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cawfulopinions · 5 years

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Persona 4 Golden and the Problem of Appealing to a Wider Audience

I’ve been questioning how to go about writing this essay ever since I first finished Persona 4 Golden back in 2013. When I first finished the game, I came out of it not liking it very much – mechanically, it felt unbalanced; and writing-wise, I found it poorer than its original. My opinions on the game have shifted somewhat since then, helped along by the release of Persona 5 and the realization that many of the game’s mechanics were testbeds for that game. However, with time, I’ve found that I can articulate a lot of the problems Golden has with its writing a lot better. What I’ve ultimately settled on is looking at the Persona 4 we were originally given, then looking at its rerelease, and seeing what changed there and why I didn’t like it. Let’s jump in, shall we?

(Note: There will be complaining about Marie. My opinions on that subject sure as hell haven’t changed in the past seven years. Also, there will obviously be spoilers.)

I. A Brief History of Persona 4 as a Franchise

Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 4 (later spinoffs would drop the subtitle) released in the west in 2008 as a follow-up to the very strange (at the time) and very niche Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 3. Persona 3 was notable for deciding to go for an urban setting, an avant-garde aesthetic, and heavy philosophical themes, something that was rare for RPGs before 2010 (though not for its own franchise). While Persona 4 kept the philosophical focus of Persona 3, it decided to dial back some of the artsier aspects in favor of a more down-to-earth, focused story. Where P3 told a story about the inevitability of death and took place in a very modern Japanese setting, P4 decides to tell a story about the lies we tell ourselves and takes place in a rustic, rural setting.

Some of the first things that Persona 4 tells you after getting to its setting, Inaba, are that the town really only has one tourist attraction, it’s far from anywhere of real note, and its local businesses are all being driven out of business by the construction of a corporate superstore. It’s relatable, particularly to anyone who’s watched their local mom-and-pops go out of business after a Wal-Mart decided to move in.

The tone of this setting permeates through Persona 4 – all of its characters are pretty down-to-earth, and though there’s some cartoonish exaggeration in their writing, they feel more like real people than your average RPG character. Yosuke is the new kid in town who struggles with feelings of inferiority, something that’s not helped by his dad running the superstore that’s driving everyone out of business. Naoto is a girl with aspirations of becoming a detective, but hides her gender out of a belief that if she does so, she’ll be taken more seriously by the male-dominated police force. Even the game’s idol character, Rise, is someone who quit the business because the pressures of the idol industry became too much for her. Most games would take the opportunity to have an idol character written into the cast as an excuse for a pandering song and dance sequence and to play up her “waifu” aspects. Persona 4 spends the first hour after Rise’s introduced having her in and apron and slacks, serving tofu, and dodging paparazzi.

Persona 4 is not perfect in how it approaches its characters – in particular, Kanji and Naoto’s storylines have gotten a deserved level of flack for having essentially written coming-out stories for a gay man and a transman, and then immediately backing off and “no homo”-ing them. There’s a number of Social Links that end with the character deciding to go do the socially acceptable thing for them to do instead of following their own hearts, too – Yukiko’s comes to mind. But the character conflicts and stories told in the game’s Social Links are grounded and relatable.

The grounded-ness of Persona 4 was what really made it stand out in 2009, a time where RPGs and games as a whole were mostly concerned with showing off the cool things they could do with their engines (keep in mind, this was the early era of the PS3, and Persona 4 was a PS2 game). Looking back, it’s easy to realize that Persona 4 was made as grounded and rustic as it was because of budgetary concerns, but what was done with its limited budget was incredible. It looked at its setting and tone and embraced them, and that helped to make the game stronger.

And it worked! Persona 4 was easily Atlus’s biggest success in the PS2 era. Though the game was hard to find in the United States due to its short print run, it was inescapable online, and the early Let’s Play era helped keep it in the public eye. There’s a large number of people in the English fandom who only knew Persona 4 existed back in the day because of the hiimdaisy comic and the Giant Bomb Endurance Run. Meanwhile, the game was huge in Japan and topped sales charts for weeks.

Source: Gamasutra

And then Atlus almost went out of business! Oops!

Here’s what we know about Atlus at the time that Persona 4 came out: it wasn’t doing good. The PS2 Shin Megami Tensei games were all desperate attempts to try and find success, something that Persona director Katsura Hashino has been fairly public about in interviews. Dataminers examining the PS2 SMT games have found evidence that suggests every game was built on top of the previous, with every game using SMT: Nocturne’s models and basic gameplay system until after Persona 4’s release. Persona 3 and Persona 4 are so similar under the hood that model swap mods are everywhere for the two, with literally the only adjustments necessary being a reordering of animations to account for Persona 4 having a guard animation and Persona 3 not.

Persona 4 was a huge hit, but it wasn’t enough to save Atlus. The last games released under an independent Atlus were Shin Megami Tensei: Devil Survivor (one of my personal favorites) and Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey (a massive failure for the company). Following Strange Journey’s release, long-time franchise artist (and, more importantly, producer and creative designer for Strange Journey) Kazuma Kaneko near entirely disappeared from future SMT titles, only credited for writing the scenario concept for SMTIV and as a demon design supervisor for later SMT titles.

Soon after Strange Journey’s failure, Atlus was snatched up by Index Corporation. Very little is known about the internal culture during the Index era, but evidence suggests that it wasn’t great. The first few games Atlus produced after this point were all remakes, save for the strange, marriage-drama focused Catherine, a game that was assuredly in development before Atlus was bought out.

It was the original games and spinoffs that Atlus produced after they were bought by Index that started to show a shift in tone. Devil Survivor 2 is a notably different game than its predecessor (which was made while Atlus was independent). While I won’t get into that too much here (that game’s worth an essay on its own), it decided to trade it’s classical SMT-style aesthetic for something more bombastic and widely-appealing. Many of the characters in that game are better summed up by what anime tropes they appeal to than by their own character arcs, and the game’s plot is an unsubtle ripoff of Neon Genesis Evangelion. And it worked. Devil Survivor 2 very notably sold better than its predecessor despite being a DS game in the 3DS era.

At around the same time as Devil Survivor 2 was released, Atlus was preparing to release the first anime adaptation of Persona 4. Persona 4: The Animation was released in October of 2011, directed by Seiji Kishi (of Angel Beats! fame) and animated by AIC. I’ll leave my thoughts on Seiji Kishi as a director out of this and focus on the content of Persona 4: The Animation instead.

Let’s get one thing out of the way. Persona 4: The Animation is a comedy anime.

The anime is a fairly faithful adaptation of the game in terms of plotline. It follows the game’s story to the letter, hitting every plot beat. When it needs to get serious, it gets serious, and when it nails its emotional beats, it nails them well. While I’ll go on record in saying that I flat out dislike the anime, I won’t deny that certain episodes, like the Nanako arc, are done very well. However, when it doesn’t need to be serious, the anime decides to look at Persona 4’s subtlety in its character arcs, and says, “Subtlety is for cowards.”

There’s an argument to be made that there isn’t time for subtlety in a 24-episode anime, which is why everyone’s character arcs needed to be compressed and character traits shaved down to only the most exaggerated bits. I disagree. You can easily show character without exaggeration in short-form media – the entire short story genre is built off of that exact concept. The decision to shave everyone down to their most basic traits was a decision made to make Persona 4 more accessible to a general anime-watching audience, who likely came in expecting a more action-packed, high energy deal.

And it worked.

For many people, Persona 4: The Animation was their first experience with Persona, period. The anime was incredibly popular, and it’s clear that at this point, Atlus (or, more likely, Index) realized they’d struck gold. Persona 4: The Animation was the start of a large spate of Persona 4 spinoffs, all of which adopting the character exaggerations of the anime in some form or fashion. Any time you see a scene in a P4 spinoff where Chie’s reduced to her love of meat and kung-fu? Blame the anime. Further original games after this point seemed to take a more mainstream shift as well – Shin Megami Tensei IV and its sequel, Apocalypse, are both very different games than their predecessors, with characters and plotlines seemingly written to appeal to Persona 4’s audience.

Atlus eventually managed to claw their way out from under the hand of Index, mostly because Index got caught up in a huge fraud investigation! Oops! Sega bought a whole bunch of Index at this point, and Atlus has more or less kept on trucking under Sega since. However, the shift in internal priorities hasn’t changed much – Persona 5, while still a good game, is much closer tonally to the games that came out under Index, Shin Megami Tensei V has been AWOL ever since its first preview, and the less said about Catherine Redux, the better.

II. Less is More, and Maybe Inaba Doesn’t Need A Nightclub

Which, after a long detour, brings us back to Persona 4 Golden.

Golden is a remake of Persona 4 with additional content, released for the Playstation Vita (RIP) during the height of its popularity in Japan. Like Persona 3 FES, a previous patch/remake for Persona 3, Golden primarily exists as a gameplay patch to Persona 4 with additional story content in places throughout the game. While most of FES’s additional story was segmented off into the controversial “The Answer” section, Golden’s additional content is peppered haphazardly throughout the game. Because of this integration into the main story, Golden’s issues are more pronounced than FES’s were – in FES, you could just not play “The Answer”. Golden isn’t letting you go home without at least pushing you toward Marie’s dungeon.

Golden feels like it was developed with an understanding that anyone who’s playing it has watched the anime, and decides to lean into chasing that mainstream appeal while also throwing out the intrigue of its plot and setting. This is first evidenced when you boot up the game and watch the opening. While it hits all of the same beats as Persona 4’s opening, Golden’s opening has a much cheerier tune to it, focusing on a dance sequence and colorful visuals instead of the larger tone of the game. It’s not like the Persona 4 opening is completely absent from the game, but you have to go out of your way to watch it, and first impressions are very important.

This change in opening tone is only one example of the general tone of the changes that Golden takes. While there are big issues with the game’s writing (specifically one big one, which, whooo boy, we’ll get to her), most of the issues are in the little things – the new gameplay elements, the new areas you can visit, and the new scenes that were added to the game.

I talked a lot about how important P4’s setting is to its game for a reason: most of Golden’s changes are ones that disrupt the carefully crafted tone and setting of the original game. From things like slice of life scenes about the party buying scooters for themselves, to a winter trip to a ski resort, to a goddamn idol concert on the roof of the supercenter driving everyone out of business, it feels like the game is trying to pull away from its rural setting and down-to-earth tone to appeal to the lowest common denominator: teenage boys who live in Japanese cities.

A big sticking point for me personally has always been that you can visit Okina City in Golden. In Persona 4, you visited the nearby city occasionally in social link events, but never explored it on the whole. It gave a sense that Okina City was somewhere inconvenient to go to – someplace worth going to for a day trip with your friends, but too out of the way to visit on the regular. In Golden, the city and all of its trappings are just a loading screen away. Having a larger setting change like this so easily accessible detracts from Inaba’s setting – it makes the anxieties that several characters have about being trapped by the town feel fake. It detracts from a feeling that’s so integral to the game’s tone.

Also, the first time you go there outside of a Social Link is because Yosuke wants to pick up chicks with his cool new motorcycle.

The first trip to Okina City is ultimately indicative of a larger problem with most of the added scenes in P4G have: because they were written after the anime, they’re written to appeal to anime watchers. You can immediately tell when you’ve entered a scene that is original to P4G because the writing almost immediately drops in quality – characters become less complex, scenes have nothing to do with the plot or character development, and, to be quite honest, the jokes get worse. The Okina City sequence ultimately just ends with a fat joke and another “no homo” moment with Kanji. It’s… really bad.

There’s four more of these additional sequences throughout the game, and they’re all similar slice of life sequences that rely on anime tropes to propel them. The next after this is a beach episode with the rest of your party. After that is the idol concert on the Junes roof, which gets a hastily written tie-in to the plot when an antagonist says that the concert was how he found the party. After that is the entire winter sequence of the game, which caps off with a ski resort trip that leads into the game’s extra dungeon (which we’ll get to), which THEN leads into the game’s second hot springs cutscene, which has even less purpose than the first one.

None of these scenes have any real substance – it feels like they were just included because they actually had the budget to include them this time around. It’s possible that Okina City and the nighttime areas in Inaba were originally intended for the original version of P4, and I’d believe it – the way nighttime jobs are implemented in the original version of the game is particularly awkward, and you visit Okina City enough times in Social Links that I fully believe it was intended for the full game. As for the idol concert sequence, it 100% only exists because they got Rie Kugimiya as Rise’s VA, but couldn’t fit a sequence where she sang into the original version of the game.

The problem is that these inclusions ultimately detract from the original story. They take a game with a pretty firm idea of what kind of tone it wanted to have and muddle it because, fuck that, we have a budget this time and we need more anime tropes, idols, and tsunderes for those kids who came in after watching the anime.

Which brings us to Persona 4 Golden’s biggest issues: its additional Social Links, the winter semester, and its new ending sequence.

III. We have to talk about Marie.

Like Persona 3 FES before it, Persona 4 Golden adds new Social Links to the game. The first of which is the Jester Social Link, which deals with Tohru Adachi, a local police officer and a major character. While I’ve never been a huge fan of this Social Link (I’ve always felt like it made the identity of the culprit too obvious), it’s fairly well received by the fanbase and I can see the argument for its inclusion, so I’m not going to spend time discussing it here.

The other is Golden’s new Aeon Social Link, who manages to encompass most of Golden’s issues in a single character.

Marie is a completely original character to Golden, the first of a long chain of Atlus “remake waifus” – characters who are added to a remake of a game that are intended to appeal to the otaku crowd, rarely fit in with the rest of the game, and introduce large changes to the game’s plot. These characters rarely work because the narrative wasn’t built around them, and the retcons these characters introduce are often detrimental to their games’ original plots or themes.

Marie has all of these problems. She feels like she was written by committee – designed to appeal to an otaku crowd with a fancy design and tsundere personality. On top of that, she’s voiced by a big name seiyuu (Kana Hanazawa), and her plotline is used to fill in gaps with the game’s ending sequence, since the original game struggled with setting it up and the anime barely even bothered to touch it (Persona 4’s True Ending was shuffled off into an OVA in the anime adaptation).

From the moment you first see Marie, it’s obvious that she doesn’t belong. It’s not that her character design is bad, but it doesn’t match with the rest of the game’s tone. This is something of a pattern for her. The first time you meet Marie, it’s in the middle of a scene that was originally dedicated to the protagonist meeting his new family in Inaba. It’s jarring, disrupts a scene that was about setting up the protagonist’s larger family dynamic, and interrupts the flow of the game’s opening sequence.

Personality-wise, Marie is probably the most tropey of Golden’s characters – she’s a tsundere with amnesia, has a mysterious past, writes bad poetry as a hobby, and has a very obvious crush on the protagonist. Romancing her is almost mandated – you’re required to complete her Social Link to access the winter semester of the game, and during the game’s new ending, she calls out the protagonist on television to talk about how much she loves him. You can choose not to romance her if you want, but the game does its best to push you into wanting to do so.

Marie ultimately becomes one of the Velvet Room’s new attendants, though a lot of the evidence suggests that she was intended to become one of your party members originally. This is partially because she has a unique Persona related to her, and partially because the game takes every effort to emphasize how much of a buddy she is to the party. Marie’s Social Link ranks are time gated, usually becoming available after a new party member joins your team. All of these early scenes are dedicated to the protagonist going on dates with Marie, and then a random party member will show up and immediately become friends with her. Probably the most egregious case is during any mid-game hangouts where you don’t rank up, because the entirety of your party will just show up at Junes at the same time as you and Marie. It’s so obviously artificially constructed and honestly feels insulting to the player.

This artificiality feels like it was a writer’s saving throw to justify why the team would go into Marie’s dungeon to save her. The problem is that it’s also an unnecessary move to take. The majority of Persona 4’s plot is about the party entering dungeons to save people that they don’t really know from a serial killer; it stands to reason that the party would decide to help Marie without that extra motivation. But no, it was important to the writers that Marie is also big friends with the party, so we got what we got instead.

Marie’s dungeon comes after the skiing trip that caps off the winter semester, a portion of the game that is only available if you’ve finished her Social Link. The skiing trip is mostly more slice of life/comedy scenes, right up until you get thrust into the TV World to help Marie. The dungeon itself is… notoriously bad. You’re stripped of your equipment and items, and can only use items found within the dungeon to fight back. On top of that, the dungeon constantly drains your HP and MP, and the boss of it can only be damaged by using items that give her elemental weaknesses, because she starts off immune to everything. Here’s hoping you didn’t bring Chie for that fight like I did!

As you go through the dungeon, it’s revealed that Marie was secretly Kusumi-no-Okami, a minor Shinto god in service to Ameno-Sagiri (the game’s first final boss). Kusumi-no-Okami’s purpose is that she’s supposed to observe humanity and suck up all of Ameno-Sagiri’s fog after the conclusion of the game’s plot, which will inevitably kill her. The dungeon ends with the party trying to appeal to Marie to convince her that she doesn’t need to die, and then beating her up to save her. It’s… not particularly well written, but if that was all to Marie’s character after that, it would be fine. Unfortunately, it’s not.

The game proceeds as normal after that point as you approach the actual final boss, Izanami-no-Okami. During the fight with her, there is a sequence where the protagonist is encouraged to keep going by all of his social links. In the original version of the game (assuming that you’ve done their Social Links), this sequence ends with Dojima and Nanako, the family he’s been staying with the whole game, encouraging him to keep going. In Golden, Nanako’s line is immediately followed by Marie showing up, once again taking a sequence about familial love to make it about Marie. It’s… kind of gross!

Then you beat Izanami, and in the scene immediately afterwards, it’s revealed that, just kidding, Marie wasn’t Kusumi-no-Okami after all! She was actually Izanami-no-Mikoto, the good part of Izanami that was shaved off so that she could do her whole evil plot. Once you beat Izanami-no-Okami, she absorbs that evil part back into her and everything is all hunky dory! Conflict resolved completely, no need to worry about it anymore!

The “Marie was actually Izanami all along” reveal undercuts the finale of the game significantly. It comes immediately after what was the final scene before the ending scene, where Izanami pledged to leave humanity’s direction to humans in recognition of your feats. It’s an unnecessary doubling down on a finale that was already pretty definitive, if somewhat bittersweet, by making it unambiguously happy. This remains a theme for Golden’s ending sequence.

Persona 4 ends with the protagonist leaving his friends behind at the end of the year. Though the killer is in jail and the mastermind defeated, Inaba is still in the same melancholy state as it was when the protagonist came to it, and ultimately, he has to leave his friends behind. There’s a bittersweet-ness to its happy ending – no matter what, you have to move on and trust that things will be okay without you. Obviously, the protagonist comes back – there wouldn’t be so many spinoffs if he couldn’t – but it’s important that Persona 4 ends the way it does at that point. It puts a definitive close on the game.

Golden, however, adds an extended epilogue sequence where the protagonist comes back a year later. In this sequence, you find out that Inaba’s businesses are recovering, Namatame (the false antagonist) is running for office with a lot of support from the town, Adachi (the actual antagonist) has been on good behavior in jail, and your party members are all making tracks toward happiness for themselves.

A theme of esoteric happiness runs through this entire sequence – it feels like it entirely exists just to tell the player not to worry, everything is fine now, don’t worry about any other points of conflict. If it was just one of these things, it would have been fine, but the gatling gun of happy endings makes every one of those little victories feel lesser for it. Marie, of course, is inserted into the ending sequence of the epilogue to cap off her involvement. The esoteric happiness started with Marie, and it ends with Marie.

Golden’s epilogue ties every conflict in the game up into a neat little bow, in a way that’s almost entirely at odds with Persona 4’s down-to-home nature. It’s a fantasy that doesn’t acknowledge the uglier parts of life that Persona 4 was all about confronting. It’s the same kind of lie that Izanami accused humanity of wanting to nestle itself into. Marie’s involvement in Golden sums up a lot of that game’s problems, but the epilogue brings them into sharp relief.

IV. So now what?

I wouldn’t call Golden a bad game – I’ve heard a lot of people call it the superior version gameplay-wise, and while I disagree with that (it’s got some balance issues thanks to its new mechanics), it’s definitely the most accessible version. But when it comes to how it relates to its original, Golden throws a lot of what makes it good out the window in favor of appealing to a more general audience with slice of life sequences, more familiar tropes, and a character who mostly exists to sell merchandise and tie up Persona 4’s ending in an unambiguously happy manner.

I realize I’m in the minority here when I talk about what I dislike about Golden – you’ll find a lot of people who dislike Marie, but not a lot who dislike the rest of the package. And if you have a Vita and haven’t played Persona 4 already, then you might as well use it as your entry point into the franchise. However, I can’t help but feel like Golden is the exact point where Persona as a franchise shifted from trying to tell philosophical stories with more grounded characters to chasing mainstream appeal. Even Persona 5, a game that tries to tell a story about very real societal problems, has a lot of the same problems as Golden does, and from what I understand, these problems only got worse with Persona 5 Royal.

At the end of the day, Persona is going nowhere anytime soon – Persona 5 is the best-selling game in the franchise period, and the influence Persona has had on JRPGs in general cannot be understated. But I wouldn’t mind if some of the things I disliked about Persona 4 Golden didn’t come back.

#persona 4 #persona 4 golden #p4 spoilers #opinion #video games #a massive pile of salt

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afewmarvelousthoughts · 6 years

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Stay Ch. 16

Master List

Pairing: Natasha X Reader (Female)

Summary: You have a gift, the ability to see other people’s innermost secrets. For years you used it to gather intel for the highest bidder when you take on The Widow. After she becomes more than a mark the two of you spend years stealing moments. Post snap you wait in your designated meeting place, look back on the sordid past you share with the woman you love and hope against everything that she’s still alive.

Warnings: Angst, and fluff, and feels oh my!

A/N: So yeah I swear I wroth an authors note for this... but idfk what happened.

ANYWAY! Thank you all for being so patient while I got my life together. This one is also short and sweet (guess that’s the mood I’m in). However, y’all should know me by now. This is just the calm before the storm.

Hope you enjoy this one my pumpkins!

Tags are open!

@mywinterwolf @disagreetoagree @breezy1415 @peachthatdrinkslemonade @5aftermidnight@jeromethepsycho @marvel-randomness @daniellajocelyn @katecolleen @yanginginthere@wonderlandmind4 @piensa-bonito @for-the-love-of-the-fandom @lesbian-girls-wayhaught @siriuslycloudy2

March 2007

At some point in the last five months, you’d stopped recognizing yourself. The woman in the mirror wasn’t Y/N. Her hair was different, down to even the eyebrows. Her accent distinctly that of a life long Londoner. She worked for an independent UK couture fashion magazine, chose wine over whiskey, and was distinctly heterosexual.

When the chance to work this job requiring deep cover came up in December you jumped on it. You didn’t want to be you anymore. The you that couldn’t be with the woman you loved. The you that was heartbroken. The you who was beginning to doubt that you’d ever be happy. Fuck her.

Being Charlie Daniels was far better. She was, of course, a real person. Just one who was now living comfortably in the Bahamas courtesy of MI6. Even legit agencies had use of freelance talent every now and then.

Settling into her life had been easy. Not setting her boss on fire or blowing his brains out daily was a different task altogether. Turned out that a magazine was a great front for a crime empire. Lots of international travel, young and beautiful and desperate men and women, money exchanged in countless untraceable ways, on and on. And this fucker was happy to take advantage of every single disgusting avenue it opened up.

You almost had everything you needed to hand to MI6, get your obscenely large payout, and get on to another gig while they threw all of these bastards into cells to rot for the rest of their miserable lives. Just one more trip. After whatever horrible things they lay out in Tokyo you’ll be set.

Tokyo is one of those cities you can lose yourself in. Like New York but better for its interesting balance of vibrancy and grounded reserve. You absolutely love it.

The whole point of the trip, at least on the surface, was to focus on Fashion Week Tokyo. Honestly, there was a part of you that wished this was your world. Nothing but runway shows and after parties. Writing about the latest trends rather than delving into the inner workings of the worlds miscreants

Oh well. It was nice enough to pretend. You had to admit that you’d miss Charlie Daniels once you shed this skin in a couple of weeks.

You’re sitting two people down from your boss at an underground show. The level of security here screams that there are other things going on behind the scenes but it’s still a room filled with a who’s who of the Japanese and international fashion communities.

This was your third show of the day, and you knew there would be a party after where you’d have to schmooze all while plucking information from your unsuspecting fellow guests. You’re exhausted. So rather than pay much attention to the show you let your mind wander.

When she walks out you feel her rather than see her. Slowly you turn your head to stare dumbstruck at the model walking onto the catwalk. Your heart begins beating against your ribs, your mouth goes dry, your hands shake.

It takes every ounce of control you have to keep your emotions in. To not scream “Natasha!” at the top of your lungs. To not grab her and run for the hills. Charlie Daniels and her easy life be damned. It’s hard but you manage.

As she turns and comes back down, passing now closer to you, her eyes don’t graze the crowd at all. Head up, shoulders back, she walks the runway like she’d been doing it for years.

The rest of the show is maybe ten minutes but it feels like years. You know the models are all attending the party. Eye candy for the high end guests.

It’s fairly easy to ditch your coworkers in the crowd as you try to find the best vantage point in the room without being too obvious. After a solid twenty minutes, you find yourself planning an escape route. Most of the models are milling about but she’s no where to be seen. You will find her.

But you know you can’t skip out just yet. At the bar, you order a red wine and make yourself seen. Charlie would never miss the whole party after all. You spend a bit chatting with designers and a few models, feigning interest in the whole thing until you hear your boss call out to you.

“Oy, Charlie!” Carl’s voice alone makes you want to put him down. When you turn he’s waving you over to the bar. Sighing heavily you head over.

You’re about ten feet away when you see her, head back laughing at something Carl or his friend had said. Both men are far to close to her for your liking and the hungry look on Carl’s face sets your blood boiling.

He slings an arm around your shoulders and you carefully coach your face to not show disgust. “Charlie here is my best writer. Doin’ some pieces for us on this whole thing,” he waves his other hand around wildly.

“Good to meet ya, Charlie, I’m Dan,” the other man, clearly American says.

“Likewise,” Natasha doesn’t react to the accent at all.

“This here is-”

“Natalie,” Natasha cuts him off, extending a hand to you. Holding her eyes with yours you take it. It’s like touching a live wire.

“Natalie is an American model working here in Japan. May be a good topic for a piece.” He ribs you leaning closer, “And a good piece for the office eh?” Suddenly that MI6 money seems far less appealing.

“I’d love that,” Natasha beams. “Why don’t you guys go mingle and Charlie and I can chat!” The men exchange a glance, but there’s plenty of fresh meat around to sink their teeth into.

Carl flashes you a greasy smile and a wink as he walks away. Thinking clearly that you’re going to snare this woman for him. You, unfortunately, had a few others. Not something you were proud of. Demands of the job you told yourself.

“She’ll take a vodka neat,” you tell the bartender.

“Yes,” Natasha smiles at him, “Whiskey for her. Makers if you have it.” He thinks nothing of it and makes your drinks.

“So, how’s modeling in Japan?”

“Probably about as good as writing for a sleazy jackal.”

You laugh, “That bad? What’s the goal.”

“Getting a cover,” you commend the clever word play.

“That’s a good goal. Long term?”

“Something like that.” She takes a sip of her vodka, “How long are you here?”

“End of the week.” Your skin itches to touch her. The men are rounding back. You hold her gaze and shift your eyes back to them. She catches on.

“Perfect! It’s so hard to have a good interview here, don’t you think?”

“Absolutely. Why don’t you come by my hotel?” You whip out your spare key card. “I’d love to get your story for the mag, maybe do a full feature.”

“A feature would be excellent exposure!”

“Wouldn’t it?” Carl slides up next to her. “We can get you all the exposure you could want Ms. Natalie.”

“Charlie was telling me all about it.” She flashes him a coy smile. “Thank you so much Charlie! I forgot I have a late fitting tonight for another show so I’ve got to run. But we’ll chat soon yeah?”

“Absolutely! It was so good to meet you Natalie.”

“Same! Bye!” She hurries through the crowded room and disappears.

“Busy girl.” Carl quips. “Whiskey?” You look down at the glass by your hand.

“Some guy sent them over,” you gesture to Natasha’s lipstick stained glass. “Seemed rude to refuse. Can’t stand the stuff though.”

“That’s a mans drink,” Carl laughs at his own perceived joke and you force a smile.

Somehow you make it through the rest of the evening. You’d refused to allow yourself to hope that she’d be here, too obvious to come the same night, better to wait. Kicking off your shoes you head straight to the mini bar and crack open a whiskey, downing it in one gulp.

“You really need to be more careful,” Natasha’s voice comes from the bathroom. “I mean not even checking around. Sloppy.”

“Charlie Daniels doesn’t have to check for Russian assassins in her bathroom,” a smile pulls your face so tight it hurts.

“Well, Natalie Rushman isn’t a Russian spy. So…”

You let your real accent resurface as you pull her into your arms, “Natalie Rushman, I don’t know if that’s clever or lazy.” She kisses you hard, tongue sliding over your lips hands gripping your ass.

“Mmm,” she hums. “Kinda like the accent.”

“Oh?” You revert to the clipped posh Londoner sound. “Would you rather be with Charlie? I hate to break it to you, she’s strictly into dick so you may need to get a bit creative.”

Natasha’s head falls back with laughter, “I’m always into a challenge but,” she cups your face in her hands, “I’d much rather Y/N, she’s got a cute accent too.” Your kiss is soft this time, “I missed you.”

“I missed you too, honey.” Gently you push a strand of hair out of her face. “Is this smart? Are you gonna get-”

“I’m good. I wouldn’t be here if I thought there was risk.” She pulls away and tugs you toward the bed. “There’s no surveillance on me here, I check in every week, that’s it. This is strictly to build a cover.”

“Cover for what?” She gives you a sideways glance. “Right. National security.”

“Do you really want to talk about work?”

Smirking at her you push her back on the bed. “Maybe later.”

You lean down to her but she stops you by planting a strappy heel in the center of your chest. Trailing your fingers down her leg you snag a knife from her thigh holster. Carefully you slide the blade under the straps, the incredibly sharp edge cuts through the thin suede like it’s nothing.

“Those were very expensive you know,” eyes sparkling with desire.

You slip the shoe off and toss it aside. “I’ll buy you a new pair.” Your lips press against her ankle.

Everything in your life until her was so fleeting. Even your own name, the sound of your own voice, who you were… But with her, you were grounded. You weren’t anything but her’s, you were Y/N.

Suddenly you’re overwhelmed. Caressing her muscular calf you just stare at her eyes. Emerald green, dark liner, lids heavy with lust and exhaustion.

“Natasha…” Your voice cracks and you fight for composure.

“Y/N? What is it?” She shoots up, cradling your face in her hands.

You shake your head, unable to really find the words and unwilling to send this storm of emotions to her. “I just…” You cover her hands with your own. It’s not that you don’t want her, you do. But…

“Can we just… I just wanna hold you…” Her expression immediately softens, eyes sparkling a touch with tears. “Sorry… I… I just…”

“I’d love that, baby.” Tenderly her lips brush yours, then your cheeks, your forehead, your eyelids as they flutter closed.

You shed your clothes and crawl into the plush bed. Holding tight to one another you spend hours drifting in and out of sleep, covering the other with soft kisses. Before the sun rises your hands wander southward.

This time you don’t fuck one another senseless. It feels like you’re trying to memorize every curve, every sound, every subtle thing that marks being together. You both know you many not get to do this for some time. The knowledge aches but it doesn’t make having her any less sweet.

Post Snap

You lean your head back on the wall behind the booth. The crying man from last night is gone, you find yourself hoping that he’s resting peacefully somewhere… even though you know it’s pointless to hope for such things.

There are more people filling the bar than there was before. The TVs are off, radios turned up, reporters frantically trying to determine what happened. It was global, that was clear. All planes grounded, trains stopped, communications spotty due to damaged cell towers.

A man speaks frantically to someone who seems to be a friend that he was heading to Nuremberg from Budapest, how the roads are almost not navigable. He doesn’t know if his family is even still there but he has to find out.

Despite his distress, your lips curl a bit at the mention of Budapest.

#natasha romanoff x reader #natasha romanoff #natasha x reader #black widow #queer fic #wlw

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littlemonstersau-blog · 5 years

Text

The Feels Awaken, Part 3: A New Hope (for Friendship)

Written by @jkl-fff, illustrated by me

PART I - PART II [Interlude] - PART III - PART IV [Interlude] - PART V [FINAL] (you are here)

——————————————————————————————–

A new day dawned then waxed then began to wane, but Ford and Bill hardly noticed. A manic, obsessive energy (plus an unhealthy amount of coffee and sugar) kept them focused throughout their self-appointed task. Such is often the case for the kind of people who feel the need to write to right a wrong in the world. Not all heroes wear capes, after all; some wear turtlenecks and trenchcoats, some wear paper-based clones of teenage boys produced through unholy abominations of SCIENCE!.

… For that matter, not all heroes are particularly heroic; some are morally ambiguous straddlers of the line between antihero and antivillain, some are demonic chaos gods who (quite frankly) still wonder how in the 79 Hells they found themselves in this position.

In the end, though it did take more than the one night, they still finished in just over 16 hours. The plot outline came in at just over 18 pages, which they tidily stacked together on the table and declared to be more than adequate … before passing out on the carpet. Facefirst.

When Bill next regained consciousness, he was in his attic bed and morning light was streaming through the window. His mouth tasted like an abandoned prison for criminally insane chalk and his head felt like the internal turmoil of a buzzsaw having an existential crisis. It was a pain that was anything but hilarious; it was the sugared caffeine hangover equivalent of nuclear fallout … Mouthwash fixed the first problem. The second took an adult dosage of aspirin, a lot of water, and deliberate manipulation of many of the clonesuit’s normally automatic processes for a full eight minutes. And even then, not completely.

“Guess I can’t pilot one of these things through 36+ hours of no sleep on a gallon of coffee … Not if I wanna be able to still maneuver it the next day without crashing every ten feet into a wall or the floor, at least,” he grumbled to himself. “Major design flaw … Can’t believe they got evolutionarily approved for mass production with such weak durability …”

Downstairs in the kitchen, Stan greeted him jovially enough. “Stancakes are up, and so are you, it seems. How you feelin’ today?”

“Honestly, confused,” Bill graveled, his clonesuit throat still raw. “I can get longterm possession of a meatbag leading to me—y’know, the real me—developing emotions and physical cravings and other … gross, brain-mush junk like that. Neurochemistry is basically just an addictive habit, like how people respond to hearing the question ‘What is love?’—”

“Baby, don’t hurt me. Don’t hurt me no more,” Stan mumbled automatically.

“Exactly. But what I don’t get is why the real me is also feeling this coffee and sugar hangover. No joke: I tried leaving my clonesuit to get away from it, but it followed me. How is that fair? And, yeah, existence isn’t fair,” Bill interjected before Stan automatically could. “But still …”

Like the benevolent and experienced sage he was (more or less), Stan chuckled to himself. Then, laying a companionable arm around Bill’s shoulders, he leaned in and whispered the truth as grimly as Death itself, “You can outrun your sins, but you can never outrun a hangover.”

“W-wha?”

“Some say if you never stop drinkin’, it’ll never catch up with you. But they are fools. Sooner or later, all things must sleep—sooner or later, all who drink must suffer.”

“Uh … K-kinda freakin’ me out here.” Bill tried to lean away, but Stan’s hold was inescapable. “And, just sayin’, I’m kinda responsible for making most of the 79 Hells as freaky as they are.”

“Heed my warning, child.”

“I’m heeding! I’m heeding! Elder Gods, Stan, the only one who’s supposed to give people nightmares around here is me …”

Straightening up, Stan went back to the stove to continue what passed for cooking with him. “Once you’re done eatin’, by the way, I gotta plate for you to take down to Ford. He prob’ly needs some food and water more ‘n you do.”

Between mouthfuls of food, Bill said, “Yeah, sure … You seen what we wrote, by the way?”

“Yeah. It’s not bad at all. I’d def’nitely go see movies like that. Might even pay my own money for it, too. Heh … Even Soos admitted the storylines are better. Haven’t seen him that downcast ‘bout anything in a while, either. Looked as painful for him as cutting out his own kidney. Might have to do something nice for him soon just to make up for it,” Stan added to himself.

“Huh … Yeah, maybe …” Bill chewed on his breakfast, almost starting to maybe feel guilty. Then, when he finished, he put his dishes in the sink, picked up what was meant for Ford, and took it down to the lab.

Ford, as usual, was at his desk. He was hunched over with a pen, which was also fairly usual. However, and this was very unusual, all his notes and Journals had been pushed into a corner—neatly stacked, but well out of the way. Close to hand, as if for quick reference, was actually their Cosmos Conflicts storyline.

Bill cleared his throat. “Brought some breakfast for ya from Stan.” He set it on the desk, but away from any of the papers (just in case). “How you feeling? I woke up with a caffeine hangover I couldn’t escape even when I left my body. Er, clonsuit. Whatever. Same dif.”

“… I didn’t really sleep very deeply,” Ford eventually replied, his voice as hoarse as Bill’s. “Ergo, I can’t really say I woke up with such a hangover, but I’m suffering one all the same.”

“Yeesh, that sucks. Taken anything? Had some water and some food? That helped me.”

“Some water and aspirin, yes, though I’m not sure I could keep much food down … I suppose I ought to try, anyway.”

“If you feel more rotten than a two-week-old apple core, why are you working?” Bill asked, sliding the plate closer.

“I’m not really working, per se,” Ford answered guiltily. “Just … sketching. Some stuff. For what we came up with.”

Bill’s eyes lit up with interest. “Ooo! Really? Can I see? Please?”

For a moment, Ford’s jaw worked. As though trying to control himself.

“It’s okay,” Bill said hurriedly, though unable to fully contain his disappointment. “I get it. I’ll leave you al—”

A couple pages’ worth of images (some rough sketches, some little more than absent doodles, and some rather intricate and detailed) were thrust at the Demon. “Here. Can’t see any harm in you looking at them, anyway, so …” Ford mumbled. Without looking up, he cut in to his food. “Was just doing this since I’m too awake and restless to just not do anything, but too … wooly in the head, I suppose you could say, to do any productive work.”

Bill poured over them, delighting in the imaginative whimsy of them. Most were of characters from the prequels, though with distinctive touches—touches reflecting their own collaboration (such as Otherkin in a stained pilot’s attire, Imdolledupa aiming ruthlessly with a blaster, and Jelived Knights wearing a different style of clothing from Jelived Sentinels or Jelived Healers). But some were very different, especially among the doodles. “Ha! You made a Soos Wookie!”

Ford couldn’t resist smiling. “Soosbacca. Co-pilot to Stan Solo.”

“In their spaceship, the Mystery Falcon, right? Is Melody a Wookie, too?”

“Huh … That’s not a bad idea, actually. I was having a hard time seeing how to fit her in, since she isn’t really the Princess Leia type.”

“But Mabel and—pff!—Dipper are?” Bill snorted, pointing to where they were both sketched with the iconic braids wrapping around their ears. “Both of them together?”

“Well, they’re also both Luke, since I couldn’t really pick who fit which roll better.”

“Two sets of the twins running around, huh?” Bill murmured, though he was really thinking about two Dippers (and they weren’t running around, either—they were very much not running). “… And Wendy’s Lando, I see. Am I Yoda, since I’m the most triangular or everybody, and the right size?”

“Uh …” Ford hesitated.

“Pff, it’s alright, I can already see 3PO and R2 are both me.”

Lamely, the Weirdologist explained, “Because you’re shiny. That’s the extent of the logic.”

“You gonna do any more sketches?”

“Assuming I can keep breakfast down, probably,” Ford said around a mouthful. “It’s … distracting. And fun. And relaxing, too. Helps to pass the time on a down day like this.”

“Um … M-mind if I stay and watch? Please?” Bill almost begged. “Y’know how much I love watching you meatbags make art.”

“… Oh, fine,” Ford relented. Because what was the harm in being nice to the Demon? Ford didn’t have to trust him for that. “Just don’t make any noise. My head aches enough as it is.”

Bill mimed zipping his lips and throwing away the key before pulling up a chair and settling himself comfortably beside Ford. The only time he broke his silence after that was to ask Ford if he wanted more water, and to assert that the others would get a kick out of seeing these sketches (“especially Soos … the Twins, too, though we’d have to text ‘em a photo of ‘em, or mail the whole project to ‘em to see …”).

All in all, it turned out to be a rather nice day for both of them together.

#little monsters au #the feels awaken #bipper #stanford #bill cipher #writing #fanfiction #please excuse the dopey ass looking star wars sketches #also omfg this is finished finallyyyy #submission

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zdbztumble · 5 years

Text

“Kingdom Hearts II” revisited, Part IV

Having said last time that I don’t understand how any of the first four Disney worlds could be considered filler, I can absolutely understand how the last four could be. I suspect that it’s these worlds, at least on the first pass, that give this game its reputation for Disney filler. The reasons why aren’t hard to spot: it’s a case of formula and stagnation combining to bring the larger story down into a fun but overlong lull.

As I said in Part III, the first of the Disney worlds follow logically from Yen Sid’s briefing, and illustrate the competing villain factions. Disney Castle represents a turning point, with Maleficent getting personally involved and striking at a world that should have been off-limits. I don’t object to the placement of Disney Castle in the line-up; the story needed a step up in stakes at that moment. But there is a total lack of follow-up from there. Agrabah, Port Royal, and Pride Rock all play out in the same way so far as the larger story is concerned; Pete shows up with some Heartless, has almost nothing to do with whatever it is the local villain is up to, and Sora and the local Disney heroes clean up the mess. The one deviation from that formula is Halloween Town, where Maleficent again takes a personal hand and her past history with Oogie Boogie is capitalized on, but it amounts to the same basic formula.

Where this issue is most apparent is in Pride Rock. Some of the worlds before this see Pete discussing how this or that character would make a good Heartless; in Pride Rock, the local Disney villain actually becomes one. That is, on paper, a major escalation, and a significant achievement for Maleficent’s forces. But the presentation of that moment utterly fails to convey that, because Pete and Scar have virtually no interaction. There’s no seduction or temptation for Scar to embrace the powers of darkness and become a Heartless, no equivalent to Maleficent’s conversations with Jafar, Hades, and Riku in KH I. Everything in Pride Rock plays out as if nothing were unique here, as if no advancement had happened; Pete’s just there, and he’s almost casual in the way he declares Scar to be a Heartless.

Really, Pete’s continued presence speaks to the problem. Maleficent’s threat that Timeless River represented his last chance should have been a real threat; after his failure there, he should have been banished to sentry duty at their hideout or something like that, while Maleficent saw to all the rest of the Disney worlds personally, gradually increasing the threat and the stakes. Meanwhile, Organization XIII could provide at least one major disruption or counter to her plans, keeping them involved. Instead, the Organization puts in no appearances in these worlds, and the only mention of them that I remember is Sora asking Nala if she’s seen anyone in dark cloaks. Whatever the merits and demerits of each individual world (and we’ll get to that in a second), the end result is that the central plot of KH II is absent for four whole worlds, except for the cutscenes tied to Kairi.

And speaking of Kairi - as good as her reintroduction to the story is in the prelude, the game takes too long to bring her back into the proceedings after Sora awakens. The reference to her at the end of Port Royal is adorable, as is the mention of her in the Pride Lands but at least one cutscene, placed somewhere within the first few Disney worlds, was needed. The long absence of DiZ and “Ansem” from the plot is felt too - not as strongly for me, though that’s a personal thing.

When Kairi does finally reappear, we get a good expansion of her character. In one short scene with Pluto and Axel, she’s shown to be brave, intuitive, and determined to set out on her own and be a part of the action. More of that side to her character would have been good to see, in this and other games, but at least this one has it in some capacity. (This scene also serves to disabuse any notions of Axel’s character; a man prepared to kidnap Sora’s lady love to use as bait in an ill-thought plan to get Roxas back is not any sort of hero.)

(For those of you who play through the worlds based on villain level, and who try and play in-character as Sora, Kairi’s cutscene being placed where it is made my path forward after Agrabah an agonizing decision. On the one hand, Twilight Town opening up would be a clear sign that there’s something there worth investigating; on the other hand, Sora couldn’t possibly know at that point that Kairi is there, and the remaining Disney worlds are all populated by old friends of his. In the end, I stuck to following villain level, but it was tough to settle on a plan.)

Now, as for the Disney worlds on their own merits...

Atlantica is bad. I don’t have any inherent objection to a combat-free musical world, and I don’t even hate “Swim This Way;” get rid of the lyrics and it’s a fairly innocuous instrumental track. But the original story for Atlantica written for KH I borrowed liberally from the actual movie plot; to go through an abridged version of that plot here is repetitive, and devoid of any of the elements that tied the world to the larger KH story in the first game. Even more than the 100 Acre Wood, I think this would have been a great candidate for a world not to repeat. KH III’s later decision to keep Ariel involved as a Summon instead is one of the few things I can unequivocally say that game did better than KH II.

I can also say that KH III did a far better job with the Pirates of the Caribbean material. On an aesthetic level, there’s no contest. The size of the world, its design and color scheme, animation of characters (though there’s still some uncanny valley issues), movement and gameplay options, Jack’s VA and original dialogue - even the music, despite the absence of Zimmer’s main theme, all made an incredible leap forward in KH III compared to what the starting point was. I’d go so far as to say that KH II’s Port Royal is, aesthetically, the weakest in the game, and possibly the entire series (though Wonderland could give it a run for its money, at least on looks.)

The bigger problem with Port Royal, at least on the first pass, is the way it handles the movie it’s based on. It’s in Port Royal where I see clearly, for the first time, the approach to adapting Disney movies that would become the detrimental standard. What we have here is an uninspired abridgement of Curse of the Black Pearl, easily the most straightforward adaptation of a Disney movie in this game, with possibly the least amount of effort made to accommodate the greater KH story (we’ll get to the competition for that title next). The abridgement itself is careless in its cuts, leaving certain elements of the world’s story confusing, awkward, or arbitrary. Dialogue is lifted wholesale from the film and delivered with less than compelling conviction by the stand-in VAs.

Pete’s limited role in Barbossa’s schemes has already been mentioned, but this world was the first where I felt that little effort was made to give Sora a role in the proceedings. As happened with infuriating frequency in KH III, Sora and his friends are basically along for the ride here, the plot of the movie playing out around them without their having any real bearing on it. The two things you can give Port Royal over later games’ worlds is that at least Sora is involved with the final battle against Barbossa, and that this world introduces his pirate fantasies (and we’ll touch more on those in a moment). To go back to KH III’s take on Pirates - most of the same problems (and those two saving graces) exist there too, but in the context of that game, The Caribbean in KH III was one of the less frustrating worlds when it came to Sora’s role (or lack thereof), so it was a bit of a bright spot. In the context of KH II, Port Royal having all these problems on the first pass means it sticks out like a sore thumb.

Honestly, if they wanted to adhere to the film so badly, I would’ve preferred that Pete and the Heartless not show up at all. The first pass could have had the skeletal pirates as the only villains, and Sora could leave that world wondering why the Keyblade would have brought him there if there were no Heartless to be had. Cut back to Port Royal, and you’d see a figure in a black cloak and hood wandering around, giving Organization XIII a badly-needed tease in this section of the game.

And, if I can nitpick - Sora and his friends explicitly state that Port Royal looks “so different” from any other world they’ve been to. Why would this game not have them adopt disguises? Give KH III another point for that one, though I think it would have been more appropriate - and funnier - if Donald and Goofy had turned into a real duck and dog.

The other Disney world that really has issues with movie adaptation and providing Sora material is Pride Rock. While it’s somewhat less rigid an a recap of The Lion King than Port Royal was for Black Pearl, the absence of any scene that builds to Scar’s succumbing is emblematic of these worlds’ inability to loosen up and be original in their material when it’s called for. Sora’s first encounter with Nala offers some fresh plot, but by the time Simba appears, we’re locked into an uninspired highlight reel of Lion King’s third act. Some lapses of logic plague this world too (the biggest one: why would Sora and his friends run away from the hyenas when they first come to Pride Rock? They have weapons and magic. Pete being there shouldn’t mean anything unless he summons an insurmountable swarm of Heartless). And this is the world that handles Sora the worst in the first pass - or at least, it’s the most frustrating of them in how it handles Sora. There’s the nonsensical and out-of-character plot of his to become king, but more than that, this world has so many opportunities to let Sora matter that aren’t taken. He’s the one who tells Nala that Simba’s alive, but we get a weak version of Rafiki’s “it is time!” moment instead of letting Sora find his old friend. Sora does at least encounter Simba first, and tries to stop him from finding Nala - but he might as well not say anything, because the “pinned ya” moment from the movie plays out as if he weren’t there. The game prompts Sora to cheer Simba up, but he doesn’t do anything of the sort - Simba just walks away, and we get the discount version of the big Hamlet moment. If it weren’t for Sora staying by Simba’s side for the Scar fight, this would be as bad a use of him in a Disney world as anything in KH III.

As with Port Royal, it’s tempting to imagine alternate scenarios. Picture a Pride Lands level where Sora, upon arriving, encounters Simba in the jungle, wtih Timon and Pumba. More is made of their reunion and Simba’s shock at seeing his friend in lion form (one moment from the world as-is that I truly love, because it’s adorable), and the level starts out with a series of short, light-hearted minigames designed to give the player a crash course in controlling the lion mode and offer a springboard for cutscenes letting these two trios bounce off one another in a fun way. You could also use these scenes to let Sora, for the first time, get a hint of the sadness in Simba. Cut to Pride Rock, where Maleficent is actively tempting Scar and providing him with Heartless. It’s the sight of this unnatural force that moves Nala to go looking for help, and this would lead to a “boss” battle where Sora, Donald, and Goofy end up fighting Nala to protect Timon and Pumba. Simba, recognizing Nala, breaks up the fight, and their reunion brings up Simba’s past, prompting Sora to ask the questions that would bring that past to light. When Simba runs off, Nala ends up asking Sora for help, and he follows her to Pride Rock. Cue two cutscenes - one of the Hamlet moment, and one where Maleficent informs Scar that trouble is coming, and gives him his next shot of darkness. When gameplay starts back up, it’s Sora confronting hyenas and Heartless, leading up to a first try at fighting Scar that it’s impossible to win. That would trigger another cutscene where Simba arrives and has his verbal confrontation with Scar, Maleficent would appear and give Scar his final “help,” and then we’d go right into the final battle with Heartless Scar.

Having been frustrated enough with this world to want a complete rewrite of it, I will say that it’s a much more attractive world than Port Royal, and it’s not without its charms. Besides little character moments that I already mentioned, getting to play as a lion is a lot of fun. I do wish that there was more variation on speed depending on the pressure you put on the analogue stick, as Sora can go a bit too fast for me in lion form, but it’s a great change-up from other worlds. And despite the changes I would have made to her introduction, Nala’s presence and interaction with Sora is nice. It’s a shame she and Simba both couldn’t have been party members.

So, I clearly had problems with those three worlds. But what about the other two? Well, while my issues with the larger KH story in this section stand, Agrabah and Halloween Town both hold up much better taken on their own terms. As someone whose disdain for Disney’s DTV sequel craze is only slightly less than my current disdain for their live-action remake trend, I was loathe to think that any of those videos would find their way into Kingdom Hearts back when I first played this game. Return of Jafar being, to my mind, one of the worst of that bunch only reinforced that feeling. But I liked Agrabah in KH II back in the day, and I’d say it holds up nicely. In some ways, I think it’s an improvement on the (surprisingly slight) material it takes from Return of Jafar, if only because it cuts away all the nonsense. Sora serving as an intermediary between Iago and the world’s heroes isn’t his most dramatic role in a Disney story, but it’s just enough to make his presence seem necessary. Riku and King Mickey getting mentioned again keeps the rest of the plot in mind to some degree. And I’ll give them credit for some variety - saving the Disney villain for the second pass in at least one world was a good call. Though, since Maleficent has a personal history with Jafar, it’s a shame she’s not personally involved in the hunt for his lamp.

That’s not an issue with Halloween Town, of course, and it’s in Halloween Town where what they were trying to do with Maleficent’s storyline is most clearly illustrated. The idea of the Mistress of All Evil, greatest of the Disney villains, having to claw her way back to the top of the totem pole after being knocked down in KH I and finding frustration and setback every step of the way, is a wonderful idea. And the pairing of the elegant Maleficent with a slob like Oogie Boogie (and Pete, for that matter) is a gold mine for material. The fact that she just gives up her plan to turn Santa Claus into a Heartless because Oogie is being somewhat rude and amnesiac makes no sense (does she need Oogie for that process? Why would she give up her side of the plan just because he was annoying?), and it undermines her scheming almost as much as the lack of movement in the larger plot does. But just being able to recognize an attempt at a coherent internal narrative for her, when later games turn her into a pointless tease for UX bullshit, counts for something.

And I love Halloween and Christmas Town in this game. I must confess that I’ve never liked the look of Halloween Town in KH I, with its heavy use of browns and purples, but the world in KH II is as perfect a match to the movie as CGI can get. It is gorgeous, and Christmas Town is even more so. I love the little details they put into that world, like the toy train running through the mountains in the background. Playing the vanilla version as I am, I don’t get to see Sora and friends in their unique Christmas Town looks, but it’s still nice to see them running around in that environment.

As with Agrabah, there’s some interesting variety on display in Halloween Town. Adapting material from the movie to make a sequel to the movie is a fun idea. With the events of Nightmare before Christmas in the past, Jack and Santa’s relationship has a nice flavor to it here, with Jack as the exhausting but lovable neighbor for old St. Nick. It’s almost like Jack is Kramer from Seinfeld, and Santa is Jerry. The story here doesn’t give Sora a whole lot more to do than tag along with Jack, which one could argue is barely a step above worlds like Pride Rock and Port Royal. But the details here matter. Jack specifically enlisting Sora and his friends as “bodyguards,” their actions directly helping Jack, and Sora’s love of Santa Claus, may be little things, but they go such a long way to generating a feeling that Sora really does belong in this story, that his role as wielder of the Keyblade has a direct impact on these Disney characters’ lives. I’m so hard on Pride Rock for lacking in those moments, because every other world in this game has them on the first pass - even Atlantica has them.

Santa Claus, and pirates, are two things in this game that awaken a childlike glee in Sora that momentarily overcomes his focus on the mission. There wasn’t necessarily anything like that in KH I, with a younger Sora. He gets into a petty fight with Donald, yes; there was a look of admiration towards Cloud in the Coliseum; he describes the Gummi ship as an “awesome rocket;” and he’s struck with wonder at being able to fly in Neverland. But there isn’t anything as pronounced as his boyish fantasies of being a pirate here, or his delight at meeting Santa. You could argue that it’s a bit of a retcon to do this; Sora didn’t exhibit any love of pirates while on Captain Hook’s ship. But it’s a slight retcon, and that instance could easily be explained away by his being preoccupied by finding Kairi at last and witnessing Riku’s continuing slide to darkness. It’s one change to Sora’s character in KH II that I don’t mind at all. It gives him a new dimension, it opens up opportunities for levity with Sora without turning him into the butt of jokes, and most importantly, it isn’t overplayed. KH III would see Sora grasping at an unfeasible lure of a pirate ship (not unlike the throne of Pride Rock in this game) and try to claim some great parallels or similarities between Sora and Jack Sparrow that are untenable, but here, it’s just a young boy’s daydream, popping up here and there, which is just enough to flesh Sora out and give scenes some charm. And the moments with Santa give some funny and unexpected insight into Sora’s past; Riku being the asshole who went around telling younger kids there was no such thing as Santa Claus fits in perfectly with what we see of him in KH I.

And to close on a positive note: Halloween Town has some of my all-time favorite gameplay material in this series. There is no reason why Jack’s Command should delight me as much as it does, but watching him sweep Sora into a crazy dance to kill Heartless always makes me laugh. And the boss battle with Oogie Boogie is fantastic. Good lead-up in the cutscenes, colorful, unorthodox layout, challenging without being impossible; would that all the boss battles in the series showed this degree of variety and creativity.

#z's crits #kingdom hearts #kingdom hearts 2 #critique #commentary

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pokemaniacal · 7 years

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Something that’s been on my mind for a bit that your professional word may be able to help with. Would you happen to know how ethnically diverse the Greek and Roman empires were?

very

next question please

…

…what, you want more? Oh, fine, but for the record this is not the sort of thing people just “happen to know.”

Okay so I’m assuming by “Greek empire” (remember, kids: there was never a politically autonomous and unified state called “Greece” or “Hellas” until 1822) you mean Alexander’s empire (320s BC) and the Hellenistic successor kingdoms (323 BC – 31 BC), and by “Roman empire” you mean Rome starting from the time it becomes a major interregional power (say, following the second Punic War, which ended in 201 BC) rather than just Rome in the time of the Emperors. You could spend like most of a book on each of these just corralling the data that might let us answer this question, but whatevs.

Lesson one: the ancient Greeks and Romans did not think about ethnicity in the same way as we do. In particular, they were not super hung up on the colour of people’s skin – skin colour in ancient art is more often a signifier of gender than race, because women are expected to spend less time outside and therefore have lighter skin (which is another whole thing that we shouldn’t even get into because this is an aristocratic ideal of female beauty and of course lots of Greek and Roman women would have worked outside). Arguably the most important signifier of ethnicity to the Greeks and Romans was actually language, with everyone who didn’t speak Greek or Latin being a “barbarian” (traditionally this word is supposed to come from the Greeks thinking that all foreign languages sounded like “bar bar bar,” although I’ve also heard a convincing argument that it comes from the Old Persian word for taxpayer, barabara, and originally signified all subjects of the Persian king).

In the modern world we have designations of ethnicity that are super broad and grow in large part out of early and long-since-debunked anthropological theory that divided humanity into three biologically distinct races, Caucasoid, Mongoloid and Negroid, and don’t really reflect a lot of important components of ethnicity. The thing is, as the internet will happily tell you ad nauseam, race is a social construct. Like, yes, designations of race describe real physical characteristics that arise from variation within human genetics, but the way we choose to bundle those characteristics is arbitrary, and where we choose to draw the lines is arbitrary (like, for a long time in the US, Greeks and Italians weren’t considered “white,” but today they definitely are, even though nothing changed about their genetics). If we today were brought face to face with a bunch of ancient Greeks and Romans, we would probably be pretty comfortable with assigning a majority of them to the big pan-European tent of modern “whiteness,” but if you had asked them about it, they certainly would not have felt any kinship with the pale-skinned people of northern and western Europe from whom most English-speaking white people today are descended. Those people were every bit as barbarian (and every bit as fair game for enslavement, for that matter) as the darker-skinned folk of the Middle East and North Africa. Ancient Greeks and Italians also had loads of internal ethnic divisions – like, the Latins (the central Italian ethnic group to which the Romans belonged) were a different thing from the Umbrians to their east, the Etruscans to the north and the Oscans to the south. In Greece, you had Dorians in the Peloponnese, Ionians in Attica and Asia Minor, Boeotians and Thessalians in central Greece, Epirotes in western Greece, and DON’T EVEN ASK about the Macedonians, because boyyyyyyyyy HOWDY you are NOT ready for that $#!tstorm. The point is, race and ethnicity can be basically anything that you think makes you different from the people in another community.

So yeah, Alexander’s empire. Alexander the Great conquered Persia, which was already the largest empire the world had ever seen at the time and incorporated dozens of ethnically distinct peoples (including many Greeks of Asia Minor, some of whom willingly fought against Alexander) through a philosophy of loose regional governance and broad religious tolerance. Now, here’s the thing: Alexander had no idea how to run an empire of that scale. No Greek did. No one alive in the world did – except for the Persians. Alexander didn’t have anything to replace the Persian systems of governance or bureaucracy, so… he didn’t. Individual Persian governors were usually given the opportunity to swear loyalty to him and keep their posts; vacant posts were filled with Macedonians, but the hierarchy was basically untouched. Alexander himself married a princess from Bactria (approximately what is now Afghanistan), Roxana, and had a kid with her, and encouraged other Macedonian nobles to take Persian wives as well, to help unify the empire. Unfortunately Alexander, of course, had to go and bloody die less than two years after he’d finished conquering everything, and tradition holds that on his deathbed he told his friends that the empire should go “to the strongest,” which was an incredibly dumb thing to say and caused literally decades of war, which we are not even going to talk about because it is the most Game of Thrones bull$#!t in the history of history. All you need to know is that when the dust settled there were basically three major Greco-Macedonian dynastic powers: the Antigonids in Greece, the Ptolemies in Egypt, and the Seleucids in Persia.

In terms of ethnic makeup the Antigonid kingdom is in principle the most straightforward because they’re basically still running the same Greece that Alexander’s father had conquered. Even then, you should bear in mind that a) most Greek cities had legal provisions for allowing foreigners to live there under certain conditions (“foreigners” often meant Greeks from other cities, but in principle could be anyone), and b) the Greeks had a lot of slaves (many of whom were, again, Greeks from other cities, because that’s fine in ancient Greek morality, but a lot of them would have come from all over the place), and even though the Greeks didn’t count slaves as “people” or consider them a real part of a city’s ethnic composition, WE SHOULD. The Ptolemaic kingdom in Egypt seems to have had a relatively small Greco-Macedonian upper class ruling over a native Egyptian, Libyan and Nubian peasant majority. Members of that ruling class seem to have been kind of snobbish about any mixing between the two – only the very last Ptolemaic ruler, Cleopatra VII (yes, that Cleopatra), even bothered to learn the Egyptian language. However, the Ptolemaic rulers did make some important cultural gestures of goodwill towards the Egyptians. They took the native title of Pharaoh, which previous foreign rulers of Egypt hadn’t, and adopted a lot of traditional Pharaonic iconography like the double crown. They also worshipped some of the most important Egyptian gods, most notably Isis, and may have kind of… deliberately created a new Greco-Egyptian god, Serapis, by blending together Osiris and Dionysus (Serapis actually becomes super important in the Roman period and is widely worshipped even outside Egypt). And then there’s the Seleucids, an empire that did nothing but slowly collapse from the moment it was established. They have a rough time of it because they have the largest land area to cover and dozens of distinct ethnic groups to bring together, and it doesn’t help that they kinda keep doing the Game of Thrones thing for about two hundred fµ¢&ing years. They often get a bad rap in history and have a reputation for oppressing the non-Greek populations of their empire, but that’s probably at least partly because some of our most important sources for the Seleucids are Jewish, and the Seleucid kings’ relationship with the Jews broke down in a fairly spectacular fashion during the reign of Antiochus IV Epiphanes (r. 175-164 BC). It’s not clear whether that’s representative of the Seleucids’ normal relationship with their subject peoples, or a worst case scenario. Also, the Seleucids tend to get painted as villains in the historical record by both the other Greek powers and the Romans, and never really get much of a chance to defend themselves because we don’t have Seleucid histories. What is clear is that they inherited all the ethnic and religious diversity of the Persian Empire, and most of their rulers were half-Persian because they followed Alexander’s example by marrying into the Persian nobility. After an initial period of conflict they also seem to have maintained cordial relations with the Mauryan Empire of India, their neighbour to the east, for several decades, and contemporary Indian sources talk about sending Buddhist missionaries into Seleucid lands, so… like, there might have been a bunch of Greek Buddhists running around the empire; that’s a thing.

Whew. Okay, so that is a criminally brief answer to-

OH CHRIST YOU ASKED ABOUT THE ROMANS AS WELL

WHAT DO YOU PEOPLE WANT FROM ME

Right. Romans. One of the major schools of thought on how the Romans were able to create such an enormous and long-lasting empire in the first place is that their openness to accepting foreigners into their community gave them an enormous manpower advantage over every other ancient Mediterranean state. Greek politics generally operates on the level of cities; even in the age of Alexander, individual cities have quite a lot of legislative autonomy. Citizenship is also something that works on the level of cities: you aren’t a citizen of, say, the Seleucid Empire; you’re a citizen of Antioch, or Tyre, or Babylon, or whatever. But then the Romans happen. The Romans are weird, because they will sometimes just declare that all the people of an allied city are now also citizens of Rome. In the early period of Rome’s expansion in the central Mediterranean, this meant (or so the theory goes) that they could draw upon larger citizen armies and sustain more casualties than their rivals. This is how they beat Pyrrhus, the Greek king of Epirus (r. 297-272 BC), when he invaded Italy in response to disputes between Rome and the Greek colony of Tarentum; this is how they beat Hannibal, the legendary Carthaginian general, even after he annihilated the largest army the Romans had ever fielded at Cannae during the second Punic War (218-201 BC). Now, at this point they are basically still just bringing in Italians, which we might consider ethnically homogenous even if they didn’t, but there’s more.

Once they really start to get going, the Romans enfranchise entire provinces at a time, like when the emperor Claudius (r. AD 41-54) decided to make everyone in Gaul (modern France, more or less) a Roman citizen. The really interesting thing about this particular decision is that we actually have a copy of the speech he made to the Senate in Rome at the time, so we can examine his rationale. Claudius’ argument is basically that being inclusive has always been what has made Rome stronger than its rivals, going right back to their mythological past, when Romulus populated his city with disenfranchised criminals from other communities (and, uh… women that they kidnapped from the next town over). The Romans believed that everything great about their civilisation had originally been learned or borrowed from someone else – metalworking and irrigation from the Etruscans, infantry combat from the Greeks, shipbuilding from the Carthaginians, etc – so it wasn’t a huge stretch for them to believe that all these people should eventually become part of Rome as citizens (well… the ones who weren’t killed or enslaved in the conquest, anyway – no one ever said the Romans were saints).

The reason Claudius feels he needs to justify all this to the Senate is that citizenship (rather than any of the forms of semi-citizen rights that Romans would sometimes grant to their allies) will make rich Gauls eligible to become Senators themselves, and occupy other high-level posts like provincial governorships. The decision affects the ethnic composition of the Senate, so even though he doesn’t actually need their permission to do it, he asks as a courtesy (the emperors’ relationship with the Senate is a weird and complicated thing). Even without being a citizen, you could actually do a great deal in the Roman government in Claudius’ time. Many of the most important jobs in the empire were ones that had existed during the age of the Republic, when Rome was theoretically a democracy, and all of those were restricted to citizens even after they stopped being elected positions – but there was also an imperial bureaucracy that answered directly to the emperor and his aides, and he was free to choose literally anyone to fill those positions. As a result, a lot of emperors deliberately picked slaves and former slaves for loads of senior positions, specifically because their lack of citizen rights meant that they could never be political rivals, and because they were a useful counterbalance to the power of the blue-blooded Roman aristocracy. And, again, slaves can be from basically anywhere. A lot of these administrative slaves were Greeks, because Greek education provided useful skills for running the imperial bureaucracy that the Romans themselves often didn’t have, but emperors could and did commission literally anyone for these positions.

Eventually the emperor Caracalla (r. AD 211-217) just decided it wasn’t worth keeping track anymore and declared that every freeborn person in the entire empire, which by that point stretched from northern England to Morocco to Romania to Jordan, was now a Roman citizen. All of these people are now “Romans,” regardless of their language or culture or religion; the only criterion is that they not be slaves or former slaves (and even if they’re former slaves, their children will be Roman citizens). And these people can move, in ways that were never possible before the Empire existed, because Rome is the first – and so far the last – political entity ever to unite the entire Mediterranean region, which allows them to wipe out piracy almost completely and jump-start trade and travel in ways that would never happen again for over a thousand years. My own research on Roman glass has led me to encounter glassblowers with Syrian or Jewish names working in northern Italy – people who were probably integral to spreading the technology of glassblowing to western Europe. The Roman army also moves people around – like, a lot. You might enlist in your home town in Syria, then serve on Hadrian’s wall and retire in northern England – in fact, we know that this happened because we’ve found stuff like inscriptions in the Aramaic language in Roman Britain.

Also Rome had, like… a whole dynasty of African emperors one time. Septimius Severus (r. AD 193-211) and his successors were part Italian, part Punic (of Carthaginian descent – ultimately Middle Eastern, since the Carthaginians were originally a Phoenician colony) and part Berber (native North African), and Severus grew up in what is now Tunisia. And that wasn’t really a big deal for the Romans, 1) because Severus’ Italian ancestry made him a Roman citizen, which trumps all other signifiers of ethnicity, and 2) Rome had already had a couple of emperors of Iberian (= Spanish) descent by this point who were considered some of the best ever, and the Iberians are just as “barbarian” as the Berbers as far as Rome is concerned. Other Roman emperors of varied ethnicities include Philip (Arabian), Diocletian (Illyrian), the three Gordians (probably Cappadocian), and Elagabalus (Syrian, and incidentally the gayest Roman of all time; like, normally I would warn you to be super cautious about using modern labels like “straight” and “gay” for Romans because they just didn’t think about sexual orientation in those terms, but I make an exception here because Elagabalus was super gay).

Oh, and just because someone will definitely bring it up if I don’t, there was a big fuss in the news a few years back because someone discovered the skeletons of what they claimed were Chinese people living in, of all places, Roman Britain. And to me, one Chinese family in Britain in the first century AD is not particularly a dramatic stretch of plausibility (a handful of people could easily slip through the historical record and just never be mentioned), but the evidence in this particular case falls some way short of “proof.” There’s chemical data that suggests these individuals grew up somewhere far away from Britain, which is well and good, but the thing that points specifically to China is not the isotopic analysis but a study of bone morphology, and trying to determine someone’s ethnicity on the basis of what their bones look like, on the universal scale of things that are sketchy, ranks “sketchy as all fµ¢&.” Again, I’m happy to believe that they exist, because China (Seres in Latin) and Rome (Dà-Qín in Chinese) definitely knew about each other, and we occasionally find Roman artefacts and coins in eastern Asia, or Chinese artefacts in the eastern Roman Empire, but the specific evidence for these individuals isn’t there, in my opinion.

…that was a brief answer. Let it stand as a warning to others.

#QandA #not pokemon

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comradecrossing · 6 years

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hi do you have any tips/recs for someone who’s just starting new leaf? i had it a long time ago but i stopped playing, and now i want to start playing again but i don’t remember it well 🙈

Hi! This might be long but! When I restarted this last time I was worried it would get boring real fast like with my first save, so I planned out as much as I possibly could ahead of time.

Think of a theme that makes you happy! Do you love witchy/fairy things? A specific color? maybe a season? particular villager animal? Aliens??? If you can figure out a theme you can build around (and it can be ANYTHING) then you will have much more confidence when you first step foot in your new town!

Now I’m gonna use my town as reference, so, I really like the Witchy/Fairy aesthetic and I knew immediately thats what i was going to do. I’m bad at town names, but i like Pokemon and remembered they have a fairy town, so I looked it up and got my name and figured why stop there? That’s how Laverre City became one of my sole inspirations for my town. I was inspired to restart because of hackers so even though I cant hack, I think about things I might like to do, or really want to do when/if i ever can and i have some big ideas lol im so sad. So ultimately i settled on a fall themed town (not perpetual fall but looks best in fall and the dreamcode will be of the town in fall) with lots of pink cosmos and regular saplings to give off a resemblance to Laverre City :)I then looked at a lot of forest and dreamy type towns to get some inspiration like mushroom rings, layout ideas, and items or PWPs to use. I also checked sites like animal crossing wikia to make a list of PWPs I might like in my town and chose 30 possible options (you can only build 30) and check the space requirements.

Once I start for real with a vague idea of where I want to put things I look at all the maps available and if they don’t have specific traits i want (secret beach, desirable town tree location, diving cliff, ponds in places that wont get in the way of projects and landscaping ideas, good spot for the cafe, etc) I restart until a map comes up that I like. Once I arrive in town its time to check my native fruit and rock locations and make sure its up to my standards, and if a resident is important for you to have/not have make sure to check the map too!

Once you get a town you’re happy with and you’ve found the perfect place to call home its time to get serious >: |It’s time for your first shovel and axe.Now, I have always been anti-axe in previous games but this last save changed me. I got a hold of that first axe and chopped down every tree that wasn’t a southern cedar tree! (southern cedars are only possible at the start! If you plant them they’ll only grow in the North, thats the top half of your town.) Now your town will feel barren at first and this is the ugliest stage but also one of the funnest -imo- so lets open up your patterns and get started. Now that you have a blank canvas use your green & blue tiles to signify trees/bamboo and bushes, you can even redesign it and write “T” or “B” respectably and start laying them out. You can also use the Yellow to lay down where you want PWPs (make sure to surround two spaces further than the project requires. a 3x3 fountain should look more like a 5x5 area to ensure no one moves directly next to where you want to build). You should have lots of fruit piled up (remember to stack them) so you can layout bush tiles and plant fruit if you’d rather have a better idea of how its gonna look. I planted all my peaches and would later go back and replace certain ones with new fruit i acquired. Its good to have a “this is all a process” mindset because it will take a while to get your town done even if you time travel, but thats good! because the game is all about making your dream town!

So now you have a good amount of the town planned out and probably have some ideas of what to do next. The next few days will be spent checking out how things are growing and making sure you planted things in the right spots. if there’s anything you’re not liking - change it! Your town Your rules!

Now while you are waiting for things to grow and get pretty its time to gather aaaaaallllll the flowers you can find and organize them in a large free space so they are all diagonally touching (XXXX), this way you can get hybrids early on :)Make sure they are the same breed and check hybrid guides so you know which colors work best to make the hybrids you most want and make sure to water them everyday as they will wilt if you don’t have the beautiful ordinance. Hybrids are good to have for trades when you dont have much money.

After all this you should be off to a pretty good start. Try to keep in mind villagers you would like to have and try to make friends online or IRL that you can adopt from (I always post when i have some one leaving and who I am hoping to replace them with and I usually get an offer fairly quickly, even for villagers I was desperate to get out. No matter who they are someone likes them :)) But if your town is set up in a way that you’ll be devastated if your dreamie moves in that one perfectly made up spot, it might be a good idea to plot set &/ reset.Plot resetting is when you make a *NEW* character save to check and see if anyone moved in overnight, and more importantly, if they moved in an undesirable place. If this happens restart and select the new save option until the villager plots in a spot you like. Once they do that build your tent somewhere and save quit. This will make the new residents spot permanent and then you can select the new save once more and delete their home. This could take quite a while if you have lots of “open” space. “Open Space” is how I refer to non-tiled/pwp or house occupied areas and the way I go about this is covering my town in about 75% tiles and spacing out pwps to where there are as few places houses can plot in as possible. Houses wont build over tiles and will plot at least 2 spaces away from other buildings, rocks and projects and one away from clifs and ponds/rivers. They dont care however if there are trees, bamboo, items, bushes, or flowers so be sure to lay out tiles in any place at risk to being plotted on. I refer to this as “Plot Setting” as you can make 3x3 empty plots you surround with tiles which will help villagers know where to plot. If you do a good job and plot everything out just right, you’ll never have to worry about someone messing up your hard work.

Now here’s the kinda sucky part of ACNL and that is The Limitations.Annoying programmed rules that seem to only get in the way such as the 2-space rule between pwps/buildings. This can mess up your aesthetic a lot and sometimes you will have to completely replan things due to a small fact you may have overlooked or not noticed and suddenly your garden isnt looking right so im gonna name off the biggest hassles and how I have gotten around some of them.

Bush + tree + bush: You can line up 12 trees/bamboo and bushes in a line. This works both straight and diagonally. only 12. Now you can leave gaps in some places that will reset the count or do intricate designs like one cedar in the middle of 4 bushes, a line of bushes with trees spaced out directly behind, a pattern of bushes and chopped bamboo, etc get creative. Visiting others towns or looking at pics people post can help you get lots of ideas. Bushes can touch each other but trees & bamboo still have the one space between rule.

PWP 2-space rule: now I’ve already mentioned this a few times but this rule is always the one that I seem to forget when planning. YOU NEED TWO SPACES. I cant tell you how many times i have planned project locations weeks in advance only to not be able to lay them out as i wanted because I got the space requirement wrong or only left one space between other objects :/

Beach Rules: You may have seen cool towns with pwps, cedar trees and hibiscus bushes scattered around their beach and Ive got some bad news; Those are hacked towns. The only thing that can be planted on the beach naturally is coconut and banana trees, flowers, and clovers. Nothing grows on the beach, not even weeds. No pwps can be built there either, even though it was initially programmed to be possible. I currently use the space for hybrid breeding since i have no space to elsewhere ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Tear Down and Build Up: I will say though that even though only maybe 15% of my original plans came to life, my town looks way better than i had ever imagined it would. Don’t be afraid to tear things down and try out different locations or setups you might figure something out that looks amazing compared to your original plans.

Finally, while you can participate in the Happy Home Ratings, you dont have too. Decorate how ever the flip you want. Find new things to do everyday as the game can get old fast and you might get temped to Timetravel (which isnt a bad thing if thats what you want to do, but be careful you dont lose your villagers/flowers! Even though I have the Beautiful ordinance, I water all my flowers incase they pop out a hybrid. I try to earn all the badges, I visit dreamtowns for inspiration, redesign areas of my town, farm PWPs, make patterns, try hunting down items to decorate my house with, etc, this is another area where having a theme can help as you will find inspiration easier, and make you feel more immersed like you’re playing an RPG.

I’ve gone on a lot here and I have more to add but I’ve spent over an hour typing this, but let me know if you have any other questions or need clarification on anything :) I’m not gonna add pics rn but if you need photo reference send another message and I will address it separately and add it here later.

Now heres a bunch of links to help you get invested:MoriBD - A catalog of every in-game item and an option to make a wishlistHybrid Guide - By @nooklingPWP GuideVillager Adoption Further Info on Plot ResettingPWP Farming Towns/interiors I found inspirationalSome QRsHacking info (if youre interested)How to upload your screenshots & Make your screenshot pretty!

Pick the right face when you startOnce you get the QR reader (talk to sable 7 days) you can use these

Please let me know if there’s anything else I can do to help :)Just putting it out there too, I am always happy to help people get whatever they want/need for no cost whether it be fruits, bamboo, mushrooms, items, hybrids, etc, I will always do what I can to help you out, whether you’re just starting or on your 5th year.

#ref #tutorial #animal crossing #acaddicts #animal crossing new leaf #i might have to go through and edit this later #but im too tired rn #blanca

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halcyonkrp · 7 years

Photo

WHO’S THAT TRAINER ?

coming from los angeles, usa and settling into the dongnae district here in busan as a contest judge, he’s not participating in league! but don’t underestimate gm, can you guess who he is?

IT’S DAVID JUNG !

ADDITIONAL POKEMON

espurr, noibat, pokachu, dedenn, mimikyu, emolga, misdreavus, quilava

POKEDEX ENTRY

David was ten when he started taking interest in coordinating and performing. He was ten when he thought it was actually kinda fun, kind of a way to express his feelings, a way to play around and be a little foolish sometimes. Of course, he was ten when he took a liking to it, but he was five when he started.

His mother, the successful designer and judge for Pokémon Super Contests, had started working actively in L.A when she met the quiet, subservient and loyal love of her life, Joshua Jung, a Korean-American, and had her only son, David. His dad was a fairly simple guy, didn’t argue much, didn’t really feel the need to lead the family in anyway, since his wife already had a taste for doing so.

She was… A little bit… Overwhelming. And by little bit, it means she had a doll for a son, and playing with him was her hobby. Im Saeron was one famous contestant that had so many prizes she stopped keeping count. She judged in South Korean, and then moved to the States when it started getting boring, but once again, she reached the top and was filled with boredom and a lot of spare time. Money was no problem, all her prizes earning her a lot of television sponsors and commercials, her minute being worth a lot. Saeron’s son, David, was made to follow the same path and possibly be even more famous than his mother, and he had no choice but to comply.

ii.

He was a star. At the age of 13, he won his first contest, moves executed to perfection, mastering the cute contest. David was a prodigy, he was known and he was technically perfect, contestant pokémon and his own battle team hand-picked by his mother, all except for one. A stubborn, little baby fennekin that was supposed to be really cute and an important asset - according to Saeron - but she didn’t like to do as told. Dave sometimes pleaded, sighing in frustration, and his mother would scream “It’s clearly no good for this, I’ll take it back to the lab”, but the boy would protest. “Let me try one more. Just once more.”

Truthfully, when there’s no one around, they’d… Play. Princess, the fennekin, wasn’t a bad pokémon at all. It didn’t like being bossed around, but it was funny and playful and comforted David on his worse, cheering him up when nobody else could. His dad had no voice in that family, and sometimes the pokémon was literally his only real friend, since playing with kids (when he had to practice!) was out of the question.

He cried once, stroking the fur of the playful pokémon, “Why won’t you… Please… I know you dislike that but… She’s gonna take you away, please…” He was too young and too afraid, back then his team was in constant rotation, he had no choice. He had to succeed with Princess. “We can do it… In a fun way, please listen to me…”

She wasn’t a bad pokémon. She didn’t want to leave either. So, once, she listened well. That once, they made the perfect combo. And that was when he was able to feel joy at what he did. At the age of ten, he felt he could really make something out of a difficult situation. That life may not give him the lemons he wanted, but at least he could give his lemonade his own quirky twist.

iii.

He stomped his feet.

“I want to choose.”

She glanced down, not in surprise, but clearly not used to hearing that tone. “… Excuse me?”

“It’s my team.” He repeated, Princess swaying it’s tail, quietly glancing while resting in his arms. She had grown to fathom a fairly appropriated look that resembled royalty, whenever looking at Saeron. His mother wasn’t content, of course, but this time a second person stood up. “Let him.”

Joshua, his laid back dad, seemed to have heard enough, finally. He looked at his wife severely, “I think this should be his choice, since he hadn’t have one up until now.”

She, of course, felt like protesting. Three pair of eyes stared at her, pressing down on her will. She was one for a good fight, but something told her, looking into her son’s eyes, that he was able to move mountains for this one. Something told her that the fire she saw there, for the first time, was something he could turn into passion, and that actually did play well into her own wishes. “… Very well.”

Dave smiled. He won…? He really sincerely honestly did win something, he did… It might have been an empty sense of joy, but he built his own team according to what he knew, and tailored his choices towards first victory. Thirteen, he practiced for three years for that, and after that victory, he did not stop winning.

iv.

Sixteen, the age he finally moved to Korea, and although he spoke Korean to his mother, fitting into the mannerisms after living so long in L.A was sort of difficult. Nonetheless, he had to, since his mother planned for him to Master his two favorite categories and then start his own career in judging.

He didn’t manage to make many friends, being mostly busy with schedules and showing up on tv as “The Contest Fairy”, some most certainly annoying tropes he had to play into, smiling a lot and being cute and dashing, followed by his Princess, now a feisty Braixen who refused to evolve any further from her adorable form.

At that age he also would, sometimes, unwind by performing and he even got a few prizes into that, even though it wasn’t what his mother wanted him to do. It wasn’t what she wanted… But in a different country, there was so much she could control. And, what do you know, David actually liked performing, he enjoyed it a lot. It didn’t cross his mind to stop doing what his mother wanted, as he still depended so much on her, specially emotionally. But… he felt really alive at that time, it was a short time, but it was the best one he had so far.

Reaching 18, he debuted as a judge. He acted in the region of Busan, but he resided in the modern and bourgeoisie Dongnae district, sometimes being spotted within the streets and asked for autographs. His childhood was dead before it could even be alive, and now he had to act like the coordi public’s boyfriend, cute and funny, humble and well mannered. Most of these were fake representations of himself, a complete made up character that knew how to rise, but somewhere in him resides a child who really missed playing around and doing nothing. As someone who’s got a lot to learn, he’s envied and hated by some of the older contestants, and adored by the younger population (specially by girls).

#hc.entry #hc.coordi central #hc.lee daehwi

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yourheartsaremine-blog · 7 years

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@seraphsword-seraphs aaaAAA APOLOGIES FOR THE LONG WAIT I’ve been sluggishly trying to get though reqs and rl at the same time so :’DD Thanks for sending in a matchup req, and I hope you enjoy!

Also fyi that the owl cafe in Tsukishima is absolutely a thing and I’d def rec it for real if anyone is in the Tokyo area. :’D

I feel like you and Futaba would get along grandly! She’s someone who has a fantastic sense of humour and will probably not only be able to appreciate your jokes, but will be more than happy to fire back some puns of her own (to the great exasperation of any of your friends who happen to be in your vicinity at the time). Additionally, she possesses a brilliant mind and would be a more than capable mental sparring partner if the urge to have a friendly debate ever arose! She loves learning about new things and would be more than happy to bestow whatever random information she comes across with you! This is especially true when it comes to topics on the mind, as both you and Futaba share an interest on learning about psychology. Futaba’s gone through a lot and, while she’s gotten better, she still has some difficulty trusting others. For this reason, I feel like she would be able to empathize with your own insecurities and feelings; despite her carefree demeanor, she’d likely pick up quite quickly on your doubts and worries. She’ll be patient and understanding if your insecurity ever rears its head in regards to her intentions, and will reassure you that she wants to stay by your side as many times as it takes. Admittedly, she may not always the best at comforting you when you’re feeling particularly emotional about something due to her own awkwardness, but she always tries to make sure that you at least know that she’s there for you. She’ll be there if you need to talk, and will try her best to cheer you up…though sometimes her own emotions start peaking and she’ll be right there getting mad right alongside you on your behalf! Sometimes, though, simply having someone who understands and expresses the same feelings as you do may help you overcome whatever hurdle is in your way. She won’t write off your feelings, but will seek to understand them while also trying to help you grow. She’s not great at taking care of herself, but Futaba will at least make sure to keep a close eye on you, especially when you ignore your own needs in favour of others. She really admires the side of you that goes out of her way to help friends, but worries about the consequences of you doing it too often. Futaba’s not above telling someone off if she thinks that they’re imposing themselves too much on you, though she’d bring the issue up with you in a gentler manner if she chooses to approach you about it. Overall, your relationship with Futaba is one that is fun and engaging, but is also one where you both mutually understand and support one another!

HCs (w/ Futaba):

Futaba loves it when you get particularly passionate about something! She enjoys the fact that you have so much to say about it, and if it’s something that she’s into as well, she adores having someone to have a nice discussion or debate with. She also finds that she learns a lot just by listening to you talk, which is always a huge bonus for this girl. It might even become somewhat of a tradition for the two of you to have a nightly discussion where, along with sharing things about your day, you choose a specific topic neither of you know a lot about but are interested in and do a little bit of research together.

Whenever a new pair of Pokemon games comes out, you can bet that Futaba will get whichever version that you don’t! You play the games together, trade Pokemon, and Futaba probably names her main team after the Phantom Thieves. She’ll have one named after you too! She would have asked you what your favourite Pokemon was at one point and made sure to breed one with perfect IVs so that she could train it up. It never leaves her team, partly because she’s biased, and partly because of how much of a powerhouse she made it.

Ever heard of cat—and even bird—cafes? Because those are pretty commonplace in Tokyo, and upon learning that you like both creatures, Futaba would probably surprise you with a trip to one! This can either stem from just an everyday urge to see you smile, or to help cheer you up if she notices that you’re feeling particularly down. They be a little crowded sometimes, but she’s willing to brave the crowd if it means seeing you happy (plus, she feels quite a bit safer in your presence anyways, so it all works out)! She ends up doing some research to find all the different cafes available around you guys, and saves some of the cooler ones—like the owl café down in Tsukishima—for special occasions.

I think that initially in your relationship, she’s not always totally sure what to do when something is making you feel particularly emotional, and this just stems from her own lack of social interaction. However, she’ll try her best to make sure that you know that she’s there for you! At first this may be just be through making sure that you’re well fed (if you like curry, she’ll be demanding lots of that from Sojiro) and staying near you, but as your relationship develops and if you’re comfortable with it, more physical affection comes into play (i.e. handholding, cuddling up, etc)!

HCs (w/ Phantom Thieves)

I like to think that the back and forth joking between you and Futaba—especially the puns—tends to drive some of your friends insane. Because of the fact he lives at Leblanc though, Akira tends to get the brunt of it, but he at least seems fairly neutral to all of the jokes…up until the point where, in the middle of a PT meeting, he makes his own punny jokes. Then everyone realizes that you’ve both rubbed off on him. In all seriousness, though, you probably do get to spend a fair time with Akira because of his relationship with both Futaba and Sojiro! He proves to be a very reliable friend, and he’s probably one of the best to confide your innermost thoughts to because he’s a great listener and isn’t one to judge.

Whenever you and Makoto find common ground on a specific topic, you two have a lot to talk about! While the student council president is generally quite collected, she absolutely beams when it comes to having a friendly discussion or debate with you on a shared interest. Sometimes, after you’ve had your initial chat, she’ll come visit you on a different day just to drop off some books on the topic that she had checked out for you because she thought you’d enjoy them.

When he learns that you like to draw and design characters, Yusuke’s interest will definitely be piqued! He may ask you to share some of your work with him if you’re willing, and will probably be very curious to ask you about the finer points of your work (i.e. why you chose to design something in that way, your colour choices, etc). Of course, you don’t necessarily have to answer him in a serious manner, but he’ll be quite delighted to know that someone else in his group of friends enjoys drawing. He may go on to ask what other creative outlets you have as well!

Short scenario:

You and Futaba briefly try to introduce Yusuke to the world of fanfiction and ships. “I’m still not sure I understand.” Beside you, Futaba let out an exasperated sigh. “Look, Inari, it’s just something that fans like to write, okay? Sometimes it’s so that they can expand the story that’s already there, and other times it’s so that they can develop their ships.” Your gaze darted back to Yusuke just in time to see the poor boy’s confused frown deepen even further. Sensing the question that was coming even before it could be asked, you opened your mouth. “Yusuke—” Too slow. “I have heard that term many times, yet I still fail to understand why anyone would seek to introduce fleets of ships in every piece of ‘fanfiction’ that they write. What is this fascination with ships?” Futaba flopped against your side, her face buried in your shoulder as she let out a short laugh. Taking this as your cue (and finally, your first opportunity) to talk, you held up a hand. “Like…’relationship’, Yusuke. A ‘ship’ is when you pair two people or things up, and if you support a specific pair, you say that you ‘ship’ them.” There was a moment of silence as Yusuke digested this information. Then, his face lit up. “Ah, I see! So it can be used as both a noun and a verb.” Yusuke folded his arms across his chest and hummed thoughtfully. “I suppose it is not unlike capturing the essence of love in a painting, only done through the medium of writing instead of the visual arts.” You thought about how to respond to that. He wasn’t entirely off, but it probably wasn’t quite as grand or…refined as he seemed to think it was. In the end, you just settled for nodding. The boy nodded back, the smile on his face indicating that he was satisfied and thought himself properly educated now. “I see. So by that token, I suppose that you and Futaba would be considered a ‘ship’ if I were to use the term correctly.” Your girlfriend finally lifted her head to grin at Yusuke. “You got it, we’re the best ship! You picked that up faster than I expected, Inari.” Yusuke’s expression grew more confident. “And I must say then, that I…’ship’ the two of you. You certainly make for a good couple…though I do continue to question your tastes in humour at times.” You weren’t sure what made you grin more; Yusuke attempting to--and, arguably, successfully--using the term “ship”, or the exasperation in the latter half of his comment. Just as you were about to thank him, however, he glanced at the clock on the wall and let out a little “ah”. “It’s nearly time for the half-price sale at the grocery store! As I ‘ship’ myself with such sales, I must depart at once to ensure that I arrive in time.” The two of you watched as he suddenly got up, and Futaba was visibly trying not to laugh. “Uhhhh, Inari, that’s not really—“ “It was lovely conversing with you both today,” he interrupted, hastily gathering up his things, “And thank you for teaching me about ‘fanfiction’ and ‘ships’. I will return at a later date to learn more, but until then, have a good evening.” And then he was off. For a moment, you and Futaba were both silent, but then you turned to look at one another. You were the first to speak up. “Think we should have emphasized the romantic aspect of shipping?” Futaba thought about it, and the shook her head and flopped backwards into your lap. “Nah, this makes it more fun!”

#after that Yusuke just liberally uses the term all over the place until someone gently corrects him #idek adghFHDGHDFGFX #Matchups #Futaba Sakura

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