#even if I’m in ZX where they’re basically human a lot of the past is still touched in what I’m working on

[no1ryomafan]

I said I was gonna talk more about MM on this blog again and I will probably eventually do analysis stuff I just need to prep this shit cause those post take time for the ones that are more coherent and not just my usual word vomits, BUT I do need to word vomit for a second about one thing that plagued my mind again today.

One of my biggest peeves with the series lore is how reploids and humans hardly have interactions, more so in the X series as Zero makes a bit more effort in this regard, given it’s a huge deal how reploids are seen lower then humans for the longest time- but what has dawned on me more of another factor that really sucks about this is how reploid society itself is ALSO unexplored.

We hardly have any idea of what makes them different from humans, we can only grasp basic details from what the games provide us but it’s unclear if there society is either “very much identical to humans but still has changes to make it different given their machines” or “completely different down to how they live and are treated”. I can’t speak for every robot media ever as I haven’t consumed them all-that’s a impossible task as some are bound to not interest me lol-but I feel like ones that are primarily having sentient robots and multiple of them rather then stuff like mechas where they don’t have much of a personality (usually) or the cases like Aigis in P3 where she is a robot in a mostly human society and therefore learns to become more human, they usually try to give the robots some kind of established society but MM only gives us breadcrumbs.

Like I know transformers is a bigger series so it got more chances to be incredibly fleshed out but I think about how my friends had told me about it and it’s society from just the comics is incredibly detailed that you even know they have religions n shit. And I’m not saying MM has to go to that extent even if it’s had metaphors of that in the later series, but more context to what reploid society has and doesn’t would be nice.

If they actually do need to eat and we aren’t supposed to guess that the energy tanks n stuff are there equivalent, if they ever got to have hobbies or jobs besides serving under humans especially when they have free will, etc. More of how they operate would be really nice to know but alas much like many things in this series lore it’s never going to be deeply elaborated on so I have to throw darts at a board.

[paullicino]

The Wizard

I wonder if you can help me, I'm trying to find a wizard.

My wizard is lost thirty-five years in the past, though I can still remember them so very clearly. They're shaped like a miniature pyramid with arms, their sides all staggered by pixels. This is my wizard.

Maybe the wizard's arms are a little longer or a little shorter. Perhaps one is bent at the elbow. It's those billowingly blocky robes that I remember the most.

I can't tell you what colour those robes are, because I only ever saw them through a black and white monitor, small and heavy, the near-square shape that all our screens were then. I think the wizard hung out with a lot of other wizards and priests and demons and beasts, the sort of contemporaries that have always collected together in the castles and catacombs we craft for them. The sort that are lined up for us to knock down, arranged to present an ever-increasing challenge. The colour of each of these beings mattered very much and the limits of black and white prevented me from ever figuring out exactly who was who, what was what. It's part of what contributed to my wizard being an enduring mystery, to the confusion I always felt when I visited them and their companions.

I remember the sparse, top-down environments through which this wizard moved, stepping from space to space without animation or articulation, through rectangular rooms that were little more than a void. Back then, so many video game worlds were huge vacuums of nothing, wide and blank spaces of black or white loosely defined by rigid lines and bold colours. Now, they look more like Mondrian paintings than recognisable realities and yet the inclusion of one distinct element, a basic attempt at brickwork or a square and spindly tree, is all it takes to tug you toward them. Combine that with the imagination of a child, with its extraordinary ability to fill in every detail, and there was more than enough to be excited about.

I think the wizard may have lived in one of several games that were part of a series. I don't remember which number in the series, what the series was called, or how long it ran for. This is the detail I feel less sure of, but I’m certain of everything else. Certain, in the way that our simultaneously tattered and yet tenacious human memories can dig their hooks into the tiniest of details and make us so sure of the vaguest of qualities.

Thirty-five years on, that hook is still caught into something and, like a fishing rod, my mind bends toward it, urging me to tug, to reel in the past. For decades now, this damn wizard has popped back into my mind. Sometimes when this happens I resume my search. I never make any progress.

The wizard manifested on our Commodore VIC-20, a home computer with five kilobytes of RAM, though I think we had an expansion pack that boosted this by a magnificent thirty-two more, all of it packed in to a chunky rectangle of metal that hung out the back of the machine. At night, the wizard slept on one of a countless collection of cassette tapes made anonymous by poor labelling and terrible sorting. I have no idea where any of these tapes came from and how many generations old the copies on them were. I rarely knew what was on any of them. I certainly wouldn’t call them curated.

Some of those tapes ran for only fifteen minutes each side, designed precisely for storing the small amounts of data required for single programs. Others were the kind used to copy music off the radio or vinyl and ran for a colossal ninety. All were full of countless games, each following the other into long, languid, linear infinity. There was no way to know what you'd find except by slipping one into the player and waiting to see what it would read. These tapes weren't always taken care of and sometimes five minutes of spooling gave you nothing but corrupted data and a blank loading screen. It was time to reboot and start again or, more often than not, keep the tape playing and move on.

I lost what felt like incalculable aeons going through these tapes, though a tiny child's perception distorts time so melodramatically that waiting whole minutes for each game to load is remembered now as an endless procession of painful purgatories. So too is trying to understand games in their most basic and arcane iteration. Decades of video gaming have seen not only tremendous leaps in technology, but also in presentation, interface and accessibility. Games have become so much more coherent, better at telling us what we should do and how we should do it. The much younger me was stuck trying to understand if I was bad at playing a video game, or if the video game was bad at being a video game. And many were.

I never made any progress with my wizard. I didn't know what was expected of me and, with so many tapes to try, I spent more time on other games. I have far firmer memories of text adventures that I'm sure improved my reading skills, of the VIC-20's version of Centipede, or of the infuriating Cops 'n' Robbers and its similarly sparse world. I imagine that most of the things I played would've disappeared into obscurity were it not for the internet's wealth of specialist retrospectives, where no topic is too niche and no dive too deep. Now, I get to see the games I played in the colours they were given. I only had to wait entire decades.

And yet I still cannot find my wizard.

All retrospection brings depth, as well as context, and I don't find the act of looking back to be one of rose-tinted romanticism. I find it one that brings a broader awareness and a greater understanding. Every time I search for my wizard I’m dragged back to an increasingly distracting version of the 1980s that becomes ever more elaborate. I never see the era the way that I did as a child. I see its versions of political unrest and social upheaval. I see its particular social divisions. And I see the ways people thought that technology would change their world, contrasted with the ways it really did.

And I like catching different flavours of the future that we cooked up during this time, because they're really about the present that was, about its hopes and values and aspirations, about Reaganomics and free markets and how technology will make us all rich and people of leisure, not anxious and underemployed. And these visions are dotted with tiny, tell-tale details that recall so many of our assumptions. The screens in so much 80s sci-fi are the same aspect ratio as our old televisions, as my small and heavy black and white monitor. However we saw the future back then, its media remained magnificently square.

I don't remember the moral panics of the time and I must have sidestepped most of them, but I do know that, even then, video games were supposed to make us violent and volatile. Movies, too. And Dungeons & Dragons was the most corrupting influence of all, leading children to death and to the devil. What I do remember is people really believing that television would ruin your eyesight. I'm infinitely grateful that the rumours of the time never gained enough momentum to impact my interests. Otherwise, I might not have a job.

I know where my wizard isn't, after searching in so many places. I know they aren’t from the later game Chaos, and I know they had friends who were similar in shape to ZX Spectrum hero Horace, like the headless humans of legend. But that’s all. Lately, I have begun to worry that I will never find them, because I will never have enough information, but that still doesn’t stop these recurring midnight meanderings that see me tunnel back through time.

I wonder what would stop them. I wonder if they will only lead me to a greater understanding of the past, even of myself, and that finally finding my wizard might end that journey prematurely. I wonder if it will be an anticlimax. I worry that it might ruin things.

And yet I keep trying.

I wonder if you can help me, I'm trying to find a wizard.

(Taken from my Patreon. If you enjoyed this writing, please consider supporting me there, where you can find much, much more.)

[shikai-the-storyteller]

May I ask what songs you have on your Zero/X playlist? I need some good music to listen too while doing things. Hope the class is going/went okay!

Sorry for the late response So I was originally going to put this playlist up on 8tracks a few months ago, but then 8tracks changed how it does things and I lost interest, so this is just the playlist I keep on my computer for them. It wound up being a ZeroX playlist as well as a “songs I associate with some arcs of the game” playlist. 

I’m still a little iffy about a few songs, but here’s the song list (+a few key lyrics) as it is right now + some of my commentary about the songs:

(Note: These songs aren’t necessarily in chronological order with the MMX games, I just like the way they sound when put together in this order) 

Mars - Sleeping At LastWe were full of life, we could barely hold it in. We were amateurs at war, strangers to suffering.

There is goodness in the heart of every broken man, who comes right up to the edge of losing everything he has.There are so many quotes in this song I associate with these two, but I feel like some of them are obvious, so here’s two main stanzas. This song feels like a good introduction to the games and to X and Zero’s experience in the first Maverick War. Of course, only one of them made it out of that first war B’’’’).

All Who Remain – Beware of DarknessWhen you leave this life, the world will be a darker place for All Who Remain And the light you gave the human race will go away…

If I can’t have you in this life, then I don’t want this life at all Cause there’s nothing in this broken world that I’ll ever love as much 

I called and I called but you never picked up, and I cried and I cried but you never woke up, you died and you died without asking me first, you left me all alone here on EarthThis song sorta has a double meaning for me. On the one hand, you can read it as a song about X post-X1 living without Zero, and on the other hand, you can read it as Zero fearing what would happen if X were to die (’’the light you gave the human race will go away’’, X is literally a son of Light as well as a light to humanity, or at least, he is in Zero’s eyes). This could also be a MM0-era Zero living in a world where X has died. The last lyric chunk ties so well into the later MMX games where Zero seals himself away and X has to deal with things without him. This isn’t a happy song I’m sorry.

But even in the end, no matter what happens, X and Zero are always the ones who are left behind, the ones who keep fighting no matter what horrible things happens, hence the “We are all, we are all who remain”, so the song isn’t necessarily all sad.

I Found – Amber RunI’ve moved further than I thought I could, but I missed you more than I thought I would

And I’ll use you as a makeshift gauge, of how much to give and how much to take Oh I’ll use you as a warning sign, that if you talk enough sense then you’ll lose your mind

Sort of a continuation of the last song. This song reminds me of how X and Zero rely on each other to keep themselves in check (consider X4 and X5). They’re canonically each other’s strengths and motivation, and this song reminded me of how always look to each other for support. 

Love Love Love – Monsters and Men Well, maybe I’m a crook for stealing your heart away Yeah, maybe I’m a crook for not caring for it Yeah, maybe I’m a bad, bad, bad, bad person Well, baby, I know.

‘Cause you love, love, love when you know I can’t love you

So I think it’s best we both forget before we dwell on it The way you held me so tight, all through the night, ‘til it was near morningGGGGGGGGGGGOSH THIS IS THE FRICKIN SONG THAT STARTED IT ALL. It was this song that made me write my first fanfic for them, which spiraled into me writing / planning out over 10 fanfics + one series (it also made me create this playlist). It’s all because of this darn song. (I still haven’t posted that first fic I wrote for them based on this song because I want it to be one of the last ones I post).

Anyways, without getting into the details of the fic, the song reminds me of Zero’s thoughts on X, and Zero’s fear that he can’t live up to his own (and maybe X’s?) expectations of who he should be since he was created to be a warbot, not someone who can empathize with other people (like X was). BASICALLY: ZERO’S IDENTITY CRISIS, THE SONG.

What if the Storm Ends?SnowpatrolX –> Zero: The perfect halo of gold hair and lightning sets you off against the planet’s last dance Zero –> X: Just for a minute the silver forked sky lit you up like a star that I will follow

Be the lightning in me, that strikes relentless

One of the core songs of this playlist imo. If I had to summarize the playlist into only a handful of songs, this and the following song would definitely be in it.

Part of this song reminded me of how Zero described X as the sun in the MMX manga, and the line above always makes me think about how Zero’s always followed and trusted X, even when X was a new Hunter. I dunno how to explain this one, it’s just very them.

The End of All Things - Panic at the DiscoIn these coming years, many things will change But the way I feel will remain the same

Short song, but this was one of the first ones I put on the playlist and it always makes me think of them. It’s hard for me to explain this one too, but in any game or any timeline, X and Zero are always there for one another no matter what hardships they’re put through. That’s what this song makes me think of.

See You Again – Charlie PuthIt’s been a long day without you my friend and I’ll tell you all about it when I see you again. I’ll be waiting right here for ya ‘till the day you’re homeCarry on, give me all the strength I need to carry onTHIS ONE’S PRETTY SELF-EXPLANATORY but regardless, definitely an X –> Zero song that applies to so many frickin games, I mean come on Zero, how many times do you have to go and die on X. (This can also definitely be a post-“Zero is sealed away for 100+ years” song too).

Like Real People Do – HozierI will not ask you where you came from, I will not ask and neither should you

I like this song because it ties back to Zero and X’s fathers / their past. But no matter what their backgrounds are or who Zero was, X implicitly trusts Zero, and the feeling is mutual. (Now that I think about it, this song counters “Love Love Love” and Zero’s POV). 

Nothing Left to Say – Imagine DragonsZero: Who knows how long I’ve been awake now? The shadows on my wall don’t sleep, They keep calling me, Beckoning…

X: Who knows what’s right? The lines keep getting thinner. My age has never made me wise, But I keep pushing on and on and on and on…

If you could only save me, I’m drowning in the waters of my soul

Admittedly when I first put this song on the list, it was just to have it act as a transition between the last song and the next one, but it’s grown on me it fits so many fandoms and characters though. The whole song frickin works for them, but the first half especially. 

To me, this song bridges the end of X4 and X5 together. X and Zero both went through hell in X4, having to kill a whole group of people who (technically) weren’t Maverick, and they don’t really have a chance to recover before X5 happens. They both ended up questioning whether they’re doing the right thing, and although they’re still relying on one another for support to get through it, with all the self-doubt and tension at the middle / end of X5, this song easily leads into…

Unwanted Battle – X vs. Zero

Great remix of their battle theme from X5. The artist said their intention was to “make the song more fitting for a fight between two close friends” and BOY DID THEY NAIL IT.

Chasing Cars – The Wind and The WaveI don’t quite know how to say how I feelThose three words are said too much, they’re not enough

All that I am, all that I ever was, is here in your perfect eyes, they’re all I can see I don’t know where, confused about how as well, just know that these things will never change for us at all

Ehh I’m still a little iffy about this song for them, but I still really like the song itself and those specific lyrics (though as of right now I’m not sure it suits them anymore). This makes me think of post-battle X5 (when they’re both KO’ed) before everything takes an even sharper turn downhill.

We’re Still Here – Sleeping At LastYou were on a frequency, the perfect opposite of meThough I never needed any proof to trust the heart that beats inside of you.

Through the static, through the ashes, we were brave. Through the perils of endless narrow escapes, we’re still here. We’re still here.

Sleeping At Last always kills me, and this song especially (I used to think the lyrics at one part said “there is pain within your memory, the origins of our family tree” and I was like “THAT”S PERFECT”. Apparently it’s “pigment” not “pain within” but REGARDLESS). I thought this sweet / sad song was a perfect way to end their playlist. No matter what canon says, (though apparently MM ZX technically confirms this) Zero and X are still around and still together, in one form or another :’)

There’s a few others that could work for them / a lot more songs I associate with them (like SPG’s “Honeybee” or “Love Like You” but these are the ones I currently have on their playlist. I’ve been putting together a playlist for X, but I’m not sure if/when that’ll ever be finished, so in the meantime I recommend greyfishes’ “Endless Fight” playlist, which is to date my favorite X playlist ever (a few of those songs I would’ve added to this playlist, but I’ll just direct you to the ‘Endless Fight’ playlist).Sorry this reply took so long, but I didn’t want to drop the list without explaining a few all of them!