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I think that part of what like. kills me about the whole media literacy and critical thinking aspect of enjoying media these days is that people refuse to like. contextualize that
A. Bad media can still hold significant meaning to people
B. Media made for a demographic you arenât apart of is not inherently bad media
C. Media made for and consumed by the opposite demographic is not inherently shallow or flawed nor is it above criticism for its media tropes either.
#unimportant thoughts#i dont feel like dropping specifics in post but like. people online drive me legitimately insane#good example is Ready Player One. its an okay book but people LOVE to hate on it for being a shallow nostalgia grab for old male demographic#and like. yeah. but also comsider that it Was written earnestly by a man in that demographic? and that people enjoyed it???#and maybe im soft hearted but my Dad was a nerd in the 80âs so both of us reading that book and comparing our experiences with it and#learning about his childhood from him. it was awesome yk??? was the book groudbreaking or particularly moving? no#are there a lot of fair criticisms you can make about the book regarding its poorly written female characters and painfully male tone#throughout? absolutely. its not the most vile piece of media its barely mediocre and its not the best thing since sliced bread either#and it kills me because instead of being able to have conversations like thay#people just attack and attack and attack and ATTACK#I donât know i think the rise of this booktook wattpad level romance smut is another big part of this#are those books incredible? no. definitely not. are they decent? yeah theyre fine enough#are their characters shallow; do they follow tropes; are the characters clearly romanticized objects for us to googoo eye over? yeah#so fucking what??? they arent winning pulitzer prizes theyre just popular online and easily accesible#people love consumbable media thats not an inherently bad thing#and i think its hypocritical for people to defend one and attack the other or even to attack both#media doesnt exist to be appropriately Deep and Meaningful before people are allowed to consume and enjoy it#like. i think theres a LOT of levels of undestanding compassion and respect that people need to reach before these conversations are worth#anything. because right now it really feels like girls and boys arguing back and forth on the playground over whos show is better#anyways. i could go on but i wont.#bottom line i suggest you take a deep look at how ârealisticâ and âmeaningfulâ the media you enjoy actually fucking is before you start#critizing other media for being too shallow or unrealistic depictions of something#hate to break it to you guys but 90% of fictional characters are fictional and dont act like people irl ÂŻ\_(ă)_/ÂŻ
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forgot i saw this the other day and . i have to giggle. as someone ostensibly way deeper into bb than gg.... just factually categorically backwards
#crow.txt#like first of all dont you ever get tired. why are we pitting two bad bitches against each other#but also like just. objectively. i love both. i have a lot of nostalgia and feelings about bb. it is worse đ#i love it. it does suck. these thoughts can coexist#like on some level there has to be self awareness but it was presented kinda serious like cmon now. is it 2011. chill#it starting out the other way around likeyeah. yeah. thats honestly the truth if we're being real. stupid baby argument to have tho#we are not kids anymore having fights about whose toys are cooler cmon
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actually. đŤˇđ𫸠THOUGHTS ON AVELINE
i think aveline is a CORE da2 character, and her relationship with hawke is super super interesting. sheâs hawkeâs oldest friend in the game & by act 3, maybe the only enduring connection to their homeland & childhood besides the mabari. her voice, her bearing, her stated values are all very noble & movingly fereldanâbut her actions both as guard captain & as a party member should be so profoundly disappointing to hawke almost no matter how you play them, which generates a powerful tension. imo itâs really poignant and adds a lot to the gameâs central tragedy.
because how can hawke cut her off! but look at how she behaves: ignoring the serial killing & sexual assault of isolated older women and elf girls, baiting the arishok, slut shaming isabela, condescending to merrill. but how can they cut her off? the question is a privilege and a torment!
in this way i think she strikingly complements gamlen. like no matter what gamlen does and says to you, your love interest, leandra, the surviving hawke twinâheâs family and the only way into kirkwall. hawke is not permitted to sever those ties. and no matter what aveline does and says to you and all the women in your party, she remains your oldest friend and the only way back to ferelden, emotionally.
both aveline & gamlen will maintain a warm relationship with hawke as long as hawke tolerates their picking on those in proximity to hawkeâbut if hawke pushes back with aggressive dialogue options, both will tone match and became sour and hostile. aveline can be really quite awful to a red hawke, and will throw them to the ground and beat them at 100% rivalry. so thereâs kind of an underlying challenge in both of these characters: how much will hawke, as gang leader & player character, put up with when itâs not directed at them?
of course, for all the nostalgia that seems to occlude avâs wrongdoings in kirkwall, sheâs not really a childhood friend of hawkeâs. she was a grown woman when they met, lothering was lost, and the moment was pretty heated thanks to avelineâs hostile templar husband.
and yet hawke is no more reliable & objective in their treatment of the past than varric is. and aveline is what they have! sheâs standing in for all of ferelden, all of the past before the blight!
and likewise hawke for her! hawke is the only one left in act 3 who remembers wesley! aveline is the only one who remembers the dead hawke twin!
and as reprehensible as some of her decisions are, avelineâs grief for wesley and her enmity toward the old corrupt guard captain are sympathetic and her voice is sexy and husky and beautiful enough that. well im sorry i just lost the plot for a minute. uh
thereâs also the act 3 subplot of the templars trying to take over the city guard, which sets up aveline as the only thing standing between kirkwallâs mages & absolute templar authority in the city. itâs literally her or cullen at his most brainwashed & violent. (to cullenâs credit he also thought it was a bad idea. but i wonât give him so much credit that i believe heâd turn down the position if aveline was removed.) between a knight-commander and a hard place, a pro-mage hawke has to choose the hard place.
so both of my playthroughs iâve felt like hawkeâs friendship with her is at the very least strained, if not completely ruptured, but they have to back her. how much that feels like fucking sandpaper may vary from hawke to hawke.
ultimately i just think she brings a lot to the table. i donât necessarily understand why sheâd be anyoneâs all time #1 favorite companion, but you know.
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You know what the batfams biggest problem is? Their views of each other are clouded by trauma, first impressions, hero worship, expectations and the past. It might be obvious to us, as objective viewers what problems they have but it's not to them.
This is also why Tim, despite keeping track of the Waynes for quite a while doesn't actually know them very well before he joins the family. Even without meeting them he is so tangled up in what he already knows of them and what he expects them to be that he doesn't see a lot of other stuff.
It's also what makes Duke's role so interesting. He's a bit crazy and traumatized, but mostly unrelated to the actual people in the batfam. He can see that Dick's drowning in eldest daughter syndrome, Jason actually wants to reconnect with his family, Bruce actually loves his kids, Tim needs a support system and Damian needs to be a regular kid. The rest of the batfam however has normalized a lot of things that would seem irregular or bad to ordinary people.
Cass might be able to read body language very well but she doesn't have a baseline for normal human emotion. Most of the people she knows are superheroes or criminals. She can understand that her family has problems, but she can't always see that these problems are actually bad things. Which would kind of make her like someone who wants to write a fic where all the characters have actual trauma and problems but also wants them to be a perfect happy family with no issues.
Steph is also unique because I think of her a lot like a casual fan in this fandom. She only interacts with the characters and events she wants to interact with, and in doing so falls into a lot of generalized characterizations and facades that aren't necessarily true.
Bruce meanwhile is stuck in the past. He still remembers his Robins when they were younger and he can't let go of that perception of them. But also that was never really real because he's remember what he wants to remember. He won't think about how reckless and angry Dick and Jason could be, he'll only bring up when they were perfect sons who did nothing wrong. He won't talk about how little supervision and time he spent on Tim and Damian, he'll just talk about the moments when they were close. And by doing this he unintentionally makes the problem worse.
I feel like Barbara would see these issues but she won't deal with them because of essentially nostalgia. Both because she desperately wants to see the past as better than it was and because it hurts her to think about the past.
#batfamily#dick grayson#jason todd#tim drake#damian wayne#batman#batfam#bruce wayne#stephanie brown#cassandra cain#barbara gordan#dc#sad shit
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Criticizing the Critics: ROP, Sexism, and Racism
This is a bit of an anti-anti-anti post, if that makes sense. Before I get into it, please understand that I am absolutely not saying that there are no sexist or racist criticisms of The Rings of Power. I am also not saying that none of the people viciously critiquing or review-bombing The Rings of Power are sexist or racist. I am certain that there are those among them who are.
My argument is that the majority of individuals criticizing the show are not doing it for those reasons and that painting them all with the same broad brush of "you're just racist or a misogynist" is making the divide in the fandom worse.
Anyway, I argue with a lot of people on both Reddit and Tumblr about The Rings of Power and I'd like to bring to the table some trends that I've noticed among them.
The Peter Jackson trilogy was the introduction to LOTR for most modern fans. Most of them have never seen the Bakshi film or listened to the BBC audio drama.
Fewer still have read the whole trilogy, especially recently. Even fewer have read the other adjacent works like The Silmarillion, History of Middle-Earth, Nature of Middle-Earth, et cetera.
A lot of these people are wrapped up in the nostalgia of Peter Jackson's films. There are huge parts of Tolkien's mythos (there isn't any hard canon for a vast majority of his world, which was a purposeful choice that he made as an author) that have no hard canon at all but rather several competing explanations or interpretations. These are portrayed largely inaccurately or entirely ignored in PJ's films - and I understand why. There's only so much you can do in a limited amount of run time.
The Rings of Power is actively digging into a lot of that ignored or broadly brushed over mythos - mythos that people are not familiar with and do not associate with the franchise, on a large scale. Many people have put up blockers in their mind and have no interest in learning about the actual mythos we are presented with in the main and extended works on Arda.
As an example, someone on Reddit called me pedantic for explaining the difference between Sauron shapeshifting and Sauron's fea being disembodied from his fana, which is what we see in episode one of season two, and for explaining that the black slime that comprises his form is probably a nod to Gandalf saying that Durin's Bane, also a fallen and corrupted maia, took on a similar form when he slew it.
These are simple concepts from the mythos that Tolkien wrote but PJ excluded and they are often the most hotly criticized by people who dislike the show.
I think these objections, for the most part, stem from the fact that PJ's trilogy is what a lot of people know and where their nostalgia is rooted. A different adaptation can feel threatening to something they know and love. Imagine you got into some series as a kid not knowing there was a book series behind it and never reading it. You grow up on it. As an adult, it's remade and it's not like the series you remember. Do you care if it adheres more closely to the original source material that you're not even that familiar with? If the pacing and themes and character choices are different from the series you loved?
Look, I'm not excusing these people from being assholes. I just don't think that most of them are actually upset about strong female or POC characters. Some of them definitely are, but in my experience those aren't the arguments that I'm actually coming across in true droves. Reducing their arguments to racism and sexism does nothing to combat their actual complaints, which in bulk seem to stem from ignorance rather than malice.
It's possible to argue in good faith, but we all have to participate. A bigger fandom is better for everyone. Unless someone is obviously being a bigot, try to extend them a little grace if you reach out to them. You might be surprised by the people who come around.
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AreOri and nostalgia
I read a hot take the other day on Twitter that said something along the lines of "AreOri isn't worse than all the other series, y'all all just blinded by nostalgia", and after a lot of pondering, I have to agree. I have not seen the later part of Ares, nor Orion but I think the way they utilised nostalgia was what made it kinda flop. Objectively speaking Ares does a decent job at being a soccer anime, but by so heavily bringing in elements that aim to make fans nostalgic and then fails to handle this nostalgia well is what makes the series lag behind all the others in the franchise.
Ares wanted to do too much all at once by making it into an alternate universe with the og cast included. While at first I was very excited about the reappearance of some of my faves, they did a poor job at handling characterisations. The og characters became bland and uninteresting because obviously the plot had to favour the development of the new main characters. This also ruined many Ares characters since it immediately invited the viewers to compare and contrast Asuto's gang with the og guys; and not only Asuto's team had more personality (which made fans who were hoping to see the og characters disappointed) but they seemed to have eerily similar traits to guys in the og series. Asuto, the sunshine boy, Haizaki with his anger issues and sick-loved-one-in-the-hospital problems, Nosaka the genius, emotionless tactician etc. In my opinion, there is nothing wrong with using a formula that seemed to work in previous installments, but the development of Ares characters 1) came at the detriment of the og character's development who just seemed to be background actors standing around without any real advancement of their own character or of the general plot and 2) was impossible not to compare and contrast the two groups of characters and find way too many similarities which makes the viewer (i am myself included xd) unable to appreciate the Ares characters as their own.
While this was going on, Ares also tried to use some tropes and themes that were already familiar to the audience. Yet again, a great move if executed correctly. My biggest issue with the execution here is that these tropes never fully made use of the full potential of Ares being in an alternate universe. We learn of Akane pretty early on in the series, Akane and Haizaki basically being the equivalent of Gouenji and Yuuka (or Gouenji and Yuuka with a different sort of relationship). Making a slight change in the trope of having a loved one in the hospital (like Haizaki and Akane being childhood friends) should have been enough, had Ares been a series on its own. The audience would have acknowledged that "haha this is a nod to the og series, how clever". But when Gouenji is right there, having gone through the same thing (especially if we considered how similar Akane is to Yuuka and Haizaki to Gouenji) the opportunity for these to bond (or hate, or whatnot, just to interact in any way) over this fact offers itself on a silver a platter, yet the series does not do anything with it, depriving both Haizaki and Gouenji from a potential character development.
The anime decided to create an alternative universe yet it was hesitant to harness the full potential of its alternative universe-ness. They could have used og characters to help them build the main character's personalities through interaction which they seemed to be doing, but at the same time, the og characters only seemed to be hollowed out shells of themselves, only there for a three minute appearance to draw in fans who started watching only to see this one character.
I think that's why I like Victory Road's premise so much. It seems to handle nostalgia much better than Ares did: the characters seemed to be very distinctly unique so far, no og characters to compare them to and a change in the protagonist's general attitude will also serve the game well, in my opinion. It alludes to previous series just enough for it to make fans want to pick it up while also introducing new, unique characters and a plot that replicates but also goes against the established story arc of Inazuma series. (I am aware that the fact that all the charas of previous series will be playable is also a big drawing force and that is the main reason that ppl are excited about this game haha).
So, in my opinion, the main reason people find AreOri the worst series in the franchise is because it establishes that it is going to rely on nostalgia and then does an abysmal job at making use of this nostalgia of the audience. It relies solely on the fans' dedication to their og characters - putting in og characters in the series as dummies with no real purpose, just so fans can say that their fave is in it - and completely forgets about the potential that fans can grow fond of new characters, can appreciate a storyline that is different from what they are used to.
I have to make it clear that I don't hate Ares, I just think that it was not well executed, due to in part in the way it relies on nostalgia, but I myself had enjoyed some parts of it when I was watching. And at the end of the day, it is a soccer anime which is mainly concerned with fancy hissatsus and high-stake matches and not the intricate details of their characters' personalities. I am also grateful for Ares because it was successful in making me nostalgic and indeed pulled me back to the franchise. Despite all the issues I think it has, a lot of characters turned out decent and I was very invested in the story when it first came out. What I also love about Ares is how it revived the fandom here on tumblr: the sakka fridays of watching the new ep without understanding anything, the long analysis posts, the fanarts and fanfics, I will always be thankful for its community-building.
Thanks for coming to my TED talk. xd
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hi im just gonna put my thoughts on every clone high ship i can think of here
jfgogh - i think its cute. i can definitely see jfk like uplifting gogh and him falling in love over like the most basic display of kindness and jfk just being like âhaha woah there guy i didnt mean it like thatâ but then he realises he Does
gogh x gandhi - LOTS of mixed feelings on this one but it is pretty interesting truth be told. like, the way gogh didnt just sit back and take what gandhi did to him and instead retaliated, i like that, i like the thought of two tiny guys having the most unnecessarily intense rivalry ever, but i know that isnât really the way the ship is portrayed often rather than wholesome stuff . you interpret ships however you want though
gfk i think is the name for it - im so sorry as a gandhabe connoisseur i know how annoying it is when people say this about a ship that absolutely entraps you but i think jfk and gandhi are more accurate together as just silly friends who see eachother like once a month. jfk casually brings up a girl hes dating (or rather just having sex with frequently) and gandhi is like wait what happened to the other one? like hes very out of the loop but he listens and they both hype eachother up a lot
ceasgogh, gogh x christo, ceaser x christo, whether itâs any of those seperately or polyamory - i love this one so very much for literally no reason. maybe its like a nostalgia thing cuz i remember people talking about them sometimes in 2020 and being like Aw thatâs cute but idk something about them feels so like. objectively correct. like yep thatâs the little background trio standing together in an episode as they should be
abefk i think - i like it!! even though itâs barely known apart from jokingly i really like the classic 2000s rivalry between a nice boy and an asshole jock thing that was going on between them before ponceâs death, i admit i miss their interactions. i miss how theyd refer to eachother with their last names. also the part in season 2 episode 6 where they both were recalling memories of the grassy knoll and abe went âi used to get food thrown at meâ and jfk continued âi used to be the one throwing that foodâ. i like them
joanabe - i know this one is like barely a ship but i still need to talk about them badly. their friendship is so important to me. the way its always been them whether itâs joan crushing on abe or the other way around, theyâre just so special to eachother in any and every way, and both struggle with the choice of helping the other or doing things that hurt the other but ultimately raise their chances of getting together. tbh im so interested in whats gonna happen with them in the finale, and in the next seasons bc i doubt their back and forth crush thing is gonna last the ENTIRE show like itll be getting a new sort of premise or main character focus which im excited for
joanfk - some of the fanart is absolutely adorable COUGH COUGH ORT SMORT COUG but its just not for me man. biggest two factors as to why i dislike it being how it overtook the fandom, and how to me they just never had any substance. they have a fun dynamic and the season 1 finale was sweet but idk it just never affected me that much. also bc i always knew it was gonna crash and burn. like that is not a stable couple as cute as it is sometimes. like at all. and im happy episode 7 finally addressed it
abe x cleo - again, not really a fondly talked about ship, but they are pretty dear to me. itâs the way cleo was clearly playing with abe at the start but actually saw the charm in him and was actually upset when he finally digested his feelings for joan⌠i really hope theyâre gonna be good friends in the future bc episode 7 seemed to be sort of a start for that friendship and them learning to be ok around eachother after the finaleâŚ
joan x cleo - ive always been scared to talk about this one bc some people see them as sisters, which i Really dont. they never acted in a sisterly way at all, and the living together thing lasted for like what. one episode. so i doubt it had any affect on how they view their relationship. but again absolutely fair if it makes you uncomfortable for this reason! but yeah i do like them. very very good trope and there can be some really cute stuff done with them dynamic wise
gandhabe my heart and soul my romeo and juliet my sun and moon my red and blue - AUGHGGGGG MY ALL TIME FAVOURITE. EVER. IN THE WHOLE SHOW FOR EVER they just have such sweet interactions and everything they do they do with the other in mind and i want them to have an emotional reunion in the season 3 finale sO SHRGFRHRVRRRRR RR RBR R R R. RR R. sorry this is mostly incoherent screaming rather than actual words I just DUCIGJGN LVOE GANDHABEEEEE EEYEHEEE THEYRE END GAME!! THEY ARE END GAME WHETHER ITS AS FRIENDS OR ROMANTICALLY RHEY ARE THE ONES
ok now onto the ones involving the new gen clones
harriucius - i like them its the second het ship in the show ive ever actually liked!! they just both go so well in so many ways, they both have almost the exact same struggles and cope in similar ways, but harriet has more of a hands on attitude with her problems, while confucius tends to avoid things. im VERY interested in how their relationship will go and i dont really think anythingâs gonna happen to them bc i cant picture the show pairing either of them up with anyone else (mostly confucius tbh đ)
joanharriet - i WISH this one was more acknowledged by the fandom like i think its the least popular one at least involving the newbies.. can you tell im a sucker for ships that are literally just two close friends who love eachother more than anything. lol. when i think of them i think of episode 5 which makes me extremely happy. like look me in the eyes and tell me that was not an absolutely beautiful wonderfully wrapped episode
johnfucius - gonna be honest i dont like this one. i know this is a really rich thing to say while talking about clone high season 2 but it just felt rushed, and especially with how they barely did anything after sleepover. like they were literally crying both of them being like OMG I FINALLY HAVE A FRIEND!! and then they proceed to have the most stale interactions with the most notable one being in the next episode and itâs literally just confucius encouraging jfk to avoid his problems like he does. not really good. but again if you enjoy them all the power to you, im happy you found something you like that hasnât been ruined and seems pretty docile and chill compared to all the other ones :o) itâs very much a mostly fandom based ship
kahlopatra - BEAUTIFUL. BEAUTIFUL. I HAVE NO WORDS JUST BEAUTIFUL. there definitely was a lack of suspense like based off the intro and the slight buildup throughout the series BUT that literally doesnât matter. out of every canon couple they are the absolute cutest im obsessed with the effect they have on eachother. especially on cleos side of things like ahhh!!!! she found someone she actually connects to genuinely!!!! i am so happy for her!!!!!!
tophucius - not much about this one its just pretty fun and silly . i feel bad for the people who thought something big was gonna be going on w them but the small details peppered in about them in sleepover were nice. i always liked how when confucius saw that topher typed your instead of youâre, he went âi thought soâ like to me that confirms they do this all the time and they know itâs them. also really funny to imagine them being sworn enemies online but when they actually see eachother in school theyre Like oh shit hey man whatâs up! hope youre well! like not even through gritted teeth or anything theyâre just so chill irl for no reason
abetoph - Sigh i sure did save this one for last. while im a lot less comfortable with it now i still love thinking of them pre episode 8 and i do think their relationship is just ever so slightly more interesting now with the added double crossing n shit added to it. but im also sad theyâll never be the way they were may 24th to june 14th again . that specific time period of them is so comforting to me for no reason, all the memes and running jokes in the fandom involving them, all the wholesome fan work of them sleeping in tophers bed, watching stuff on tophers computer together, abe being tophers voice of the reason and the one person he actually likes, itâs just so ⌠man. We Could Have Had It All. i love them for ever.
thank you so much for listening
#i also want to write an essay on why abe is autistic#clone high#clone high van gogh#clone high jfk#clone high gandhi#clone high julius caesar#clone high christo#abe lincoln#clone high joan#clone high cleo#clone high harriet#clone high confucius#clone high frida#topher bus#gandhabe#abetoph#clone high spoilers#mine
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Hey friend!
Maybe this has been asked before, but was Avery inspired by anyone? ( ¡ิĎ¡ิ)
I don't think anyone has ever asked me this on this blog! Honestly, I've tried many times to nail down exactly what inspired Avery, but... I never can, not completely.
This is going to get long, I'm sorry.
I turned 30 last year. It wasn't in a "midlife crisis" or depressive kind of way, but I started thinking a lot about how I wanted the rest of my life to go, and what I wanted out of life that I'd never had a chance to have. I decided that there were two things I really yearned to do -- make art, and make friends. I figured a good place to start dipping my toes in would be Tumblr, since I'd used it in the past and I knew there would be a lot of art here to inspire me. And I was inspired... massively. Especially after I started actually drawing, myself. I started getting more ideas at once than I'd ever had in my life, and it triggered a bout of insomnia I am still dealing with now, almost six months later.
The first time I can remember thinking about Avery was during one such sleepless night, desperately trying to coax myself to sleep. Laying in the dark, I'd close my eyes and imagine leaving my body, floating above my apartment complex. I'd wander around like a ghost, exploring places I'd seen, but which are normally inaccessible... private roads, fenced estates, etc. I'd imagine sitting on the edge of a skyscraper, watching the city move beneath me, imagining what people were doing, why they were up so late, etc.
I imagined this many nights... It became a pet fantasy. When I was a kid, I read a book called Billy the Bird by Dick King-Smith, maybe that's where I got the idea... I don't know. Along with the insomnia were vicious bouts of nostalgia, too, so... It's possible.
But, anyway... I'd get lonely.
I wanted someone to talk to, so I imagined someone sitting with me. Someone who could only come out at night, for fear of being seen. Someone for whom sitting on the edge of a skyscraper was no concern, and who could catch me if I fell. I imagined he was soft, gentle... a good listener, maybe even a bit shy. I imagined he was an intellectual, capable of being quite serious, but never dour. He was quick with a smile, and it was easy to make him laugh.
In some respects, I suppose, he was inspired by a friend of mine, who died many years ago. In most ways, he wasn't like Avery at all -- he was extremely blue-collar, the exact opposite of an intellectual, and very outgoing. He was not refined in any way, and could even be quite reckless, at times. But, he had a unique, gentle, innocent sort of kindness that I've found to be exceedingly rare. To know him was to love him, really; he was a hard worker and a fierce friend, someone who wanted nothing more than to love and be loved. My relationship with him and the way his passing affected me touches everything I make and everything I do, intentional or not.
When I was building Avery's character, I was very fascinated by object heads at the time (particularly Prince Robot from Saga), and I was also seeing a lot art for "doctor/scientist" type characters. Despite never playing the game, I liked TF2 fanart, especially of Medic. I thought about other characters I'd fixated on, too, and what exactly I liked about them... Milo Thatch from Atlantis, Data from Star Trek, John from Homestuck, Sans from Undertale, Stanley and the Narrator from The Stanley Parable, Pokemon professors both Oak and Elm, Nightcrawler from X-Men, Wilson from House, Dr. Bashir from DS9... The list goes on, really.
I know this is kind of a non-answer, and I'm sorry about that. It isn't really a clear answer for me, either. All I can really say for sure is this: Avery is the embodiment of everyone and everything I've ever loved, as well as the reflection of my own self-love. Relatively speaking, we just met, but I feel like he's been here the whole time. I've made so many wonderful friends because of him, too! Can't say what the exact moment was, only that now that he's here, I can't imagine life without him. đ
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A little love post to HORROR JRPGs
Content Warning:
So I'm gonna be talking a lot about some pre-Undertale era RPG Maker Horror games, and this post is gonna contain both spoilers and the discussion of the following:
Blood and Gore
Psychological horror
Child abuse
Sexual assault
Suicide
Violence
Fictional minors being put into very messed up situations, because that's just the kinds of games these are
Other upsetting themes
Hetalia (because I can imagine that all of us have very complex feelings about this fucking franchise. It existing feels like it needs a warning)
This post is a nostalgia trip and exists purely because uh. I have literally no one else to talk to about these games, and please just click away if any of the above makes you uncomfortable in any way. Some of this stuff can't exactly be handwaved as just being products of their time.
I'll draw smthn real quick later just to make up for it I promise
I'm like days late to Halloween but I just wanted to write this after getting a bout of nostalgia lmao
I absolutely fucking love Horror JRPGs - the freeware ones, even though I haven't touched one in a LONG time. I'm talking about the pre-Undertale era freeware games by the way, and in the first place I don't think I can consider Undertale a horror game but that's a topic for another day. OneShot also doesn't count aksjak OneShot gives me existential dread and a nonzero amount of guilt sure, but never terror
But let's dial that back a bit.
To begin with. 'Vir, you're a fucking coward, you run upstairs when you see that someone on TV has a gun. You can't stand watching horror movies. How the FUCK did this happen'
Weirdly, you can thank Hetalia for that. Specifically, the freeware Hetalia fangames that used to circulate on DeviantArt - that shit led me down this rabbit hole. And I guess it made sense, most Hetalia fangames are a coin toss between a horror game and a fantasy JRPG with countries getting isekai'd. I also played the fuck out of those.
For a bit of background, I love video games, but neither me nor my family ever really had that much spending power to buy game consoles, so my selection was pretty limited. Before I turned 18, I remember that we owned a GameBoy, a GameBoy Advance, a PSP, and one of those Fun-Sized Nintendo consoles with built-in games. We never bought cartridges either. I got my first DS from my dad on my birthday when I turned 18, and that's all the consoles that my family has ever owned. Still kinda jealous of my friends who have Switches, but eh - one day.
I just played a lot of Harvest Moon growing up, that's been my object of interest in my elementary days. The most of a horror game that I've been exposed to was watching my friends play Five Nights At Freddy's back in 5th grade.
Then high school happened, and I got new friends and shit - and was introduced to both more conventional horror games and Hetalia. Which is. A really weird combination when I think about it now, but everyone who was alive and kicking around in the early 2010's would know what HetaOni is, and you can see how that slope led to me playing freeware horror games. I'll always be grateful to these games, seeing as I never had easy access to mainstream experiences growing up.
I think I played HetaOni exactly once, on my first laptop. I played most Hetalia fangames exactly once, but they all just stayed on my old hard drive. None of them really had anything interesting going on gameplay-wise, I mean it's RPGMaker and these were people who just really wanted to make Hetalia fangames, but I remember some of them just sticking with me. I'd play them while I was away on trips to my grandmother's house, then watch let's plays on YouTube when I wasn't otherwise occupied with schoolwork. Really when I say Let's Plays I only mean KyoKoon64's - and that's how I was actually introduced to horror JRPGs.
CLOĂ'S REQUIEM
There's been a couple of times where they played some of the more recognizable horror JRPGs on their channel, but the first one I REALLY saw a playthrough on was one called CloÊ's Requiem. I don't know what exactly it was about this specific game that stuck with me, and at the time I didn't know that this had like. More warnings than you would usually find on a horror JRPG. Calling it now, please look up said warnings before you try ANYTHING with this game - I can't promise quality and nuance, but I can promise great moments. Those moments stuck with me to this day, SOMEHOW, even after encountering games with better story and gameplay experiences⌠it's about a cursed 12 year-old boy trying to free a cursed 13 year-old girl, never getting a shot at the normal life he wanted and playing the violin because he can't do much else.
I think this game changed my life. Not in like, any grand manner mind you - but I feel like it's the game that best represented this time of my life as a weird high school outsider who obsesses over games that nobody's ever heard about. I was introduced to a lot of things through this game, it's just this whole volley of firsts that I wouldn't trade for anything else. Baby's first horror game, first jumpscare I ever consented to, first taste of games containing disturbing themes of sexual assault and gore, first trips to Pixiv and NicoNicoDouga - just all the fucking firsts. I wouldn't call it a great game, but it IS important to me.
When I think about it now, it's a game about curses. Michel D'Alembert is a talented violinist at 12, and his alcoholic father milks the shit out of this talent because they're not exactly what you would call well-off. His twin brother Pierre is a pianist, is nowhere near as talented as his brother, and hides his misery over this situation under a big-little brother façade. CloÊ Ardennes is a pianist too, she's wealthy, talented, and still plays with her stuffed animals. She is cursed with an insane father who rapes her, and a mother who hates her. Charlotte is a young maid with nothing and tries her best, only to be killed because she happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time. Unsurprisingly things fall apart for everybody very quickly.
Pierre's frustrations with his spoiled, lazy brother boiled over, and he curses Michel out in a heated moment. This drives Michel to murder their Charlotte by accident, and she becomes his curse - he runs out of the house, kills cats, and finds himself in the dilapidated mansion that CloĂŠ inhabits. CloĂŠ by this point is already dead, and so is her dad, her parents, and the maids. CloĂŠ's father may be her curse but she is the curse of this mansion, and it transforms into something hostile until Michel comes along and saves her from the shadow of her father. Michel plays her a requiem, and resolves to go home to confront his crimes - and back to Pierre, who regrets everything he's done. Watching the sun rise with a disappearing CloĂŠ in the True Ending will likely be the last peaceful moment he will ever have in his life.
That's like. Not everything that happens in this game, but this post is already so goddamn long and I still have a lot of other stuff I want to talk about. But the gist of it to me nowadays is that these children are cursed with loveless lives and the whims of the adults that have power over them. In the end, their lives are all ruined. CloĂŠ and Charlotte are dead, and we have no idea what becomes of Michel and Pierre when word gets out that Michel killed a maid and assaulted several others in the house in a fit of emotional instability. In every other ending, Michel is killed and CloĂŠ remains an evil spirit, so really this is the best that anyone ever gets out of this experience.
I remember watching a playthrough of Con Amore on YouTube, but I understood none of it because it was in Japanese, and the game itself was untranslated at the time. It follows the cats Noir and Blanc and basically serves as an addendum to the base game - honestly it made me feel sorry for Charlotte, who was nowhere near as psychotic as Michel thought she was. There's also light novels, but international shipping is expensive and I don't know Japanese so. I'll just never figure out what happens to everyone after the game ends I guess
One of these days, I'll buy the remake on Steam - which exists, and I can't say I recommend it if everything I just listed bothers you in any way. But I can't shake the attachment I feel towards this game no matter how many years it's been, nor how uncomfortable its themes are, so you know - maybe one day. I'll go back to it.
IB
So - following that, I got pretty curious about the other games in this genre of freeware horror. Ib is the one that everyone knows the best, both Markiplier and Pewdiepie played it so you KNOW it gets press, but even in Japan this game was a hell of a hit. To me, it's a simple game that I can finish in an hour, but man what an hour it can be.
If you were to play this game right now after seeing how much press it gets (which I think you should, it's on the Switch now! Go get it!), you MIGHT be a little disappointed. It's nowhere near as gory or disturbing as Cloe's Requiem for one and you know - a bunch of blood and guts and ghosts on the walls does not a good horror game make, but make your choices accordingly. Nah - instead this game's staying power lies in its atmosphere. Like how many games can you say take place inside of an art gallery where most of the pieces try to fucking murder you? I mean there's probably a lot, but something about Ib's almost ambient sense of dread and exploration just kind of sticks in people's brains. Everything's a little scarier when the shapes are so close to being discernable but aren't, and I guess that's the appeal and horror behind Guertena's gallery.
Ib herself is a mute protagonist, pretty typical, but she's also NINE, and the game will let you know that no matter how unfazed she gets or how precocious she can be, she is a child all the same - and children break very easily. I personally love how the game barely has to say anything about how shaken she actually is about her situation, because it will show you how - she has nightmares that you can't escape, she sees herself getting hanged, Garry will need to shake her out of her shock when she sees a picture of her parents in the gallery that should not exist. She loses all of her will to live when she loses Garry to insanity. And speaking of GarryâŚ
There's one standout room in this game and it's the Doll Room. 10/10 would NOT recommend it to anyone who suffers from anxiety because WOW I did not think the RPG Maker 2000 engine could ever have been capable of that. Nobody blames Garry if this room fucks him up. I mean come on the dude has to literally rip open the stomachs of dolls to find a paint ball. Those sound effects make it sound like the dolls are made of skin and flesh and all the while the giant fucking doll is creeping out of the goddamn painting while some of the most anxiety-inducing background noise is playing -
Yeah no I don't know why I ever said you'd be disappointed by this game. Or maybe you still would, this is a low-res game made in 2012. But my god does it TRY to scare you in the best ways it can.
One of the best moments in this game I think is the one where Mary and Ib are alone together, and the conversation gets increasingly unhinged with Mary asking Ib questions non-stop with no background noise other than their steps. At this point, they're separated from Garry, and they're trying to find a way back to each other. Garry meanwhile is slowly piecing together the truth about Mary and how dangerous it is for Ib to remain alone with her, all the while still trying to figure out how to get back to both of them.
The section after that is in the Sketchbook which honestly? The vibes of this place are impeccable. Somehow it's fitting that one of the tensest areas in a game about a fine arts gallery is the place made entirely out of childlike scribbles.
Overall, I'd say the experience is well worth an hour or two - I'd recommend it happily over CloĂŠ's Requiem, if only so you can have a taste of what Horror JRPGs were like before Omori came along. Yes I know that Omori isn't Japanese but it's very much in the same vein as these games.
OTHER GAMES
Those were the safe two that planted my feet firmly into the Horror JRPG fandom, but there's a lot of other titles out there, so let's go - lightning round!
Ao Oni is the ubiquitous one, like chances are you've at least HEARD of it in passing at some point in your life. Like this shit made it to the big screen in Japan, that's how much of a deal it was. I've never played the original myself, but it's partly because its formula of stuck in a mansion with a horror that chases you around is present in pretty much every Horror JRPG after its release in 2007. If you want some classic fun with the big blue demon though then you can't go wrong with the freeware version.
Mad Father and The Witch's House are part of what I like to call the Big 3 of JRPGs starring preteen girls experiencing the Horrorsâ˘, mostly because back in the mid-2010's I couldn't go three posts without seeing them all together. Mad Father is the only other one of said Big 3 that I've touched, because I was too coward to touch The Witch's House and Ellen's whole deal remains a mystery to me to this day. I think Mad Father got a remake a couple of years ago, so you can check that out if you want, but keep in mind that these two games in particular might not stoke the same kind of magical staying power that Ib somehow retained years after its release, and I know those two rely on jumpscares a lot more than Ib does.
I'll eat my fedora right here by the way, because one of my cardinal sins of being a Horror JRPG fan is that I've never played Yume Nikki. As far as these freeware games go, this is probably one of the more avant-garde ones - it's artsy, atmospheric, and a game best experienced by getting lost in the strange environments it provides. Out of every game on this post, this is the one I'd describe as the most Earthbound-esque, with its horror lying mostly in the surrealist ambience of just⌠wandering around in Madotsuki's mind. The end is just as quiet as the beginning, but is no less chilling to watch happen. Then you fuck around a little bit on Youtube and you find out what's actually going on, and uh - yeah that checks out, cosmic horror sounds par for the course at this point.
Yume Nikki and OFF are two of the games I think of when I hear about Horror JRPGs being talked about alongside Undertale - and nope, I haven't played OFF either. That's my other Horror JRPG sin. I was a picky teenager, but I've grown now and wow I need to find a time to play these games in peace. OFF actually isn't even Japanese, it was developed by Mortis Ghost and released in French back in 2008, making both pretty old and already pretty weird in the library. The reason I bring up OFF is because it's one of the older examples I know of that also incorporate Earthbound's precision 4th-wall breaks, and that it's a game about judgment and interrogates the player (more you than the Batter you play as, serving more as a vehicle that the game uses to ask questions through) about the choices they make in the game. OneShot is probably the one game in this genre of indie RPG that I know so far that employs this metaphysical idea of the player existing in the game in any kind of charitable fashion (aside from again, Earthbound and to some extent Mother 3), so between it, OFF, and Undertale they're what I'd refer to as the Interface Screw-RPG Trio.
Some other titles that I like are between the same devs, even some that I haven't really played to completion. CloÊ's Requiem for example was made by Buriki Clock, and they've made other titles like Fantasy Maiden's Off Hideout and Trauma Traum - the latter I can't play because it doesn't have an English translation rip. Miwashiba is another dev which I think people who have a taste for light lolita goth-pastel colors would like, because my god the character designs in both Alice Mare and LiEat are peak. Don't even get me started on the fashion of 1BitHeart because everything in that game has such an impeccable aesthetic. I think I saw something at one point about 1BitHeart that like. Might count as a shared joke between Xenoblade fans, but I'd be hard-pressed to give context because again⌠packed schedule, who dis?
Just to talk about Alice Mare a little more, I've actually played this one - it sports a heavily storybook-inspired cast with some unique tastes on the tales. Most of my actual experiences with Alice Mare were from the English Light Novel, which I do still have! I really recommend it to people who have a couple of hours to spare on some light, relatively bloodless horror. Most of these games have Light Novels, come to think of it - hell Ib even has whole audio dramas, one of which was fanmade in English, and from what I remember of it the voice acting for Mary was PEAK.
One last dev I want to talk about is Segawa. I've saved them for last because their brand of horror is reserved mainly for one game, but their other games Farethere City and Tower of Hanoi are no slouches either. I don't know much about Tower of Hanoi (or if it even has an English translation right now), but Farethere City is a pretty cute experience as far as pseudo-horror games go from what I've heard, which is probably good for us because their other standout game is anything but cute.
END ROLL
Ah, End Roll. The last of the Horror JRPGs I've played before school kicked me even harder in the shins and I had barely any time for it. Out of all the games I mentioned on this list, this is the one with the most staying power in my brain - and also the one that influenced me the most.
So, I don't talk a lot about my original works. Nobody asks, so I don't overshare. But some of the prevalent overarching themes of my personal mythos are those of guilt, self-love, and the burdens of love. All of these themes were lifted directly from End Roll - which is to say, End Roll actually only deals in guilt, my brain just ran buckwild with trying to wrap itself around the logistics behind InfoRuss. One of my main protagonists, Rosso, is a dead-ringer expy of Russell - the same goes for Blanco with the Informant. One of the only ways I can describe Rosso and Blanco's relationship is 'selfcest as a metaphor for the painful coexistence of self-love and self-loathing', and how this relationship reached this point was largely thanks to the Informant and his role in Russell's dream.
I don't really know why I've come to associate the idea of self-love with guilt, because that's like. Not what the game is trying to do. The game's express purpose is to tell you the story of a boy who comes to love his victims and self-destructs under the crushing guilt that he carries from killing them. By some weird hand, I've fixated on the Informant and his determination in seeing that mission of the game through - AND his secret boss fight. Actually, I should. Go ahead and describe the build-up to his secret boss fight
You can only access it if you've purchased the optional villa, and if I recall correctly you can only fight him on the last day of the dream. The locked shed next to the villa is revealed to be a library of some kind called the Graveyard of Books and like - sure enough, there's books of every kind just torn apart and scattered about everywhere. The reason for all of this is because of the Informant's jealousy. He is created specifically so he can provide Russell with the necessary information to complete the Happy Dream Experiment, and in this regard he thinks Russell doesn't need anyone other source of information than him. So he does away with the useless other books, except for the strategy guides because that's the only kind of book Russell likes - and thus, the only kind of book that the Informant likes. Notes are scattered in the hallway leading up into his boss room, with the last one sticking out in my mind to this day:
'He thinks he's the most important thing to you.'
Which. I don't know why that line is so important to me. Whether it be because it awakened something weird in me, or because I myself was dealing with my self-loathing in a VERY complicated manner at the time, that line has gone on to dictate the way that I write about my characters even to this day.
It's such a visceral depiction of self-inflicted brutality. Russell Seager is a 14 year-old serial killer who grew up loveless and abused, and has no shortage of things that make every waking moment of his life fucked up. He killed people - some who just happened to be wherever he was at the time, some willingly by his hand - could not feel guilt about any of it, and when he lost Yumi to his drunken father while his nymphomaniac mother watched he snapped and killed both his tormentors. He then turned himself in to the police, a teen on death row. Happy Dream is him discovering guilt through dream versions of the people he killed. Happy Dream is what allows him to manifest the newfound emotions he felt through interacting with the kinds of people that his victims COULD have been. The world he creates morphs into the self-inflicted hell that is his guilt.
Russell has no happy ending, his guilt won't allow him that. Everything around him becomes a reminder of the lives he's destroyed, and how much of a living hell his own life was. Through feeling happiness and love from these fabricated visages of the people he killed, he learned guilt. It's such a weird exercise in sympathy, knowing that you're playing as this remorseless kid going through rehabilitation through extreme means. It either doesn't work, and he's deemed a failure - or it does, and he commits suicide either by confessing his crimes to one of his victims and stabbing himself to death with a syringe, or he stays in the deteriorating dream, never to wake up again.
At some point it honestly just turns into misery porn, if you look at it from a certain angle - this game is set on having Russell die no matter what. I couldn't tell you what EXACTLY it is about this experience was so impactful that it would go on to influence the way I want to spend my life - that is, I want to make games exploring these kinds of themes. Guilt. Sins. If loveless lives can be redeemed and made better. By the time the last day in the game rolls around, it's just a matter of giving Russell closure over his miserable life and choosing for him what his last freedom is going to be.
I think one of the reasons I like thinking about the Informant with regards to Russell is the scene that happens if you choose to go through with the first True Ending. Russell never really much liked the Informant, and the feeling is mutual. Russell is cold to him, and the Informant takes every opportunity he can to rub all of Russell's sins in his face - and that's his job, he represents the fundamental, uncomfortable truths of Happy Dream. If Russell chooses not to leave the dream, he is resigned to its destruction and waits for the inevitable along with the other denizens of Nameless Town. But if Russell chooses to get out of the dream, the Informant returns to Russell in tears, happy that he can finally be back to being a part of him - to this game, it's the ultimate acceptance. Russell then goes on to confess his crimes and the reality of the dream to one of the citizens, and he wakes up when they kill him in tearful retribution by his request.
He grabs the syringe next to his bed, and stabs himself to death, unable to handle the guilt. That's how the game always ends for me. The Informant succeeded, Happy Dream succeeded - and Russell chose to die as person who could finally feel remorse.
It's a regretful story with themes that really shouldn't be replicated in any fashion in real life, but somehow I found it fascinating in the way it explores the facets of the self. It makes me want to ask more questions and explore that angle of self-reflection to the furthest extremes that I can conceivably reach, and I guess that's one of the many reasons why I respect it so much.
SO⌠WHAT NOW.
Nah, that's kind of it. Like, OF COURSE this isn't all I have to say about the games that I mentioned, but wow this post is so long and I was just pining for the days of a couple of years ago. These games were present for the most transformative years of my life, and uh - whether or not that was actually a good thing remains to be seen, but I'll always be grateful for their presence in the void that I call my gaming experiences.
Horror JRPGs will always have a special place in my heart for how they tell their stories. Nowadays, I've developed more of a taste for fantastical RPGs that prefer to hide their horror in the margins of the narrative, fridging the terror for when the player wants to step back a bit and think about the implications of certain events in the greater world. Undertale, OneShot, and the Octopath Traveler games all tick that box for me - and all of those games are ones I hold dear. Like I'll probably ramble about OneShot some other day, because that's the other game that really changed my life in a way I felt like I can never come back from - but there's just a lot of special things to be said about these neat little self-contained, 6-hour freeware games. For now I'll close this long-ass post out. Happy late Halloween I guess - the M&Ms in our fridge have never tasted better.
#rpg maker horror#rpg maker#horror rpg#ib rpg#cloe's requiem#end roll rpg#ao oni#mad father#the witch's house#OFF rpg#yume nikki#alice mare#farethere city#cw horror#seriously please read the content warnings
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Whatâs your top three beloved Pokemon? And if you have themâ your top three most hated Pokemon?
omg hi Sofie!! :0 Get ready because I have a whole lot to say about this.
Most Beloved:
Number 1: Squirtle
My absolute favorite is squirtle. What's funny about this is I can't really pinpoint a specific reason why I like him so much. My first pokemon game was alpha sapphire, and I didn't play gen 1 until Let's Go Eevee, so it's not a nostalgia factor. I think my brain just subconsciously selected him back when I was watching the Indigo League anime in middle school. The squirtle squad showed up and my brain was like "Yeah. This guy. He's awesome. This is the one." And he has been my number 1 favorite fella ever since then, and as a consequence he is the pokemon I have the most merch of and it isn't really close.
Please keep in mind this is just what I have in my apartment where I live for college, and that I have even more stuff in my bedroom back at home. Now that I think about it, Koopa Troopa is my favorite mario character, so maybe I have an affinity for characters that are just little turtles. Either way, water is also my favorite type, which means even more bonus points for squirtle.
Number 2: Riolu
Riolu's high ranking has been somewhat of a recent development for me. I've always liked lucario, but I didn't see the light that was riolu until after I watched Pokemon Journeys. Ash's riolu was so silly and adorable, and I always felt so bubbly inside when he was on screen. This shift in my preference is probably due to me developing a major soft spot for cute characters/creatures over the past few years. Most of my favorite pokemon at this point are just little guys because of it. Anyways, the reason I like him so much is because of the aura control him and lucario are capable of. I've always loved aura as a power system; the idea of being able to harness one's own life energy and see it in others is just so cool to me. I especially like how it's established as its own concept outside of moves in pokemon, making it something super unique that only riolu's evolutionary line can take advantage of. I have a lot of lore/worldbuilding ideas for PMD that would utilize aura. For example, Milo, the protagonist of the PMD verse I've been brainstorming, on is a riolu with much stronger aura than normal due to him being a pokemon with a human soul. I have a lot of ideas for how I could use this concept to drive plot points or character arcs, and I might share more in the future if I ever get time to start solidifying a story.
By the way, Milo's partner, Lilly, is a squirtle. No way I don't give both of my two favorites the spotlight.
Number 3: Sprigatito
My love of sprigatito is really quite simple. I love cats. So much. They are easily my number one favorite animal of all time. My Instagram feed is covered in them. So imagine my excitement when I saw that one of the new generation 9 starters was a kitty. My violet team is my favorite team I've ever used in a pokemon game, and the sprigatito line is a massive part of why I love it so much. Sprigatito is adorable, and my meowscarada was so much fun to use after he evolved. On top of that, sprigatito's depiction in Pokemon Horizons makes me love it even more. It's literally just a cat. It loafs. It makes biscuits.. It gets annoyed at the mildest inconvenience. Liko squishes its beans. Plus it releases a super sweet scent when you cuddle it as a bonus. It's so perfect. It's like Game Freak was like "Yeah this is the perfect pokemon for Ray, put it in the game." I have a sprigatito character in my PMD verse named Mayple, but I can't share much about her because it would mean dropping pretty big spoilers for a plot point I have planned.
Honorable Mentions: Greninja and Ceruledge
I love ninjas. I love frogs. Greninja is both. And ceruledge is just objectively one of the coolest pokemon designs ever.
In terms of behated pokemon, I don't have many that I personally despise. It's more so that I feel indifferent about them, and I would simply prefer not to use them on my teams. Usually I don't have any real reason to dislike the ones I do hate; I think it just stems from a gut feeling. The biggest one off the top of my head is the tepig line. I don't know what it is, something just feels off about them. I also dislike incineroar. I like litten and torracat a lot, but they really dropped the ball with the final evolution for me.
That's about all I have. This was really fun to do! Thank you so much for submitting this ask. I look up to you and your work a lot, and it made my night when I got the notification. I'm still pretty new to Tumblr, so I don't know exactly how I'm supposed to do things around here. I want to try to meet more people here, but my social anxiety and tendency to overthink online interactions usually shuts down anything before it can happen. Because of that, being able to answer something simple like this means a lot!! Thank you!! :D
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I want to say I really love your art and the way you draw Zack! Are there any tips you have for drawing his hair?
Thank you! Honestly I go about Zacksâ hair like I do most anything just following my own weird logic, so this might be both super generic yet biased advice.
DISCLAIMER: THIS IS ALL MY OWN BIASED INTERPRETATION
here goes:
I like to know where and how objects are placed in a space. In the case of hair this would be: where hair starts, its direction, and where it ends. Because of this I think about the hairline (where the hair starts) and then try to be aware of the volumetric direction, and finally end the hairs to make an interesting silhouette. I like to keep things simple so it can be easily understood both by me who has to draw it and by whoever sees it once I'm done. (bonus easy consistency)
One of the reasons I like to be aware of the hairline is I think it makes a stronger shape profile and you're less likely to get lost in the details
In terms of Zacks' hair shape in particular, I honestly don't think there is a single right answer to draw Zacks. Best boy has gone through so many iterations and so many faces, it is hard to pick one. Just to name a few:
FF7 original concept art
FF7 international polygon model
Before Crisis
Crisis Core Original
Crisis Core Reunion
Ehrgeiz
How Nomura drew him before
How Nomura draws him now
Even limited to my personal Zacks influences thats a lot and they are all pretty different. All of these are an "answer", and at the end of the day I think it's up to the artist to create their own Zacks that matches their experiences.
Just by hairline alone you could go multiple ways, here are 3 examples:
Having just come off crisis core reunion the newer Zacks design is more fresh in my mind, why I leaned more toward crisis core original over crisis core reunion design of Zacks' hairline is purely personal preference.
This no right answer nature of Zacks is true not for just his hairline it is also true in his overall hair look. For instance! Please look at this Zacks I drew using FF7 original concept art as a base:
He looks super duper different from modern Zacks or even the Zacks I draw these days, however if Iâm honest he still looks very much like Zacks to me. Added bonus of nostalgia lol.
So.... that was a super duper long way to say, I change up how I draw Zacks depending on what I feel like, and you should too. Draw the Zacks you feel in your heart.
#asks#fanart#tutorial#so longwinded am I even making sense???#everyone should draw Zacks#I love seeing new Zacks'#zacks fair#Like the objective is to invoke the idea of Zacks rather than to draw Zacks correctly#why can't I talk well lol#honestly I think just Zacks just filtered through the logic of your own style makes an already interesting pic
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When I was a little kid, I used to be pretty arrogant and elitist towards a lot of anime. I thought shonan was stupid and Dragon Ball Z was for idiots. I thought I was hot shit for drawing the characters from the playstation games I was interested in and that the kids who drew dragon ball characters in their notebooks were shit artists by virtue of "being unoriginal" or something.
I was a pretty shit kid. It took watching Gurren Lagaan years later to course correct me on my frankly objectively terrible opinions, and I didn't stop viewing Dragon Ball with some measure of contempt until much later after that. My first exposure to Dragon Ball was through the abridged series, and I was one of those people who believed that DBZA actually wrote it better. Which is an exceptionally arrogant and unfair idea. There's a sort of pseudo-intelectual attitude towards Dragon Ball Z that I inherrited, as I was growing up being sarcastic and critical towards media was attractive. The internet was full of an entire cultural landscape of Nostalgia Critics, and video game reviewers who couldn't help themselves when describing everything japan makes as outlandish and wild. Ever western cartoon I was exposed to would inevitably do a bit where they would have some godawful parody based on someone's surface level idea of anime. I think that attitude is alive and well today, quieter but buried in the hearts of a lot of people who are on their way from being young adults to becoming crotchety old farts. Ready to speak up and pressure others to find ways to apologize for liking something. After I finally grew to love Dragon Ball Z for what it was I also grew to deeply dislike the framework of judging media through quantitative statements. Better, worse, dumber, smarter, peak, cringe.
I've never thought of myself as a Dragon Ball fan, but I've grown to love it more and more. Dragon Ball is a series that will find a way to burrow into your heart one way or the other. After you give it that first bit of forgiveness you'll find yourself letting go of more and more of the unfair reasons you hated it.
I won't belittle Akira Toriyama by pretending he ever had to be a perfect author. And I won't diminish his work by describing it in all the boring stupid ways people are keen to use. Dragon Ball Z can't be described honestly by calling it a show where people just glow funny colors, yell for a whole episode, and then start punching each other and throwing energy blasts. The curtains aren't just blue and neither is SSGSS, unless you suddenly need things to be complicated in order for them to be meaningful. Dragon Ball Z is a show about how he inherit the love people have raised us with, the arrogance and pettiness of the powerful elite, disregarding the idea that what you are capable of has anything to do with how you were born, and how hateful people can be irrevocably changed by being forced to acknowledge the worth of a single kind idiot. It is also exceptionally emotional, uses presentation and escalating force to poke at all the right spots of the brain to make you excited and interested in a show of power you otherwise might never be so you can feel the same adrenaline rush and payoff Goku does, and watch the atmosphere of the fights warp and twist around the changing feelings in the hearts of both the combatants and onlookers. It rocks and if you think it's all an accident I can point you to a man who says "I like birds." and make you look like a moron.
Gonna start fucking crying now.
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Hello again! Hope youâre having a good day! đ
My question this time is, if you had to rank the TMNT series from your ultimate fave to your least fave, what would you pick and why? đ
Thank you! đ
Hello! I got four hours of sleep but otherwise yeah I'm doing okayish.
OUGH okay-- here me out-- I'm doing this by my personal tastes, this is not what I think is the "best" show objectively. By "series" I'm going to assume you mean the TV show series, because if I get into the comics this is gonna get messy fhgkdfjg
2003 (personal favorite, I love the story and the characters so much, the animation still holds up, I have nostalgia bias for it)
Rise (absolutely gorgeous animation, the story is great, the characters are great, honestly if they'd gotten a full second and third season like they wanted it would probably be my favorite)
2012 (fun character dynamics, a long show which I know throws a lot of people off because the pacing can be ough sometimes but I enjoy the content, I... Highly disagree with a lot of the writing choices they made but the amount of POSSIBILITIES also the turtles tell each other "I love you" and that's a lot of points)
1987 (this show!!! is really cute!!! and fun!!! but I can only handle a little of it at a time. There's no cohesive storyline except for like, three seasons I think? The humor is fun, the animation is.... both bad and really good at times. Very unreliable. Very cute turtles tho 10/10)
The Next Mutation (THAT'S RIGHT I BROUGHT IT UP. I'm still only halfway through this one because we only watch 2 episodes every other week but OUGH this show can be so fun to laugh at. The amount of sound effects, ridiculous. Venus, I love her. They do take the Bold Stance of pulling a "we're not blood related" even though they most likely would be??? just to have a romantic plot with Leo and Venus?? which hasn't come up yet, but ough I am so afraid for when it does. The costumes aren't great, the story's not great, if this was a fan-made project I would be really impressed but this was a full production thing and just-- jesus fhgkdjfg)
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Well here's a fucking Chortle headline for the roundup:
Holy fuck. I cannot believe that. Never for a moment did it cross my mind that this might happen. It's been nearly ten years since he left, and this never once seemed like a possibility.
I remember exactly when he left. I know it was announced in February 2015, because I was sitting in my bedroom in the city where I lived in 2015, where I'd moved to join their bigger and more impressive sports team and ended up just being miserable and lonely for two years because I did not have any of the skills required to fit in there. Anyway, it's fine, not the point of this post. The point is I know it was 2015 and I know it was February because I vividly remember sitting in that bedroom and scrolling on Facebook, and seeing a mock Valentine's Day card that said "May Jon Stewart be the only man to break your heart this week." And that's how I found out he'd announced he was leaving The Daily Show.
I know when he actually left, too. It was August 2015. Because Donald Trump walked down that fucking escalator in June 2015, and announced he'd be running for president. I remember watching The Daily Show that night, and Jon Stewart, incredibly pleased at the comedy gold mine that was about to befall all political comedians, looked into the camera and said to Donald Trump: "Thank you for making my last six weeks the best six weeks." Then he stayed on for six more weeks and made Trump jokes every night, then he left, and the world immediately ended. Looking back with a bit of perspective, Jon Stewart really did happen leave the show right as the Western world was on a precipice of having the norms as we thought we knew them all crumble at once. I'm thinking of that timeline that says 2000-2015=nostalgia, 2016-2019=2016, 2020-present=plague. Those are pretty much my life's eras. And Jon Stewart was there for a hell of a lot of that first one. (Not actually the first era of my life, there is also 90s=childhood, but I'm pretty sure everything was fine then, right?)
It's a bit weird to me now to see Jon Stewart as having an individual career, if that makes any sense at all. If you'd asked me in 2009 who my favourite comedians were, it wouldn't have occurred to me to say Jon Stewart or Stephen Colbert, even though I watched them both every night and loved those shows. I hardly even though of those as things that people had to make by being comedians and writers. They were just fixtures. Part of the landscape. I was so confused when he left the show, I didn't think it could exist without him. It didn't really feel like television could exist without Jon Stewart coming on at the end of the night. I remember learning some time ago about Marc Maron's feud with Jon Stewart over their days on the comedy circuit, and that was so weird. Jon Stewart didn't have days on the comedy circuit. He didn't have a career you could object to or admire, or opinions you could agree with or disagree with. He was just a fixture in the landscape.
I remember the first time I saw Jon Stewart. I think it was probably 2006, maybe 2005. I was really into Rick Mercer, this Canadian comedian who did TV shows where he made fun of the news. My mother put on a TV show, pointed to the guy behind the desk, and said, "That's Jon Stewart, he's like an American Rick Mercer." It only occurred to me relatively recently how funny it is to call Jon Stewart "an American Rick Mercer". But anyway, I watched that episode with my mom and then I kept doing that every night for many years.
I remember watching his final Daily Show episode with my mother, in August 2015. Bruce Springsteen came on live and played him out. My mother and I both got fairly emotional.
I kept watching The Daily Show for a long time after Jon Stewart left. I even followed a lot of the similar spinoff shows by its correspondents. I watched Full Frontal with Samantha Bee, and The Opposition with Jordan Klepper, and Larry Wilmore's The Nightly Show, and Hasan Minhaj's Patriot Act, and Michelle Wolf's The Break. Obviously, I followed John Oliver to Last Week Tonight (and would also if necessary follow him to the ends of the Earth, but that's beside the point).
I quite like Trevor Noah too; when he took over the show I read his autobiography and watched his stand-up specials and the documentary about him. I even saw him live in 2019. So I wasn't one of those people saying the show could never recover from Jon Stewart leaving. I watched a lot of the Trevor Noah years, and only dropped off from following it so closely fairly recently. It was around 2022, I think, when I just stopped keeping up with it. I had so much Britcom going on, and the world was so fucking depressing, getting all my news from actual news sites (as everyone should always always do, do not get your news from comedians, use political comedy as a way to lighten the mood of the regular news that you should first get from actual journalists, for the love of God please do not let the industry of actual journalism be steamrolled by entertainment) was stressful enough and I didn't want to keep having this other way of going over it.
So, those are a few disjointed memories that came into my mind when I saw that story this week. Here's another memory: I remember reading an interview with Jon Stewart from just after he left The Daily Show, in which he was asked if he would ever watch Fox News again. He replied that if he were ever in some post-apocalyptic scenario where Fox News was the only way to find out where to find vital life-saving information, he still wouldn't watch it. Because doing that job that required him to watch so much Fox News had destroyed him mentally and he could not wait to never ever ever ever ever do it again.
I was one of those people, after he left, saying, "I get it, it's high-pressure and difficult, I see why he wants to move on and have a break. But I would pay to have Jon Stewart just broadcast once a month in his sweatpants from his living room couch. He can't just be gone. He needs to keep telling us about the news, what will we do without him?"
We did do without him for nine years, and the world we thought we knew has crumbled around us in about twenty-five different ways since then, and I have absolutely no idea how the fuck Jon Stewart could fit into the landscape as it exists today. Like. I don't know what to do with this information. It wasn't on my radar. It's like finding out they're rebooting Buffy with the entire original cast and writing crew. Or if the girl I had a crush on from the ages of 9 to 14 showed up and told me she was in love with me. Of course it's what I wanted, but... what? Really? Why? Why now? Do I even still want this? You mean everything pre-2016 wasn't just a dream and we still technically exist in the same world as that one and the things in it are still out there and could just come back?
...There are people like @lastweeksshirttonight who actually know things about the US late-night comedy show scene, who have always understood that Jon Stewart is a person with a backstory who entered and then left an industry that also had a backstory and those things affected each other and this will have a significant effect on the ecosystem. Those people will have intelligent takes on what's happening right now. But I do not. Jon Stewart was on TV when I was in high school. He can't be on TV now because I am no longer in high school (even though I was 24 when he left in 2015). What the fuck?
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sims tag game!!
i was tagged by these lovely people @seokolat @pxeltownie @mdmszee @moonriesims @magpiesims @oasivy @tbeanie-sims !! <3 lots of love to you!!
1. Whatâs your favourite sims death? death by vending machine just because that's the only "unique" sim death i've gotten so far lol (it happened to mawar btw but i immediately quit the game bc of obvious reasons)
2. Alpha CC or Maxis Match? i'm personally a maxis mix girl but i loveeeee looking at sims with alpha cc
3. Do you cheat when your sims gain weight? nope :)
4. Do you use move objects? yes. i would not be able to survive without it
5. Favorite mod? bed cuddle mod my beloved <3 no but in all seriousness, mccc and iu cheats are a gamechanger! i also love a bunch of adeepindigo's mods
6. First expansion/game/stuff pack you got? get to work ;)
7. Do you pronounce âlive modeâ like aLIVE or LIVing? live as in aLIVE :)
8. Whoâs your favorite sim that youâve made? aww just one? :( i have so many! priya, kohana, harlow, jae!!!, hunter and sooooooo much more. but if i have to choose one i'd say my favourite is probably harlow because i based her off of savannah smith and she is gorggggg (both savannah and harlow!)
9. Have you made a simself? yeap
10. What sim traits do you give yourself? foodie for sure, umm maybe creative and dog lover :D
11. Which is your favorite EA hair color? the ash brown swatch? the one hunter's hair colour is in
12. Favorite EA hair? i don't knowwww đ i mostly use cc hair yikes
13. Favorite life stage? young adult! i get to do so much :D
14. Are you a builder or are you in it for the gameplay? both i think? but if i had to pick a side, i'd say that i'm more of a gameplay person in ts4 :) i'm an avid builder in ts3 tho hehe iâve always loved the building aspect of the sims and i loveee watching speed build vids on youtube
15. Are you a CC creator? i wish! but unfortunately iâm not :(
16. Do you have any simblr friends/a sim squad? i like to think we're all friends here so i'm going to say yes! i've met sooo many amazing simmers on here and i intend on making more :D
17. Whatâs your favorite game? (1, 2, 3, or 4)Â iâll say ts3 just for the nostalgia :â) but ts4 is pretty good too minus the bugs lmao
18. Do you have any sims merch? do knockoff plumbob headbands count? :p
19. Do you have a YouTube for sims? i do actually lol my yt username is still d4isy-nukes but i currenty have no vids up.......YET
20. How has your âsim styleâ changed throughout your years of playing? when i first started playing the sims, i was obsessed with making the "perfect" sims with "perfect" lives and would aaalways cheat away negative moodlets or never give them "negative" traits ykwim? but now i just go with the flow at whatever the game throws at me lol it's much fun that way :D also it helps to not stress about the things in game too much, it takes the fun out of it :p
21. Whatâs your Origin ID? same as my tumblr name!
22. Whoâs your favorite CC creator? oof i can't name just one đ @littlbowbub @oni28 are my go-tos for food cc! @simstrouble @johnnysimmer are also very cool! idk man i feel like if i list all my fav cc creators it would be never ending lol
23. How long have you had a simblr? ohh omg i think i made this account somewhere mid-2021? not sure tho but i've only started being active earlier this year :) and hopefully for the years to come!
24. How do you edit your pictures? i use photoshop! i don't do much besides adjusting the brightness, cropping the pics and run a few actions. if i'm feeling fancy i'll add a moodlet/thought bubble or text :) gshade basically carries my editing process atp lol
25. What expansion/game/stuff pack do you want next? give me hotels/resorts!!!! but ngl it's probably going to be buggy af tho lmao
25. What expansion/game/stuff pack is your favorite so far? cottage living AND seasons. i canot live without seasons
i know for a fact that a bunch of my moots have done this tag already so i'll be tagging whoever sees this lol
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sims get to know me tag!
@akitasimblr @oasivy @duusheen @druidberries thank you so much for tagging me â¤ď¸
1. Whatâs your favourite sims death? getting eaten by a cowplant!!
2. Alpha CC or Maxis Match? maxis mix! and i have a lot of alpha hair too. i can't help it, they all look so pretty...
3. Do you cheat when your sims gain weight? not for weight but for the muscle. idk but it seems funny that they go buff so fast even if you've not made your sims exercise for long
4. Do you use move objects? it's on as soon as i enter build mode
5. Favorite mod? mccc and ui cheats. but for gameplay wonderfulwhims.
6. First expansion/game/stuff pack you got? get to work! and then i got that bundle with parenthood and vintage glamour/bowling night.
7. Do you pronounce âlive modeâ like aLIVE or LIVing? now that i think about it i've called them both ways.
8. Whoâs your favorite sim that youâve made? so i made this gorgeous sim in cas and he just became my favourite right there. he will eventually make an appearance in tjol posts, but my favourite sim you've seen it's bryce of course!!
9. Have you made a simself? yep! once i saw that simstrouble hair i had to make myself! but i've only shared it to my good friend @oasivy!! maybe i'll show you all in the future.
10. What sim traits do you give yourself? lazy, foodie and hot-headed. nooo those are awful traits but it's true....ok if i had 5 traits then it's also clumsy and perfectionist!!
11. Which is your favorite EA hair color? i love all the blond hair swatches!!
12. Favorite EA hair? when i saw that outdoor retreat hair, the one wavy hair parted in the middle i used it on all my females! it was my favourite at the time, but now i only use cc hairs.
13. Favorite life stage? has to be YA. i always have lots of plans with them and get the most gameplay at that stage (as you can tell).
14. Are you a builder or are you in it for the gameplay? definitely gameplay, but my building is slowly improving! i rarely go into cas unless it's to create a new sim for my legacy
15. Are you a CC creator? nope! no skills or patience lol
16. Do you have any simblr friends/a sim squad? yes! i have talked to a lot of wonderful people here, simblr would not be the same without you guys!!
17. Whatâs your favorite game? sims 4!! but sims 3 for the nostalgia.
18. Do you have any sims merch? no.
19. Do you have a YouTube for sims? no.
20. How has your âsim styleâ changed throughout your years of playing? i was an on/off sims 4 player since 2015 and back then i was completely vanilla, then i found out about cc in 2018! only in 2022 i started using more skin details and gshade. but one thing's for sure, i have always been a legacy player!!
21. Whatâs your Origin ID? same as my simblr, but there's nothing on my gallery. i changed it bc it used my real first name and i upload sims for ppl to download on simblr, but ive not done that for a very long time.
22. Whoâs your favorite CC creator? there are too many creators that i have downloaded everything of. i love everything from pralinesims!!
23. How long have you had a simblr? this simblr is almost a year old! i started posting on the 13th July 2022!
24. How do you edit your pictures? i completely rely on my personal gshade/lighting mods and don't really edit, i just sharpen on photopea or add the moodlet stuff when needed.
25. What expansion/game/stuff pack is your favorite so far? when cottage living came out it was my absolute favourite!! i made all my families live there including nsb pink gen, gen 4 of another legacy and my 100 baby challenge! by the time i started my postcard legacy i played with too much cottage living so i decided to start on freegan.
26. What expansion/game/stuff pack do you want next? honestly it would be great if the sims team improves the older packs, i feel mostly everything from previous games have been included. but it was family gameplay i wanted before growing together was released.
i'll tag: @weindenburg @raiiny-bay @bloomingkyras @glowbloom @igotsnothing but feel free to ignore â¤ď¸
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