonna solve the mystery!!!!!! and hopefully not die in the process.

oh and also knives definitely jokes sometimes about having an evil twin named spoons that he has to defeat in hand-to-hand combat

i love knives so much its unreal

first of all. old genderfuckery ocs are something that can be so personal <3

second this entire character is so. rotates him in my mind at 349073498579485 miles per hour

third that plot is very Eyes Emoji and i am interested to hear more!!!

[bongkillua]

im SUPER late to the ask game however. 5 & 9 for all of them

anon you are never too late i love talking abt these guys and these r rly good questions

5. How did you figure out your oc’s identity?

TUCKER - Tucker's has definitely ebbed and flowed with my own identity! He initially had a very different backstory that was explicitly about him being a stealth and closeted gay trans man. the way i played him made it so that it didnt really work for him to be trans but i hate playing cis characters so there was some weird magic and memory shit involved to make it work. but it just didnt make sense with the reworked story. took it as an opportunity to make him more openly trans but he was still an exclusive gay man for a while. and well then xander came around and i realized i was bisexual so now tucker is unlabeled because i just know hes going to keep changing with me. but like i truly dont think his character can wholly by separated from Gay Trans Man because so much of his personality and identity was built around that in the beginning.

XANDER - i made xander for the sole purpose of having fun with him. like seriously i made him for a school assignment because i didnt have a "cunty, whorish enough" character for the assignment and then she just stuck around so like... her identity has always just been "whatever is fun!" in the beginning he was like explicitly transmasc but i was playing around with using she/her pronouns for myself again so i gave them to xander to see if it would help me gain more confidence and it did! as i fleshed her out more tho her backstory started to rly revolve around changing identity and like specifically masculinity vs. femininity and how she performs both, and wuth that came the idea of transitioning back and forth over periods of time. because of THAT i wanted her to be really into drag because thats what drag is all about... and because shes rly into drag i wanted to explore her relationship to the transFEMININE experience because drag really cant be separated from that. so ive rly focused on embodying binary identities as performance for her gender. and because she sleeps around a lot ive just made her super fluid in terms of sexuality. shes not picky!

JORDAN - jordan was a he/they from the jump but i struggled a lot with their design and development for like YEARS but once i finally started fleshing them out i was immediately like "nah this guy prefers they/them and tacks he on for normies" and it genuinely helped me solidify his perception of not only their own identity but also life in general? theyre very "go with the flow because theyre extremely confident in themself and dont care how others perceive them". and then bisexual just seemed Right. idk. he sorta embodies "cool bisexual kid in high school that helps u realize ur also queer" and i just kinda went with the stereotype lol. also he seems like a Megan Fox Enjoyer.

KONAMI - i designed konami at a time where i was rly interested in the intersection of neurodivergence and queerness so his identity was def informed by that! along with queerness in childhood as a theme. ive always associated aesthetics like his with the rise in usage of neopronouns (in a good way!) so it just made sense to have them use it/its. if i wasnt a coward id throw some more fun pronouns on there but konami is also just a little guy so i honestly default to he/him a lot in the same way that you'd refer to like. a dog. and once again bisexual just made sense. i established pretty early on that his parents were super accepting of him being trans (konami was a binary trans guy when he was alive!) so i feel like sexuality just wasnt a huge concern for him.

9. Are there cultural or lore specific aspects to their identity? If applicable, does their species affect it?

OH MY GODDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDD THIS IS LITERALLY THE ENTIRE UNDERLYING PREMISE OF WOLFSBANE SO HERE WE GO LOL

TUCKER- ok so the more independent tucker became as a character the more i really leaned into how lycanthropy influences his identity and specifically his queerness. its always been a big part of his story but i rly got to Focus on it once he was mine and mine alone. so in wolfsbane lycanthropy is like. almost directly a metaphor for neurodivergence and like. how do i say this. Being Weird And Feeling Wrong As A Child. which you could argue also makes it a metaphor for transness but like i feel like his lycanthropy makes him trans in other separate ways? like lycanthropy in wolfsbane canonically causes an increase in testosterone production so tucker naturally has facial hair and body hair and a rly deep voice and "male-aligned" body fat distribution. despite being afab. and thats like a big struggle in the story bc his father wants him to Hide that but tucker is very Confident in that, both because he wants to embrace being a werewolf but ALSO because it gives him gender euphoria. and it takes him a LONG time to figure out that those are simultaneously separate things ("im not trans i just look like this!" (you are. you are trans)) and also intrinsically tied (transness as a feeling of Other as opposed to a distinct Gender Identity). AUGH idk if that makes sense. sexuality works pretty similarly. tucker has to repress a lot of himself because his family is scared that his lycanthropy will make him unruly and uncontrollable, and that he will hurt WHOEVER he loves. and in trying to control him they want him to Assimilate (aka Be Heterosexual). so he faces a similar struggle where he spends a long time trying to figure out if hes queer because he Likes Men or if hes queer because he Likes People, BOTH of which have been withheld from him.

XANDER- xander is an energy vampire and relies a lot on the balance between Taking and Giving. this means that he has to hide his true identity and give people a false one in order to get what he needs from them. and when you are performing an identity day in and day out is it really a performance anymore? or is it such a performance that it cant possibly be who you are? so thats like the Central struggle that vampirism invokes onto his identity. sexuality works similarly (can you tell that i have a hard time distancing gender from sexuality?) where he spends so much time forging these fake bonds and hooking up with anyone who will give him the time of day that he really doesnt have the time, energy, or maturity to figure out who he's Truly attracted to. her constant need to perform makes it nearly impossible for her to feel authentic in any way.

JORDAN- im gonna start sounding like a broken record at this point but my understanding of transness and queerness is so far removed from the idea of gender itself that i have no choice but to talk about identity as a whole. SORRY. anyways jordan's identity is heavily influenced by his schizophrenia and his dad. and the way THAT influences him is that he wants to Minimize his body because they do not feel attached to their body at all. and Maximize his ability to Reflect his Father because those experiences were the most important to him. so like. really thinking about it now i feel like a big reason why they even identify as transmasc is a. They Need To Remove Any Unnecessary Part Of Their Body NOW And That Means The Tits Have Got to Go amd b. he can distance himself from who he was as a child and align himself with his FATHER who is like the most important and influential figure in his life. in terms of sexuality they're kind of similar to xander but like the reverse side of the coin? They are so authentically themself that its hard for them to find room in their life for another person. so like while jordan identifies as bisexual i often say they also align themself with aromanticism because romance is just very difficult for him to figure out. a lot of the times it boils down to utility over attraction. which works for some people! (tucker) and not for others (all of his ex's).

KONAMI- konami died and forgot what gender and sexuality were. i explain this more HERE but because of konami's history it doesnt have a reference point for what gender Is. so a lot of his identity boils down to concepts as opposed to things like masculinity and femininity. i really want to do more deep exploration into how tucker, xander, and jordan's queerness influences konami's own identity as well as his perception of gender and identity but i guess for a quick answer he latches onto Connecting Words before he latches onto Individual Labels. so things like "dad" and "aunt" make more sense to him than "man" and "woman" because they have a purpose and a role attached to them. but then again those roles have been defined by queer people who don't perfectly fit into the Status Quo of that role but enact/perform it in unique and nuanced ways. this is also why he more quickly latches onto "son" and "boy" (and specifically how boy fits into a Family structure) than any other gendered labels. again like ive stated before, bisexual came pretty easily because with a lack of gender awareness just came an understanding that gender wasn't a factor in regards to attraction. hence bisexual.

this is so long omfg but what it all boils down to is um. my relationship to queerness is founded on experience, intersectionality, and bodily autonomy, not gender as its own concept. so nonhuman identities (and sometimes just Different Human identities) are always going to influence identity and Be A Metaphor for HOW experience influences identity and vis versa.

[minecraftsz]

I don’t understand the use of genderswap aus-

Like “Omg the protagonist is the opposite sex! That must rlly change the story by a lot.”

i actually disagree with you here just because yellow has told me some interesting thoughts abt this. like… someone’s gender actually does change a lot! it would affect the story, because the story revolves around them and their character arc.

gender swaps can be concretely very interesting if you take in the societal implications of being a certain gender. by and large your gender actually does a lot to your life. like yellows talked a lot abt how differently c quackity would be seen if he was a woman - like just think for a moment how different the character would feel. people literally call him a girlboss like imagine if he actually was. how would the fandom perception of him change? or take the straight haired girl from squid game, ji young, for example. her character was initially a boy! her gender was changed because the writer wanted to explore female friendship. so it’s that kind of thing that i think make gender swaps interesting, but you definitely have to be very considerate when you work on them.

but most genderswaps are tbh. gross. because they’re just presentation swapping, going from masc to fem and vice versa, but they’re still called gender swaps? for most people a gender swap is just a character design challenge, which. like, you do not need to be feminine to be a woman, or masculine to be a man, but that’s the broad implication of most genderswaps. they run a lot into bioessentialism too when they start changing character traits to “match”. although living as a man/woman in society can affect how you act - women’s pressure to be small and dainty, that kind of thing - it’s rarely handled delicately, at least from what i’ve seen, and it’s not a necessary outcome of being a man or a woman. sucks.

people’s experience with gender is not limited to themselves because we are always burdened by the perceptions and assumptions of society; that’s why changing a characters gender in order to explore these aspects can be really interesting. but it’s also so easy to slip into bigotry and gender essentialism, so, you know. be careful

[jamlavender]

Gaslight, gatekeep, girlboss: Mrs Coulter, misogyny and the His Dark Materials TV show

The show went hard on misogyny as a vital part of Mrs Coulter’s backstory, and I want to talk about how they did it, and why, and how it might have been done better. This is quite long (when is anything I write not, let’s be real) so it’s under the cut. Read on for thoughts on women, power and fictional villainy.

As a quick disclaimer, though: I’ve enjoyed the show a lot! I’m so glad they made it! Ruth Wilson is mesmerising as Mrs Coulter! There’s so much to appreciate about the show overall, including many aspects of Mrs Coulter’s portrayal. But the HDM team have also made gender politics and misogyny very explicit themes of the show – particularly season two, particularly season two, episode five – and I think it’s fair to critique that.

Let’s be clear: Mrs Coulter is a villain. She murders kids by tearing out their souls. She kills and tortures friends and foes alike without a second thought. She abuses her daughter. She upholds and advances a totalitarian regime. She’s a Bad Person, as confirmed by God himself with the unforgettable line: “You are a cesspit of moral filth.” She’s fucking terrible, but, in life as in art, many of us are fascinated by how such awful people are made. What drives someone to commit atrocities? I am keen to see such questions examined in fiction, because I don’t think exploring a character necessarily means excusing their actions, and because it’s interesting (I mean, of course I find her fascinating, I’ve written a novel’s worth of fic about her). However, after a few snarky comments (“What sort of woman raised Father Graves, do you think?”) and some subtler commentary on sexuality, gender and power (her unsettling MacPhail with the key in the bra in S1E2), S2E5 drew a weird line between sexism in Mrs Coulter’s professional and academic life and her vast and senseless institutionalised child murder, and the longer I’ve sat with that the more I’m like: what the fuck?

Look, Mrs Coulter doesn’t tear apart children to search for sin inside them and poison Boreal and break a witch’s fingers because she’s experienced sexism in the workplace and in her education. That’s… a very odd thing to imply. We have to remember that there are lots of women in Lyra’s world, all of whom will also have experienced sexism, misogyny and other forms of marginalisation (many in more expansive and pernicious ways than Mrs Coulter, who’s a woman, yes, but also white, wealthy, highly educated and very thin and beautiful), and none of them are running arctic torture stations. She will have experienced misogyny, absolutely, and that will have affected her in various ways that inform how she approaches her work, but to imply that being denied a doctorate is the reason she became a sadistic killer is frankly bizarre. Here are a few of the lines from that episode with my commentary:

“Do you know who I could have been in this world?” What does this mean? If she’d been roughly the same person in our world, the answer is: Margaret Thatcher, which is probably a step down for Marisa, all things considered, because the Magisterium is far more autocratic than any recent Tory government and would be a much easier institutional environment in which to enact her cruelty. What we’re supposed to think, clearly, is that she’d have been a different person: a scientist and a mother, and she’s had this realisation because she saw a woman with a baby and a laptop and had a three-minute conversation with Mary. This doesn’t make sense. We live in our world! It’s less repressive than Lyra’s world but it’s hardly a gender utopia. If Mrs Coulter had chosen the scientist-and-mother life (which, as I’ll revisit later, she could have done in her world but chose not to because of her megalomaniac tendencies), she’d still have been affected by misogyny here too. Our world is not kind to young mothers, nor young women embroiled in scandals, nor is the world teeming with female physicists. It might be a little better, sure, but it’s hardly as if those gendered challenges would have been solved.  

“What do you mean she runs a department?” This is just the show forgetting its own canon. Marisa, you ran a massive government organisation (the GOB), including a huge murder science research initiative in the Arctic. That’s a much bigger undertaking and much more impressive than running a university department in our world. Pull yourself together.

“But because I was a woman, I was denied a doctorate by the Magisterium.” This is the show flagrantly ignoring the source material to make a clumsy political point. In the books, there are women with doctorates (notably Hannah Relf, also a major player in the new Book of Dust trilogy) and at least one women’s college full of female scholars. Now, would that women’s college likely be underfunded and disrespected compared to the men’s colleges? Almost certainly. But saying that is different than saying “I couldn’t get my doctorate!” when women in Lyra’s world can. The show knew what point they wanted to make, and were willing to ignore canon to do so, which is frustrating. Also, given that there are female academics and scientists in Lyra’s world, and that Mrs Coulter is a member of St Sophia’s college, it’s clear that she could have lived that life if she so desired. But she didn’t want that, because being a scientist and academic at St Sophia’s imbues her with no real power, and that’s what she craves.

I’m not opposed, in theory, to exploring Mrs Coulter and misogyny in more depth, but I think doing so through an examination of the sexual politics of her life would have made a lot more narrative sense and been much more powerful. It’s better evidenced in the text – her using her sexuality to manipulate people and taking lovers for political sway is entirely canon, as is her backstory where genuine love and lust blew up her life – and it links much more closely with the most shocking of her villainy, which involves cutting out children’s dæmons to stop them developing “troublesome thoughts and feelings,” referencing sexual and romantic desire (and what Lyra and Will do to save Dust is clearly a big ‘fuck you’ to those aims). She even says this to MacPhail in TAS, “If you thought for one moment that I would release my daughter into the care - the care! - of a body of men with a feverish obsession with sexuality, men with dirty fingernails, reeking of ancient sweat, men whose furtive imaginations would crawl over her body like cockroaches - if you thought I would expose my child to that, my Lord President, you are more stupid than you take me for.” Don’t get me wrong, she’d have been a villain regardless, but I do believe that there’s a much stronger link between her sexual and romantic experiences and her murder work than between professional and academic stifling and child murder. It would have been a lot more interesting and a lot less tenuous.

However, the show is trying to be family-friendly, and digging into why this terrible, cruel woman might want to cut the ability for desire and love (and other non-sexual adult feelings, I’m sure) out of people could get dark. We know that the show doesn’t want to go there, because they’ve actively toned down her weaponising her sexuality: in the books, she has an established sexual relationship with Boreal, whereas the show made it seem like she’s been stringing him along all this time, and made it about potentially ‘sharing a life’ together rather than fucking, which was clearly the arrangement in the books. Also, I think Ruth Wilson said she and Ariyon Bakare filmed a “steamy scene” together, and given that only a single chaste kiss between them aired it must have been cut. I think they deliberately minimised the sexual elements of the text, particularly regarding Mrs Coulter (the mountain scene with Asriel, which I did still love, was also a lot less horny than in the book) and replaced that with another gender issue, that of professional sexism, as if the two are interchangeable, which they are not. This is a shame, both for Mrs Coulter’s character and also for the story as a whole, because the characters’ relationships with sex and desire are an important part of the books! (If this minimised sexuality approach means that they don’t use the TAS scene where Asriel threatens to gag her and she tries to goad him into doing it, I’ll scream). Overall, I think they missed the mark here, which is a shame because I also think it could have been done well, if they’d been bolder and darker and more thoughtful.

Why might this happen? Why might the show take this approach? Why might it be latched onto by viewers? Personally, I think the conversations we have about women and power are very simplistic, which leaves us in a tight spot when we see women seizing power for themselves (even in fiction) and weaponising that against others, not just other women but people of all genders, because we struggle to move past ‘women have overall been denied power, so them taking it ‘back’ is good,’ even if that immediately becomes a hot mess of white, corporate feminism and results in the ongoing oppression of many people. I think we are so hungry for representations of powerful women that we – producers and viewers alike – struggle to see them as bad, because it’s uncomfortable to be so intoxicated by Mrs Coulter effortlessly dominating the men around her, subverting systems designed to marginalise her for her own benefit, and generally being aggressive and intelligent and ruthless, and then realise that you are entranced by someone who is, objectively, a terrible, terrible person. It can be hard to realise that if you channelled the energy of someone who mesmerises you, you’d be the villain. So instead of sitting with that (more on this below), a lot of legwork goes into reworking her villainy into, somehow, a just act, a result of oppression, as her taking back power that has been denied to her, rather than grappling with the fact that for anyone to desire power in such a merciless way, even if they have to overcome marginalisation to get it, is really, really dangerous.

The joy, of course, is that Mrs Coulter is not real! She’s not real! Adoring fictional characters does not mean condoning their (imaginary) decisions, nor do stories exist for each person in them to fit neatly into a good or bad box so you know who you’re allowed to love. Furthermore, fiction can be a fabulous tool for exploring and interrogating the parts of yourself that, if left to bloom unexamined, might perpetuate beliefs or behaviour that cause harm to others. Mrs Coulter doesn’t need to be a feminist or taking down the patriarchy or a righteous powerful woman to illuminate things about gender, power and feminism for those reading and watching. In fact, it’s important that we explore what happens when women (most commonly white, wealthy women, as she is) continue to perpetuate brutal systems under the guise of sticking it to ‘men,’ because it happens all the time in the real world, and it’s a serious issue. Finding characters like Mrs Coulter so cool and compelling doesn’t make you a bad person, but it might tell you something about yourself – not that you want to be a villain or kill kids or whatever, but something about how you relate to your gender or women or men or power – and that knowledge can be useful! We all have better and worse impulses, and finding art that helps us make sense of ourselves, both the good and bad parts, is a gift that we should relish.

Anyway, tl;dr, Mrs Coulter doesn’t need to be sympathetic or understandable or redeemable to be brilliant – but you wouldn’t know that from how she’s been portrayed in the new adaptation.

[rawliverandcigarettes]

Our discussion on turians made me wonder: how do you imagine the culture of the Salarian Union? (I'm sorry, you probably talked about this elsewhere, but I was too lazy to look for that, if so feel free to refer me to that post.) I find that there are surprisingly little elements about it in canon, though there are a few hints, like the fact that the planets in the Pranas system all have modern names, the previous names having been discarded, presumably, because they evoke "bygone superstition"?

Hello! Sorry I took some time. I actually rarely packaged my thoughts on salarian culture in a digestible way, so you gave me a great opportunity to give it a recap! I will go more indepth in the future for sure, but I might do a lil' overarching presentation of my general thoughts.

First, I have written an exploration/explanation of some of my headcanons regarding salarian reproduction, and it can be found here on Ao3: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18872515

It is sliightly out of date and I need to do a pass to adjust some of my thoughts, but I still go by the general idea.

I also agree that there is very little things in the OT canon. I think there might be slightly more in Andromeda maybe, but I still haven't played the game so who knows!

I even believe the games kind of give up on salarian culture past ME1, where they are arguably given the most importance; we get more depth to it in ME2 through the sole and lonely perspective of Mordin; and in ME3 they are barely worth more than somewhat cheap antagonism and a couple of questionable jokes. Even right now during the promo of MELE, I felt like salarians keep being characterized as weird-cute-gross, and more like the butt of a joke than people. Even the promo for Director Tann in MEA had this "haha you get a role for a mass effect character and you thought you'd be sexy and cool TOO BAD" vibe to it, which makes me think part of the devteam (or at least the marketing side of it) don't think too highly of their very own space frogs :'(((

But to get on my actual thoughts (under the cut and the nice gif, because it won't be as long as it could be, but it's still somewhat long):

So first off, I'm trying to keep in mind how indescribably huge the Salarian Union is: we're talking about a conglomerate of planet-sized communities, moons, artificial stations, plus appendages in every large-scaled, cosmopolitan communities in Council space and possibly beyond. Just like it would be hard to talk about any united "human culture", I think the same could be true for any Mass Effect species --even though, for the sake of both narrative convenience and the tendency for globalization once communities get connected and break down communication barriers, shortcuts have to be made (and that helps make Points, and I like stories to have Points so yee).

For this reason, I have identified organizational tendencies within these communities, based both on baseline of natural grouping emerging off salarian biology (clan-based structures with matriarchal figures) and where I speculated breakdowns would happen in the modern, multicultural setting of the ME universe. To brutally over-simplify: there would be the "traditional" political organization of Sur'kesh (that I will briefly cover later), the "colonial" style (a derivation of the Sur'kesh style with more centralization), and the growing influence of ultraliberalism creeping from Council space back unto these communities, creating a myriad of variations depending on how much the communities are willing to adapt to production being controlled by corporations.

I headcanon the culture, however, to be at once: very collectivist yet an oligarchy (because dalatrasses have a right to power by virtue of existence basically), extremely eugenist to the point of having created literal, biological races that are genetically distinct from each other and cultivated to remain as such by some clans (and therefore can be very cruel towards the disabled/the imperfect at birth too), misandrist (I believe being a male salarian from a shitty clan/baronny is one of the lower forms of political existence that can be in this universe, hence why their lives in the working force are so goddamn disposable), but also designed to protect its members and have the community take care of their basic needs (so homelessness is almost not a thing, or at least used to not be a thing). I also believe the culture to be consistently young and vibrant, with lots of energy (for better and for worse). And during the time of ME, to be under economical and social duress (even gender duress!) as it sits at a crossroad regarding its future, and everyone has a lots of ideas on what this future should look like, including people gawking the outside with economical or political interests in the outcome (this basically the plot of The Empire of Preys, which is technically a prequel to Halfway Home but will be written after HH because I love chronologies that make sense and are easy to understand :) :) ).

So concerning the OG, Sur'kesh style: I have contorted a weird economical/diplomatic/land planning system into quasi-existence, that is based around a unit called the "symposium". This is a *relatively* young system in their history (still milleniums old, it really solidified in the middle of the Rachni Wars as a reaction/adaptation after several waves of imperialism that didn't really look like ours but had the same effect of flattening local cultures into a more aggressive semi-ethnostate), but central into dividing resources, workers, affect. I will not go into too much details because this is quite complicated, but these are basically commitees that will take democratic decisions among its members, based on how many clan members are appointed in both this symposium and and adjacent symposiums that might be helpful to this one --it's a system explicitely based on bribes and social influence, and getting the partial control of key symposiums is absolutely essential for Dalatrasses to maintain the influence and relevance of their respective clans. It's also a system that has, traditionally, very little use for money (it exists, but as a token of exchange that doesn't carry inherent value --if you have only access to money as a clan, you are basically worthless and won't get access to good matches or good symposium seats, or at least you used to until capitalism knocked at the doooooor and that kinda fucked things uppppppp and the society is not recovering and the gaps are getting extreeeeeme this is the plot of TEOP basically).

Oh and on the subject of the transition to more capitalist values and the decay of clans that cannot keep up, I wrote The Leftovers a couple of years ago, which talks about a young dalatrass-to-be discovering she might be sterile, right here: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15854244

I have a ton more things to say on the subject (and salarian culture as a whole), buuut this is getting quite long already haha.

And in regards to your question: I headcanon that salarians from one specific continent -that then became the "cultural norm" over imperialism and complications- were confronted, in a continental way, to a huge hurricane that led to incredible floods and then stagnant water and diseases, which really soured their relationship to water that was previously quite holy. This led to a very bitter enlightenment; their "Renaissance" came out of spite against nature rather than anything else, and a lot of previous ideas were abandoned for a time -then reclaimed, then abandoned again, then warped... It's complicated. :D

[gingermintpepper]

After thinking it over for a bit, I've decided that I might as well do a proper underrated 3DS game rec list. I'm a bit of an ATLUS junkie and that's gonna be pretty disgustingly apparent in this list, but it's not my fault that they released hit after hit and all of them were duly ignored.

Due to tumblr's 10 image limit (and my struggle to keep motivated to do one thing for more than three hours) I'm definitely gonna have to break this up into parts and I'm fairly certain one of these lists is just gonna be MegaTen games lmao but I'd like to let people know about these excellent titles and see if I can't at least get people interested in them so they can get more traction.

So, without further ado:

Some 3DS Games that were criminally slept on (part 1)

Monster Hunter Stories

God, where do I begin with this game. Well, the basics: It's a JRPG spinoff title of the now widely successful and popular Monster Hunter series featuring a different take on interacting with the varied and intricate monsters populating the world: Riders.

Yep, instead of hunting the beasties, you play as a young rider who's completed their intiation ritual and can now bond with 'Monsties' as they've cutely labelled the usually ferocious monsters of the wilds. The great thing is that you still fight Monsters--tons of them in fact but this isn't a paid review and in my humble opinion, the most impressive thing about this game is the visual style. The landscapes, the armour, the way they redesigned and 3DS-ified the classically hyper realistic and monstrous beasts to not only be absolutely adorable but still capable of being intimidating when the time calls for it, the stellar animation of special moves and combination attacks--it's delicious, nutritious, stupendous, I can and will consume it like it's part of my recommended caloric intake.

It's very akin to Pokemon in the way its basic gameplay premise is set up, however, instead of catching--or even indeed befriending--the Monsties in the game, you rummage through their nests and steal their eggs, later hatching them and getting yourself a brand new lightly kidnapped monster pal!

Other general things about the game:

Pros:

The armour and weapon sets for both male and female characters slap along with the general character customisation options. They're incredibly diverse (though limited in body type) and you can switch around traits and features whenever you want from your house.

The POGS--these porkers are everywhere and they serve as tiny little achievements for exploring every odd and end of the world. Also they have little outfits. They're so cute. 🥺🥺

You can actually ride the Monsties. All of em. Or, at least the ones that you have available to be your buddies. They all have exploration skills and traits that not only make exploring much more interesting but encourage you to swap out your active Monstie and play around with your options a bit.

Y'all breeding Monsties is complicated and I live for just how intense and ridiculous you can get with optimal builds for these things.

The story is really competently put together! The characters, character designs and even the internal conflict with your starting trio of characters is really compelling along with the mystery of the blight that's infecting Monsters across the world. It's not anything worth awards but it's compelling and it makes you care about the characters if that's what you're in the market for.

Amazing sound design, expansive world, everything about the presentation of this game oozes that Monster Hunter charm even if the art is cutesier than usual. You'll never get bored of its stellar visual presentation!

Available for around twenty quid on the Google Play store, so if you want, you could actually get the full game on your smartphone or tablet. Note though that it would be a battery nuker.

Cons:

If you're on a regular 3DS, frame rate drops are a given. This game kinda pushes the visual capabilities of the 3DS to its absolute limit--a lot like Okamiden did back on the DS.

One save file :( It's pretty much for the same reason as above but still.

If you're playing as the girl, you can't get male armour and vice versa. Since there's only one save file, you'll never be able to have all of the armour sets in a single playthrough and that's criminal because both of the sets for the genders are absolutely breath-taking, thank you.

I 👏can't 👏make👏my👏 own 👏Palico👏

Multi-player for this game is pretty dead seeing as it's almost five years old by now and never got much press or traction. Usually this wouldn't be an issue - this game is 99% singleplayer and you don't really need to fuss about with multi-player to have fun, but if you want to collect all the Monsties, you'll need it since the only way to get Glavenus is through pvp achievements. :/

Final thoughts: Play it if you find yourself getting tired or disappointed with 3DS Pokemon games but still want something that feels as fantastical as Pokemon. It outshines the 3DS Pokemon games at every turn and I will never be over just how thoughtfully put together and fully realised these games are. Of course, if you've ever played Monster Hunter, then you know just how intensive these games are with the lore, biology, cultures and world of their Monsters but seeing that translated into JRPG format was just very sobering and it's a game that, to this day, continues to awe me with just how much love and attention went into it.

Last note: If you're still unsure about it, there's a demo available on the e-shop of the 3DS that allows you to play through the entire initial area of the game. Your data does carry through to the full release and to give you an idea of how much I've been able to squeeze out of it - my playtime for that demo is currently sitting at 22 hours. Make sure to get a hold of that Cyan-Kut-Ku!

7th Dragon III Code: VFD

The title may sound intimidating but the premise is not! A mysterious disease called Dragon Sickness spread by the Dragonsbane flowers that have cropped up all around the world. You and your team are recruited by the Nodens game company after you display extraordinary prowess in their hit virtual reality game 7th Encount. As you go through the adventure, you are tasked with finding out the truth behind the Dragon Sickness and asked to stop both it and the Dragons that are destroying the world.

This game is fun. It's another turn-based JRPG however, in this game you create all of your characters yourself from the myriad of classes available to you from the jump. Different classes of course have very different specialisations - Samurai focus on high powered cutting damage with their swords, Duelists are summoners who can influence the element of the battlefield as well as summon monsters from each element, Agents can hack into your enemies and inflict a barrage of nasty ailments, just to name a few - and you are given three teams of three characters each to experiment with different team comps and find the balance that works for you. There's also a wide variety of Dragons to hunt and kill in the game, which directly affects how infected your world is with the Dragon Sickness causing Dragonsbane. Along the way you will also come into contact with many interesting characters, concepts and confrontations that will make the task of saving the world all the more imperative.

Pros

1. The character creator and differing classes give way for tons of experimenting and playing around with your own unique approach to combat and carrying out your missions. Granted, 'character creation' is generous, it's little more than palatte swaps but the classes are really where VFD shines. Eight main classes may not sound like a lot, but the expaniveness of the character skills, their synergy with their fellow classes and the uniqueness of some of the classes in and of itself allows for so much flexibility and creativity in approaches to even tougher bosses. It also encourages the switching about of your party members to really finagle with the options available to you.

2. God this game is pretty. The locations, the character art, the creature design - all of it is gorgeous and this game capitalises on every bit of the 3DS's presentation limitations as it can.

3. You can romance anything and everyone - yes, you can even be gay/lesbian/poly in this game. In fact, one of the main characters - Julietta - is gnc and he's a constant source of joy as well one of my personal favourite characters, right behind Yuma.

4. Exploration is very very forgiving as the game has healing spots and teleport nodes all over the world to allow for quick, seamless travel between quest points without feeling like anything is too much of a hassle. There are also special enemies that allow for quick grinding as well as quick farming of money. In general, the game does a really good job of making sure that the grind is never unbearable or inconsiderate of your time.

Cons:

1. This is the fourth game in a series the West has never seen any other title for, and from the looks of it, will probably never see any other titles for. Because of that, there are some elements that may seem confusing or revelations in the plot that may seem to come out of nowhere.

2. While the visuals are great, the OST of this one is pretty short making for a lot of reused soundtracks that can get really annoying if you're like me and need your audio to be interesting or consistent so it doesn't distract you too much.

3. This one isn't really a con but it is divisive: This game gets pretty difficult at times. A few of the main dragon enemies including and especially the final boss can give you a serious run for your money in the annoy-o-meter in terms of the kind of absolute JRPG fuckery they can pull out of their magic bag of bullshit movesets and while I generally enjoy that kind of thing, I know it's not for everyone. Most regular combat shouldn't be too tricky once you have a team comp that works well together but you also need to pay attention since the same team that carries you to victory one time might be worth beans against another dragon.

Final thoughts: This is... a really good game. Interesting story, really interesting characters, pretty world and a battle system that really makes you sit down and think. There's also a demo for this available in the e-shop and while your data doesn't carry over - you do receive multiple perks for carrying over your demo data including some exclusive items that, while not game breaking, do help a ton in the early stages of the game.

This isn't a final list by any stretch of the word; I only have the energy to do these two right now, but the next games up for coverage are Ever Oasis and Stella Glow! If you're interested in my full plan of games I want to cover here then my current lineup includes: Theatrhythm: Curtain Call, Project Mirai: Deluxe, Culdecept Revolt, Alliance Alive, Radiant Historia: Perfect Chronology, Etrian Odyssey V, Devil Survivor 2: Record Breaker and Shin Megami Tensei IV: Apocalypse.

Finally, if anyone has played any of the games I mention, cover or plan to cover PLEASE REACH OUT TO ME, I AM SO LONELY IN MY FORTRESS OF SAND. On a serious note, I'd love to hear what other people who've played these games think!

Thanks for reading,

-Ginger

PS: @feralpeacock Because a million years ago, on my first underrated games post, you asked that I remember you. :D

[thelovelyghostwriter]

just wanna throw it out there, i don’t know where you watched it, but neferpitou is never referred to as her in the subs that i saw, like not even once that i can think of

Hello. Well, of course, our experiences are different.

My memory is a little hazy, but I first watched it on Kissanime (or is it Gogoanime?) several years ago. The second time watching it was on Singapore Netflix, which only has the Eng/Chinese subtitles and Japanese/Mandarin audio back in 2018/9.

Now, I cannot remember if the Kissanime referred to Pitou as a her, and the site was shut down already, though I do remember the subs referencing Pitou as a mother cat. Back then, I actually thought Pitou was a girl because of the appearance and the mother cat, until sometime a year later, I found out that the manga and anime had discrepancies.

For the Netflix one, I must say, the English subtitles are different and inaccurate (we had the full series really early). I remember rewatching this and I think they referred to Alluka as a "she" throughout, even with characters other than Killua, although they had referred to Alluka as a "brother". I had to explain to my friends because they just assumed Alluka is biologically female. I think they also used "she" for Pitou (again, this is 2 to 3 years ago, my memory is super hazy). I could check again, but currently, I'm too busy to check the episodes.

Maybe I had made a mistake with that phrasing, although I'm not sure what phrase I should use instead as data collection is still ongoing. I need to be careful when editing it, as it might affect the charts. I may have to fix the phrasing, but right now, I’m out of ideas and I’m open to anyone who have suggestions. 

Now that has gotten out of the way, let me share with you my thought processes on Pitou in this survey.

Please note that I am aware that anon just wants to tell me this information, and I am willing to take any questions and clarify anything. I am only taking this opportunity to clear up any potential questions by ensuring that everyone who is interested understands the decision I had made when it comes to Pitou, since the question is in regards to Pitou's gender.

Frankly speaking, it doesn't matter to me if Pitou is a female or male, it's just a fictional character, it's a chimera ant. I like Pitou as a character and the design, and initially, I never bothered to look at Pitou's gender due to mixed opinions about it. While some people refer to Pitou as a boy, there's someone on Reddit recently that is debating that Pitou is a woman and commented why I did not include Pitou in the hxh girls/women under the "favourite hxh girls/women" question. The Redditor also reasoned that the manga part about Pitou referring to themselves as "boku" was a mistranslation. And then there's people who are just saying chimera ants do not have biological sex (but we see the Chimera Ant Queen giving birth so??)

It's honestly extremely confusing to me and that's why I never bothered to look into it. Pitou is just a character that I know and love. And I never cared about whether people prefer addressing Pitou as a girl or boy, or something else.

Until I had to make this survey.

The only reason why I categorised ships into het, BL and Yuri is that there are over 50 pairings on Hunterpedia. For example, if people indicate that they only ship het ships, then all the ships featuring a girl and a boy will be presented in the next question. The BL and Yuri ships won't appear. This is designed so that people do not have to go through the trouble of scrolling through an incredibly long list of ships just to pick their favourites. Again, it's a technical reason.

However, this was a problem for Pitou because well, I didn't actually bother to look up Pitou's gender previously.

At first, I went to look at what people who refer to the manga had to say, and most of them reasoned it's because Pitou used "boku" which was a masculine(?) term. Now, I can't read Japanese but this is what people used for the rationale. It's just that Pitou seemed to have breasts and more feminine in the anime.

So initially, I wanted to list Pitou as a boy in that shipping section.

The only reason why I changed my mind, is because many people had only watched the 2011 anime version for the pre-Dark Continent Exploration arc. Even in my survey, only 168 had read the manga before the Dark Continent Exploration arc, but 403 people had watched the 2011 anime.

And as far as I know, from my observation, most people who had only watched the 2011 anime refer to Pitou as a girl (even if they know how Pitou is presented in the manga). And when they ship Pitou with someone, they usually view Pitou as a catgirl or something. Or at least, in the fanarts I've seen.

I did not want the case where people who ship Pitou with someone has to adjust their "thinking" when choosing the list of ships.

Those were pretty much my thoughts when I decided to list Pitou as a girl in the shipping section. And I'm not sure if that affected my memory when it comes to thinking that the anime referred to Pitou as a she/her.

Pitou is ambiguous but the anime refers to Pitou as a "her" a lot. Therefore, listed as a girl.

This is why I came up with these two sentences. Again, I am not very particular about this detail, but for the sake of technical reasons, I did what I had to do. You also need to understand that for texts in a survey, you have to make them as concise as possible.

Which we move on to the other comment I had about not including Pitou in the list of hxh girls/women. It's tied to my initial decision of listing Pitou as a boy. I made a tough decision to just... not include all Chimera Ants in that section, since they aren't human anyway. The only character that wasn't human that I included in that question is Nanika, but that's because Nanika is tied to Alluka (I listed Alluka as a girl. I know certain people won't agree with me. Killua says Alluka is a girl, and that's that). Besides, there was already a question regarding ranking Chimera Ants. So I think it's fair not to include Chimera Ants, although I do feel really bad because I think there are people who feels that their favourite female hxh character is Pitou. 

Please understand that the decisions to include and what not to include can be difficult, in certain questions or characters when it comes to this. I cannot make everyone satisfied with the survey and I don't intend to make that promise. However, I will try my very best to make it as good as it can be. 

I am going to address this in my report, in regards to Pitou and my decisions when it comes to this character in the survey. I need to look for the manga panel where Pitou uses "boku" so that I can properly explain it in my report.

[emersonfreepress]

okay so is there content that you had planned for the ROs and story in general but then scrapped cause there wasn’t a good place in the story to stick it in? and if so, can you share what it was? 👀 👀 👀

yes, definitely. *rubs hands together* oh man, you done asked THE question today xD I can't wait to get into this 😁

Academics. I almost decided to have classes and grades be a minor part of gameplay, but the more time I spent designing it the more I realized I wanted nothing to do with it 😂 I haven’t really enjoyed academic gameplay in other interactive fiction because I 1) hate having to choose between studying and interacting with awesome characters, 2) have terrible short term memory, and 3) hate school in general!! So instead I just opted to have the MC be really good at school, point blank period so I could focus on social drama and relationships instead! 😆

Physical skills. I spent literal months crafting the catering scene around setting up stats for stamina/endurance, dexterity, and strength instead of just magnetism, confidence, and persuasion. They had their own backstories with the MC’s parents being overly invested sports parents instead and I think the background choices were like... martial arts, gymnastics, and track? But yeah, I ended up scrapping it all because I was spending hours on research about those individual sports so I could integrate them into the MC’s narrative organically but like... when I tried to think of what use they would be in the actual story, I came up blank. Best decision yet, esp since it means a lot less coding!

Skin tone customization. For one, I noticed that a lot of my favorite IFs don’t offer that customization and it hasn’t impacted my experience at all. For two, I originally realized I might as well not implement it since I am striving real hard not to introduce any customization that won’t actually be mentioned in interesting or meaningful ways in-story. I don’t think it’s really all that common for real life friends (esp in high school?) to comment or compliment each other’s skin and like... when it comes from someone who doesn’t share a similar complexion or ethnic background, that type of commentary gets... d i c e y. So then I wanted to be sensitive to that but what’s the pay-off? An RO mentioning how they love your skin tone once? Awkward sentences with the MC referring to their own skin color? Idk, just wasn’t vibing with it. I’m open to revisiting it in beta or something but for now it’s scrapped.

Singing, Rapping, and Gaming as Hobbies/Talents. I feel bad about scrapping these, honestly 😂 They’re great and I really wanted to incorporate them but it just came down to already having a lot of stuff to code. Plus, I know I can write the Hobbies/Talents I stuck with far better. And for Book 2 purposes, as well!

Leo. as @sourandflightypeaches ​​ asked me about a long while ago, I had to scrap an entire RO 😢 His name is Leo, he was the nephew of wealthy west African diplomats residing in Emerson, and I love him dearly! His backstory was largely based on my mother’s childhood and the circumstances she lived through after immigrating to America. and... ok, i’m about to go on one hell of a tangent so buckle up and bear with me if you can 😅

my intention with this story, aside from writing things that I personally enjoy (graphic violence, spooky woods, social drama, romance, conspiracies 😚), is to explore greed, wealth, and how the ways people and families interact with those two things influence young people and who they grow up to be. here i go sounding pretentious af 😝 and here’s where I apply a cut for those who want to preserve a little mystery to the main characters!

With Gabe, we’ve got someone who grew up with very little stability or financial security but who has found unscrupulous methods to gain status and money, with both noble and selfish motivations.

Kile has some of that childhood experience in common with Gabe, having been in the foster care system since infancy, but they lucked out when they were adopted into massive wealth by a caring, loving couple—a couple that uses their wealth and privilege to be far more lenient and protective of Kile than is actually reasonable or responsible.

Jack comes from a prestigious wealthy family on his dad’s side who he loves dearly but there’s no getting around the fact that they love him back as much as they despise his working class mom.

Jessie is a spoiled sweet heiress (being the baby of her family and the only girl) and while she lives blissfully ignorant of the harmful source and impact of her father's income and career, she bears the weight of the expectation to fulfill very traditional gender roles, including her behavior and appearance, but also extending to her career and life plans.

Rain's wealth led to them growing up sheltered and isolated but also extremely accommodated, giving them maximum freedom and opportunity to discover and develop their personal talents and interests. However, they have almost no positive relationship with their parents who have essentially decided to give up on a kid that couldn't be exactly the accessory they tried to mold them to be—both in terms of their identity and personality.

Rupan/Rohan, at their very core, rejects everything about conformity, self-importance, and excessive luxury—which means they have never, ever truly fit in with their peers. Going full non-conformist, however, has resulted in them becoming alienated from much of their family, as well, despite them all loving each other very much. Their history with false friends and betrayals has led them to over-indulge in their vices and reckless behavior to compensate for that isolation. Sometimes, they just get in over their head and many times, they know better. Every time, it's just that the feeling of finally belonging is utterly intoxicating.

Vivian/Vincent has two extremely successful parents who didn't inherit but instead built up their wealth and they aspire to be just like them, to a degree that is well and truly unhealthy. Their mother specifically is an over-achiever and applies mountainous pressure for them to follow in her footsteps, especially academically. Vi is completely capable of achieving what their mom expects of them, but they were already an extremely sensitive perfectionist so this has made them intensely critical of themself. This is a large part of why they are such a rigid, no-nonsense person and that in turn has made them one of the most disliked people among their peers—which is a huge personal failure to them since their father is a very well-liked and socially successful person in town.

And the Emersons are peak privilege: inherent high social status, brains, looks, charisma, athleticism, and massive wealth. They could never have been anything less than extremely popular, just by virtue of their last name and the nature of the town's social dynamics and politics. And they do enjoy that privilege (esp Curt lol). However, it should go without saying that being so high profile, even (or maybe especially) just in the isolated scope of your hometown, isn't always a boon. Their family's and their own perceived failings are widely discussed and privately mocked and/or celebrated. Real friends are scarce while fake ones and snakes are plentiful. Plus their dad is a gigantic dickhead who sees his kids as extensions of his own status and reputation and not much else. Public shortcomings make for an unbearable time at home and the world outside the estate is at once overly accommodating, full of assumptions, and even subtly hostile at times—all unrelated to their own actions or character.

And with the MC, I think the narrative will make it clear there are several ways that story can go. You start off with irresponsible parents that have lost their wealth due to their own mismanagement and material ambitions—how that affects any individual MC should differ based on choices and consequences!

So why bring any of that up when I was supposed to be talking about my cut OC? 😂😂

Leo was going to be the unwelcome recent addition to his uncle’s household, the son of a brother his aunt hates for (petty af) Reasons, and she took that resentment out on him directly by restricting his access to nearly every aspect of the family's wealth. Especially material goods and living conditions. He was basically treated like the help, tasked with playing nanny for his many younger cousins and burdened with doing the homework and providing academic cover for his dumb as rocks cousin in the same grade as you all. To sum it up, he was basically a victim of trafficking at the hands of his own family with his uncle out of town enough to feign ignorance to how bad his wife was treating his nephew and his aunt going out of her way to keep him busy, at home, and isolated. This is sadly a super common form of trafficking in Francophone African cultures (although I don't think most people view it as trafficking. and I’m sure the same is true of other cultures but I don’t want to speak outside of my purview). And like I mentioned above, it’s how my own mom's (and idek how many cousins') child/teenhood went.

It’s a perspective on modern wealth, privilege and greed that I really, really wanted to tell. I am confident in saying it hasn't been explored in interactive fiction yet (though correct me—and direct me 👀—if I'm wrong) and out of all the wealth/greed explorations I came up with, it's the one I have the closest personal ties to and the strongest feelings about. The characters and plans I had for it were detailed and I'm proud of them but at the end of the day... I just couldn't find a place for Leo in the story at large.

Leo was, in fact, the last main character I came up with, when I had already designed and fleshed out the larger story and started crafting the timeline of major events. I think the worst thing I could have done for a story and perspective that I care about this much is shove it into a plot that didn't have room for it at the very base level, regardless of how well the character or his story is written. Shoe-horned characters always stick out. I didn’t want to disservice Leo by having him be the character that did nothing or could be removed from the main plot without affecting it at all, y’know? That’s so much worse than just forgoing the indulgence, imo :((

ugh.... Leooooo 😭 I'm so sorry bb, I failed youuu 😥

[self-loving-vampire]

Ultima VII Part Two: Serpent Isle (1993)

Summary

Serpent Isle is a direct sequel to the Black Gate. The arrival of the Guardian has been prevented and his cult has been outlawed and disbanded, but his most loyal follower has escaped to a place called the Serpent Isle to enact their backup plan.

But the Serpent Isle is not just an island, it is another world that you find yourself in after sailing your ship between the Serpent Pillars (yes, you get isekai’d while already living in another world).

This strange land is populated by people who fled from your lord long ago, and it seems to be suffering from an apocalyptic event that you soon experience for yourself, as a magical storm teleports your companions away and replaces most of the potent items you arrived with with random junk.

So your goals are clear: Recover your items, find the Guardian’s followers, and try to prevent the world’s destruction.

In many ways, Serpent Isle can feel like a more linear and limited game than the Black Gate (for one, you can’t own and freely sail a ship), but there are actually many things that I think it actually does better.

I played it using Exult and the SI Fixes mod.

Freedom

While Serpent Isle is not fully linear, it is definitely not nearly as open as the Black Gate was.

Where the Black Gate lets you travel nearly anywhere in the world almost immediately, even enabling several forms of transportation for this purpose, Serpent Isle initially allows only one section of the island to be explored with the rest opening up as one progresses through the game.

To its credit, the way in which these areas are locked off are sometimes reasonable and do not feel arbitrary. For instance, Moonshade is an island and nearly every ship in the land have been wrecked by the same magical storms that affected your party at the start of the game, so reaching it is not as simple as just buying a boat and going there.

There are other cases, however, where the restrictions do feel nonsensical. Such as the way the Bull Tower pikemen demand obscene amounts of money for the captain’s release but will happily accept a single much less valuable gold bar instead (since acquiring those is tied to a plot point). Then there’s all the stuff with the Hound of Doskar...

On the positive side, you can deal with various parts of the game in whatever order you desire within these limitations. This includes resolving the central quests in each of the land’s three cities in your own preferred order.

However, the game is still lacking in alternate solutions for quests in general. There are some decisions to be made, but they are rather minor in the grand scheme of things.

Character Creation/Customization

This aspect of the games is just as barebones as the Black Gate. You can only select your name, gender, and portrait. Your starting stats are pre-set and there are no further decisions to be made there.

However, Serpent Isle does have a marginal benefit over the Black Gate in that how you spend your training points matters a lot more, since you can’t just automatically max out your stats by completing the expansion.

Even then, there is not much to the character creation here at all.

Story/Setting

I think this is one of the game’s stronger points. The Black Gate may have had a larger world with more total settlements, but Serpent Isle’s three cities of Monitor, Fawn, and Moonshade are each significantly larger than the average Black Gate town and, most importantly, this world feels more dynamic.

Due to the way many of the game’s quests and events work, Serpent Isle manages to feel more alive than its predecessor. I will not spoil the details, but you often feel like something is always happening and like new developments are organically finding you rather than you having to actively search for them.

As has become typical of the Ultima series, the setting this time around is also centered around virtues, but in this case it goes beyond the Eight Virtues you mastered in the last trilogy.

Serpent Isle’s three cities are inhabited by the descendants of people who fled the reign of Lord British and who resent his edict of the eight virtues. The knights of Monitor considered Valor to be the highest virtue, the sailors of Fawn wanted to elevate Beauty as a virtue, and the mages of Moonshade did not feel that their profession should be associated with the virtue of Honesty.

But in addition to all that, much of the game revolves around learning about and mastering the ancient Ophidian virtue system, which functions differently from what you are used to. 

The Ophidian virtues are divided into Order (Ethicality, Discipline, Logic) and Chaos (Tolerance, Enthusiasm, Emotion). The forces composing both sides must be in balance to achieve a new set of principles (Harmony arising from Ethicality + Tolerance, Dedication from Discipline + Enthusiasm, and Rationality from Logic + Emotion).

The incoming apocalypse you face in the game is the result of a cosmic imbalance in these forces. The ancient Ophidians polarized into Order and Chaos factions that warred each other, with Order winning the war and destroying the Chaos Serpent, which causes the universe to begin unravelling.

While this game does have an antagonist, resolving this imbalance remains the most significant part of the game in terms of story.

The game also has multiple big scripted scenes that did not quite exist in the Black Gate, and the world as a whole changes dramatically partway through as a result of a certain event.

Immersion

As previously mentioned, things like the quest design and more dynamic world can help make this game more immersive than Black Gate in some ways. I am reasonably certain that some of the NPC schedules are a bit more complex this time around as well.

There are also a few new things, such as a frozen wasteland up north that you need warm clothes to traverse without freezing.

Apart from that, all the features mentioned in the Black Gate are still present here, such as weather, day/night cycles, and more.

But really I think one of the most significant differences is actually just the fact that you are significantly less overpowered than in the Black Gate and have less allies. I feel like that changes the feel of the game a lot on its own in ways that have to be experienced to be fully understood.

Gameplay

Combat is, as in Black Gate, automatic and uninteresting, though it is slightly more difficult now overall.

The rest of the gameplay is largely the same as in the Black Gate as well, though dialogue has been slightly expanded with more complex trees.

Really the main difference comes down to the differences in the world and available items rather than any mechanical changes.

Some of the most significant items are a ring (obtained from the Silver Seed expansion) that provides infinite magical reagents and a magical goblet that provides endless nourishment. These things are not nearly as broken as what the Forge of Virtue provides in the Black Gate, but are still nice conveniences.

While this game has less towns than its predecessor, it does have larger and more interesting dungeons overall. The one issue with them is that some of the puzzles in them are not very interesting (often amounting to just placing items on pedestals and such).

This is also where I should talk about one of the game’s major flaws: It is the first one where the influence of Electronic Arts began to manifest. It is nothing too major at this point (just wait until we get to Ultima 8 and especially Ultima 9) but it does mean there are some questlines that were left unfinished due to EA rushing things.

It’s not just questlines either. The towns were supposed to be larger and with more content, the player was meant to eventually gain a ship they could freely sail like in the Black Gate, and a major plot element had to be changed. The Silver Seed expansion in particular feels incomplete and inconsequential in terms of story, and is largely centered around four dungeons to explore for unique loot (both the dungeons and the loot are reasonably good at least).

I also dislike just how many plot-critical items are in the game. I would like to use my backpack space for other things.

The game also offers a decent amount of locations to explore, including many optional curiosities unrelated to the main quest.

Aesthetics

While the engine and graphics are largely the same as in the Black Gate, there have been graphical upgrades, most notably in the form of significantly more detailed and lifelike portraits for NPCs.

But I would say that the biggest aesthetic changes here have more to do with the game’s design and atmosphere. 

Serpent Isle is a far more unfriendly place than Britannia, and you will be accosted by assassins and deceivers during your quest. It makes for a more grim adventure.

The whole game has a much darker tone than any in the series since Ultima 5, I think. The world is completely falling apart due to the imbalance, with storms obliterating Fawn’s fleet, goblins making significant gains in their war against Monitor, and plagues are starting to break out. You do get the sense as you explore the world that this is a land experiencing its final days.

And things only get worse from here too.

I also like how unique several of the locations are. The city of Monitor is not just a walled city, it is populated by knights who organize into three different commands that rule the city. Meanwhile the city of Fawn is completely unlike any other in the series, being built entirely over the sea.

It is good stuff, and I wish they had had the time to expand and develop these locations as they had originally planned.

Accessibility

Exactly as good in this regard as the Black Gate, I think. Even the increased difficulty (which is still not enough to make this a “hard” game by any means) does not really matter since at the start of the game you get a magical hourglass that can be used to resurrect any fallen party members and the local monks will take care of your own mortality as well.

If there’s frustrations to be had here, they may come more from some of the less intuitive puzzles than anything and plot points than anything. The core gameplay is still extremely simple.

While the game can theoretically be played on its own, I strongly recommend playing at least the Black Gate first to learn a little about the events that led to this whole expedition. The two games really are part of the same package.

Conclusion

Between the Black Gate and Serpent Isle, I always got the impression that the Black Gate was the more popular of the two. I can understand why, as Serpent Isle was a bit rushed and lacks the open exploration that has defined the previous games in the series.

Despite this, I remember loving it about as much as the Black Gate largely because of the atmosphere and how the game feels. It is a particularly easy recommendation for those who enjoyed the previous game, as the engine and mechanics remain largely the same.

I also recommend this game for anyone who may be interested in following the story or looking for an immersive experience, but who doesn’t want to bother too much with stuff like combat or numbers. Even just watching the NPCs go about their day can be fun in this game.

[loreolympusanalysisforfunsies]

How to put this-

What are the ethics of using queer coded characters and themes in a narrative that has no explicitly queer characters?

Welp, that question can be asked of many stories in media. Like, a metric shit ton. A lot. But since Lore Olympus is the flavour of the week (month? year?) for my brain, that's what I'll be applying this question to. And right away, asap, I'm talking critically about Lore Olympus. Critically as in taking a subject and thinking about what themes are in it and what those themes mean to me as a reader, not critically as in badmouthing it. Also, I'm no expert and I've only read my favourite chapters fifty million times, the other chapters maybe three times. So there's stuff I could have missed, please feel free to correct me. Also also I will be using the word queer a lot because that's what I am and what I'm talking about.

Just wanted to make that crystal queer.

Alrighty, queer-coded characters in Lore Olympus. Hello Eros, nice to be talking about you again. He's a fan favourite for some pretty good reasons. Compelling romantic sideplot, clear adversary to the asshat, and he's just plain fun. There can be plenty of heavy content when he's around, but he's also the guy that lightens the mood. Some of the faces he makes-fucking priceless. And hoo boy does he come off as the gay best friend. Romantic advice, shopping trips, make overs, the squeeing, those are some very old tropes. But he's not the gay best friend. Or at least, so vaguely bi/pan/etc that it can be written off as none of the above. The only hint we get that he's not straight is that orgy mentioned waaay back in the beginning. After that we get his backstory with Psyche and no mention of other interests since. The gay best friend trope was made when hollywood and equivalents stopped being quite so nasty to the LGBTQ+ community, but not quite to the point of queer positivity. It took signifiers that were used maliciously in the past (feminine aspects and interests) and put a humerous spin on them. Ah look, it's a guy that can expertly apply make up, how funny and nonthreatening he is. Maybe it was that funny and nonthreatening bit that the author was going for. Both Persephone and the readers just endured some pretty awful shit, so here's a new person for her support system that isn't threatening at all and brings along some lighter atmosphere. Super flamboyant and never shown to be sexually attracted to her-that's perfect, in you go.

And honestly, seeing a man that's in a relationship with a woman whose also in touch with his emotions and feminine side, that's pretty great. But it comes in a narrative completely without queer characters. When I first saw him I was pretty sure he was a stereotype. Now that I know he isn't, I feel mixed. Straight dudes should be able to be soft. But a story with so many characters, that talks seriously about their complicated inner lives, with all these romantic relationships, all that with no queer representation? Ehhhhhhh-

Getting to the endpoint a little early there, so onto the other queer coded characters. Most notable are Athena and Artemis. Athena is very androgynous in her design. And Artemis has a very telling moment with Persephone in which she tries to push the conversation away from the danger zone of her personal feelings. A loud, embarrassed exclamation that she isn't attracted to anyone? Yeah I've seen that one before. And here's where I'd like to think somewhat positively, because this is going somewhere. It might just be a similar line as Persephone, being torn about her membership with the eternal maidens. Or Lore Olympus Artemis may very well be a lesbian or asexual as her mythic counterpart has been. There's a lot of potential in her storyline.

Heck, there's a lot of potential all over this story. Greek mythology is filled to the brim with LGBTQ+ people. Skip Zeus and Apollo, because fuck those guys. We've got Achilles and Patroclus as the most well-known, but to be fair the mortals don't heavily feature in this one. Athena was bi, Hermes was bi, Dionysus isn't born yet but again, super bi. Aphrodite and Poseidon are both in open relationships within the story, and oh hey bi the way in the myths. Just saying, the greeks were very very gay.

But even if they weren't. Guess what. When you write a story of your very own, you can make your characters be anything. Case and point with Hera. This is a very, very different version of Hera. Sure, she can be capricious and act on a whim. But this isn't the same goddess that committed cruelties against women that Zeus forced himself on. At least to our knowledge. Nerp, this author has reinterpreted her to be a very sympathetic woman, and that's without changing what she went through. Hera was always someone that endured a lot of crap from her husband, but I didn't feel bad for her when I read her stories in class because hey, she was a vindictive shrew. By changing the patriarchal perspective that has some pretty strong opinions on women scorned, to the perspective of a woman author sympathetic to the woman character who is constantly shit on by everyone around her, the author has improved on the original subject material. Change, it's a good thing.

Ok, queer themes. Again I'd like to make a point right away, and the point here is the themes I'm about to talk about don't just affect queer people. These are lived experiences for many. But being kept naive of an outside world, being unable to explore your sexuality, people trying to override you when you tell them what's best for you and your body, are all things that deeply affect the queer community. There's a very good reason this fandom has so many LGBTQ+ members. Many moments in this story are affirming to us, and that's a good thing. This story also has a lot to say about gender roles. Persephone is the most recent of women that people are looking to use for their own selfish advancement. Hera has a very powerful line about sacrificing her power and potential to make Zeus feel comfortable and happy. And boy is that a line that fits millions of women and afabs throughout history. Making people comfortable by keeping a part of yourself shoved down, whether it's your ability in a field of work or your identity. Or maybe your disability. Or your religion. Your background. Lore Olympus hits pretty hard with a very real feeling of sacrificing bits of yourself to make what people see more palatable, easier for them to deal with. Hera and Persephone have breakdowns over these forced versions of themselves, the facade that's too much to keep up.

These problems don't exist in a bubble. They are problems that weave through many different subcultures and peoples. And unfortunately, some affected people can be excluded when such problems are addressed. I don't think the author decided to be exclusive on purpose. The kindest interpretation is that this simply isn't something that affected her directly, so she either didn't think to include it or didn't feel comfortable writing from a pov she doesn't share. The less kind interpretation is that she wanted to appeal to as broad a demographic as possible, and decided this was the way to do it. I'm not inclined to think that way of her, because she's showed herself to be very empathetic and thoughtful with pretty much every other aspect. But when we become so close with a piece of media, a story that touches us so deeply, one that strives to be realistic in themes like abuse and trauma, the question comes up. What about us? Do we exist? Are our problems seen? The end result of a narrative using queer-coded characters and themes without explicitly being queer is a disconnect. A feeling of separation from a story and characters that I otherwise feel very close to. A worry that these problems are only seen by, only affecting, heterosexual and cisgendered peoples. And I realize this would be hard to cover for someone who hasn't written queer characters in this story yet, someone who may or may not be LGBTQ+ themselves. But even so, even though there would be mistakes and bad faith critics and all else, I would rather she try. I would rather be seen.

[ecrivainsolitaire]

What if Doctor Who Fam was better written?

I’ve been thinking how to fix The Fam from Chibnall’s DW run by rewriting the first episode.  No preamble, imagine I made a clever intro, and hear me out for a moment.

In the first episode we learn three things about Ryan. He’s a Youtuber, he has dyspraxia, and he hates his grandpa. The first two issues are barely brought back up, and the last one is dropped like two episodes in. So here’s my idea: make Ryan into a wannabe Logan Paul. He’s trying to get big on YouTube so he can get rich and stop living at home. The problem is, he’s a bit too self-obsessed and can’t really think outside of what would make good content. He stumbles with the aliens because he’s trying to film something cool, and he’s an asshole who gradually learns to care for others through series 11. Also, he can actually bike; he just doesn’t like to do it because he falls often. He’s also very resentful towards Graham, because...

Graham is abusive. In this version, Grace died a year ago, and Grant blames Ryan for it (make something up). He treats him like shit, but he doesn’t kick him out because he still has a sense of obligation to Grace’s memory. They hate each other but on the first episode Jazz and the Doctor confront him about it, eventually he tries to sacrifice himself to save Ryan and starts trying to build a relationship with him. Ryan doesn’t reciprocate, that’s their character arc for the season. He also has a nasty habit of talking over the Doctor, which is often called out by...

Jazz in this version isn’t a cop, because fuck the police; she’s an EMT. She comes from a wealthy family and has always been looking out for Ryan; helping him out of childhood accidents inspired her to want to help people. On the first episode she gifts Ryan a very expensive camera but he doesn’t take it because he doesn’t want to risk breaking it while biking since he doesn’t have a car. (Before I continue, disclaimer: while I have some experience with motor limitations, dyspraxia isn’t something I’m very familiar with; I’ll be basing this off my own experience and if I mess up somewhere please let me know in the notes). She has trouble learning to respect when people don’t want her help, and her arc for the season is realising Ryan is actually able to do much more than she gives him credit for, even if he still does need her help sometimes. When the Doctor lands, she takes her pulse and realises the Doctor has two hearts. She’s also very outspoken against bigots and keeps grant in his place.

Finally, the Doctor. They had so much wasted potential for such an obvious plot idea, and probably everyone has talked about this already, but: The Doctor has always presented as a white Englishman. He’s arrogant and a know-it-all and is used to people taking him as an authority just out of his word. While this dynamic can be preserved on other planets (and would be the perfect excuse for an “I wanna get away from humans from a day” to give her a solo episode), it would be far more interesting for the Earth-based episodes to explore her struggle at realising she just lost quite a ton of privilege. Note that I’m not giving her gender dysphoria, because fuck if I know how that would affect a Time Lord, but instead focusing on the fact that people don’t treat her with the same assumed authority they did before. Her first encounter with Graham she experiences Earth sexism for the first time and realises she has to make adjustments in order to get things done. She definitely takes her time to school an asshole or two, River Song style, because this is that kind of show. Also, she has a scene where someone tries to call her “Doctoress” or something stupid like that and she reaffirms that her name is still The Doctor. That serves little purpose in the English version but it gives room for international dubs to keep the name they’ve been using for her forever and avoid struggling with syllable counts by turning her into “Dottoressa” in Italian, for example. Also, she’s not racist in this version.

So as they become a team they settle on roles: Ryan is the adventure seeker who keeps trying to film cool things for YouTube (on the last episode he needs to sacrifice his phone to save Graham; he loses all the data but gains a grandpa, cue cheesy music). Jazz is the one who keeps trying to save everyone wherever they go and learns she’s not to blame if she can’t save everyone, which is a good lesson for an EMT. Grant slowly transitions into the designated White Hat Karen who gets idiots to listen to the Doctor, and the Doctor gets to learn a lesson or two about the way her female companions have historically been treated.

So that’s how I’d do it. Any comments?

[whetstonefires]

Your post about romance was so spot on and this is from someone who really likes reading romances some of the time. I just wish there were more books where friendships (which after all make up the majority of people's relationships!!) were given the same weight and importance as romance gets unthinkingly. Like, I want books or fic which show the development of two (or more) new friends *as the plot and main part of the book*, and the same thing for the progression of pre-established friendship.

Human relationships are varied and complex and interesting and limiting writing to mainly concerning romantic or dating ones is infuriating! I enjoy reading character driven stuff, which is why I like some romances but I really want to see similarly detailed deep studies of friendship. Friendships are so important, and romantic relationships do not supersede them.  Obviously there is gendered bias against romance as a genre but that is not the only reason to be uninterested in romance damnit!

Sorry for ranting in your inbox about romance and thanks for the post

Hah thank and welcome. Very true!

Yeah, the problem is not just how ubiquitous romance is but the inevitability of it. So many people are so much in the habit of hanging their emotional investment on ‘couples getting together’ that not putting one in is a risk, as a creator, and the faint suggestion of a possibility that a romance might eventuate between two characters constitutes a promise that the audience will be outraged to see not followed through.

So making a story focus at all on a relationship between two people who are considered valid potential romantic partners means having to go through incredible backflips and contortions as a writer to get away with not pairing them up, or there will be outrage. There will be outrage anyway, but hopefully on a contained scale that doesn’t have people throwing your book away.

(The easiest way, of course, is to give one or both of them an alternate partner, but then you either have to build up that relationship as the central focus instead, because you aren’t allowed to love anyone that much and not be romantically involved or be romantically involved For Real with anyone but whoever you love most, or accept that you’ve plastered on a beard of some kind in a way that at this point makes your main duo look even more romantic to people who are looking for that in the first place, even if it lets you write a plot that doesn’t acknowledge this.)

This has contributed enormously to the cultural truism ‘men and women can’t be friends.’ They aren’t allowed to be. And this weird intense romantic pressure is now increasingly extending to same-sex friendships, and it’s like...it’s good that gay visibility and acceptance are growing! That’s great!

But it means that all relationships are increasingly exposed to this honestly fucked up set of expectations. That every single love of any intensity is romantic and probably sexual. That that’s the only love that’s real, or that really matters. With occasional exemptions carved out for parents.

And that’s cultural, I want to say. The inclusion of and an interest in the romantic lives of characters in fiction is definitely natural and practically inevitable, but the outsize role it occupies in our current media culture is abnormal and totally non-compulsory. The central role of romance in so much of narrative is just...a pattern, a narrative schema that currently holds sway, born of an assortment of historical accidents and trends, and I don’t think it’s a good one.

I think it would be better for us as a culture and all our individual relationships for that particular social construct to be broken down.

Because this cultural obsession with The Romance in media mirrors and continually recreates the obsession with The Romance in real life. You know how many people are making themselves miserable by either being in a relationship predicated on the need to have one, any one, rather than actual mutual affection, or about not having a love interest currently at any given moment?

Like, quite separately from the actual frustrated romantic feelings themselves, people feeling like they are less or failures or just...unfinished somehow, because they don’t have a romantic partner. It’s so harmful and absurd! We all know this!

And there are of course a lot of sociological factors that have led to that point as well, but it’s linked particularly closely I think to the atomization of modern society.

You’re not likely to retain any particular community for long--we move around so much over the course of our lives, anything you have is designed to be taken apart. School friends are only rarely retained after school, work friends are only until you get a new job, family is quite often something to be avoided or something you have to leave behind, and not usually an extended network anymore anyway.

We are always moving into new contexts, or knowing we might be moved, and holding onto relationships from one context into another is generally regarded as an unusual feat betokening particular, though not lionized, devotion, and leaning on these relationships ‘too much’ or pursuing them with ‘too much’ energy is regarded with deep suspicion.

This, too, is not particularly normal in the human experience. We are not psychologically designed for this level of impermanence. And we have developed very few structures as a culture thus far to make up for it, which is why the modern adult is so famously, dangerously lonely.

But we have all these social protocols for acquiring a person and holding onto them. A person who’s just yours, all yours, who it is promised will fulfill all those gaping needs all by themselves, and if they don’t it’s because you or they are wrong, and need either a different partner or fixing.

The fact that this is insane and not how romance works over 90% of the time is irrelevant to the dream of it, and the dream overwhelms and controls the reality. I agree that codependency is really fucking romantic, and having a kind and supportive mutual one is a lovely fantasy! It’s just...

A lot of harm eventuates from pursuing this fantasy in reality with a media-based conviction that it is 1) a reasonable thing to expect and 2) a necessary precondition for wellbeing and worthiness.

But we have poured so much cultural freight and need into this one single relationship format. At this point having need in any other direction is regarded as disordered and suspect and probably a misdirected application of sexual desire.

The law, too, has put a lot of energy into supporting the focus on seeking the romance as life goal, because the nuclear family is built on the codependent marriage, and capitalism likes the nuclear family very much. The nuclear family is extremely vulnerable to market pressures and bad at collective action, and tends to produce new tiny humans whose main social outlet has been within the school system, which is specifically structured to condition you to accept abusive workplace conditions as a normal precondition of existence, and not to attempt too much intimacy.

Ahem. Spiraled there. But! It’s all connected! Many of the privileges piled onto the institution of marriage were put there specifically because the nuclear family was considered desirable for the expansion of the economy. That’s clearly documented historical fact.

So yeah, the modern cultural obsession with the romance is a symptom of collective emotional disorder, and it chugs along at the expense of the more complex emotional support infrastructures most of us need and deserve.

It’s not just about me wanting representation, wanting an image in the narratives of my culture where I can see myself with the potential for happiness. Everyone needs this. We learn so much about how to be, how to relate to others, from media at this point, since the school system and other weird age-hierarchy stuff keeps us largely segregated from human society for a majority of our growing years and limits our exposure to live examples.

So the paucity of in-depth explorations of friendship, of mutual support, of widespread narrative acceptance that you can have a good life without a romance as its central support pillar, is harmful to people in general.

-

It’s funny, I get frustrated about this periodically, when a piece of media lets me down, or even when I’m following along a funny piece of meta and then the punchline is ‘and the ace character is obviously in denial about how they’re already dating their favorite person’ or whatever.

(The meta is annoying on a surface level and distressing on a deeper level because it’s a threat; so many times a good platonic relationship will buckle under public pressure and it doesn’t matter how asexual, how uninterested in romance, how emphatically platonic the affection has been established as being, The Romance arrives in the next installment of the story because it’s what people expect. Which reinforces the general perception that any other love is illegitimate, lesser, and as soon as it’s meant to be taken seriously it has to be crammed into that one valid shape, and invalidates future insistences in the same mode.

Seriously people stop doing this, we long since reached the point where a character saying in words ‘I have no romantic interest in [person]’ is perceived as a glaring neon sign that they’re destined to get together and that does not do good things for fostering a culture of consent. Obviously people are in denial sometimes but it should not be understood to be the rule.)

But I don’t get upset about it until someone starts in with reasons I’m bad and wrong for not liking these norms.

Like, whatever, media does not cater to my needs, I’ll cope, but when people start trying to get in my head and make me not only responsible for my own discomfort that I’m managing thanks but dishonest and malevolent I...get upset. There’s history there, okay.

‘You don’t care about this ship because you’re homophobic’ ‘you don’t want a love interest in the sequel because you’re racist’ ‘you don’t like romance in stories because you’re a misogynist’ fucking stop.

And occasionally it’s like ‘i guess you have the right to feel that way but how dare you talk about it where other people might hear’ which...well, is particularly common and particularly ironic in the context of people hung up on gay representation.

If we as a society had a healthy relationship with romance, there wouldn’t be negative side effects to that crowd’s pursuit of their worthy goal of applying that schema in places it has been Forbidden, but as it is we don’t, and there are.

[dafodilion]

okay so like, this might be lowkey controversial but, for the time being i’m not mad with The Letter For The King. Do i think certain things could have been handled better? Absolutely. But it’s definitely set up for another season at least. Tiuri’s mom hasn’t been seen since like, ep 2 or 3, The Queen had the black eyes that they haven’t explored yet, Lavinia hasn’t found the road, and Iona and Jaro’s strange acquantanceship is just starting.

I’m definitely upset about the death but I want to see what the show writers do with it. If it’s kept through the story and used as a source of inspiration/determination and not completely forgotten about then its one thing but if it is completely forgotten then it begs the question of why the character was introduced in the first place if they were only going to die.

This got long so analysis under the cut

I know a lot of people are upset that Tiuri was teased as the hero but it turned out to be Lavinia who had magic and I just have to say that Tiuri is definitely the protagonist in this story. It is completely centered around him. Not only does he tick most of the ‘hero’ boxes from Campbell’s The Hero’s Journey, he’s also the one we establish the emotional connection with first. I think that’s a part of why a lot of people are upset about the magic thing. He was designated ‘special dude’ in the first few episodes and then everyone finds out that there’s nothing supernatural about him. But what I think a lot of people are forgetting is that the thing that makes Tiuri the hero/protagonist in TLFTK is that he chose to be. He made the choice to help the old man at the chapel door. He’s also a kid. They all are. And save for Lavinia, they likely haven’t had much agency in a lot of their choices because they’re kids. They’re only just starting to be baby adults. So Tiuri chose to go help and that lead to him travelling across the continent.

Another part is the race thing. I’m not going to comment on this too much, not because I don’t think it’s there, I think it is to an extant, but more because I don’t want to make any rash judgments on the writers who had six episodes to tell a story that could very easily have been cut back from ten which is the usual netflix original s1 episode count. They also address that Tiuri does endure certain racist attitudes from other characters through the series. This in mind i’m really hoping that there is some nuance going into the writing that we’ll be able to see in future seasons.

Tiuri also has a questionable Lineage. His home was a victim of genocide and his and his Mother are, for all that we know, some of the few who are left. He doesn’t know who his biological father was. It was teased that his father was a Shaman and while I want to believe that, the information was given when we still thought that he had magic. It’s also shown that Shaman is used as a gender neutral term and I’ll get to that later. His mother tells him not to worry about who his father was and it could be that she was trying to get him to accept Sir Tiuri as his father and that it really doesn’t matter, or it could be that she said it for complicated plot reasons.

Speaking of parents, we have Lavinia. Lavinia’s character is interesting. She was introduced as a self-serving and very ambitious noble/princess who wants to help her people in a sustainable way. Her father is shown to see a quick fix and try to take it. Lavinia wants to find the road that ran from two kingdoms directly through her town(?). She’s done the research and the math and the planning. She just needs to go do it. That’s her goal. Then we’re introduced to the idea of her mother. We know almost nothing about her mother other than she’s gone. There’s mysterious circumstances there that have yet to be explored but they’re set up to be major plot points in the future. Also, just a side note about the magic, we only know of three cultures in TLFTK when there could easily be hundreds of cultures around the world. For there to only be one with magic would be bad world building and just on the detail we’re getting for future season set ups I want to say that the world building wouldn’t be that bad but I could be wrong.

I mentioned the gender neutral term used for Shaman and it being used to describe a magic user. For the time being, and until we get more info on the world building and term usage for the Netflix series because it apparently does differ wildly from the source material, I’m inclined to believe that Lavinia is a Shaman. So was(is?) Prince Veridian. Lavinia’s mother could have been the Shaman being talked about when Prince Veridian was interrogating the Shaman in the village. Now I’m not trying to say that Lavinia could be a woc in this world, I’m just saying that we don’t really know a whole lot about the magic being used and it’s cultural significance throughout the world, and that what we do know is incredibly limited.

Now, names are important for characters not only to distinguish them to readers but the also tell something about the characters. The name Lavinia also belonged to the wife of Aeneus who in Roman mythology was a survivor of Troy and son of Aphrodite and is an ancestor to Romulus and Remus, founders of Rome. One part of her story that her hair catches fire as an omen promising good things for her people and bad things for the latins. This is similar to how Lavinia in TLFTK almost looks to be on fire as ‘the light’ in the battle scene in e6. This is so interesting just from a meta standpoint so I wanted to point it out. I haven’t read the book or the sequel so I don’t know anything about the source material but from a writing perspective that’s a hell of a derivitave. Side note, Tiuri could possibly be derived from Turi meaning ‘of Thor’ or Tiri meaning ‘swift one’ from persian mythology or ‘outsider’ in ijaw, and these are theoretical, it could just be a name. The meanings do come from behindthename and babynames so the meanings could be entirely wrong.

Now Iona. I lover her character and I can’t wait to see more of her. She’s competent, knows what she does and doesn’t know, she can work in a group or independently, takes charge, and can kick ass. She’s also a kid, which is super important. We don’t know much about her history other than her parents are dead and that she’s likely lived a pretty rough life to be somewhat proficient in thievery, survival skills, sleight of hand, and ‘bar speak’ for lack of a better term. Past this we don’t really know much about her, or the rest of the characters for that matter. We have six plot based episodes and that’s it, so from here it’s gonna be less character analysis and more general analysis.

I think that she’s being set up as a foil to Tiuri. A foil is one character who contrasts another. They’re not necessarily opposites. One of the reasons I think this is so is because of how competent Iona is and how incompetent Tiuri is. She goes off with an adult who now(?) has no real ties to anyone, but he’s following her. (This would seem creepy but I see it more as an exasperated adult accidentally adopted an ambitious kid and now feels obligated to make sure they don’t get themselves killed.) Tiuri ends the series belonging to the knighthood. Speaking of the knighthood, this was the one thing that Iona was sure she would get and Tiuri was sure he wouldn’t. She had the confidence and skill to match and Tiuri was just kind of. There.

Now, we know so little of the characters mentioned above and even less of Foldo, Guissipo, and Piak, but they are intrinsically connected to eachother.

Its implied that they grew up together. Piak knows that Foldo tells good stories. So the three of them know each other and that makes the little romance between Foldo and Guissipo a bit more believable once that is realized. Like I said earlier, I really want to know what the show writers deal with Guissipo’s death and how it affects Foldo and Piak. I don’t really expect it to hit Tiuri or Lavinia so hard, maybe Iona if she knows, but it should definitely hit Foldo and Piak. I really hope that in the future, it’s addressed how they both grieve individually and together.

I think the only other character that I really wanna talk about is Queen Alianor. She has Tiuri’s mother and had black eyes, but she also knighted all of the boys. i really want to see what they do with that only because I don’t know what could happen.

Anyway this was more of a ‘okay people are mad about a lot of things and while I know and can agree with why, we don’t really have a lot of information as to what is planned especially with only 6 episodes adding up to less than 300 minutes and a story that could have been so much longer.’ I know that it has issues and that the show has hit certain pitfalls. I know. But I want to hope that there was a reason behind what they’ve done and with more time we’ll get to see those reasons.

[ambrosiaicecreem]

93 Fun OC Asks Because Why Not ( Pt 1 / 2 ) 

here we go, but helene style. courtesy of @simpink. LETS GOOOO

BASICS: 

1. What is their gender?

Cis Female

2. What is their sexuality? 

Homosexual

3. What is the meaning behind their name? Do they have any nicknames? 

Helene means “torch”, “beautiful”, “light”, “bright”, and “shining” in Greek. She was named after an Amazon by the same name, who was a daughter of Tityrus and an Amazon who fought Achilles and died after he seriously wounded her.  Her only nickname is “Hel”, which she’s called by her siblings and her friends. 

4. Do they have any siblings? How many? Are they older or younger? Which sibling are they the closest with? 

Helene has 4 known siblings: Ajax, Kassandra, and twins Jason and Hector. They are all younger than her. She’s closest with Ajax. 

5. What’s their relationship with their parents like? What about other relatives? 

Helene is a total daddy’s girl. She was always closer with Silas versus Serafina. Her relationship with her mother is still strained, but thanks to recent events, they’re working on improving their relationship with each other. Her only other known relative is her Uncle Marcus, who she has a fairly good relationship with. 

6. What would they give their life for?

Family

7. Are they in a romantic relationship? With who? How did they meet? 

She is single... for now.

8. What do they believe will happen to them after they die? Does this belief scare them? 

Helene believes in the thought of an Afterlife. It doesn’t scare her as much as you think it would. 

9. What is their favorite color? Favorite animal?

Yellow & Aegean Cats, a domestic cat native to Greece. Fun fact: she was never allowed to have a cat growing up but Silas would let her feed the outdoor cats. 

10. What are some of their talents/skills?

Helene has a vast knowledge of world history, given her interest in Archaeology. She tends to know random facts about almost everything because of how much she studies. She’s a skilled Theatre Hand, working mostly on set design.

11. If they could make a mark on history, what would they like it to be? 

Saving the Library of Alexandria.

12. How old are they? When is their birthday? 

Helene is 19 years old. Her birthday is April 23rd.

13. What do they do for fun? 

She likes to read, go hiking, explore historical ruins, visit museums, and painting. 

14. What is their favorite food? How often do they get to eat it? 

Helene’s favorite food is Bourdeto, fish cooked in tomato sauce with onion, garlic, and red spicy pepper. Which is ironic.. considering the vampire “allergy” to garlic. She’s actually ate enough of it to not be as bothered by garlic anymore. But because of the smell and how it affects her family members, she only eats it when she’s by herself in the house for a long time. 

15. What was something their parents taught them? 

Helene was taught to have a kind and patient heart from Silas. Despite the strained relationship, before things went south for them Serafina taught Helene to always stick up for herself. To not let anybody walk all over her and tell her how she should feel.. even if its her own mother. 

16. Are they religious? 

She makes offerings to the Greek gods and participates in their holidays. She also prays the most out of her siblings. 

17. Where were they born? 

Athens, Greece

18. What languages can they speak? Where did they learn these languages? 

English, Greek, and she’s trying to learn Latin. She knows Greek and English because of where she grew up, and she’s learning Latin all on her own. 

19. What is their occupation? 

Full-Time University Student. Whenever she finds something of historical significance however, she also submits those to the appropriate groups which is how she also makes money. 

20. Do they have any titles? How did they earn them? 

No titles yet. 

PERSONALITY: 

21 & 22. What is their favorite & least favorite thing about their personality?

She really likes how well she can remember things she’s studied, but she dislikes her lack of confidence in herself. 

23. Do they get lonely easily? 

Yes, and that stems from her issues with her mother. 

24. Do you know their MBTI type? 

ENTP: The Debater. Smart, Curious, Intellectual. 

25 & 26. What is their biggest flaw? Are they aware of their flaws?

Her lack of confidence. She’s totally aware. 

27 & 28. What is their biggest strength? Are they aware of their strengths? 

Her sense of loyalty towards those she cares about. And yes, she’s aware. 

29. How would they describe their own personality? 

“Loyal, organized, a bit up-tight at times.. Maybe a little more boring than my siblings.”

30. When frightened, will they resort to “fight” or “flight”? 

Flight

31. Does this character ever put somebody else’s needs before their own? Who do they do this for? How often do they do this?  

She tends to put those that she trusts’ needs over her own. It’s almost like a subconscious thing more often than not. 

32. What is their self esteem like?

When it comes to her smarts, HIGH. When it comes to everything else, LOW. 

33. What is their biggest fear? How would they react to having to face it? 

Disappointing her family. She already thought she was living it with her mother, but if Silas were to EVER be disappointed in her, she’d feel like her world would end. 

34. How easily do they trust others with their secrets? With their lives? 

Secrets are a no-go. Not everybody gets that, and its only really a select few in her inner circle. With her life, she’d only trust her father and her siblings. 

35. What is the easiest way to annoy them? 

Belittling her decisions. 

36. What is their sense of humor like? Give an example of a joke they would find humorous? 

“Why can’t your nose be 12 inches long? Cause then it’d be a foot”

37. How easy is it for hem to say “I love you”? Do they say it without meaning it? 

She’s never said “I love you” to someone who isn’t in her family before. It’s safe to say she’s saving that for her one and only. 

38. What do others admire most about their personality? 

She doesn’t really notice it, but in times of high stress she steps up and becomes a leader. 

39. What does their happily ever after look like? 

Again, this spoils the ENDINGGGG. But hint: a family of her own. 

40. Who do they trust most? Is that trust mutual?

Silas. Feeling is mutual. 

PHYSICAL PROFILE:

41. What does their laugh sound like? Do they snort when they laugh? How often do they laugh? 

Helene definitely snorts when she laughs really hard. She tries to avoid it as much as she can just because of it. She does laugh pretty often though, regardless. 

42 & 43. What is their favorite and least favorite thing about their physical appearance? 

She likes how toned she is from working out. She doesn’t like her hair. She feels really insecure with the length of it, but she doesn’t cut it because of... reasons. 

44. Do they have any scars? If so, what are the stories behind those scars? 

No scars

45. How would they describe their own appearance? 

“Plain jane, boring. Looks a little lost, honestly.” 

46. How easily can they express emotions? How easily can they hide emotions? 

She’s honestly not very good at hiding her emotions. She wears them all on her face.