#i love how it changes up the hades formula but it's still. so hades

[californianedgeworth]

might start posting more hades 2 spoilers (under "hades 2 spoilers" tag) but

I was stuck on the Scylla battle in Hades 2 for a while, but in my last run I beat it and kept on going until I got to Chronos!! YAY. I didn't beat him but I got halfway through his health bar (a quarter bcus I assume he probably has a second phase. but still)

[togetherhearted]

Could I request Nikola, Qin Shi Huang and Hades with a s/o that's from another universe :D? she can travel through universes and can collect the history of the universe in her books/scrolls and write something to change it and erase things to remove them from history/the future

Sorry if this requests is kinda cringey, but I'm sort of a nerd for space :)

Naaaah,you're not cringe come on! It's a love that you have. Nothing wrong with it!

I took some freedom to change a couple of things. But the core is the same. Hoping it's still ok

NIKOLA,QIN AND HADES WITH A UNIVERSE TRAVELER S/O

Nothing was better that landing inside what it looked like a lab. Your eyes scanned projects, blackboards, all full of formulas. The twinkle in your eyes brightening up at all you could take with yourself. It was time to hide though, footsteps echoed in the corridor. You flinched and tried to hide in time but those steps were fast to come. The door slammed open and you were caught;projects under your arms. There was silence between the two of you. tThe tall man noticed the warp behind you, then looked better at you, at what you were wearing. -Are you perhaps?- He started -F-from the future?!- He shouted with enthusiasm. -I..uhhh- -Oh no, no. Don't tell me. I'll figure it out!- You watched him circling you, a smile on his face, muttering about science. Was this the sign to flee? As he kept circling around you you smiled amused;no matter the universe Nikola Tesla was Nikola Tesla,your over excited lover.

Where did you land this time? Judging by how comfy you were it was probably a cushion;no wait,too big to be just pillows. As per always you didn't recognize the place, warping from the past to future and vice versa was still troublesomea nd let's not talk about universes jumps.  You hopped from what happened to be a bed; your figure searching for something to take away with you. Though your lookout was stopped once you heard a male voice from behind. -Looking for something?- Your head snapped at the young man. The blood washing away your face as you recognized the first China emperor. -Oh no no...I was...- Words died in your throat as he walked towards you with confident steps. He didn't seem that pleased to have visitors. Only one solution was possible;warping again but this time without a single piece of paper. Mission failed. Time to go to the Qin of your universe.

Another day, another jump between the fabric of times and reality. Where were you this time?And why did it look so dark? Luckily you always had a backup plan. You lit up a light and walked down a narrowed corridor. You entered a room. A man was hunched on a desk,his mind seemingly too focused on what he had under his nose to even notice your entrance. This was risky but you liked the risk and your mission was worth it. You took little steps towards the pile of books on the corner. You just had to take a look at the covers, grab one and warp away. You were now close enough to read the titles when a hand grabbed your wrist. -So, you wanted to steal from the king of the underworld...- His deep voice gave you the chills. That was the place you warped in;Hades domain and he didn't look happy to see you,of course he wasn't;he wasn't your lover here. You were in big trouble now.

[terapsina]

Reasons to watch Love Between Fairy and Devil.

A Chinese fantasy romantic drama with a dash of comedy in the beginning and a huge wallop of angst in the second half.

One, the romance.

(take careful note of this gesture, please, it will break your hearts in the future)

Okay, so this is honestly one of the best told love stories I've watched in recent memory. And that is honestly very impressive when you consider how very easy it is to mess up this kind of love story.

She's Xiao Lanhua (or 'Little Orchid Fairy'), bright and innocent and kind. And in the beginning more than a bit naive and foolish. A fairy who is looked down on because of her damaged immortal root, who bends under the pressure of the bullying she's always known from the other fairies. Lonely in her home of Arbiter Hall where she looks after the destiny books alone by herself because her shifu left to wander the mortal realms.

He's Dongfang Qingcang. The Moon Supreme, the leader of the Moon Tribe who has been imprisoned following the last war between his people and the Heavenly Realm 30'000 years ago. He's cold and unfeeling and quite literally heartless (this involves fantasy reasons and some pretty horrible childhood trauma that gets slowly unraveled through the story).

And in the beginning the only reason he doesn't kill her as soon as he's free is that there's an accidental curse that ties his life to hers. If she dies so does he. If she's cut, so is he. And whatever emotion she feels, he will feel too. Whatever order she gives, he must follow. And sometimes, under certain conditions, they switch bodies.

(the actors have great fun with it, warning of huge amounts of second-hand embarrassment in two out of 36 episodes, I nearly died, it was worth it)

He keeps her safe because he has no choice.

And the thing is that he doesn't actually ever try to seduce her. The normal formula of this kind of story is 'he lies, seduces her, then falls in love, but still breaks her heart, she forgives him' right? This show though? It plays with the formula, yeah, but it twists it in a very interesting (in my opinion) way.

There's a misunderstanding between them. And here's some of the comedy of the show. She thinks he's fallen in love with her and she's trying to gently let him down. Meanwhile he's not actually pretending that he's in love with her, he's just not telling her exactly why he can't let her out of his sight.

And the development in both their characters is incredibly detailed and intricate. They both grow immensely through the story. As Dongfang Qingcang first experiences emotions through her and then as his own emotions begin to wake up following that. As Xiao Lanhua starts out wanting to return to her normal life and then falls in love not only with him but also his land and his people.

They're very Hades and Persephone (minor kidnappings including). And very Romeo and Juliet (though more mature about it, she isn't actually willing to compromise her own morality just because she's fallen in love with him).

And their love story isn't at all rushed. It takes nearly three quarters of the story for them both to fall in love, it is gradual and believable and mutual. And then once they have fallen in love despite the fact that there are all kinds of very familiar angsty plots thrown at them, none of them get dragged out to annoying lengths and many of them get resolved in very refreshing ways.

(angst, there will be such big whallops of angst, my friends)

But the romance is not the ONLY thing this show has going for it. It is what changes the fate of all three realms, yes, but there are other relationships that deserve to be mentioned.

And other characters, because this is actually a pretty beautifully built ensemble show.

One character is Dongfang Qingcang's brother Xun Feng, the character that in a different show would be the malicious underhanded brother who wants to steal his brother's throne and cares only of power.

Here though, after an old secret is revealed and he finds out the truth behind the reason (a good one) he's hated his brother for thousands of years his wish to rebuild his relationship with his brother is genuine. And though there are things he does after that which could have been because of cruelty in a different show, here they are simply misguided.

(there are lots of awkward Dongfang Qingcang trying to show affection for the first time since childhood scenes, they're adorable, and hilarious)

Then there's the false friendship between Xiao Lanhua and Jie Li which slowly develops into a real one through the power of Xiao Lanhua being simply too stubborn and too good and too genuine for Jie Li to remain stone against.

(here portrayed scene of Jie Li flinching under horror that is Dongfang Qingcang doing his very best to make Xiao Lanhua as ugly and unattractive as possible)

Jie Li is an orphan of the Moon Tribe from Haishi City who has spent her entire life scrapping for survival by lying and cheating. Including by selling to Xiao Lanhua fake cures for her damaged immortal root.

Again, there are certain ways you'd expect her story to go. You'd be wrong.

And then the relationship between Dongfang Qingcang and his most loyal guard, the Black Dragon Shang Que.

(here shown the reaction to the miracle of his lord patting his brother on the shoulder).

Poor dragon needs to deal with a lot and deserves a raise. He's also just as dumb as the rest of them. And FYI falls in love with Jie Li.

And then of course is the very healthy way this show portrays unrequited love too.

There are two characters who this is shown through. One is fairy Dan Yin who is in love with the God of War Chang Heng and is introduced as a spoiled bully but very quickly is shown being capable of fairness and ultimately gets developed into a character that you want to see gaining happiness.

The other character is Chang Heng himself who is secretly in love with Xiao Lanhua (who actually does have a crush on him bourne from gratefulness and a little hero-worship at the start of the story), but he ultimately loses his chance through inaction and silence that he abandons too late. But I want to make clear that he is not an unlikable character. In a different show he would have been the other lead. Just... not in this one.

Anyway, the two characters experience unrequited affection and though both go through stages of denial and unwillingness to abandon hope, neither do either one of them ever turns into something despicable - and when the time where they must choose between selfishness that would hurt the ones they love, and selflessness that would save them comes around both do the right thing.

Which is something I found refreshing and a relief.

And this show has so many relationships that get fully developed and explored. Not simply between the main couple and those around them. But between the secondary characters themselves. Other than the relationships I've already mentioned, other ones that have their chance in the sun are Xiao Lanhua and Dan Yin, Dan Yin and Jie Li, Dongfang Qingcang and Chang Heng, Xun Feng and Xiao Lanhua. And more besides.

And then there's the villain of the story who is both monstrous and utterly unforgivable and yet also has a very sad story and motivations for what they do. I can't really say anything more though.

Basically I just really recommend this show to fans of fantasy and people with a weakness for a very compelling, well developed love story.

For those interested, the first five episodes are available to be watched free on the official streaming site here (at which point you can decide if it's worth subscribing for a single month to finish watching).

I think it's also going to be available on Netflix on September 18, 2022 update: September 9, 2022.

That's of course for the... official sites. There are of course other options available 🏴‍☠️.

P.S. I finished the entire show with all its 36 episodes in three days (despite it being my first time watching a live action Chinese TV series) am now going into withdrawal. Seriously, this show is SO GOOD, I PROMISE.

P.P.S. It's got a happy ending. I will not tell you anything other than that. But yes, it's got a happy ending.

[shuunnico]

any games you're interested in thisyear?

Actually quite a lot, which is different than most years. In no particular order:

2023 Confirmed

Warhammer 40k: Space Marine 2. I liked the original. It was simple but fun. I'm hoping they have evolved the formula a bit from that point.

Darkest Dungeon 2. I have a lot of issues with the game changing directions into an FTL-ish game. But it could be good, regardless of my feelings on the genre shift.

Starfield. Bethesda is still on my radar but they're no longer a "Must buy" company after Fallout 4 and Fallout76. The fact that they're STILL using the CreationEngine gives me worry, but I'm still waiting to see how it turns out.

Hogwarts Legacy. It's a immersive RPG with character customization. That's going to always catch my attention.

Redfall. Arcane disappointed me with Deathloop but they still have good will from Prey. If they can break the core "Xshock" gameplay they've reused for nearly all their games, I'll be interested.

Book of Hours. I really enjoyed the mythology set up in Cultist Simulator and I'm interested in any game that further explores it.

Suicide Squad. Rocksteady is a solid studio and I liked the Arkham Games, even Knight. So I'm willing to give them a shot in this.

Atomic Heart. New studio attempting the Xshock formula, so I'll be watching to see how it turns out. But I've heard this was a troubled production, so I dunno how it'll be as a final product.

Like a Dragon: Ishin. I'm a sucker for the Yakuza franchise.

System Shock. After so long, I'm just interested in how it'll be when it finally comes out.

Baldur's Gate 3. Someone gifted it to me back when it started Early Access, but I haven't tried it because I don't want to be spoiled. I've just toyed around with the character creation. Larian Studios is a studio I still have a lot of trust in.

Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora. I have not seen either Avatar film. But from the start it seems like Cameron want to build a world and only crafted a story as an excuse. He should've just made a game like this instead to begin with.

Announced but TBD (so may not be in 2023)

Into the Dead: Our Darkest Days. Looks like This War of Mine but with zombies and a 1980's aesthetic.

Warhammer 40k: Roguetrader. Made by Owlcat and I liked their two Pathfinder games. A Warhammer CRPG? Sounds fun!

Hellboy: Web of the Wyrd. I love Hellboy. I just hope the game itself is good.

Frostpunk 2. I liked the original, will see what they do with the sequel.

Silksong. I only recently played Hollow Knight, but I enjoyed the experience enough to look forward to this.

Avowed. I really, really liked Deadfire and this game is set in the PoE world. The 'eh' feeling I got from Outer Worlds puts a damper on things, but I hope that maybe by returning to the PoE universe, there might be a return to form. Also, immersive RPG with character customization, so...

Hades 2. I LOVED Hades. More of it is going to appeal to me.

Judas. The creator of Bioshock comes back to make a brand new Xshock game? I wanna see if he innovates the formula he helped popularize or not.

Nightengale. I'm not huge into the 'survivor crafting' game but the aesthetics interest me.

Cyberpunk: Phantom Liberty. Okay, not a game, but DLC. Cyberpunk hurt me, but I'm really, really hoping that this DLC is being made by CDPR with the idea that they need to step up their game.

[greenjokwe-blog]

Pyre - Finished 20/02/2023

Going back through my Supergiant game journey after putting it on hold for a year and a half, playing through them all in order has been a very interesting experience for me. They’re a studio who both haven’t released any bad games and not only have improved more and more over time, but with the massive success of Hades warranting their first direct sequel, it’s very fun putting all of their other games in context to that without having played the game for myself. Pyre in a lot of ways is technically more impressive than both of their previous games, although for me in terms of favourites I’d probably put it in the exact middle right now.

Firstly, the structure is completely different this time. While it does keep a lot (maybe even most) of the studio’s staples, some aspects are much favoured over others, such as the more narrator-style of storytelling being changed for it’s more multi-choice, choose your own adventure story, hell most of the game is basically a visual novel! While I loved the old story presentation, seeing how perfectly it was executed in Transistor, I’m happy to see them strive for new ideas, and this game definitely shows the heights of the new formula at certain points.

First off, I must talk about the best part about this game - the characters. The cast is easily the best Supergiant has ever done, there will be at least a couple of characters you’ll be invested in their character arcs throughout, and wanna stick out from them. Which is when the game reveals its biggest secret and greatest strength; its understanding of character progression and levelling with player investment, leading to some reveals that hit the player like a brick.

Although that being said, once the game first drops its biggest ball about four hours in, the rest of the game never really seems to hit quite as hard, which is fine because it still has its moments that shine very bright, but considering that when this released it was the studios longest game, and that a lot of that is bogged down by large dialogue of lore dumps, the game really shined only as bright to me with the characters I liked and the choices I made. Towards the game’s end the game suffers the most, but also created this unique feeling of melancholy I definitely appreciated and is befitting of Supergiant's body of work as a whole.

But uh yeah, rest is as you expect. Beautiful art, wonderful soundtrack, the gameplay... even more unbalanced and exploitable than usual. I definitely still do like it, and I think that’s due to my love of sports RPGs sparked by Inazuma Eleven, but it definitely suffers from character playstyles that aren’t great or synergize very well with other party compositions, trivializing a lot of encounters or making some character styles suffer when the game forces you to use them. Still, at its best, it’s incredibly involving and exciting, with incredibly tight controls and decision-making play.

So yeah, Pyre isn’t without its flaws, but I’d still say it’s a very good game. Honestly, I’m just really glad to see them try something new, and if Hades uses the character dialogue presentation of story (which from what I’ve seen of what Hades story is) and improves on it as much as Transistor did with Bastion’s roots, I think I’ll definitely love that game as well. But considering it’s longer than the length of every Supergiant game up to this point combined, I’m not in a rush. I’d still recommend this, the most slept-on Supergiant game that’s definitely worth checking out.

[popculturebuffet]

House of Mouse: Halloween with Hades: Wingmickey (Commissioned by Weirdkev27)

Happy Halloween all you happy people! We’re back to the house of mouse for our second halloween visit as Mickey Tries to get Hades laid, Donald tries to be spooky, Goofy goes into space and Donald and the boys gaslight each other. All of this and more under the cut!

How To Camp:

Look at this point anyone whose read my reviews before knows I love How To Shorts. Their funny fun and the gimmick of the snooty narrator doing this thing while Goofy does his thing never gets old. And given the last one I covered was a masterpiece, I was shocked to get another almost as good. 

How To Camp plays with the fomula by having Goofy use a tape deck for the how too  narratoin, though still thankfully the same voice... and by having Aliens abduct goofy and thus goofy explore their ship while thinking it’s the wilderness. 

The shake up is a nice tweak to the formula, using the contrast of what goofy sees and the headset for comedy as you’d expect but also just being plain fun watching Goofy tumble around a space ship as aliens try to catch him, then progress to trying to do a murder on him. It’s pure fun and I highly recommend you seek it out. 

Donald’s Halloween Scare:

Another truly excellent short and one of the best from the episodes i’ve covered this year by far. 

It’s also the rare one using the triplets as so far in an entire year of doing these I have not seen them outside of the quack street boys or quacking pumpkins, probably one of the most 2000′s sentences ever uttered by man or murder doll. 

But HDL are out in devil costumes, much like the one Donald wears in both this and House of Villains, and we get a nice sequence where Mickey, Minnie and Goofy give them a scare and then a pile of candy for trick or treat. Well Mickey and Minnie do, Goofy dresses up as a bunny because he has the holiday wrong and the kids are mad he got them eggs. Dudes i’d of killed to get a hardboiled egg for halloween. Still would. Maybe dress it up like Freddy or Chucky. Realy make it jazzy. 

So the little devils end up at Donald’s house, where Donald is , shockingly, a huge dick about halloween. 

His plan of course is to dress up like a Jason and scare them, chasing them off then stealing their candy. I dunno.. he probably woudlv’e made more of an impression as the Axeman. 

I just like that song. I can’t wait to hear a full versoin next year. Might even honestly buy it just so I can listen to it sooner. 

Anyways, our heroes are scared off but soon find out Donald was conning them and get back at him the old fashioned way: by making him think his Jasonsona is wante dto murder, chasing him around and scaring him and finally making him think THEY SCARED THEM TO DEATH AND PREPARING TO BURY HIM ALIVE. 

Donald promises to get them their candy back and gets them some new candy, all is well, and Goofy accidnetlys cares them as Santa. Which i’d chuckle at but as we’ll see in a few weeks santa is no joke when he’s off his leash. 

Halloween With Hades:

So now is time for our Wraparound. It’s Halloween at the House of Mouse.. again. For the first time. This episode came before House Ghosts and I mistakingly put it first. It’s also one of three halloweens the club has overall. Because like most cartoons the characters only age if the creators WANT them to. Same goes for comic strips and comic books. And it’s a shame as I DO wish more cartoons did gradual aging, with one of the neatest thigns adventure time did being letting Finn slowly grow up. Most other cartoons either take place in too short a timespan for it to matter (Gravity Falls (Which only did so in the finale arc), Owl House, Amphibia) or flat out have a case of can’t make me don’t wanna (Gumball, Bob’s Burgers, The Simpsons). The former is fine... the latter.. not so much. I get not changing a characters age just to satsify time, that way you can tell all the stories you can. But leveling them up just a YEAR can change things in a way that allows more intresting situation.. and for shows that actually cast children it means they can keep their parts instead of being recast because your too scared to have actual change or too cheap to pitch it down.  This.. this may be a button for me. NGL. 

So anyways it’s halloween 1 at house of mouse. Donald wants to scare people and has a whole runner about that where he shouts boo at people while wearing a devil costume and instead gets scared by the villians he’s trying to scare. It’s.. funnier than it sounds as there’s plenty of good varation my faviorite being one of the sisters from hercules taking out her eye and showing it to him. 

But while most of the people are happy, Hades isn’t because he’s alone and thinks love is for suckers. Given he used love as part of an elaborate scheme to try and ruin his nephew’s life and kill every other member of his family, he might not be the best expert on the topic. This is proven when he DOES find someone who piques his intrest: Malificent. If your expecting decendants jokes.. I got nothing. I haven’t watched it and my attitude towards doing so is very much “Can’t make me don’t wanna”. Unless someone paid me for it. Guys gotta eat. 

Hades tries sleezing on her, she shoots him down, and Mickey says “well why don’t you try being nice”. Oh Mickey you poor naive bastard.. son of Igantz Mouse, you have no idea what “nice guy syndrome” is do you? 

Still Hades sees Malificent seemingly enjoy Mickey’s schitck. You can probably guess what comes next

Sadly we don’t get a fun makeover montage. We instead get Mickey introducing THE NEW HADES... which is hades in mickey’s outfit.. whic his a mostly naked hades in oversized mickey mouse gloves and a mickey hat

No.. no one needed this. I mean he has abs which.. nice but even people who WANTED sexy drawings of hades or made them did not want “half naked hades dressed up as mickey mouse’ I’d say that’s no one’s fetish but at least one person probably has it so fair play to them. But for me there’s only one sane, resonable way to deal with this

This goes about as well for hades as the burning in my eyes is going for me, and Hades gets pissed. Thankfulyl NOT at malificent herself, he’s not tha tlevel of douche, but at Mickey’s terrible advice.... which.. bud... you probably should’ve known this was a bad idea the second it involved mickey mouse asking you to strip naked. 

Hades chases him and prepares to kill him which turns out IS Malificent’s fetish and the two happily walk off together. Mickey claims credit for this. 

Halloween With Hades is an okay wraparound, and the sight of hades in that horrifyign getup IS funny enough to get some laughs but overall it’s just kinda there despite the fun of finally doing a crossover ship. With all the wacky potetial for one, it woudl’ve been nice to show some other pairings like that for funzies as a gag or something. Instead this was.. okay it just wasn’t really memorable ASIDE from crossing the mover. it was also annoying to hear James Woods for a full ep, but him slowly turning into a total ballbag is not something the series coudl’ve predicted, so it’s not the shows fault. It’s fine but the other halloween special is geninely better. 

As a whole the episode is decent. The wraparound is just eh, but the two shorts are pretty dang good so it’s still worth watching. So with that we have one last HOM scare cooking for you coming on halloween as Jafar makes a move and the house of mouse becomes a house of villians. See ya real soon and if you like these reviews please subscribe to my patreon

LINK IS RIGHT HERE

[antiloreolympus]

10 Anti LO Asks

1. tbh i think the pointed ears on the nymphs is kinda cute, the issue is that rachel and her team cannot keep most of their designs consistent and most are so lazy (ie daphne is just persephone with blue splotches, leto is just hera with black eyes, echo is just female hades, etc) that the features arent really a sign of thought out character design, but rather laziness that even they cant keep straight, as well as showing how lazy it is when only single features can tell anyone apart.

2. if anyone wants to see good versions of taking a webtoon and reworking it for print, go look at hooky, punderworld, and even let's play to see how it's actually done. the LO version is so rushed and lazy it's honestly kind of insulting to how well the other examples did their print versions.

3. It’s a fairly profound realization when you can sit back and recognize that Persephone has almost zero personality traits that aren’t completely wrapped around Hades. When taking a moment to think about what other meaningful relationships Persephone has outside of her love interest, there’s maybe…two (Hecate and Eros…possibly Hera)? I just need to point out that this is highly unusual for any sort of character, especially within a serialized work of art, to possess nearly no identifiable attributes aside from “what will their crush think of them if they do [blank]?” Persephone retains the same lukewarm qualities that early-era Disney princesses hold: interchangeable, formulaic, and malleable enough that viewers can easily insert themselves within the character’s respective roles. Some other anon had mentioned this before, but you could just as easily change Persephone’s name to “Y/N” and practically nothing would change within the story context itself.

4. heres what i dont get. its pretty obvious the first lo book at least is riding off repurposing longer panels as page backgrounds, which i do think is neat, the problem is even by ep 26 (which is where the first book ends) rs stops doing panels like this, and if she ever uses them very rare and still lacking interest. by the time the print version line up with the actual comic, it'll be nothing but a bunch of squished in. static panels with nothing to try and punch it up in the background.

5. itss really weird hera pointed out persephone is young and impressionable and would never argue with hades because of her naive nature and how her youth makes her easy to be pushed around and yet ... hades does exactly that to her and its framed as romantic?? like rachel you know when you say hades shouldn't do that that you actually shouldn't have him do that, right?? like she always setts something up to be disproven (like the age gap or smth) only to play it straight, like???

6. what i dont get of the print LO books is that the logo implies it's a whimsical fantasy, which LO is not, and even the first volume's cover implies its a contrast between the ancient world and the modern when thats not what LO is either. It's aN obvious example of false advertising and promising a viewer something they wont be getting. The second volume cover is horribly designed and lazy, but it's a bit more accurate in telling the viewer LO is just a 50 shades rip off at least.

7. What bugs me the most about LO is the over the top naive personality that RS puts on Persephone; for a goddess who lives with her mother in the farms I guess she could have a more assertive personality giving the context of dealing with the constant feeling of getting married unbeknownst to her or her mother, @a-gnosis comic portraits a more competent and unyielding Persephone, even when it needs to confront Hades, she doesn't fall in love in the way like LO Persephone does, that's a good story.

8. I had to stop reading the most recent fastpass because I couldn’t stop laughing at how some of the hands were drawn. Like, there are panels of Apollo and Zeus where their hands are so out of proportion that they are comically huge in comparison to their tiny heads.

9. I looked at the lo fast pass tag and found an account blaming us antis for effing up the LO tag… Like can you guys take it up to ones who made this app??.. It’s not our fault that tag system is messed up.

10. Is it just me or the humour in lo got super tiring an completely out of place? We are getting same old jokes all the time with "people" being loud and disrespectful to social norms (like Hermes walking in the court as it's a tv show) and every time it's placed during serious events, like what for? Why destroying the mood? Also it got super predictable - who would have know P would ask H to represent her - such complicated plot much suspence. It got super tiring to read now

[bellamyroselia]

Who could replace Hades as the new big bad? Overly long essay

Like pretty much everyone else in this fandom, I love Hades. Guy’s your typical pure evil villain with a personality larger than life itself and he’s having so much fun with it that it’s contagious. Every time he pops up, I’m delighted to see him. It’s so fun to see him do his shtick and have the time of his life with it, which also makes beating him feel so great. After all the crap he has put the main cast through, it’s so satisfying to blast him into the face because for a moment that confidence finally breaks and once it's all over, people cheer because they don’t have to live in horrible fear for a while at least. This characterization is mostly rooted on the sheer fear factor Hades had in the eyes of ancient people - even in civilizations which have rather chipper afterlife people tended to prefer living over dying, and this of course meant that they were absolutely terrified of the Underworld deities. Hades was mostly addressed by epithets in texts because people thought that if they called him by his name, they were drawing his attention and the last thing a sane person wants is the attention of an powerful god who has power over the dead. So if a god has this level of appeal, be it positive or negative, you may not even need excessive amount of mythological content to create a frame for a character!

This being said, I don’t believe his chances of coming back are as the big bad of a next game are high - that is unless we have to wait another 15-20 years to get a new game, but I’d like to be more hopeful than that. So if he isn’t coming back, who could possibly replace him as the new big bad of Kid Icarus? It’s not like the writers could ever run out of source material because there’s so many monsters to deal with and every god is more or less morally grey, meaning that there’s many possibilities for new bad guys regardless of the scale.

This took a lot longer than I originally expected and I’m sorry for that - there’s no worse idea than to jump into a rabbit hole and bringing a shovel with you because things will quickly spiral out of control into new interesting directions. The more info I gathered, the more interested I was on looking more into it and sometimes it even spiraled out of mythology into history and philosophy. If you’re interested on some specific reasons for why this took so long, here’s few: myths are long and there’s many different versions of them, epics are even longer, Peloponnese people couldn’t be bothered to write their own things down so I had to look what travelers wrote down, it takes Plato way too long to get into the point, Herodotus never gets into the point, someone translated the term metic as resident alien of all things which I thought was the funniest thing ever and Ludovisi Ares is really pretty.

This is the point where I give the obligatory warnings, so here - since I'm discussing mythology here, it's inevitable that there's some talk about violence and death. I'm not going to linger on the gruesome details, but know that it's there. At couple points this will spiral into a full-on history lesson because I thought that understanding the historical context was important regarding the topic I was discussing. Also this is a one long essay - and by long, I mean really, really long. If you want to read it all at one sitting, prepare some time for yourself. But with that all out of the way, let’s jump straight into the discussion on who could be the next possible big bad, shall we?

I’m limiting this mostly to the main 12 Olympians with the addition of some other big names to keep things simple - while some smaller mythological figures such as Arachne or Arke would work fantastically as villains, they don’t have that recognition or presentation the more well known characters have. We’re trying to speculate who could fill Hades’ shoes as the new main bad guy here after all, not who we could add on the list of great yet less significant antagonists like Medusa, Pandora and Thanatos. I’m excluding Zeus, Athena, Hephaestus and Demeter from this list for rather obvious reasons - Zeus because the the guy seems to be MIA for good so Palutena could rule the place, Athena and Hephaestus because Palutena and Dyntos practically are them and Demeter because Viridi pretty much is Mycenaean Demeter on steroids in a package way too small to contain all that anger within. I also don’t think her relationship with Pit and Palutena will change drastically, so she’s sitting comfortably on her friendenemy-zone.

As for already existing characters, I don’t think anyone of them could snatch the title of the big bad. Viridi is off the competition for already mentioned reasons and I don’t see anyone from Forces of Nature defecting to become the new main villain. Pyrrhon is either gone for good or went back to whatever is this world’s equivalent of Egypt to lick his wounds, so I don’t think he’s coming back anytime soon - and if he’s coming, I don’t think he’s coming back as a main bad guy since he really wasn’t one to begin with. Thanatos’ only major mythological appearance is the myth of Sisyphus capturing death which doesn’t exactly strike confidence on his abilities in general and if that version of Thanatos couldn’t do his job correctly when meeting one guy too stubborn to die, do you really think that I believe our Thanatos has any chances of becoming the new big bad? Bringing back Medusa would be beating a dead horse at this point unless they really twist the formula and I don’t think that’s going to happen, so Medusa is off the competition. Pandora wasn’t all that big of a threat to begin with, so if she comes back she most likely stays that way. So it’s definitely going to be a new character, but who could it be?

As for who for sure can’t replace Hades as the new main bad, it’s Hestia. She probably has the lowest chance of any big Greek god to even appear in a possible future Kid Icarus game simply because there’s next to no material of her and that’s for a good reason. She was the goddess of hearth, domesticity, family, home and state. Most of these were and still are considered private, so that explains why there’s very little material of Hestia actually doing anything - we don’t write epic poetry about cleaning the house, making a macaroni casserole for dinner or going to bathroom and so didn’t the ancient people. With Hestia, you’re dealing with the bare bones of a character because she’s so passive and non-confrontational figure. It would be hard to make her a central figure in any kind of plot, especially for a one centered around action, so she’s out.

Hermes is also a figure I don’t think would work as a big bad or as an antagonist in general and I don’t really have any concrete reasons for why I think so. I just feel that he would be unfit for the role. He’s a trickster who started his shenanigans on the day he was born and the rest is mythology - by cunning escapades and underdog tactics he became the messenger of gods and from that point onward he kept collecting even more jobs such as becoming the god of merchants, shepherds and thieves, being a psychopomp, guiding dreams and helping heroes whenever he felt like it. He has a lot of going on but he’s always regarded as someone who knows all the tricks and isn’t afraid to use them, not all bad for a guy whose name was derived from a word meaning a pile of rocks.

As for why I think Hermes would make an terrible antagonist is mostly because of his status as the god of thieves and how it’s pretty much the easiest way to turn him into an antagonist. The thing here is that I just can’t stand antagonists whose main thing is that they’re amazing thieves and/or tricksters in games. While I think they can be enjoyable in other forms of media if they’re written on a smart way, in games this is almost never the case because gameplay and story don’t always match perfectly and writers need to use cheap tactics to make the character work - and by cheap I mean either A.I stands for artificial incompetence and the character is simply bad at being a thief/trickster despite all the characters and lore saying otherwise or that the game just starts cheating against the player to make them feel dumb even though they did nothing wrong. Thieves and tricksters are just really hard to balance in a game when it’s not the player character doing the deceiving. That perfect sweet spot for a great character is too goddamn tiny and if the thief/trickster isn’t exactly in there, you have an annoying character either because they’re incompetent at their job or because computer is a cheating bastard. So while there’s many enjoyable antagonists who share traits with Hermes, combine them all into a one character with the problems I already mentioned and most of the time you have a figure everybody hates due to how infuriating they’re to deal with. We’re trying to make people interested of going on and seeing what happens next here, not trying to annoy them to the point where they can just drop the game and never pick it up again. As for another reason I don’t think Hermes would work all that well as an antagonist is because his whole shtick is that despite his incredible powers, he still manages to be an underdog. Needless to say, the way underdogs are represented in media is vastly different from the way major antagonists are and while it can work, it’s hard to pull off. And of course there’s the thing of Hermes being portrayed almost always as a positive figure in myths, meaning that I and many others have a hard time imagining him as a bad guy. At his most evil we imagine Hermes doing stuff such as saying to his nephew that grandpa equals target practice, not anything that could threaten the world. Though if Hermes is included into the cast of a future game, I can image him having a theme that sounds similar to the BW rival theme for some reason. It has that I’m a one chipper fella but I’m also extremely busy right now so goodbye for a moment, see you soon-energy in it that I associate with Hermes.

As for what kind of role Hermes could be playing, he could work rather well as a quick cameo like Poseidon was in KI:U, where he offers help in some form. If one wants to go deeper into it, he could possibly run some service since he was the god of merchants and trade as well - though if one want to involve the fact of him being the god of thieves in addition to previously mentioned things, make him an occasional scammer because that’s what one would expect from a trickster. Or have him as a boss in a training gauntlet. Works either way.

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If Artemis was introduced into the series, I don’t think she would be antagonistic. I can totally see her having a cold personality and her being bit of a hard person to deal with, but I don’t see her being actively malicious character - only example of Artemis being overly cruel towards figures KI-characters seem to be based on would be her sending the Calydonian boar to cause chaos in Calydon. It’s interesting if you believe Magnus and Gaol are at least partially inspired by Meleager and Atalanta like I do, but I don’t think it’s enough to make Artemis an antagonist, much less the main villain so she’s off the competition. Not to say she isn't wrathful, I looked into it and her wrath far outnumbers her blessings, though it's rather messy at times and some of them even can't co-exist the ones about Orion and Callisto definitely can't but her wrath is divorced from the main KI-cast. You'd have to create new characters to excuse it and KI already has a rather large cast, so I don't think it would be all that wise to create new characters just for the sake of goddess cursing them for a plot line that's resolved in couple chapters. Maybe she’s just a cameo or possibly a boss in a training gauntlet.

Apollo would be an antagonist. I just don’t see any other way how he could be introduced into the series. He has potential to be a charismatic, funny and mostly harmless antagonist who isn’t there to cause any trouble, he just really hates Pit and only Pit. But why would he hate Pit? It’s not like the mythological Apollo dislikes Icarus or Perseus and that’s indeed true, but there’s one more thing. For a god who we associate with a celestial body mostly made out of hydrogen and helium, Apollo has extremely high levels of sodium chloride within him - which is to say that he has been salty starting from the moment Hermes robbed him that one time and that lake of salt inside him has only become larger ever since. That salt is directed at people he dislikes and while he doesn’t dislike Icarus or Perseus because he never met either of them, guess who he does dislike? Angel-like gods, or just Eros to be more specific.

The story goes that Apollo’s enormous ego took the better of him one day and so he started to mock his nephew for what he thought was mediocre use of the bow and arrow. Insulted Eros decided that Apollo had officially lost his uncle-license which led him to curse Apollo to have the worst love life imaginable, starting with Daphne. And as we all know Cupid is Roman version of Eros and Pit is named after Cupid, so this was hatred made in heaven and it would be disappointing to not use the opportunity when it has been given to us on a golden platter. And you don’t even have to come up with an detailed and intriguing story to explain why Apollo hates him - something could’ve very well happened during the three years Pit’s consciousness was in that ring. His body may have ruined Apollo’s chances to hit it off with people because it was destroying their cities or something similar. Or just leave it as a noodle incident that’s referenced multiple times, everyone wonders what the heck actually happened but only Apollo knows, refusing to tell the story because he just assumes that everyone already knows it and they’re just messing with him by pretending to not know. Either way, Apollo should be an antagonist if he’s featured in a sequel. Not a villain, definitely not the big bad but fun antagonist to deal with.

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This is something that most of you probably already know or at least you would know if you’ve actually read something other than Ovid’s Metamorphoses, or as I like to call it Jaded man screams at Emperor Augustus because apparently telling the Roman citizens to go all out on every monument the prude ever built clearly wasn’t enough, please tell me you have but Medusa isn’t an only child. She’s in fact one of Phorcys and Ceto’s seven children, both of them being somewhat monstrous primordial ocean deities - Phorcys has been described as a merman with red skin and crab claws, Ceto’s name in the other hand just literally means sea monster. Besides Medusa and the two other gorgons Stheno and Euryale, the list of their children includes the graeae sisters, serpentine dragon Ladon and Echidna, which is quite a lot of snake monsters for two deities who themselves don’t have any snake traits. There’s a lot of potential in this group but ideas of any of them becoming the new big bad end up falling apart because just like Medusa, they’re all rather bland characters like you’d expect from a mythological monster. They’re less like characters and more like plot devices that the hero needs to deal with. The only two members of this family besides Medusa who actually get to do something of importance are Ladon and Echidna and even those acts aren’t all that interesting. Echidna gets to have her many monstrous children with Typhon and then she’s apparently is killed by Argus, Hera’s servant-giant while sleeping on a cave just like her sister. Ladon guarded the garden of Hesperides which was well known for its golden apples and he doesn’t get to die with much dignity either, since Heracles just shoots him in the back and literally the next day other Argonauts find nymphs looking at his still twitching body. Alternatively Heracles just tricks Titan Atlas to do all the apple picking, which leaves Ladon alive.

Possibly one of the biggest problems writers have to deal with is setting. Ladon is very strictly tied into the garden setting and Echidna was cave dweller who never left her home, so writers would have to come with rather specific situations for them to appear. Of course if one wants to be lazy, Underworld could possibly serve as their home. It could very well house caves big enough to house a snake monster and Greek Underworld does have Elysium, which is basically Paradise and it could very well also function as a garden. But honestly even with the right setting, I don’t think either of them would make all that interesting big bads. They would definitely work fantastically as large-scale villains, but they don’t really have that much intimidation factor all things considered - you can blame Argus and Heracles for that.

But I’m not done with this family yet as there’s one character connected to them who’s probably the most feared monster of all Greco-Roman mythology and that’s Typhon, Echidna’s mate. He’s essentially an ancient Greek equivalent of a kaiju, more a destructive force of nature than a monster and everyone fears him - and by everyone, I mean everyone. There’s couple of versions of what happens but the most popular one goes that when the gods saw him, their first instinct was to shapeshift into animals and flee into Egypt. Those who did stay behind such as Hades were said to cover in fear in their homes while Typhon ravaged the land. Zeus tried to fight him but when he went for the kill, Typhon caught him and cut off his sinews, then threw him into a cave under the watch of another snake monster Delphyne. This didn’t stop Hermes and Pan from getting the sinews back and saving Zeus, and once his strength has been restored he and Typhon fought once again. Zeus eventually wearied Typhon down and then either casted him down into Tartarus or dropped a mountain on top of him, that being Mount Etna.

He could work very well as a big bad, problem here are just how high the stakes need to be for him to work. He’d had to be the ultimate villain if that was the case, the stakes need to be higher than they were with Hades. And considering how Hades was pretty much your typical pure evil villain causing chaos, what separates Typhon from him? Just some more chaos and no wisecracking dialogue because everyone is too scared to talk? He comes off as way too similar to Hades without all the fun personality. Maybe if KI:U became a KI:U-trilogy he could work as the ultimate big bad of the last game, but I got to say no otherwise. The bar for making him work is already sky-high due to how destructive he is and we don’t want to repeat the plot of Uprising here. So while he definitely can work, maybe save him for later.

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Hera and Poseidon both have potential to be serious antagonistic forces, but I don’t think they have it to be main villains. Hera simply fits the bill because most of the times she’s the antagonistic force actively trying to make people’s lives worse, all because she can’t direct her anger at correct people. Some times she’s just blatantly evil, like how she imprisoned her own daughter Eileithyia or you may better know her as Lucina to prevent the birth of Artemis and Apollo or how she tricked her pregnant great-granddaughter into disintegrating herself Semele is her great-granddaughter by the way. As for examples of Hera being wrathful which don’t involve Zeus being horny, she was said to be the one who sent Sphinx to Thebes, no reason given why or if there’s one, I couldn’t find it. Works either way.

Because she might as well be the personification of divine wrath, it’s pretty easy to see why one would think she would make a great villain. However that wrath also gives us a big problem, it being that her evil escapades are mostly rooted on anger and spite - while wrath is a good driving force for a villain, it needs more to work. With Hades, he does evil things for fun and is having a blast while doing it. Hera on the other hand just rages and most of the times it’s because of Zeus, who seems to be out of the picture. She’s not there to have fun and when you add her general lack of charisma on the top, you don’t end up with the most endearing character. While wrath can serve as a character motivation, it can become stale very quickly and this means that unless the story regarding villainy her is short (as in solved in 1-3 chapters) it starts to feel like dragging. I overall think that Hera does have very low chances to appear in general, but if she does appear as an antagonist she should preferably be a minor one in the same way Viridi was. You know the meme of what makes villain a supervillain and the answer is presentation? Hera doesn’t have that presentation. Writers can certainly just give her that which is what they did with Hades whose mythological counterpart was more or less a basement dweller, but why go trough all that trouble when there’s so many better candidates to work with?

On to Poseidon, who’s an important figure in the founding myth of Athens - it’s honestly quite odd how it’s never mentioned in any shape or form in KI:U despite Palutena being based on Athena. But then again, considering how much “care” this series put on the names of its cities and towns, this being ignored doesn’t really surprise me even if it does disappoint. He was a really big deal during the Mycenaean period, besides being the god of ocean he was also seen as the head god and the ruler of the Underworld. Then the Late Bronze Age collapse happened and Poseidon was nerfed in the lack of better words - during the Dark Age, Zeus became the new head god and Hades popped seemingly out of nowhere, taking over Poseidon’s role as the god ruling the Underworld. On the other news Poseidon’s antagonistic potential is somewhat dwarfed by the fact that most of his escapades involve banging and they don’t really feature any figures the main cast of KI seem to be based on. It’s annoying because he does so much but because it’s mostly banging people and either helping or bullying very specific heroes, it’s just not something that’s all that relevant in the context of KI. But there’s couple myths and stories that would make him an easy bad guy, first one is that of Atlantis - and we’re going to jump straight to the source material because on it’s core, it’s technically just another tale of Athena and Poseidon having a conflict. Fish people under the sea is fun as well, but by using the source directly it gives us the most potential.

So Plato tells in his dialogues Timaeus and Critias that when Athenian statesman Solon visited Egypt, he found some interesting records about certain events during 10th millennium BCE and translated them into Greek. Only thing here that’s true is Solon visiting Egypt, everything else was made up Plato - if you need more proof, know that 10th millennium BCE was during the stone age for context, Britain wasn’t sharing a land border with just France, but also with Belgium, Netherlands, Germany and Denmark during this time. It was that far into the past. As for the actual story, it begins by gods choosing lots of land for themselves and Poseidon chooses Atlantis. He then falls in love with a mortal woman Cleito, builds her a luxurious home, they have five sets of twin boys together and once the kids have all grown up, they divide Atlantis into ten parts and so is born ten different lineages of kings. But by each generation the kings become more and more human, meaning that it’s much more easier for their wealthy lifestyle to hit them in the head - compare that to Athenians in the story, who’re not tempted by luxuries and have quite Spartan lifestyle interestingly enough. This wealthy lifestyle of the Atlanteans quickly leads into colonialism and war mongering, leading into them trying to take over the Mediterranean but they’re are stopped by Athens because naval warfare was the only type of warfare Athenians actually excelled at. Zeus eventually looks down to see what the heck is going on and then tells Poseidon to do something because this racket is technically speaking all his fault. Poseidon agrees, causes an earthquake and then sweeps Atlantis under his rug, that being the ocean. So Atlantis is pretty much an antithesis of a perfect society, a concept that’s discussed more in Republic and the lesson here is that being consumed by hubris in the search of luxury leads to ruin - but since we’re not here for philosophy lessons, let’s forget all of that and think what kind of plot one could craft out of this mess.

Island nation in search of wealth is a good set-up for some action, so I don’t think there’s much that needs changing. Have Atlanteans attack some cities which alerts Palutena and that leads Pit into a mission in which he tries to tell Poseidon what’s going on. After 2-5 chapters of war against Atlanteans, Poseidon deals with the problem either willingly or by force - whether he just destroys the place or makes Atlanteans full on aquatic folk who can’t survive on land meaning that they have to give up the conquest is up to writers. It’s honestly quite refreshing to have the original tale working so well, because usually everything related to Atlantis in media is so divorced from what Plato told. Sure, a submerged city full of fish people could still work but by using the original tale as base we get a story with clear beginning and end which makes perfect sense in context of KI. Or maybe have the a plotline inspired by the original story first and then later have something related to the submerged city with the fish people. Best of both worlds, amazing!

Also orichalcum, the metal Atlanteans were said to have aplenty, is pretty much just copper. Reddish metal and only gold is more valuable than it, it couldn't be anything else but copper. The term even translates into mountain copper! So why is it never portrayed as copper in fiction?

Besides Atlantis, Poseidon has couple other myths I’d like to talk about too. The first one has him and Apollo losing their divine authority for a while and as punishment they have to serve Trojan king Laomedon father of king Priam and grandfather of Hector among some others if you’re wondering. The king makes them to build the legendary walls of Troy and he promises them great rewards, but once he doesn’t deliver them Apollo sends the plague upon Troy and then Poseidon sends a sea monster to terrorize the place Heracles kills it if you’re wondering. There’s also certain another situation which I’ve actually already talked about on a different post and how with little shaking it could work nicely on a future game - what I said was that Pit should do something Poseidon is going to hate to the point that the god is screaming for his head and that he wants to settle things on court.

The myth I used as reference was that of the supposed first trial in history, in which Ares kills Poseidon’s son Halirrhothius for assaulting his daughter and Poseidon loses his marbles over it. The gods gathered on Areopagus which is a real place in Athens, fun fact and I’ve heard two versions of how the trial goes. In the first version everyone agrees that Ares’ actions were justified and in the second one gods side with Poseidon, but goddesses side with Ares and since there was more goddesses present than gods, their words mattered more. Either way, Poseidon loses the trial and Ares gets away scot-free.

Were a future KI-game do their own twist with this myth, Pit would obviously take the role of Ares. Besides the fact that we’re trying to make Poseidon more antagonistic, Pit just being on a situation similar as Ares makes sense thematically speaking and I’m going to talk more about this later since it’s rather interesting. As for why the trial happens in the first place, it could very well be over anything. Maybe mix it with the one where Poseidon sends a sea monster to terrorize Troy just replace Troy with some unimportant city as this series always does and he’s so attached to it that seeing it getting slayed deeply saddens and angers him. You don’t even need to get rid of the idea that it was over a girl, even if the motive for killing the monster is changed along with what kind of relationship the girl could possibly have with the main cast. This is something I’ll get back into later because there’s in fact one other character who I’d like to talk about and how their most cruel and personal form of villainy happens to bound to a certain girl.

So back to Hera and Poseidon. There’s definitely potential for them to be antagonistic, but I’d say they would work much better as arc villains rather than as the main bad guy. There’s only so many things you can do with characters whose actions are rooted on anger or wrath, especially when they don’t have all that striking personalities.

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As for someone who could well work as the big bad, Dionysus is the first serious candidate. It’s partially due to how inconsistent his characterization has been, which I guess is something one should expect from a figure who has been around since the Mycenaean times and who happens to be the god of insanity, vegetation, orchards, fruit, grape-harvest, winemaking and wine. Does this sound like someone you’d expect to be a member of Forces of Nature? Because it sure does for me and I’d honestly be surprised if he wasn’t one if he was introduced to the franchise.

Symbolism behind Dionysus’ birth is pretty neat, my favorite version of it is the one written down by Diodorus of Sicily in Bibliotheca Historica and in that one Demeter is his mother. It starts the usual way in which the poor kid is killed shortly after his birth by Titans and Demeter comes back just in time to gather his remains to allow his rebirth shortly after. It references the harvest process and wine making - the god wine is born from the union of rain and earth just any plant is, he’s torn apart and boiled alive symbolizing the harvesting and wine-making process, his remains represent the fallen bare vines which become fertilizer for the earth and lastly wine itself is supposed symbolize the now reborn Dionysus. All of the versions of his birth myth do have this symbolism to a certain degree but I’d say this version has it the strongest because unlike his other the mother candidates, Demeter is a nature goddess first and foremost and also the goddess of agriculture.

This next point is somewhat tied to the previous one which is that he actually has valid reasons for his absence, that being his meanderings. Long story short - Hera’s angry over the fact that he exists, she injects him with madness and he wanders around like a madman for a while, then Rhea cures said madness and tells him to go on a journey so he could teach people how to make wine. So he goes and wanders around the world with the exception of Britain and Ethiopia for some reason teaching people the art of winemaking and does some other things in the meanwhile, such as apparently founding a city it’s told that on his campaign Alexander the Great came across a city that was supposedly founded by Dionysus. And this is a fun fact, apparently Dionysus’ popularity exploding around late 4th century BCE can be directly linked into Alexander, which is pretty neat. Once he comes back home he firmly establishes his place as a god and then he starts doing shenanigans much more familiar to us, such as giving king Midas his golden touch and marrying Ariadne.

So why do I think Dionysus is the first real contender for a possible new big bad? Well, do you know what’s the first thing he did once he came back to Greece? According to Bacchae, he brainwashed a city to worship him, caused an earthquake, set a palace on fire, gleefully watched when his worshipers teared a man into pieces and then turned some other people into serpents. Now that’s an entrance Viridi would be proud of!

Besides this, there’s also two similar stories in which Dionysus meets some pirates and they both show him as an unhinged god. They capture him and in the first one Dionysus shapeshifts into a lion and unleashes a bear against his captors, causing the scared pirates to abandon the ship and then Dionysus turns them into dolphins. In the other one he turns the mast and oars into snakes, fills the ship with ivy and the sound of flutes to make the pirates go mad and once again when they abandon the ship, Dionysus turns them into dolphins. The tale of him giving Midas his golden touch could also count as him being antagonistic since the act gives Midas nothing but suffering. So while he is much more friendly towards humans than your average god, Dionysus definitely has an antagonistic flare deep inside him and a place in the Forces of Nature and you can’t change my mind.

If Dionysus was a major antagonist or the big bad, I could see the plot going a lot like this - he comes home, causes some racket because he feels neglected, Viridi is happy about all of this and tries to control it while keeping him on this state of mind because who wants a happy party guy when you can have a chaotic deity, for a while she can do it but not for long before things snowball out of control and he becomes an unhinged god dead set on causing chaos. As for how he’s defeated, I can’t really come up with anything concrete on a fly but I don’t think Dionysus would be defeated the same way Hades was. And while he has the personality and presentation needed for a main antagonist, I just can’t see him as a pure evil villain like Hades was. He’s very much redeemable in my eyes and as for what happens to him after his defeat, I could see it leading to him mellowing down kind of like how Greek wine was watered down before it was used for anything - he’s still part of Forces of Nature and perfectly capable of doing all the same stuff he did as a major antagonist, but he would prefer partying with humans over destroying them. Viridi probably isn’t going to be all too happy about this, but it’s not like she’s going to be all that angry about it either.

Also fun fact at the end - in Dionysiaca, Ariadne laments if Eros and Anteros hate her because she had amazing dream about a wedding, only for Theseus to piss off and abandon her on Naxos. But as we all know, she would soon meet Dionysus who she does end up marrying so hey, the dream just wasn’t about the guy she thought she would marry. So if Dionysus isn’t going to be the big bad and the arc devoted to his villainy is relatively short, this could very well be used as a blueprint for a funny side story. Ariadne lamenting about Eros and Anteros would give Pit and Dark Pit valid reasons to be there.

This is not a joke, by the way. The part of Underworld which wasn't either Elysium or Tartarus was commonly referred as "the House of Hades" in ancient texts.

As for someone else who could also work quite well as the big bad, that would be Persephone. You all know the drill with her - Hades takes her, Demeter panics and goes to search her, she causes the Mediterranean summer on the meanwhile and does a thing which looks awful without context Demeter sets a baby on fire which is supposed to make him immortal if you’re wondering, everyone else decides that enough is enough because endless Mediterranean summer is a nightmare, they beg for Hades to give her back and he does that but not before the pomegranate trick. Demeter causes Mediterranean winter to come, the trouble is solved, we have a nice functional couple in our hands and they continue to appear together when Underworld is relevant to the plot - which surprisingly isn’t all that often as only Adonis, Heracles, Theseus who loses his arse and friend in the process, Orpheus who loses his wife and will to live in the process, Odysseys, Psyche and Aeneas managed to go to Underworld and back. That’s not really all that much all things considered.

And before anyone says anything about seasons here - Mediterranean climate is a thing and it’s best known for its hot, dry summers and mild, wet winters. One of these is much more preferable for plant life and in this case, it’s not summer. The more you know.

While there’s not much material of her when compared some other people in this list, I’d say there’s enough to create a frame for a character. In both Theogony and Iliad Persephone is described as dreaded and in Odyssey Odysseus assumes Persephone is the one sending ghosts to torture him while he’s visiting the Underworld. Just like Hades she has her fair share of vague epithets like Despoina (mistress) and Kore (maiden), presumably for the same reason as to avoid getting her attention. And while the etymology behind her actual name is rather muddied, the popular theories are that it means something in the vain of to destroy, to bring/cause death and she who brings destruction. And people have the gall to say she isn’t scary!

With this info and Hades’ characterization from KI:U in mind, you could very easily create a powerful pure evil villain who’s not going to be happy to learn what happened to her husband. As for why I believe she would be pure evil instead of redeemable one like Dionysus, it’s simply so she and Hades would match on their villainy. Considering how the big thing about Hades and Persephone is that they genuinely love each other to the point of possessiveness Pirithous and Minthe learned it the hard way, it would be weird if they hadn’t rubbed on each other during the time they were together. There’s an amazing chance for drama here and it would be dumb to ignore it when it has been given to us on a golden platter. And besides, unholy matrimonies are quite fun in fiction. Villains too have something they love.

As for attempts of villainy that don’t revolve around her being antsy at Pit about Hades, we interestingly need to look at the list of those she granted favors rather than those that had to deal with her wrath - or just one of them in particular, Psyche. As I’ve already mentioned she was one of those mortals who managed to go to Underworld and back and to make things better, she went to Underworld specifically so she could speak to Persephone. Persephone greets her with a nice cushion to sit on and a banquet, which Psyche declines because it’s a trap this is practically just the pomegranate trick on a larger scale. She tells why she came into the Underworld in the first place and Persephone fulfills her request, which is to say that she gives Psyche boxed death.

Coming to Underworld to speak to Persephone in particular definitely gives Psyche an edge compared to others when it comes to exploring Persephone’s potential villainy. But just why is Psyche such a big deal when compared to someone else like Orpheus, Adonis or Aeneas? Well, Psyche just happens to be the girl who would become the goddess of soul, a job that isn’t currently filled by anyone in KI-universe which Hades has kindly illustrated to us in KI:U by eating and repurposing souls for his own purposes. She’s also Eros’ wife with the addition of being the mother of his daughter and as we all know at this point, Pit is mostly inspired by Eros. While Persephone just being angry about her husband’s treatment makes a perfectly fine motivation, why not use the chance when it has been represented to us on a golden platter? Because while KI has a large cast of characters, most them are quite divorced from one another when it comes to their mythological counterparts interacting with each other. This subverts it since Persephone actually gets to interact with someone important to the figure Pit’s inspired of, which is more than almost anyone else in this list can say. The opportunity is there and there’s an open position for a new god, so why not take it?

Also if Persephone is going to be in a future game, I say I’m going to be so disappointed if there's not at least one pun about her epithet Kore. Like imagine if she was introduced on a chapter called Lost Kore or something similar and then the characters would just continue on making bad puns, annoying her. Wouldn’t be too out of line when it comes to this series humor.

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I know what I’m going to say next is probably going to be controversial, but anyway - if Ares ever makes an appearance, I don’t think he would be a bad guy and this is mostly due to how Pit has been characterized. I know that may sound weird at first but trust me, I do actually have a point with this.

So let’s start with something that may seem completely unrelated at first, these being a history lesson and some talk about over-demonization. We honestly don’t know much about how some city states worshiped gods and what specific versions of the myths they had because some people just couldn’t be bothered to write things down. Besides it being extremely annoying for me, this is also probably where the misconception of all of ancient Greece being either like Athens or Sparta came from, which just is completely false. However what is correct is that city states didn’t really like one another all that much and often engaged on stupid wars with each other, only uniting when there was a much bigger threat looming on the horizon - and with war comes propaganda and when only some people write things down, we’re usually left with really one-sided information when it comes to both good and bad. For one example of this coming off as hilariously hypocritical to me is Athena being worshiped under the epithet Areia in Athens. Areia is very obviously derived from Ares and means warlike, but Athenians had their heads so far in their arses that they came up with a reasoning that this version of the epithet is actually derived from areô or areskô, meaning to propriate or atone for. It’s most likely just some crap Athenians came up with to excuse the worship of Athena Areia, which I just can’t help but find pathetically funny - you can only blame your own propaganda for this, guys.

Historically speaking Ares most likely originates from Thrace since besides his popularity in there Herodotus notes in Histories that only gods from Olympian Pantheon that Thracians worshiped were Ares, Artemis and Dionysus, a really odd trio if I have to say so myself, it’s also said to be his birthplace in the myths. His name can be found on Linear B scripts, a writing system that goes as far back as 1450 BCE and which disappeared during the Late Bronze Age collapse around 1100 BCE. This informs us that he was part of the Mycenaean Pantheon in some way, most likely even then as a war god - it also informs us that he predates gods such as Apollo, Hades and Aphrodite who just don’t exist in Mycenaean texts at least in any recognizable forms. As for Ares during the Archaic, Classical and Hellenic period, especially when it came to places that weren’t either Athens/Attica or Sparta, I had to mostly rely on travelers who wrote things they saw down because some people just didn’t bother to write their own stuff down. Pausanias’ Description of Greece was especially helpful with the research, but what must be remembered is that he lived during 2nd century CE and that he was an outsider to these cultural aspects so how old some of this stuff here is and what the exact context behind it was, I don’t know and neither do others at least currently, one sure can hope so we know more in the future. Then again past is another country so maybe I'm setting my hopes way too high. When given anything in Linear A, people channel their best "I never learned how to read!"-impression.

As for how Ares’ Roman counterpart Mars came to be, it’s mostly due to syncretization. He probably was originally an agricultural god who was later associated with warfare once the Roman Republic started expanding. It’s possible that he was syncretized with an Etruscan deity called Maris, who was usually portrayed as a young boy whose caregiver was Menrva, a goddess who was later identified with Athena and Minerva. While this isn’t an universally agreed take, it’s still pretty interesting in context of Kid Icarus even if it wasn’t intentional or in the case of the take, true. Once Romans started to interact with Greek settlers from Magna Graecia Mars was syncretized with Ares, giving us the Roman god that looks familiar to us. One notable thing to keep in mind is that most of those Greek settlers in Magna Graecia originated from Peloponnese and what I’ve managed to find, they held Ares on much more higher regard than those originating from Attica did.

Okay, now when that has been cleaned out of the way, let’s go to the slightly more interesting stuff which is cult titles and epithets. Just like any other god he has his fair share of both, some examples include Teichesipletes (stormer of cities/walls), Hippius (horseman, of the horses), Theritas (beastly/brutish), Enyalius (warlike), Obrimus (strong/mighty), Thurus (violent/furious), Chrysopelex (of the golden helm) and Chalcocorustes (armed with bronze). I’m using Latin spelling of these to make things easier for myself if you’re wondering. But there’s two titles I specifically want to talk about, both them originating from Arcadia around Tegea because apparently all the cool stuff happens in Arcadia.

Interestingly also in Tegea there was a temple of Athena under epithet Alea. Pausanias tells that her priest there was a boy who held the title until he reached puberty, meaning that her priest was a child. Now this has nothing to do with Ares, but it’s pretty interesting when thinking of Pit. It’s not exactly same for sure, but could this mean that he would leave Palutena if he ever grew up?

The first one is Gynaecothoenas, meaning “Feasted by women” - and no need to worry, it’s nowhere near as sexual as it sounds. The story goes that Tegeteans were at war with Sparta and what decided the victory was an ambush by Tegetean women. Because of this, they offered Ares a sacrifice and celebrated the victory alone. The king of the Spartans at the time was said to be Charilaus, meaning that this victory must have happened around early-to-mid 8th century BCE, making this rather old cult title by the time Pausanias was writing. If only the research for everything else here could’ve been as easy as this.

The other and much more interesting title was Aphneius, meaning “Abundant” and under this title he was worshiped as the giver of food or abundance. The story behind this title goes that Ares fell in love with Tegetean princess Aerope and they had a child together, but she died during childbirth. Ares, doing his damndest to keep his son alive, managed to find a way for the baby to still have milk. Once he grew up, his son Aeropus then managed to do the thing that’s near impossible for a demigod, which is to live a normal life as the lord of Tegea. Now this would make a great character backstory…

… What was I talking about again? Oh yeah, history lesson is over! Finally! Now into the fun stuff, which is Pit’s characterization. It’s pretty common knowledge at this point that that Pit’s inspirations are Icarus, Perseus and Eros but when it comes to his characterization, Eros definitely takes the cake as the main inspiration. He is a fully realized character with multiple myths under his wing, unlike Icarus or Perseus.

Starting with Icarus, he isn’t even a character but a plot device. He’s a tool for Daedalus’ character development and that’s where his importance ends. He’s a miniscule part on a much larger narrative in which the most important part is the Minotaur, as it drives the plot for everything else in it. Icarus’ death serves to drive Daedalus’ character to the point which eventually leads into him killing Minos. He exists for a metaphor that pop-culture has blown out to be way more important than it originally was and that’s it.

As for Perseus… The guy is just really bland. While all the other heroes have their flaws like hubris and wrath, Perseus doesn’t really have any flaws. He doesn’t have that many achievements in either bravery or stupidity due to his method of dealing with things being the quickest way possible. This makes all of his battles extremely boring and because he’s one of the first demigod heroes in the mythological timeline, he doesn’t even get to interact with anyone who could be interesting. How many of you even know that he’s supposed be the founding hero of Mycenae? Not many, I’m sure about that. The most interesting thing about the guy his that he’s an ancestor to people such as Tyndareus, Alcheme, Heracles, Penelope and Telemachus but this doesn’t save him from being any less boring. He's that famous ancestor nobody gives a damn, so to speak. Pit certainly doesn’t get any part of his personality from a plot device or a blank of wood, only a literary reference and an antagonist.

Also can I quickly rant about the Angels in art vs. Angels in Bible meme because I hate it? For some reason most of times when people show art of these supposed angels, they aren’t even showing biblical angels but Erotes/Amores or Nike/Victoria instead. Erotes/Amores and Nike/Victoria are winged Greco-Roman gods, not biblical angels and using art of them proves absolutely nothing. Also you may have forgotten that there’s in fact hierarchy of angels and not all of them look identical. In Christian faith angelic hierarchy is composed of three orders, there being nine different kinds of angels - Seraphim, Cherubim, Ophanim/Thrones, Dominions, Virtues, Powers, Principalities, Archangels and Angels. Seraphim and Cherubim do indeed look terrifying and so do Ophanim, but Thrones are just bizarre because apparently they’re elderly carrying God’s throne, whatever that means also I’ve seen people use Ophanim and Thrones interchangeably which just makes the whole deal even bigger of a mess. And then there’s Dominions, who’re just really pretty winged people, proving that the idea of all biblical angels looking terrifying is completely false. I couldn’t find what Virtues looked like, but if they’re anything like Powers, Principalities, Archangels and Angels they’re most likely pretty winged humanoids. So yeah, surprising amount of biblical angels are indeed just pretty winged humanoids and only the highest order of them is clearly inhuman - so if you ever wondered why so many angels in art actually featuring Biblical angels have them looking so humanlike, now you know! It's not the highest rank's job to interact with the human world. Though in modern language, the term angel is simply used as an umbrella term which refers into a winged humanoid being regardless of which religion they originated from - so by using this as a frame, it would indeed make Erotes/Amores and Nike/Victoria angels along with some other winged gods such as Eos and Iris. This would also make Iris’ twin sister Arke a fallen angel because as punishment for siding with the Titans during Titanomachy, she was casted into Tartarus and her wings were ripped off so she could never escape from there. And then much later her wings are given as a wedding gift to Achilles’ parents, my god! You could actually a craft a plot out of this, hmmm. When it comes Pit and Dark Pit, I do think they’re angels only on this broad, modern way definition due to them being mostly inspired by the Greco-Roman Erotes/Amores and it’s possible that they’re only referred as angels because not only is the term Erotes/Amores is strictly associated with Aphrodite and only Aphrodite, it's also much more specialized term than just "angel". There has also been cases in art featuring multiple Nikes, but Nike's special role as the goddess of victory still prevents its use as a broad term. So I believe that in the case of KI, angel is just an useful umbrella term and nothing more.

So Pit’s mostly an Eros-expy when it comes to his personality and attributes, so what makes him so special when compared to many other Eros-expies in media? It’s actually a surprisingly small thing, but boy does it make a difference - on a thematic sense, Pit’s a total daddy’s boy and in this case the dad would be Ares. Most of the Eros-expies you see in media are completely divorced from anything related to Ares despite the guy being Eros’ dad but not in Kid Icarus, where we have a very blatant Eros-expy whose connections to his main mythological inspiration come almost exclusively from Ares. Just why is Pit doing Nike’s job? Because Nike happens to be Ares’ daughter according to some sources, like in the Homeric hymn dedicated to him. Why’s he a soldier in an army? Because Ares was a soldier and in some parts of Greece he was seen as a model of a perfect one who’s resilient and has physical strength that isn’t matched by anyone else. Apparently in Sparta they even had a statue of shacked Ares, supposedly as an attempt to keep the martial spirit and victory in Sparta I don’t know about you but for me this sounds like a very bad move, as if they were asking for the god’s wrath. Then again Athenians did the same thing with wingless Nike, so I guess it was fine in some twisted way. Why does Dark Pit exist? Because would you know it, there’s myth in which Ares and Aphrodite spot lonely little Eros and decide to create Anteros to be his brother, their only differences being hair, wings and weapons of choice Anteros has longer hair, plumed butterfly wings, golden club and lead arrows when compared to Eros' golden bow + both golden and lead arrows. Why does Magnus possibly being based on Meleager matter? Because would you know it, the dude’s sometimes a son of Ares. Why did he spend three years trapped inside a ring? It could parallel the tale of Ares and the giants, in which he spent a lunar year trapped inside a jar. Why does a dog help him during that section? It could still very well be reference Ares and the giants as Hermes and Artemis came to save him and one of Artemis’ sacred animals is a dog and Hermes is the god guard dogs. Also one of Ares’ sacred animals is dog as well, meaning that it could reference this as well. Honestly if Pit ends up having a divine parent and it’s not Ares, I call bullcrap.

So now when that has been made clear, what can writers do with Ares? Well if you take the myth of Poseidon wanting to settle things on court and give it to Pit, you end up losing one of his three major myths in which he’s wrathful towards someone odd I know, you’d probably expect a god of war to be much more wrathful but no, he’s not. The two ones that are left don’t really give all that great material either because in the first one, the target is Adonis and whether it even was Ares’ wrath that killed him is left open - in some versions it’s Artemis who wants him dead because she’s angry at Aphrodite for causing the situation which lead to the death of her hunter Hippolytus, sometimes it’s Apollo who still hasn’t forgiven Aphrodite for blinding his son Erymanthus, occasionally it’s Persephone of all people because she’s angry at Adonis for wanting so spend time with Aphrodite and at times it’s just an accident this all makes me think it was an elaborate coup. There’s always a reason for a divine being to be angry at Aphrodite because she just can’t help but cause trouble whenever she can. When it comes to the second one, it’s honestly pretty odd because not only does Ares forgive the man who originally was the target of his wrath, it illustrates how good of a parent he is on Olympian standards not that it’s a high bar but anyway - even better than the lady whose favorite boytoy he is, and she’s well known for being an overprotective parent.

The myth starts with this lad called Cadmus, who founds the city of Thebes, becomes its king and then kills a dragon residing on a nearby spring. Ares is furious about this since the dragon was sacred to him and apparently it’s sometimes his son, don't know how that works and as punishment, Cadmus has to serve Ares for eight years he got it easy when compared to Adonis and Halirrhothius. Once that service is over, Cadmus marries one of the two daughters of Ares and Aphrodite, this being Harmonia, the goddess of harmony. However not everything is all sunshine and rainbows because Hephaestus is still salty about how his marriage with Aphrodite went south and once he hears about a wedding, he prepares two gifts for the bride - first one was a beautiful necklace that could keep its wearer eternally youthful and the other one was a luxurious robe. But there was a catch, since both of these objects were cursed to bring bad luck to those who owned them. The bad luck eventually took its take on Cadmus’ mental state and one day he remarked that if gods fancied those serpents so much, maybe his life would be so much better as one. Gods fulfill this wish, he’s turned into a serpent and once Harmonia notices what has happened, she wishes the same. At one point Dionysus comes to the city, trashes the place and then gives them a propechy of this happening. Either way, Ares comes down to get the unlucky couple and then scoots them to safety in paradise-like Elysium, where they get to reside from now on.

You may already be familiar with this myth to a certain degree because Pokemon B/W could technically count as an adaptation of it. N is of course the most obvious parallel due to him getting his second name from Harmonia and Ghetsis takes a role comparable to Hephaestus. It all becomes even funnier because Harmonia hits some characteristics associated with yin - she’s passive, feminine figure who represents harmony which can only exist due to lack of action, an idea. It gains even more hilarity points thanks to existence of Adrestia, Harmonia’s sister and the goddess of revolt - she’s pretty much yang to Harmonia’s yin and to make things even more hilarious, she was often portrayed as a beautiful winged maiden. Now who would expect the goddess of revolt to be a lovely winged lady and the goddess of harmony to be at least momentarily a serpent?

While this is indeed an interesting myth, I don’t think it would make all great material for future KI-game, at least on its current form. The cast of KI doesn’t really get to interact with humans on a personal level, which is something this myth largely relies on. Honestly, I think the best way it could be referenced in game would be just Pit going to Elysium and meeting Harmonia still trapped on a draconic form. Considering the way Hades had been characterized in KI:U, it wouldn’t surprise me if he had just kept trapped Harmonia as a pet lizard in his garden. Maybe say something on the vain of him eating the husband’s soul or using it for something else to explain why she’s there all by herself. And if you want to make fun of the fact that the fourth wall might as well not exist, throw Adrestia in Elysium as well as a dragon as a nod to Pokemon. “The Twin Dragonesses of Elysium” sounds like it would make a very cool boss fight.

So a wrath or blessing, Ares gives us not much to work with either of those at least when it comes to him actually doing stuff - but that doesn’t mean we’re left with nothing because there’s three myths that I’ve glossed over quickly that could give us something, one just for comedy and two others actual plot. As for the one that’s just for comedy, it’s the one in which Sisyphus captures Thanatos. Ares is actually the one to save Thanatos from the tough situation since after it has continued for a month, he bursts into Sisyphus’ house, frees Thanatos and drags Sisyphus’ spirit to the Underworld… Only for him to come up with a sad story, which leads into Persephone letting him go only for it to backfire. Ares then disappears from the story, but it ends up with Sisyphus doing P.E for eternity in Tartarus once he dies for real as you all already know. This is pretty funny if a bit morbid myth, so it could be really easy to use it as a comedy goldmine if Ares ever interacted with Thanatos. Maybe have Thanatos trying to act like they’re friends, only for Ares to become more and more frustrated the longer Thanatos continues. Maybe once he mentions some of his escapades involving Pit, Ares finally decides that enough is enough and shows to Thanatos that mortals don’t call him by the name Thurus for nothing.

To the myths you could get some serious plot out of, the first one is very predictably the one in which he earns the title Aphneius. It just has everything a great character backstory needs on its original form, meaning that it could easily be inserted on the game with minimal changes and it could still work fantastically. It has a romance between a god and a mortal which ends up on a tragedy during a moment that was supposed to be joyous not because of any divine whim or I guess it could’ve been Aphrodite being salty because she has a habit of releasing her wrath upon Ares’ loved ones or relatives, usually grandchildren such as Hippolytus, but I think it would’ve been written down had the story actually said it was Aphrodite behind Aerope’s death, but because of something beyond their control. And instead of taking his frustrations on the baby like so many fathers in these stories do, he instead does everything to keep him alive and so Aeropus grows up to be fine ruler, if an unremarkable demigod. A writer could easily use Aeropus as a base for an interesting heroic character… And I guess you can already see where this is going. I already said that Ares would make the most sense as Pit’s divine parent if he indeed has one, so this would make an excellent backstory if that was the case.

I could see the timeline going something like this if this was true - Ares meets KI-universe’s equivalent of Aerope, the two have an adorable romance and are expecting a kid but something goes horribly wrong and Aerope dies, instead of letting Aerope’s family to take care of the kid Ares takes the baby with him because who knows what they would do to a winged baby so many myths have families abandoning their kids for dumber reasons than this so why wouldn’t he take the kid with him + this dude had 3-6 winged kids, one all by himself, so he definitely is the one hogging all the wing genes instead of Aphrodite, he tries single parenting but it’s hard when certain goddess is constantly shooting stinkeyes and paralyzing glares at his direction and it leads into him asking help from Palutena because a winged kid wouldn’t look too out of place among her angel minions. Considering how Palutena and Poseidon were capable of having a conversation in KI:U without any horrible atrocities being committed, I don’t think it’s too far-fetched to imagine her relationship with Ares being along your typical sibling-relationship rather than what Atheanians wrote down Ares and Athena were actually worshiped together in the town of Olympia under titles Hippius and Hippias, fun fact. You could also see it as a favor inspired by how Menrva took care of Maris. Anyway, this deal goes swimmingly for a while until the events of a certain other myth take place, which makes Palutena the sole caregiver of Pit - some unspecified amount of time later que the events of the original Kid Icarus and onward.

Fanfic time over, now to the other myth which could explain Ares’ absence - it’s the one about him and the giants. Long story short, there’s these two giants called Ephialtes (derived from the word meaning nightmare) and Otus (either derived from the word meaning insatiate, doom or horned owl) who’re sons of Poseidon because of course they are, goddammit Poseidon and a mortal woman Iphimedeia, they’re also called by the name Aloadae. They were planning to storm into Olympus to kidnap some wives for themselves, Otus wanting Artemis and Ephialtes wanting Hera what great choices, you complete imbeciles, absolutely amazing. So one day Olympians are surprised to find these two giants piling up mountains on top one another and as expected, there’s a big fight between them because no one comes to the Olympian home turf without facing the consequences. Once the two giants finally leave, the Olympians notice that someone is missing, that being Ares. Ephialtes and Otus probably realized way too late that kidnapping the god of war wasn’t the brightest idea and because letting him go wasn’t an option, they locked him inside bronze jar of which he tried to break out without success. It took around a lunar year for the giants stepmother to rat this out to Hermes, who went to save Ares with Artemis. While she distracted the giants and made them throw their spears at each other, Hermes lockpicked Ares out of the jar and so the three returned to Olympus.

So how could this myth be used while crafting a plot for a future game? I’d say it depends on whether writers want to use Ares as a full-blown good guy from the start or as an antagonist at first - and while I do still believe that Ares wouldn’t be a bad guy on his own free will, who said he’s going to burst out of that jar with that free will still intact? It’s not like we haven’t seen brainwashed antagonists in the series before, Gaol was a one.

So if we have Ares as an antagonist who’s brainwashed and crazy, how could the possible plot be handled? I could see it starting with the two giants resurfacing for something trivial but because they’re being destructive, it catches the attention of Palutena who sends Pit down to deal with them. The giants are dealt with in 1-3 chapters and one way or another Pit finds a large jar and breaks it, releasing the crazed Ares. Neither side recognizes each other and there’s possibly a boss fight which ends with Ares leaving and him becoming a wandering antagonist who causes racket when someone angers him. He most likely isn’t connected to any other antagonist or the main villain, but I could see them trying to recruit him without any success. As for how he was brainwashed in the first place, it could be the Aloadae wanting to get some use out of their prisoner and they decided to make him into an indestructible living weapon either to themselves or someone else - maybe it even was commissioned by the big bad because who wouldn’t want an powerful living weapon who’s loyal to you and only you. Either way it proves fruitless as Pit frees Ares from the mind control and slowly but surely he starts to establish himself as a good guy and an ally to Pit and Palutena.

This would actually go pretty well along with a certain another thing about Ares, that being helmet and symbolism connected to it - you see, mythological Ares was often portrayed to have something I like to call Meta Knight-syndrome. He was said to be a beautiful man with a lovely face, apparently much more prettier than any other male Olympian which could possibly explain why he’s Aphrodite’s favorite boytoy and he wasn’t particularly proud of it - just what kind of self-respecting enemy would take you seriously if you have a face of an angel? But that didn’t stop people from drawing or sculpting him without a helmet, and the result were indeed pretty my goodness is Ludovisi Ares a one beautiful sculpture. Just considering how the art we see of Ares can be categorized into him either with or without a helmet, writers could easily craft a narrative out of this - while wearing a helmet he’s under mind control and once freed he fights helmetless, allowing player to see him as who he really is. Helmet obscuring the face equals bad guy and once it cracks, we can have a very confused ally who cries over the fact that his baby is a big boy now, cries some more because there’s two of them now, may or may not join us to missions if there’s a two-player mode for story or just help with training and also maybe cracks dad jokes few times because humor is a valid coping mechanism. This all kind of reminds me how one other popular trend relating to Ares in art was to have him disarmed with young Eros playing with his armor. Cute!

Somewhat relating to the idea of Ares starting as a brainwashed antagonist turned ally once the helmet is smashed, I could see him having two different themes which illustrate the different natures of him. First one should be something brooding and terrifying, maybe something similar to Gustav Holst’s Mars, the Bringer of War which a really great piece of classical music that has inspired composers all around the world, even at Nintendo. If you haven’t heard it, you certainly have heard at least one song inspired by it metal genre can thank its existence on Mars, no kidding. As for the other theme, I think it should be a warm, calm and welcoming one with a hint of sadness, a complete opposite of the battle theme when it comes to the first expression. I’ve been recently listening a lot of TSFH and Hans Zimmer so if I had to say what kind of energy I’d want this possible theme to have, I’d probably say something between TSFH’s Friendship To Last from the demonstration album Nemesis, Final Days of Rome from album Unleashed and Now we are free from Gladiator. They all have this bittersweet yet beautiful feeling in them I love. Maybe there’s a shared leitmotif or something between the two themes connecting them into each other. Thurus and Aphneius were both titles for the same god after all, even if they were about wildly different aspects of him.

So just like with Apollo, I think there’s only one way to bring Ares into the franchise and in this case it would be making him Pit’s dad. It just makes way too much sense to me considering how Pit has been characterized that it would be odd if there wasn’t any connection between the two. And there’s even couple out-of-universe reasons why I don’t believe he would be the bad guy, the first and most notable being that the names Ares and Mars are already associated with morally righteous characters or at least characters we’re supposed to root for in Nintendo games. Sakurai certainly knows this, Marth has been in Super Smash Bros since Melee as a playable character and his name just blatantly is Mars in Japanese and his English name is just the Japanese way of saying Mars. You don’t bastardize the face of another franchise in your own one, especially if you’re both exclusives to the same company and the other franchise is much more bigger and important than yours is.

Since it would be hard to introduce Ares into the franchise, I would be completely fine with him not being featured in next game at all even though I would find it extremely disappointing. But if you’re not going to have him, at least have a reference to him in form of a weapon like Blade of Ares or Blade of Mars because would you know it, the legendary sword of Attila was also known as the sword of Mars. We’re probably never going to get actual swords in KI but blade has been used as a synonym for them, so there being a blade with said name could work just fine. That or finally add spear and shield combo into the game. But if you want to use the character who would work as the big bad the best into their fullest, maybe it would be a good idea to have Ares as well... All roads may lead to Rome, but not to the arms of Genetrix in this case.

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Call me crazy, but I think that Aphrodite would make the perfect big bad. Does she have that charisma and personality comparable to Hades? Yes she does, and unlike him she had all that in real life - one of her titles was Pandemos, quite literally meaning “of the people”. This made her extremely popular among people regardless who they were or where they lived, and how can you blame them since there’s not many people whom things such as beauty, love and sex don’t matter in some shape or form. Only Olympian who really matched her when it came to popularity was Zeus, but considering how he was the king of all gods it was to be expected that he’d outrank her on the popularity board. She was the most popular goddess in Greece by a longshot and that was also true for Venus in Rome, even if Mars took the place as the second most popular god after Jupiter. Due to her being the mother of Roman founding hero Aeneas, she was viewed as the mother of all Rome and it was used by people as a way to climb up the political ladder. The Julio-Claudian dynasty claimed to descend from her through Aeneas and it didn’t stop there - you can actually trace the ancestry of multiple mythological European figures all the way back to her! Some notable examples of this include Bladud/Blaiddyd, Leir of Britain, Goneril, Regan, Cordelia of Britain and supposedly even king Arthur himself last one is a bit iffy, but all the others are concrete, Aphrodite just flat out is their ancestor through Aeneas. She definitely has the charisma and presentation needed for a big bad because you simply couldn’t be able to pull of any of the previously mentioned things without them and if she could do it in real life, who says she couldn’t do it in a fictional world?

Pretty much only thing about Aphrodite that stays constant is her popularity because in the myths, her characterization is wildly inconsistent - I guess that something one should expect from a goddess who rules over matters such as beauty and love, two things one can never truly understand. However with that being said, there’s trends that stay with her regardless her ever-changing personality. She’s technically speaking an outsider to the Olympian family tree as her most popular and possibly the oldest one as well birth story has her as the motherless child of Ouranos, emerging fully formed from seafoam. Hestia, Hades, Demeter, Poseidon, Hera and Zeus form the first generation of Olympians and Ares, Athena, Hephaestus, Artemis, Apollo, Hermes and Dionysus are principal members of the second generation. By adding Eileithyia, Persephone and Hebe into the mix you get the main Olympian family, making Aphrodite feel like even more of an outsider. She only starts to fit among the family when the third generation is added and speaking of said generation, part of it forms her attendants. The two most important ones are her sons Eros and Anteros, love and love requited, whom she let’s to do pretty much all they want as long as they stay loyal to her. However once that loyalty shifts, she can be quite cruel towards them which is illustrated in the myth of Eros and Psyche quite well - and I’m going to let Aphrodite herself to do all the talking, so here’s a quote from from Apuleius’ The Golden Ass:

‘This is a fine state of affairs, just what one would expect from a child of mine, from a decent man like you! First of all you trampled underfoot the instructions of your mother--or I should say your employer--and you refused to humble my personal enemy with a vile love-liaison; and then, mark you, a mere boy of tender years, you hugged her close in your wanton, stunted embraces! You wanted me to have to cope with my enemy as a daughter-in-law! You take too much for granted, you good-for-nothing, loathsome seducer! You think of yourself as my only noble heir, and you imagine that I'm now too old to bear another. Just realize that I'll get another son, one far better than you. In fact I'll rub your nose in it further. I'll adopt one of my young slaves, and make him a present of these wings and torches of yours, the bow and arrows, and all the rest of my paraphernalia which I did not entrust to you to be misused like this. None of the cost of kitting you out came from your father's estate.’

Let’s file that under yikes. She’s saying this to her injured child and it’s about a girl he loves more than anything but she can’t stand her. And it’s not like Aphrodite dislikes her for any valid reasons, it’s all because Psyche is pretty and Aphrodite took it as a personal attack. This temperament is a stable with her, be the fuss she causes either positive or negative. It goes well in the line of the idea that she was never a child and was born fully formed, as it’s pretty hard to learn those important childhood life lessons as an adult. And do you want to know the best part about this mess? After this massive rant she’s confronted by Hera and Demeter, two goddesses who in all intents and purposes should understand what she’s feeling right now and guess what they do? They call Aphrodite a hypocrite in her face because that’s exactly what she is. Why is she so angry at her child for growing up and experiencing romantic love for the first time when she spends most of her time either being in love or making others fall in love?

Let’s leave the sad lovers behind for a while and talk about Aphrodite in some other myths. There’s not many myths about her that don’t feature romance or sex in some form, but those few are usually about her competitive nature. There’s a myth about Hermes and Aphrodite participating on funeral games yes, this was a real tradition organized by Apollo and she won, her prize being a zither which she later gave to Paris. There’s also a myth about her and Athena having a weaving competition which ended on her losing miserably because as one might expect, challenging the goddess of weaving into a weaving competition couldn’t possibly end well. But since these kind of myths are about things out of her assignments, there isn’t many of them. Most of them are about her helping people with their relationship problems, some examples could be her giving Galatea life on Pygmalion’s wishes and gifting Hippomenes the three golden apples so he could win the race for Atalanta’s heart. But it’s also really easy to earn her anger, some notable immortals who were victims of her wrath are the titan goddess of dawn Eos (she didn’t want to share Ares so she cursed Eos to feel uncontrollable desire towards a new man every day), the titan god of sun Helios (he ratted out her relationship with Ares so she cursed him to forget everyone he ever loved romantically and then made him fall in love with princess Leucothoe - it ends badly and that’s how we got heliotropes), the muse Calliope (Aphrodite saw Zeus asking her help for covering the whole deal about who gets to keep Adonis as a personal attack and so she cursed her son Orpheus to have a horrible death in the hands of Dionysus’ worshipers - interestingly enough this has nothing to do with the fact that Calliope did also sleep with Ares or that she married Oeagrus who’s sometimes said to be Ares’ son, which would make Orpheus his grandson), a minor ocean deity Nerites (he refused to follow her into the land so she turned him into a shrimp) and Pan (Aphrodite and this handsome lad Acheilus had a beauty competition and Pan was the judge - he said Acheilus was prettier so Aphrodite turned the poor lad into into a hideous shark-creature and then cursed Pan to be hopelessly in love with the nymph Echo, the very same Echo who had her eyes on Narcissus). It could even be said that her blessings aren’t going to last for long and by using Hippomenes as an example once again, we learn that in one version of the story she turned him into a lion all because he didn’t pay his respects back to her soon enough. Guileful Aphrodite indeed.

Due to her temperament and general lack of caring about the consequences of her actions, Aphrodite has earned the ire of many gods - just look no further than Adonis, there’s four possible culprits who could’ve caused his death. Because of their contradictory natures, she’s often portrayed as not getting along with Hestia, Athena and Artemis and while there’s not much material for Hestia there’s multiple myths of Aphrodite causing unpleasant situations for Artemis and her hunters, Hippolytus being the shining example of this. The judgement of Paris establishes her relationship with Hera and Athena as a rocky one and the Trojan war has them full-on enemies on opposite sides, Athena even telling the Greek Diomedes during the war that he should avoid fighting literally any god with the exception of Aphrodite - it leads into him throwing a spear at Aphrodite, piercing her wrist and this leads into Aphrodite cursing Diomedes in return. Also in some records such as Cypria Helen’s mother is stated to be the goddess Nemesis, so add her into the list of gods Aphrodite has angered so it turns out the goddess who truly was Nemesis’ enemy was never the one from Blue Sea Star but rather the one who represented Morning Star, how ironic. Her relationship with the male Olympians are a bit better but not always, in fact she has no meaningful one with Apollo at all. Her marriage with Hephaestus was an unhappy one and only after they divorced were they both allowed to be happy, Hephaestus by marrying Aglaea and having a family with her and Aphrodite by continuing her many affairs without any worries. She did scorn Zeus when he tried to get it on with her, but otherwise there’s not much either good or bad blood between them. Besides Ares, Aphrodite did find both Poseidon and Dionysus handsome and had affairs with them, but it’s unclear if they resulted any children - Rhodos has Telchine Halia and Amphitrite as her other mother candidates, Peitho is almost always said to be a child of Tethys and Oceanus instead, the Charites were more often said to be children of Zeus and Oceanid Eurynome rather than Aphrodite’s and Priapus just has no parents set in stone because no telling was seemingly more popular than others. The birth myth of Hermaphroditus starts with Aphrodite telling Hermes to piss off because he doesn’t come even close to her standards, so he asks little help from Zeus to get what he wants and therefore I can’t imagine them having a positive relationship because of this. And after reading so many myths in which Aphrodite targets Ares’ grandkids for whatever reasons, I’m starting to think that he should start running away and quickly. Maybe she really did kill Aerope.

Now returning to the love story with a happy ending which has the most famous victim of Aphrodite’s wrath, Eros and Psyche. It begins in a town with no name given oh, so this isn’t completely baseless in KI where princess Psyche (meaning either soul or breath of life) is having trouble socializing - the people have declared that she’s as if not more beautiful than Aphrodite and they have started worshiping her, denying normal human interaction from her. This obviously pisses off Aphrodite because it has been established that she has the self-control skills comparable to a toddler and so she orders her son Eros to make Psyche to fall in love with something hideous. While he agrees to do the deed, once he sees the beautiful Psyche he can’t help but to fall in love with her and then he chooses to defy his mother, crafting a plan on what to do next. In the meanwhile the loneliness is making Psyche miserable and that doesn’t go unnoticed by her parents, so they go to visit the oracle of Apollo for help. Considering how Apollo is still very much salty at Eros for cursing him to have the worst love life imaginable, his words aren’t all that comforting (another quote from The Golden Ass):

‘Adorn this girl, O king, for wedlock dread, and set her on a lofty mountain-rock. Renounce all hope that one of mortal stock can be your son-in-law, for she shall wed a fierce, barbaric, snake-like monster. He, flitting on wings aloft, makes all things smart, plaguing each moving thing with torch and dart. Why, Jupiter himself must fearful be. The other gods for him their terror show, and rivers shudder, and the dark realms below.’

She and her parents are obviously horrified by this, but they do as they were told to and Psyche is left alone on a cliffside where the god of west wind Zephyrus picks her up. He brings her into a lovely meadow where she takes a refreshing nap and after she wakes up, she sees a beautiful palace and goes in. She’s charmed by the looks of the place and then a disembodied voice tells her that she will be provided by many invisible servants while living in there. Once night falls she’s nervous to meet her husband, but after the first meeting she starts looking forward on their nights together. This continues for quite some time, but in the meanwhile Psyche’s family is starting to get worried about her and she’s in return worrying about them. Eros promises that her sisters can come to visit, but also tells her that she shouldn’t listen them if they sound jealous. Psyche agrees and Eros gets Zephyrus to scoot the sisters down to visit, but as expected the sisters get jealous really quickly and start to make her worry if what the oracle told about her husband was indeed true - what finally broke the camels back was the sisters suggesting that he’s planning to kill her and their unborn child. So when the next night falls, she has prepared herself a lamp and dagger to see if her husband really is a monster - once she draws the lamp near and sees that he’s in fact Eros himself, she’s awestruck and accidentally stabs herself with one of his arrows, making her fall for him even harder. But while admiring him some oil spills from the lamp on Eros, causing him to wake up and leave. Earlier in the story Psyche had said that she’d much rather die than throw this marriage away and she’s willing to live by that statement, so she goes to search Eros and atonement - meanwhile Aphrodite is beating her son in the head by talking how horrible child he is for daring to fall in love and then she imprisons him Genetrix knows nothing in this case. Hera and Demeter call her a hypocrite, which doesn’t ease her anger in the slightest.

Psyche eventually finds her way into a temple of Aphrodite and she calls her two servants to beat the poor girl to make herself feel better. After having a good laugh over Psyche’s suffering, she gives her another beating herself and then dumbs different kinds of grains on the ground, saying that she should sort them by night if she ever wants to see Eros again. Sometimes prompted by him, ants nearby take pity on Psyche and help her - predictably Aphrodite isn’t all too happy about this and she comes up with a much more deadlier task. By morning she tells her that she should get some golden fleece from the sheep living on a grove across nearby river. This disheartens Psyche because she knows gathering the fleas directly is a suicide mission, but she’s consulted by local river deity who tells her how the sheep behave and that instead of approaching the sheep at all she should just collect fleas caught on foliage. She does as was told and Aphrodite becomes even more enraged, telling her to go gather water from river Styx. While she finds her way to Styx without much hassle, she’s overwhelmed by the hopelessness of the situation - luckily for her everyone has come to the conclusion that Aphrodite is being horrible and Zeus sends one of his eagles to help Psyche to get the water.

At this point Aphrodite’s patience is running thin and she gives Psyche a box, tells her to go into Underworld to get a part of Persephone’s beauty and come back with it because this whole deal of torturing her little daughter-in-law has been so hard for her and she needs to look good while going to the divine theatre. After being consulted by a tower on how to actually get into the Underworld without dying, she does as was told and and it doesn’t take long for her to be greeted by Persephone. After refusing to fall into an obvious trap, Psyche told her why she was visiting her and Persephone agreed to help her without hassle - but after returning into the mortal world, Psyche’s curiosity took the better of her and she wanted to see that beauty herself. Turns out it was Stygian sleep fancy words for boxed death and Psyche drops on the ground like a rock, but at this point Eros has escaped his imprisonment goes straight to her. He draws the sleep back into the box, gently pricks her with an arrow to wake her up, the two have a heartfelt reunion and Eros brings Psyche to Olympus, asking Zeus if the two can now get properly married. Everyone agrees, Zeus tells Aphrodite to stfu and they give Psyche ambrosia, making her the goddess of soul. The two have a glorious wedding and some time after it Psyche gives birth to their daughter, either named Hedone or Volupta(s) depends if it’s a Greek or Roman telling the story, the personification of pleasure, joy and delight. I personally prefer the name Volupta, it rhymes much more nicer with rest of the family.

And since we’re at here, that gorgeous painting by John William Waterhouse that everyone thinks has Pandora wearing a pink dress? It’s actually Psyche opening the deathly beauty box. Don’t believe me? Just check Psyche opening the golden box and you see who’s right. He however did create an equally pretty painting about Pandora though.

So now when the story time finally over, what can we do with all of this info? Well, it does tell how perfect of an antagonist Aphrodite makes for an Eros-expy. She has power over him and isn’t afraid of abusing it when she feels betrayed. Compare this to the tales of Icarus and Perseus which really don’t have a main antagonists - Icarus has no personal stakes in the story because he’s a plot device rather than a character and from Daedalus’ point of view, the main antagonist is Minos but mythology doesn’t really treat him as all that horrible person. After he died he became one of the judges of the Underworld and probably sent Daedalus to Tartarus once he died, which illustrates a one seriously big missed opportunity which should’ve been used if Icarus truly was that important inspiration for Pit. Instead it just makes it even more clear how irrelevant Icarus and the narrative about the Minotaur are to KI. As for Perseus, I already talked about how Medusa is a mcguffin while alive and the other ones aren’t much better. Polydectes, Phineus and Acrisius are all dealt with so quickly that they don’t really matter - his only fight that isn’t solved by a handwave is against Cetus and it’s just a sea monster sent to kill Andromeda by Poseidon. Poseidon’s antagonistic potential is a topic I’ve already discussed and the already mentioned possible fusion of the myths of Poseidon sending a sea monster to harass Troy and Ares’ trial covers the idea of Pit saving a girl from a sea monster which is bit funny because in the former one, oracle tells that king Laomedon should let it eat his daughter Hesione to get rid of the monster, so that doesn’t really add anything new here. But with Aphrodite as the big bad it could be rather easy to craft two different but overlapping plotlines, one with a main goal and the other with a personal one. Aphrodite always was Eros’ biggest personal antagonist who treated him as a trophy child and didn’t take it well when he stepped out of the line - how dare her little doll grow up, behave like a man and then decide that he wants to move on to build a family of his own, which now takes the priority over her? Him choosing Psyche over his mother is his defining myth, with the addition of it being the myth in which he finally gains the respect of the other gods. Besides having its message about heart and soul being capable feeling and creating joy while together, it also functions as a coming of age story for its main couple - and when those stories have an antagonist, things tend get really personal.

So going back to those possible two plotlines and goals, what could they possibly be about? I’d say that the main plot line shouldn’t really be based on any myth but instead it should take advantage of her popularity among ancient people, more so when it comes to Venus and Rome. Even as a city, Rome was massive - by the time of 1st century CE it had reached the population of million people, being the first city in history to do that. And this was only the capital of the empire! Rome wasn’t build in a day indeed. Venus wasn’t worshiped by the thousands, her popularity was in the millions during this time period. That’s a lot of power for one goddess and as we all know, too much power can easily hit one in the head - especially when remembering that we’re dealing with a Pantheon composed entirely of manchildren. Give Aphrodite an empire that looks up to her, doesn’t do anything without a last world from her and you’re set with a supervillain who has it all from power to personality. In this case, the reason why Aphrodite should be stopped is that she’s a conqueror who rules by fear, saying that if she was ever abandoned she would curse them and take away all the blessings she has ever granted, leading her empire to ruin. If you want to make her feel even more villainous, don’t even give her an army of her own like Hades and Viridi had but make her use the people of the empire she rules over. There’s nothing more evil than using people who look up to you for protection for your own selfish goals. What those selfish goals may be, writers can be creative with them - maybe she wants to be viewed as the supreme goddess above everyone else, maybe she wants everyone to worship her and isn’t afraid to use extreme measures to get what she wants, maybe she wants to wipe out everyone who could be a threat to her, everything goes. Considering her role on the judgement of Paris, her causing a war or chaos for selfish reasons isn’t out of character. But whatever her reasons may be, there’s going to sparks in the air and fights of massive proportions. Ares may be Pit’s father but Aphrodite definitely isn’t his mother, so she’s not going to show him any sympathy or kindness if he gets in the way of her plans.

This would be the plotline that’s more on the background and focused on Aphrodite’s relationships with Palutena, possibly Ares and the other gods, the main goal is their goal. It’s why they want her defeated. If Palutena is anything like Athena, she can’t get along with her and she understands that allowing Aphrodite to do whatever she wants will have catastrophic consequences even if she herself couldn’t care less about those. If Ares was featured on a future game along with Aphrodite, their relationship would probably be focused on how they feel betrayed by each other. The myth of her cursing Eos illustrates how she sees their relationship open only from her end so she’s very likely still angry at him for leaving her, be it for Aerope or something else entirely. If you want to go with the depressing idea of her being the one who ordered Aloadae to kidnap him, she probably feels even more betrayed because even under mind control he didn’t come back to her like she had anticipated. And if it’s indeed her favorite ex-boytoy’s son with some other lady who has been foiling her plans, her blood quite possibly starts to boil. Ares’ feelings of betrayal would likely stem from Aphrodite trying to kill his child for no other reason than sheer pettiness, along with orchestrating his kidnapping and torture just so she could get her boytoy back. Other gods probably want her stopped for similar reasons as Palutena, maybe with some selfishness rippled in - the consequences of her actions are hurting them and because she doesn’t care, something must be done to stop her. For example, Viridi could possibly oppose Aphrodite because she doesn’t care about how she’s hurting nature on her attempts to viewed as the supreme goddess. Not to say that Pit doesn’t also care about this goal since he’s an empathetic youngster, but I think that the more personal plotline should be his and it’s goal his main motivator during the story.

As for the plotline with the more personal goal, the myth of Eros and Psyche makes the perfect outline for it. Aphrodite is already the main antagonist of the tale, so there’s no need for any massive changes when it comes to her jealousy and want to dispose Psyche. The tasks she gives to her could also be mostly unchanged, if adjusted with something that makes gameplay more immersive assuming we would get to play as her like we got to play as Dark Pit in chapter 22 in KI:U. However what needs to changed is Aphrodite’s relationship with Pit, how he and Psyche first meet and how their relationship is evolves from that point onward since following the myth to a T isn’t an option in this case. I could see Pit and Psyche’s first meeting being a result of Aphrodite’s wrath manifesting on a relatively harmless way, meaning that she already knows about this new, pretty princess that challenges her status as the supreme goddess and she’s not having any of it. As for how her wrath could manifest, it could be a your garden-variety monster attack in the first chapter disguised as someone else’s troops so no one would suspect it was her behind it. The sheer weirdness of it could catch Palutena’s attention so she sends Pit down to investigate it and to get rid of the monsters. While getting rid of them, he meets Psyche in one way or another - maybe she’s trying to escape from them or she’s trying to fight against them, either way Pit comes to her aid and they befriend each other. Maybe she’s featured on a few following chapters as minor character doing something on the background, giving them more possibilities to interact and become better friends - in these chapters Apollo could possibly be introduced along with reintroducing Poseidon, to foreshadow the roles they would play later on. What side plots would these chapters have, it could anything - maybe Pit meets Ares for the first time at this point of the story, but he’s not freed from mind control just yet.

At this point Aphrodite could be getting more angrier but she doesn’t want to out herself as the main villain yet, so she crafts a plan that would eventually lead into Poseidon hating Pit into the point of him wanting to take things into the court. Maybe she tricks Poseidon and Apollo into becoming mad at Psyche’s home city for whatever reason, like how they got angry at Troy in mythology proper. If this was the case, I think that she would keep Poseidon in the dark while letting Apollo fully know what’s going on - if Poseidon doesn’t know the true reason why Aphrodite wanted his sea monster to terrorize the city and why it was killed, he would be much more enraged when it happens. I’ve already established reasons as for why Apollo would dislike Pit, so he probably wouldn’t really need any prompting to cause Pit suffering since he’d still want some payback from that embarrassing noodle incident. So Poseidon sends his sea monster to terrorize the coastline and once citizens start asking help from the gods, Apollo lets the hate flow through him and offers nothing useful - instead he tells them to take the Hesione/Andromeda-approach and let it eat someone to calm it down oh look, it’s a reference to Perseus that’s not about Medusa for once, nice. In this case, it would be Psyche and Pit’s of course not going to let his friend die so he goes to save her, be it with or without Palutena’s approval. In my head I did imagine this as a chapter that would work amazingly with multiplayer, starting with Pit and Dark Pit distracting the monster, then Pit freeing Psyche and them setting out to kill the monster before it causes more harm. Player 2 would have to deal with changing characters on the fly but if Pittoo and Psyche had similar weapons, I don’t think it would be too distracting since they’d be playable on different parts of the chapter. But once the monster has finally been defeated, the joy is cut short by Poseidon interrupting and wanting vengeance for what happened to his monster, ending the chapter. The plot would immediately catch on the next one and what I could see happening on this chapter is that Pit’s taken into the court by Poseidon and he’s not allowed to have anyone defending him, but Dark Pit and Psyche go into his defense anyway Pittoo being the playable character. After a long and treacherous journey they find they way to the divine courthouse and tell their point of view on the events, which gives Pit the sympathy of the court and he gets away scot-free. Poseidon and Apollo may face on consequences at this point and they may even rat Aphrodite out on a subtle way, but the main group doesn’t catch it.

The following few chapters would be breathers before the plot kicks in again, Aphrodite ousting herself as the big bad in one way or another. Maybe she has sent her troops to attack some place, possibly in search for Ares since he would make a great ally on this brainwashed state. Much to her dismay he declines her offers, he and Pit fight and the helmet is smashed, but Palutena recalls Pit before anything can come out of it. The fight continues for couple following chapters, Palutena and Aphrodite are gradually getting more and more mad at each other and maybe she comes down to face Pit herself because the little brat getting on her way is starting to be really annoying now this would make a pretty cool unwinnable boss fight, but Ares comes just in time save him - que silent, cold anger between them, confusion from Pit and Palutena’s end with some extremely awkward reunions and explanations.

What could follow from here is another set more lighter chapters focused less on Aphrodite’s plans to become the supreme goddess and more of the cast getting to know each other better - Palutena and Ares reconnecting, Ares trying to form a meaningful relationship with Pit and Dark Pit, Pit and Psyche becoming better friends, etc etc. Not to say Aphrodite has given up on her plans - she’s still doing things on the background, but it’s implied that what little chaos she currently causes is serving as distraction to hide her bigger plans. Persephone could possibly be introduced at this point of the story, making it clear that she knows about the events of KI:U and that she’s going to get her payback on what happened to Hades in one way or another, possibly drop an implication that she’s working together with Aphrodite. But since everything good comes to an end and so do the breather episodes, plot would go on with Aphrodite kidnapping Pit and getting Persephone to throw him into some dark part of the Underworld, maybe even to Tartarus. And now we get into the fun part of the myth, Psyche’s four tasks!

I could see the plot separating into two directions from here on, first one being Pit’s great prison escape from wherever Persephone threw him into and the second one being the titular four tasks. The prison escape is more focused on traversing the Underworld and Pit trying get out of there while Persephone throws all kinds of obstacles at him - maybe it ends with a ghost gauntlet, since Odyssey illustrated that she can summon ghosts. Arke would make a pretty great boss fight here as well, since she could be classified as a fallen angel. Maybe her motive for going after Pit is to get his wings for herself as a mean to escape, since her own ones were ripped off as punishment for siding with the Titans. But since Pit’s a brave boy, this isn’t enough to stop him and he eventually finds his way out so there could be reunion and a final battle against Persephone.

While Pit’s great prison break is going on, Aphrodite makes an empty promise to rest of the cast that she can give Pit back, with some conditions - but just like in the myth, all she actually wants is Psyche’s death so the danger factor is amped up to eleven. I honestly don’t know how the one about sorting grains could be handled I guess it could work as a puzzle chapter, but the rest work rather well without massive changes. The one about gathering te golden fleas could now take a more direct approach, the one about getting Styx’s water is now missing the helpful eagle and the Underworld trip is largely same with the exception of Persephone not being cooperative. This would be the point where the two plotlines merge together and they take Persephone down together before leaving from the Underworld. Psyche falling for Stygian sleep in this version is up to debate, I say it could work either way. It mostly depends on when she’s going to wake up - if it’s too early it might as well not matter, if it’s after the final battle I’d say that’s too late.

As one might expect Pit’s escape makes Aphrodite furious and she challenges him into a one final battle - that brat has stolen her favorite boytoy from her, satisfaction of getting rid of the annoying princess and also her chances to become the supreme goddess way too many times, she has reached her third-act breakdown and at this point she has nothing left to lose anymore. Ares isn’t going to come back to her, Psyche is not going to die and the people under her empire have started to become less dependent of her, the last thing she can do is get rid the troublesome kid that brought her into this situation. Of course Pit ends up winning, sending the goddess to Aether to hang with Hades where they can now together sulk over the fact that they got defeated by an angel. Pit triumphantly returns to Skyworld where Palutena and others have been waiting, there’s a joyful reunion between all of them and if one wants to follow the original myth at this point, Psyche could gain divinity or immortality for her bravery for standing against Aphrodite as a mere mortal. People have become immortals for dumber reasons in Greco-Roman mythology, so at least Psyche doesn’t become immortal merely because one god thought she was pretty. Have some little banter at the end between the cast and then credits can finally roll in.

When thinking of some nice bonus content, maybe there could be a secret ending player can unlock after beating all the chapters on a certain difficulty, which confirms that everyone is doing well. If we have to deal with another long hiatus that could last for decade or two or eternity, best the game can offer is closure. Pit doesn’t have to a married man with a daughter, but at least show that he’s doing well and ready for a new adventure or that he has had many of those under his belt at this point. All one can do is hope at this point that there will be a new adventure or a happy ending that ties all the loose ends together. Praise Volupta, maybe one day dreams can come true.

______

Welp, this turned out to be much more longer and heavier than I originally expected! If nothing else, that would make an interesting fanfic. Anyway, I think I made my point clear - Aphrodite has everything a big bad needs from power to personality and motives to harass the already existing KI-cast. Even if you don’t want to go with the ideas I came up with, there’s so many myths to use and modify in which she could fill the role of the main villain. And just because there’s heavy themes it doesn’t mean it has to be without humor - I mean, there’s a lot of heavy implications in KI:U yet the game still manages to be a comedy gold mine despite those heavy implications. Writers just need to know when to be serious and when levity is needed, good pacing is something that every great story needs. For some reason I could definitely see there being a gag in which Pandora has regained her true form, only for Aphrodite to snatch it away because Pandora was living on borrowed beauty anyway and she’d like to have it back.

Though I must say that I’m proud of all of these plot bunnies I came up with. It was a fun journey to me to research, overthink, adapt and mix myths while trying to imagine who could be the next possible big bad and what the plotline relating to their villainy could be. And I came out wiser from it, so I really can’t be angry over it even if it took so me so much longer than I originally planned. I never thought that me wanting to write about a Nintendo game would make me read this much about history and philosophy yet here I am. Also now when I’m thinking of it, that last one would tie a lot of threads nicely together if they had a plotline like it on a future game - Poseidon gets to be an antagonist, Apollo gets to be an antagonist, Persephone gets to be an antagonist and Aphrodite gets to be the villain. It’s so nice when things work out this well together! Dionysus is left out though, but I guess it’s not all that bad because having too many antagonists would make the plot feel overly complicated.

Anyway, I hope you enjoyed my thoughts of who could replace Hades as the big bad. You can’t change my mind on Aphrodite being the best possible candidate but if you disagree with me, who do you think it could be? I’m always open for discussion so feel free to talk with me. Now there’s only one question remaining on my head - if a future Kid Icarus game had Arachne, would she be a jorōgumo?

[kinda-just-chillin-here]

Greek Mythology and Julie & the Phantoms

My first watch through of Julie and the Phantoms (JATP), I noticed a few similarities and parallels to certain myths within Greek mythology. On my million rewatches, I paid more attention to see if there were others. This post is all my observations of the parallels, as well as a few possible theories for season 2 the writers could follow for certain storylines. This is a ridiculously long read, I apologize.

**Disclaimers: 

There are spoilers, so if you haven’t finished watching for the first time yet, don’t read this. 

The content in Greek myths can vary depending on the source. This is largely due to the fact they are just super old. So some of the myths might be slightly different. I did my best just to compare to the gist of the myth. 

I’m going to refer to Luke, Reggie, and Alex together as either Sunset Curve or the boys to save space. 

I apologize for any typos and mistakes; midterm season has left me with an empty head.

1. Orpheus

Obviously a major motif in the first season is the Orpheum. Orpheum literally means House of Orpheus. 

Background information of Orpheus:

His mother is Calliope (muse of epic poetry), and depending on the version of the story, his father is either Apollo (god of the sun, healing, music, medicine, archery, and poetry) or King Oeagrus of Thrace. 

Orpheus was considered to be one of the greatest musicians. He had a “divinely gifted voice that could charm anyone who heard it,” no god or mortal could resist his music. 

Let’s look at some of his myths.

Orpheus and Eurydice:

The basic summary of this myth is that Eurydice, Orpheus’ wife, died after being bitten by snakes while running away from a man, Aristaeus, or a satyr (depends on source) who wanted her for himself. Devastated, Orpheus began singing sad songs until he was advised by nymphs to go to the Underworld and bring her back. After singing to Hades and Persephone, they agreed to let Eurydice return to the main world. However, they warned him not to look back before they both entered the light of the surface. He happily began his trek back to the surface. When Orpheus reached the exit, Eurydice in toe, he turned around to see her, anxious to make sure it wasn’t a trick, that she was really there. Only, Eurydice was still in the Underworld, she hadn’t crossed over yet. Orpheus turning around when he did, caused Eurydice to remain in the underworld. 

So who’s who?

Julie = Orpheus (talented musician and desperate to save their love from the Underworld)

Sunset Curve = Eurydice (dead and trapped)

Caleb = Aristaeus and Hades (wants Eurydice/Sunset Curve for himself; controls the place the dead are) 

Hollywood Ghost Club (HGC) = The Underworld

How do they relate? Stand Tall (s1e09) is where it all goes down.

Like Aristaeus, Caleb is pursing Sunset Curve because he wants them for himself (and Caleb is also threaten by the power they have).

Caleb has the boys trapped in the HGC, just like Eurydice in the Underworld. 

Julie had to deal with the idea the boys died (again) when they didn’t show up before the performance. At first she couldn’t, she ran out until she had a sign from her mom, telling her to go on stage. You could argue this sort of parallels the nymphs telling Orpheus to plea to Hades, or that it parallels Orpheus on his journey back to the surface after Hades agreed.

This is where Julie and Orpheus differ. Julie goes onstage, fully believing in the sign from her mother; that even if the boys don’t come, she can do it. The lyrics of Stand Tall are pure genius. “Keep moving on, never look back.” That’s exactly what Julie does. Unlike Orpheus, Julie doesn’t look back. And the boys appear, no longer trapped by Caleb at the HGC. Julie breaks away from the Orpheus formula and wins. 

@multifandomterrors wrote an essay on how it relates too! She has three theories of how it fits and I definitely recommend you check it out!

Bonus reasons Julie is Orpheus:

Orpheus joined Jason and the Argonauts. When the ship was approaching the Sirens, Orpheus saves the crew from death by playing his own music, drowning out the Sirens’ Song. Likewise, Julie is able to save the boys from Caleb. You can argue that her singing Stand Tall acted as a beacon, beckoning the boys away from Caleb and back to her, saving them in the process.

This one is more of a long shot but oh well. Orpheus is said to have a “divinely gifted voice that could charm anyone who heard it,” that no god or mortal could resist his music. The boys say that Julie has “the voice of an angel.” Throughout the season, as soon as Julie starts to sing, people are generally drawn in, even Carrie by the end. 

Onto the next parallel...

2. Lotus Eaters

As soon as the slightest idea of the boys missing the dance was hinted at I knew it was going to happen because ~formulas~, but once they got to the HGC, I had a strong feeling it was going to be a Lotus Eaters situation. 

Summary of the Lotus Eaters:

In The Odyssey, Odysseus and his crew encounter the Lotus Eaters. They do as their name suggests, they eat the peculiar Lotus flower. When the lotus flower is eaten, those who eat it are “overcome with a blissful forgetfulness,” and want to do nothing more than stay where they are. The crew mates had to be dragged back to the ship, otherwise they never would have returned to their duties. The most well known adaptation of this is probably the Lotus Casino in Percy Jackson & the Olympians series, where the characters spend days/years there, only thinking it was a few hours/days. It’s a time warp per se. 

So what’s what?

Hollywood Ghost Club =  Lair/island of the lotus eaters (everyone there appears to have no other worries in life)

The music & dancing = Lotus flower (sucks everyone in)

How do they relate?

Once Caleb starts performing, Sunset Curve are sucked in. Eventually, they are overcome with a “blissful forgetfulness” and forget about Julie and the dance. They only get sucked back out once Caleb mentions it’s the witching hour.

Alex literally says “This place is some sort of time warp.”

When the boys try to leave, the dancers and then Caleb try to reel them back in. 

The next is not directly Greek mythology, but distantly related:

3. Disney’s Hercules 

The story in Disney’s Hercules isn’t exactly what the myths of Heracles are. It’s Disney, so of course the stories are romanticized and changed significantly. First of all, in the original myths, Hercules is really named Heracles, and Megara is nothing more than Heracles’ wife that ends with a tragic story.

In the movie, Hades wants Hercules dead since he is the only one that can ruin his plan to take over the world. He enlists Megara (or Meg, whose soul he owns) to get to know him and find his weakness. As Meg gets to know Hercules, they fall in love. Hades uses this as Hercules’ weakness, and once he outs Meg for working for him, Hercules is emotionally defeated. However, he still gives up his power for 24 hours, as long as Meg remains untouched by harm. Of course that doesn’t happen, and Meg dies while saving Hercules. Her soul is returned to the Underworld, and Hercules journeys down there to save her, even though he might die doing so. Except he doesn’t; he saves Meg, and it’s happily ever after. 

So who’s who?

Alex = Hercules

Willie = Meg

Caleb = Hades

How does it relate?

Like Hades wants Hercules dead, Caleb wants Alex (and the boys) under his control because they are too powerful. He’s threatened by them.

Even though Willie didn’t mean to bring the boys into the mess with Caleb, he still did (no hate, I love my son). Willie acts as Meg in this situation because Caleb still uses him to get to the boys. Caleb gets to put his stamp on them.

Willie, just like Meg, decides to not help Caleb anymore, though he’s still stuck. He cares about Alex, he doesn’t want him to be stuck at the HGC like him forever; he doesn’t want Caleb to own Alex’s soul. So, Willie helps Alex and the boys with their plan to crossover. 

In Stand Tall, right before You’ve Got Nothing to Lose, Caleb appeals to each of the boys’ weakness. Caleb says “Everything you want, including Willie, is right here.” Just like Hades uses Meg against Hercules, Caleb uses Willie against Alex.

Potential Season 2 Willex Storyline

The parallel to Hercules and Meg isn’t finished. Alex hasn’t saved Willie from Caleb yet, and Caleb hasn’t been defeated yet. We don’t see Willie after the Willex hug in Stand Tall. I think it’s safe to assume that Willie is not safe from Caleb, especially since he helped Sunset Curve escape Caleb’s curse. There’s a lot of things that could happen. One of my assumptions is that Caleb is going to use Willie as bait to lure Alex back in. Another is that, like how Hercules goes to the Underworld to save Meg’s soul,  Alex is going to actively choose to return to the HGC to try to save Willie from Caleb. 

And the last parallel to Greek mythology in season 1...

4. Cheyenne Jackson

He plays Hades in Descendants 3, a Disney movie, meaning he’s the same Hades as in Hercules. 

Caleb Covington, you could argue is the “king of the dead” in JATP

That’s it, that’s the parallel.

Possible Season 2 Storylines

Cephalus and Procris (I’m not as familiar with this myth, but it basically goes like this)

Cephalus and Procris are happily married and very in love with each other. One day, the goddess of dawn, Eos, kidnaps Cephalus because she wants him to herself. Depending on the version you read, Cephalus either sleeps with Eos, or he doesn’t, but regardless, his only concern is how much he loves his wife, Procris. Eos finds that annoying, and plants the idea in his head that Procris is cheating on him when she releases him eight years later. Cephalus returns to Procris, disguised as another man, to see if she would remain faithful. A disguised Cephalus continuously brings Procris presents, and slowly, Procris is swayed by the mysterious man. When Cephalus reveals himself, Procris runs away, ashamed, and joins Artemis’ hunt. Eos wins essentially. She get’s Cephalus... until Procris returns, trying to make amends with her husband. He takes her back, but not long after Procris hears rumors that Cephalus has been unfaithful. She follows him on a hunt, hiding behind a bush. Cephalus hears a bush move, and thinking it’s an animal, he shoots, killing Procris. In the end, Eos still wins as Procris is no longer in the picture, and she could theoretically be with him. Expect Cephalus exiles himself and Eos is never seen again.

How could this apply to JATP season 2?

Julie = Procris

Luke = Cephalus

Caleb = Eos

Caleb-Possessed-Nick = Disguised man

Since Caleb possessed Nick at the end, I assume his plan is to get Julie to pick Nick, thus pushing Luke away from her. Caleb wants Luke and the boys to himself, and as long as Julie is in the picture, that won’t happen. As Caleb-Possessed-Nick tries to flirt and get closer to Julie, Luke will see this and get jealous. His jealousness could lead to tensions between Julie and Luke, making the band a bit awkward, maybe even a big fight that pushes Luke to think about joining Caleb, or at least isolating himself where Caleb would have easy access. I think it would be a very loosely applied parallel, but the idea of Caleb working to cause a rift between Luke and Julie to get Luke by himself is a major possibility. Regardless, Caleb-Possessed-Nick is going to get in the way of Luke and Julie’s slow burn pining for each other. 

A General Thought Not Related to Greek Mythology 

Regardless of what the writers end up doing, I think Caleb’s best plan would be to target the boys individually; like the continuance of the Hercules parallel with Willex and potential Cephalus & Procris parallel with Juke. I don’t know how he would isolate Reggie, maybe something with his family, but targeting the boys one-on-one would be the most strategic move for Caleb. He could even get super manipulative with it. He could say something like “Alex already agreed” or something along those lines to try to persuade the boy he is talking to. 

Additionally, I don’t have any theories on where Carrie and Julie’s relationship may go, but i’m looking forward to a Carrie redemption arc. As far as where Bobby fits in, I read someone’s theory that Caleb may approach him, offering to help keep his reputation as Trevor Wilson, if he helps deal with the boys somehow. I’m sure there’s a potential greek myth that fits a potential Bobby and the boys storyline, but out of the ones I can think of right now, there aren’t. Betrayal is a huge theme in greek mythology though.

Anyway...

While the original target audience was kids and the show probably wasn’t meant to be this deep, as a screenwriter myself, I find it super useful (and fun) to parallel classic stories and myths when I write. It can add a sense of nuance to the story, especially when done right. I hope the writers (assuming at least the Orpheus and Lotus Eaters parallels were intentional) continue to parallel the season with some form of myth or classic story, only to then completely flip the ending. 

If you actually took the time to read ALL of this, my god, I applaud you, you amazing human. Thank you so much for reading it. I’d love to hear what y’all think or what theories y’all have as well!

[lakemojave]

Supergiant Games: Same Bones, Different Skeletons

I just finished a retrospective of all 4 games by Supergiant on my twitch channel, and I have a few thoughts I wanna connect and questions I wanna explore. My love for these games is real strong and i could write a whole essay just gushing about them, but I wanna give some thought to what makes them so compelling: not just to me, but to damn near everyone I’ve talked to on their discord who feels the same. I myself rank Bastion among my favorite games ever, and Hades is climbing that list at a clip. And even though I could take or leave Transistor or Pyre, they keep pulling me back.

But I could talk a whole lot about each game’s appeal and waste a lot of time. I’ve gushed enough to my friends about how Bastion and Pyre’s rugged, apocalyptic atmospheres draw me in with their incredible vibrance to contrast. I could talk about how Ashley Barrett’s vocal tracks carry Transistor on their shoulders, or what makes Hades so much goddamn fun that the game doesn’t really need to be much else. But I realize that if the Supergiant library is so universally appealing to me, there must be some sort of connective tissue between them--some sort of fundamental similarity that makes them work. After thinking about it for more than five minutes, it turns out there are many; some are pretty obvious, and some less so. This brings me to the conclusion that the Supergiant library, with its four wildly distinct and different games, still follow a noticeable formula--one that is flexible enough to allow such completely different games.

Game Design

The Supergiant library are all essentially top down action rpgs, Transistor having the most elements of the genre. This is still a pretty weak connection, given how different they all play from each other. The only two that have much overlap in the most basic sense are Bastion and Hades, with the same general fast paced, real time combat. On closer examination, the two games have enough differences in the variety of mechanics at play, (Bastion with its multiple weapon slots and a shield, Hades with its sheer number of commands) that even they are hard to compare.

There are, however, several mechanics that the library loves to use. The first that comes to mind are the difficulty conditions: idols in Bastion, limiters in Transistor, titan stars in Pyre, and the pact of punishment--and arguably Chaos boons as well--in Hades. Their function is simple: increase your challenge for a little extra reward. Bastion and Pyre go the extra mile by fixing in world building elements to this mechanic; Bastion’s idols inform about the game’s pantheon, while Pyre informs about its, well, evil pantheon. The use of these conditions is indicative of Supergiant’s game design philosophy as a whole--you, the player, can make the game as hard or easy as it takes for you to have fun. The inclusion of infinite lives in Bastion or god mode or hell mode in Hades further builds on this point. This library is designed for all sorts of audiences, whether they want to be challenged by their games or simply immersed in the story.

Another repeating mechanic in these games are the use of challenge rooms, which started in Bastion as the training grounds and, to a lesser extent, Who Knows Where. In Transistor they are the sandbox test rooms, and in Pyre they are the beyonder crystal’s scribe trials. They appear in Hades a little more ambiguously; the infernal troves or Erebus rooms are not quite the same, but they serve a similar function. This function is a momentary break from the gameplay loop for a little extra reward, much like the previously discussed conditions. Transistor and Hades’ challenge rooms offer relatively negligible rewards; the sandbox rooms simply offer xp and unlock tracks for the jukebox, while the Erebus tiles offer double the reward for any normal tile. Bastion and Pyre go the extra mile by giving specific, long term rewards for their challenges. In Bastion’s training grounds, the Kid earns weapon specific abilities that are among the game’s most powerful; in Pyre’s scribe trials, exiles can earn character specific talismans that feed their specialization. For the most part, these rooms give the player a low stakes opportunity to practice, hone their preferred playstyle, and reward the effort, all while being completely optional.

Akin to these breaks in the game loop are designated resting areas/hub worlds. The Bastion, the Sandbox, the Blackwagon, and the House of Hades each offer a moment to interact with characters and lore, goof around with the environment, buy permanent upgrades, or just take a break. Transistor utilizes this function the least of the library, since it never once requires the player to enter the space. Pyre utilizes it the most since it has the most breaks in both frequency and number. In a way, this decision is both a game design and storytelling choice. Between all four games, perhaps excluding Transistor, this is where the majority of story beats take place. It is where the player can read up on some fresh lore or meet the ever growing cast of characters, and eventually grow to cherish them (as I often do playing this library). Without little breaks like these, the climactic or world/story shaking events that take place out in the actual playable space have no impact or narrative weight. The fact that all these sort of interactions are completely voluntary also rewards the player in the storytelling sense; by choosing to engage with the figures of the story rather than having that choice decided for them, the player feels as though they themselves have agency in the story unfolding.

Style

Perhaps the most distinct part of the Supergiant library, (and perhaps what I personally love most about it) is its aesthetics. There are few games that look, feel, and sound the way these games do. Yet, the four of them hardly resemble each other. Bastion is a rugged, frontier-esque sci fi apocalypse, Transistor is a sleek, cyberpunk apocalypse, Pyre is a high fantasy purgatory space, and Hades is simply stylized Greek mythology. It is a shock to remember, then, that these four games are all designed by the same artistic team.

I confess I don’t know much about art, so I don’t have anything too profound to say about Jen Zee’s art style, besides that I like it a lot. It is also worth noting that despite her spearheading art and character design for the whole library, each game still looks visually distinct, and not just in their overall aesthetics. Take the character design of the library, for instance. Bastion’s human figures tend to be short, stocky, with exaggerated facial features. Their colors are highly saturated, with a soft, almost blurry quality that gives a level of warmth to the fatalistic atmosphere. Transistor’s characters, barring Red, tend to be based around palettes centered around a single color, such as the Camerata red and the spectrum of the function character profiles. Pyre is the first of the library to use talking portraits, which contrast robed figures with stark color palettes and simple designs with unrobed figures with much noisier details. Hades is easily the most distinct of all four, using simple colors and thick outlines on all its characters. The most consistent feature of all their designs, as usual, is how wildly different they are. For Hades, Zee makes sure that characters only look alike in any way if they have some relation to each other, such as the Furies, Achilles and Patroclus, or Zagreus and his parents. On the whole, the versatility and variety in the character design is impeccable.

What I most enjoy about these games is Darren Korb’s soundtracks, which continue to vary wildly. From the closet-recorded Bastion soundtrack to the whole two and a half Hades score, Korb’s scoring keeps improving and changing in the 10 years Supergiant has operated. His music, which adds and changes motifs as each game progresses, contributes to the atmosphere just as much as the visuals do. Whenever he teams up with Ashley Barret to add vocal tracks to certain parts of the game, they always manage to place them at critical narrative or emotional beats, turning them into the games’ most memorable moments. The team goes one step further every game by incorporating a musician or source of music into each game, giving the music just as much character as the one performing it. It also sneaks its way into the aforementioned hub worlds by providing the player a means to play their favorite tracks whenever they want (except in Hades, where they have to pay in game for that privilege). In essence, Korb makes sure to give each game a distinct feel through its music, but familiar enough to connect the library in the player’s mind.

Just as Supergiant gets so much mileage from Korb and Zee alike, they also manage time and time again to make use of Logan Cunningham’s top notch voice over work. Originally the sole voice actor at Supergiant Games, Cunningham continued on from famously narrating Bastion as Rucks to remaining a ubiquitous voice throughout the library. His role as the Transistor in the game proper drives the emotional core of that game, and his role as the Voice/Archjustice proves to be a solidly effective, yet distant antagonist. In Hades, his roles are somewhat overshadowed by Korb’s performance as Zagreus, (which I’m still blown away he still had time to do) but his performance as Lord Hades is still excellent. Supergiant also uses Cunningham in Hades to sort of satirize how often he narrates for them by casting him as the narrating Old Man, then allowing Zagreus to break the fourth wall and acknowledge him. It is as if the team at Supergiant knows how much they use the same stylistic team, then mocking that same choice.

To other studios: learn from Supergiant

I’m running out of things to say and my ball of yarn that connects all these newspapers and polaroids on my wall is running thin. I would talk more about Supergiant really knows how to end a game and frequently does so in similar ways, or that their library is a masterclass in character-driven stories, but this little essay is long enough.

Instead, I wanna talk about how Supergiant does something right which so many AAA developers and publishers don’t seem to understand. To contrast with the Supergiant library, consider Assassin’s Creed, another franchise I have spent an embarrassing amount of time playing. This franchise releases a game almost every year, and in my experience, when a company does this, you tend to get the same pig with a different paint. From the original Assassin’s Creed to their most recent release, Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, the differences seem to be night and day. Combat and free running are far more complex than they once were, rpg elements to story and gameplay have been introduced, composers, writers, voice actors, and cast members have changed with each release, and the sheer size of the game has become staggering. Yet, in the 13 years and 11 main releases in the game’s history, (plus spinoffs) any change has not only felt incremental over time, but fundamentally insignificant to the skeleton of the game. Assassin’s Creed 1 and 2 play and feel differently, but the differences are subtle. The bones are different, but every year they assemble to form a vaguely Assassin’s Creed shaped thing. People who play games tend to hate this and frequently berate companies for this practice; Bethesda and GameFreak receive the same criticism that their games are so formulaic that their new releases might as well be carbon copies of the ones before it.

Yet, Supergiant Games, with its four games over ten years, has used essentially the same team and building blocks to make games that can hardly be considered interchangeable. Whether its the passion of this humble little indie studio or the sheer talent of this team, Supergiant takes the same pile of bones and assembles them in a different shape each time with care and attention. They are proof that a formula doesn’t need to be tweaked or altered or given a different coat of paint in order to be accepted; instead the formula needs versatility, the means to produce a fresh result each time. It also works best when we adore the result every time.

[hotwifeluigi]

“At least you’re still not that far from San Francisco!” Kichiro Guerra looks for the bright side of everything, even after the alternate swap. If she didn’t, she simply wouldn’t be Kichiro Guerra. Unfortunately, Allison doesn’t need any more bright sides or sunshine or optimism, Dallas has all of those things in spades.

“Yeah,” She concedes, and holds her phone between her ear and her shoulder while unpacks her things, “at least it’s still driving distance.”

“I mean!” Kichiro’s voice falters for half a second as she considers that this ‘bright side’ tactic might not be working, it will though, she decides. After all, love can survive anything, and especially something as small as a Feedback. It’s not like either of them was Incinerated, “You could be all the way in New York! Or Philadelphia!”

“And be on a team with Patty Fox? Or Jessica Telephone? That’d really be the worst, wouldn’t it, Kichi.” The smirk sneaks into Allison’s voice as she begins hanging up jerseys, she has almost as much Lovers merch as Garages at this point, even though she knows full well that pink isn’t her color.

“That’s not what I meant and you know it!” Kichi giggles all the way through saying it and Allison’s smirk grows. If there was anything Kichiro was good at, it was being a good sport about Allison’s teasing.

“No? You weren’t referring to how woefully jealous you’d be if I shared an apartment with The Patty Fox or even worse, a locker room with Jess Telephone?” She hangs up her third Lovers hoodie and slides it to the far left of her closet.

“Ugh! No, I was referring to how woefully jealous you’d be if I spent half my visit trying to get Jessica’s autograph.”

“If anything she should be trying to get yours.” It’s easy talking to Kichiro because Allison knows how. The formula is pretty simple, give her something to take care of, tease her about her solution, give in and then compliment her. It’s a win-win all around because it means that Allison doesn’t have to explain that it doesn’t matter to her whether it’s New York, or Dallas, or Philadelphia, or Hades, it doesn’t matter where it is if it’s not Seattle. She puts one of her Garages caps on the wall and thinks about Teddy Duende packing everything she left in the Garage, he’d probably be crying, the big softie.

“Allie!” It sounds like a protest but Allison can tell that Kichi’s smiling, probably twirling that long pink hair too, blushing but barely.

“Yes, Kichi?” The smirk stays, the playfulness is gone, Allison looks at the two new Steaks jerseys in the bottom of her duffel.

“You’re just such a sweetheart, never change, babe.”

Allison bites down the urge to say, ‘You’re one to talk,’ the two of them had enough trouble with the alternate reality swap, and bringing it up is bad faith and she knows it. Instead she says, “Speaking of sweethearts, how’s Ortiz?” This’ll be enough to get Kichiro rambling long enough for Allison to mute herself without Kichiro noticing. Allison is right, of course, Kichi doesn’t notice. So Allison sinks down to the ground at the foot of her bed, pulls her knees to her chest, and regrets not closing the curtains as the sun pours in her window, and she cries.

[theliterateape]

I Like to Watch | Zack Snyder’s Justice League

by Don Hall

Mythology is fun.

As a kid I loved reading Edith Hamilton’s book on the Greek gods and the myths. Hercules, Perseus, Apollo, and Hera—this fell completely in line with my love for superhero comics. The strangely petty human traits of envy, greed, and lust combined with the power to level cities make for some great storytelling.

Zeus was basically Harvey Weinstein in the retroactive revision we’re mired in today. If Harvey could’ve changed into a golden animal and boned unsuspecting ladies looking for careers in Hollywood I’m pretty certain he would. The gods and demi-gods of the Greeks dealt with daddy issues, mommy issues, bad relationships, and fighting. Lots of fighting. Sometimes for the good of humanity but more often for the glory of winning.

Zach Snyder is in the business of tackling myths and reframing them with a style all his own. His career has become its own myth.

From Dawn of the Dead (not so much a reboot of Romero's zombie mythology but a philosophical reimagining of the genre that arguably jumpstarted The Hollywood fascination with it), 300 (a borderline homoerotic take on the myth of the Greek underdog), and Watchmen (a ridiculously ambitious attempt to put one of the most iconic takedowns on the potential fascism of the superhero legend machine ever written) to his nearly single-handed hack at answering the Marvel juggernaut with Man of Steel and Batman vs Superman: Dawn of Justice, Snyder is in the artistic business of subverting and re-envisioning the mythologies we embrace without even seeing them as such.

Snyder's style is operatic. It is on a grand scale even in the most mundane moments. The guy loves slow motion like Scorcese loves mobsters and Italian food. When you're tackling big themes with larger than life stories, the epic nature of his vision makes sense and has alienated a good number of audience members. With such excess, there are bound to be missteps but I'd argue that his massive take on these characters he molds from common understanding and popular nomenclature elevates them to god-like stature.

Fans of Moore's Watchmen have much to complain about Snyder's adaptation. The titular graphic novel is almost impossible to put in any other form than the one Moore intended and yet, Snyder jumped in feet-first and created a living, breathing representation of most, if not all, of the source material's intent. Whether you dig on it or not, it's hard to avoid acknowledging that the first five minutes of Watchmen is a mini-masterpiece of style, storytelling, and epic tragedy wrapped up in a music video.

Despite a host of critical backlash for his one fully original take, Sucker Punch is an amazing thing to see. More a commentary on video game enthusiasm with its lust for hot animated chicks and over-the-top violence that a celebration of cleavage and guns, the film is crazily entertaining. For those who hated the ending, he told you in the title what his plan was all along.

The first movie I saw in the theaters that tried to take a superhero mythology and treat it seriously (for the most part) was Richard Donner's Superman: The Movie. Never as big a fan of the DC characters as I have been of Marvel, it was still extraordinary to see a character I had only really known in pages to be so fully realized. Then came Burton's Batman movies. The superhero film was still an anomaly but steam was gaining. Things changed with Bryan Singer's X-Men in 2000, then Raimi's Spiderman, and those of us who grew up with our pulpy versions of Athena, Hermes, and Hades were rewarded with Nolan's Batman Begins. A far cry from the tongue-in-cheek camp of the 1966 TV Batman, Christian Bale's Bruce Wayne was a serious character and his tale over three films is a tragic commentary filled with the kind of death and betrayal and triumph befitting the grand narrative he deserved.

I loved Singer's Superman Returns in 2006 because it was such a love letter to the 1978 film (down to the opening credits) but by then, the MCU was taking over the world.

Snyder's first of what turns out to be an epic storyline involving perhaps seven or eight movies was Man of Steel. It was fun and, while I had my issues with the broodiness of Kal El, the odd take on Jonathan Kent, and a redheaded Lois Lane, I had no issue with Superman snapping Zod's neck. Darker and more tragic than any other version of the Kryptonian, it was still super entertaining.

Then came Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice. By 2016, Marvel had codified their formula of serious characters wrestling with serious issues of power and responsibility peppered with lots of good humor and bright colors. Snyder's desaturated pallete and angst-filled demi-gods was not the obvious road to financial competition.

I'll confess, I hated it. BvS felt half-rendered. Lex Luthor was kind of superficial and played as a kind of Joker. The whole Bruce Wayne wants to kill Superman thing felt undeveloped and the "Martha" moment was just stupid.

When Joss Whedon's version of Snyder's Justice League came out in 2017, I was primed for it to be a turd and I wasn't surprised. So much of it didn't work on any level. I dismissed it as DC trying and failing miserably and was comforted by the coming of Thanos.

Following Thanos and the time heist was COVID. Suddenly, we were internationally sidelined and the movie theater industry caved in. Streaming services started popping up like knock-off smartphones and Hollywood was reeling, doing anything and everything to find a way back. Since Whedon's disastrous helming of Snyder's third act, fans online had been demanding to #ReleasetheSnyderCut but no one was ever really taking them seriously until all movie production was shut down for a year.

The stage was set to remedy a mistake (or at least make some bucks on a do-over of a huge box office failure). Snyder had left the production in part because of the suicide of his daughter and in part due to the constant artistic fights over executives looking for the quippy fun of the MCU but he still had all the original footage. Add to that the broiling accusations that Joss Whedon was "abusive" during the reshoots, the path seemed destined. For an additional $70 million and complete control, Snyder delivered a four hour mega-movie streamed on HBOMax.

Of course, I was going to watch the thing as soon as I could.

The Whedon version opens with an homage to the now dead Superman (including the much maligned digitally erased mustache on Henry Cavill). The SynderCut opens with the death of Superman and the agony of his death scream as it travels across the planet. It's a simple change but exemplifies the very different visions of how this thing is gonna play out.

Snyder doesn't want us to be OK with the power of these beings unleashed. He wants us to feel the damage and pain of death. He wants the results of violence to be as real as he can. When Marvel's Steve Rogers kicks a thug across the room and the thug hits a wall, he crumples and it is effectively over. When Batman does the same thing, we see the broken bones (often in slow motion) and the blood smear on the wall as the thug slides to the ground.

The longer SnyderCut is bloated in some places (like the extended Celtic choir singing Aquaman off to sea or the extended narrations by Wonder Woman which sound slightly like someone trying to explain the plot to Siri). On the other hand, the scene with Barry Allen saving Iris West is both endearing and extraordinary, giving insight to the power of the Flash as well as some essential character-building in contrast to Whedon's comic foil version.

One thing I noticed in this variant is that Zach wants the audience to experience the sequence of every moment as the characters do. An example comes when Diana Prince goes to the crypt to see the very plot she belabors over later. The sequence is simple. She gets a torch and goes down. Most directors which jump cut to the torch. Snyder gives us five beats as she grabs the timber, wraps cloth around the end, soaks it with kerosene, pulls out a box of matches, and lights the torch. Then she goes down the dark passageway.

The gigantic, lush diversity of Snyder’s vision of the DC superhero universe—from the long shots of the sea life in the world of Atlantis to the ancient structures and equipment of Themyscira— is almost painterly. Snyder isn't taking our time; he's taking his time. We are rewarded our patience with a far better backstory for the villain, a beautifully rendered historic battle thwarting Darkseid's initial invasion (including a fucking Green Lantern), and answers to a score of questions set up in both previous films.

Whedon's Bruce Wayne was more Ben Affleck; Snyder's is full-on Frank Miller Batman, the smartest, most brutal fucker in the room. Cyborg, instead of Whedon's sidelined non-character, is now a Frankenstein's monster, grappling with the trade-off between acceptance and enormous power. Wonder Woman is now more in line with the Patty Jenkins version and instead of being told about the loss of Superman, we are forced to live with the anguish of both his mother and Lois Lane in quiet moments of incredible grief.

To be fair to Whedon (something few are willing to do as he is now being castigated not for racism or sexism but for being mean to people) having him come in to throw in some levity and Marvel-esque color to Snyder's Wagnerian pomposity is like hiring Huey Lewis to lighten up Pink Floyd's The Wall or getting Douglas Adams to rewrite Cormac McCarthy's The Road.

I loved Snyder's self-indulgent, mythologic DC universe.

So much so that I then re-watched Man of Steel and then watched the director's version of BvS (which Snyder added approximately 32 minutes). The second film is far better at three hours and Eisenberg's Lex Luthor now makes sense. Then I watched Zach Snyder's Justice League a second time.

After nineteen hours of Snyder's re-imagining of these DC heroes and villains, I saw details that, upon first viewing, are ignored or dismissed, but after seeing them in order and complete, are suddenly consistent and relevant. Like Nolan or Fincher, Snyder defies anyone to eliminate even one piece of his narrative no matter how long. With all the pieces, this is an epic story and the pieces left at the extended epilogue play into a grander narrative we will never see.

Or maybe we will. Who knows these days?

[fmdkiana]

【✧】━━━━━ 🌿 k i a n a     i n t r o     p l a y l i s t 🌿 ━━━━━【✧】

these are nineteen songs that i’ve been listening to while making kiana’s blog [x] some i came across, some randomly thought of, and some suggested by lovely muns i’ve been chatting about kiana to. since she’s a character that i’ve adapted for the purpose of famed, these songs have helped ground me in the person she is. i hope the songs and descriptions below will help you learn kiana a little better too

1. to be torn by kyla la grange

this first song was a suggestion from someone, and i think set the tune for the rest of my choices. apparently it’s from beauty and the beast? lol anyway it describes this desire to be torn, a carnal need to be used. the heavy sound of it is kind of haunting, a bit sad, but also strong. the emotion can be felt even without the lyrics. kiana has this part of her that deeply craves being important, whether it comes at her own expense -her own tearing- or not. also forewarning that a lot of these overlap on the same concepts. shrug emoji

2. intertwined by dodie

intertwined is a song that immediately came to mind for kiana after to be torn. when this song came out, many people saw it as a cute love story, wanting to be intertwined with a lover, and have them be the safe space when you have a troubled head. however, dodie made a video debunking this, against her natural inclination, because the song describes something severely unhealthy. the following music video also helped many people to see the gore that’s strung throughout the lyrics. it Actually describes a relationship where the participants have put all of their source of happiness in one another, and it’s left them codependent, but ever seeking more. kiana has this perpetual trouble in relationships, especially romantic ones

3. bite by troye sivan

i can be the subjective of your dreams, your sickening desire is a pretty good sum up of where the inspo comes from. it’s difficult, when talking about the negative parts of kiana, to not talk about her ex-boyfriend. i have lots planned to talk on so i won’t go on forever here, but it reminds me of how all it took was the tiniest invitation for kiana to “become his.” that’s how she works. come here puppy, don’t bite, and she’ll heel at your side forever. at least, back then. she’s someone who seems difficult, because she’s very asocial, but with the right formula, it could be so easy to slip her into your arms

4. hell in heaven by twice wish

this song is a bit similar to intertwined, i would say? someone who feels stuck, drowning in a “hell” that is only saved by a piece of “heaven/paradise.” yet they’re in between the place of hell and heaven, constantly confused of where they land, because they’ve placed their hope for salvation in this one, singular place/person. they want to be freer than they are, yet their salvation keeps them locked away. open the door to heaven, let me walk on the cloud. the day i’m trapped in you, save me, hold me tight

5. dinner & diatribes by hozier

a few different levels come from this song. while it was created with the idea of how tedious social gatherings are, the story that comes from it makes another world. kiana is asocial, and struggles with fear over social situations, which make something like dinner parties quite stressful for her. she’s also someone who isn’t fond of small talk, and more likely that type to say ‘talk to me about your deepest fears,’ but... she actually means it and isn’t saying it to be pretentious. she would much rather see the sickest, nastiest parts of someone, soak all of that up, than talk about whether the food was good. the music video describes this in part, but also gives a hades/persephone but worse type of story that is also quite kiana aligned. that’s the kind of love i’ve been dreaming of

6. creep by radiohead

i want you to notice when i’m not around. so fuckin special, i wish i was special, but i’m a creep. not to ‘have you ever seen me without this hat’ on you, but lissen! kiana is forever convinced she’s an outsider. the things she likes are more Cool these days than they were when she was a kid, but the feeling of being ostracized for liking them back then will always live with her. she’s an insecure overthinking fuck at times too. and also desperately wants to be someone special, and unique, as if having that would make her pain of feeling different worth it

7. seigfried by frank ocean

the meaning of this song is pretty different from how i view it in relation to kiana. for her, the focus is on the idea of ‘settling down’ being... acceptance of normality? her whole life, she’s been searching for someone and/or something that makes her feel special. she became an idol for this exact reason, dated her ex for that reason, seeks the relationships she does, thinks she could still have superpowers for this reason. but the truth is that she’s pretty normal. her hobbies are very normal people type things. her talents aren’t anything that would have her being called top of the line. her thoughts are all things other people have thought of. her booksmart intelligence isn’t any stronger than the average. she is very normal, and the tiny part of her that acknowledges that usually shoves it away. but on occasion, she wonders if she should accept it, and settle

8. gimme love by joji

gimme gimme love is all you really need to know lol kiana doesn’t stick around easily when she’s not being given the same kind of world-ending affection from those she’s chosen to share that with that she gives out. she gives at Least 110% of her love, affection, and loyalty into anyone that she has chosen to keep closest to her heart, and if she isn’t getting that back, she can feel dejected, unloved, and unimportant. she may give people like this a few chances to change, but her expectations, or “standards,” won’t change

9. pain by king princess

cos i can’t help turning my love into pain is the strongest lyric that ties back to kiana. the overall message isn’t as strong because king princess has a different view on a relationship as described than kiana. for her, it’s yet another kiana will put herself in the face of terrible parts of relationships. the trouble is that she enjoys it, and seeks it, thinking it’s the ultimate show of love. not to pain one another, but to be pained without them. also realizing after all these i should be saying this applies to her inner circle friendships as well, but the standards are just a little less heavy

10. any song by zico sun

not one for big gatherings, kiana likes to have her social interaction either through the wire, or in small groups (duos are best to her tbh) the song has an upbeat tune that contrasts against the lyrical meaning of something more about... any song will do, something to drag away the sadness that’s living inside. kiana functions a bit like that, always seeking her uniqueness to bust out and save her from her own mind thinking she’s not good enough

11. why won’t they talk to me? by tame impala

she is asocial, but that doesn’t mean being a hermit,, an otaku,, whatever you want to call her, is a life full of happiness. she functions very well on her own, but when she has that for too long, it can be damaging to her head as well, especially when she has inner circle friends or a romantic relationship. when not speaking to these people, the need for human connection seems unbearable to deal with, and anxiety runs rampant

12. alien by lee suhyun

her mama told her she’s alien, but actually it was herself telling herself she’s alien mixed with influence from pop culture making her want to be a superhero and kids who told her she was a freak, all coming together in the desire for weirdness to be a Cool thing. kiana will wish til the day she croaks that she will have a realization that she has a special power

13. stressed out by twenty one pilots

ki doesn���t care about the core message of this song. many people relate to oh no bills~ adult stress~ but kiana doesn’t. even if she wasn’t born into a family that could live comfortably, and didn’t become an idol making phat stacks, she would feel the same. to her, it’s an inevitability. HOWEVA the beginning lines are 1:1 for how she wishes to be something extraordinary, and is supa insecure that she isn’t. i wish found some better sounds that no one’s ever heard. i wish i had a better voice that sang some better words ... i was told when i get older all my fears would shrink but now i’m insecure and i care what people think

14. true crime by epik high ft. miso

not exactly 1:1 word by word, since there’s several perspectives coming in one song, however, the overall message i think can be summed in it’s a true crime to be without you. other lines like i’d open up my chest for your entertainment, that was the line that drew me to originally put this in the playlist. i’m not sure on a story behind the song, but it strikes me as something bonnie & clyde-esque? there’s themes of being on the run, lying on the pavement dying, stuff like that. that kind of relationship is strongly the ideals kiana holds for her romantic and close platonic relationships

15. shine by pentagon (shouldve been knight but bad bois image PLAYIN)

i cannot explain to u the random joy this dumb song gave me when it came out. it’s similar to power up like i just?? get so happy lol anyway the whole premise is like nerdy person has a crush n theyre like oh my god~ why would u like me~ i cant say i like u~ it’s super fucking cute. i’m a loser who loves you. yes, i’m a misery. to you, i’m a nuisance, i’m an outsider, but in this world, i only need you. that’s where the kiana part comes in strongest, or explains it in one sentence. she worries she isn’t enough for others but her affections are always incredibly strong. also she’s cute

16. tail by sunmi dimensions soloist 2

when i first heard this song, i needed to play it again to pay attention to the lyrics because i had the feeling it was kiana-esque. i was right, but i would say that it’s where kiana could go at her worst. has she been there? i’m not so sure. perhaps teetering on the edge of having her claws out, but really, for now, it’s just that the potential is there

17. she’s my religion by pale waves

so as to not repeat myself too much and because this is so much fookin writing already, this is another song that talks about how deeply and dangerously kiana falls into others. she’s no angel, but she’s my religion, always finding ways to numb the pain ... made me feel like i was finally enough ... she needs this love just as much as me

18. space cadet by beabadoobee

this song has similar themes to alien, but rather than about being special, it’s about being in a shitty place and letting your mind wander to create a better reality. ki has her interests, her extreme love of her fandoms, because it’s an escape for her. that’s not something i personally approve of, however, it’s a common reality for many people. living in these online spaces and thinking of these fictional worlds gives her a place to go to when the irl world is too difficult for her to handle

19. me! me! me! by teddyloid

you might think this is a meme addition and sure! to a degree it is! but i’m also going to talk about it as an actual piece of music and visuals. first we’ll talk about the music video. kiana feels complicated about the type of anime fans that oversexualize everything, so in general, she likes a message that’s against those types. the message of addiction tearing real life relationships apart also is something kiana sorta needs to hear. the lyrics of the song itself talk about an all consuming type of relationship, and dissects it to explain how it wasn’t love, but worship, which was dangerous to them both. it’s a song that kiana perhaps would need to take to heart, but i, as her mun, am unsure if she ever will. that depends on the connections she forms, and what types of people are goading her on, or trying to get her to stop

[rainbowkittyblossomwings]

So I don’t want to get into a huge retrospective of how 2020 was for me, because it’s personal and I think we can all agree things have been bad. So instead I’d like to talk about great video games I got into in 2020!!! These games didn’t necessarily come out in 2020 just things I discovered and I’d like to talk about my top 10 faves

1.       The first best video game I discovered in 2020 is the entire Trails Series (I played all of them in 2020, cold steel, ao, zero, and Sky). Initially I played Cold Steel 1 because my friend told me it was like “Playing Code Geass the anime”. The story was pretty easy to get into of a guy going to military school and you’re placed in the special class for commoners and nobles when there’s a huge class divide in your country. From there it had some basic anime tropes like a dating simulator like thing and various cliched characters, like the tsundere, the guy who’s trying to get everybody to work, the music kid, and the noble, you know?

But Cold Steel wasn’t cliché in the least bit. I played it after surgery recovery so I was in a lot of pain and out of my mind, but each character had depth, the entire world was fleshed out and after each game more of the story and the villains were revealed, secret robot technologies were given to the main characters and they slowly became more and more powerful after that.

I wanted to know more and more about the world so I played the first series trails in the sky and the Japanese only series, Zero and Ao, and they were even better. Not only that but in this JRPG there were canon gay characters that had traits to their character besides “I’m gay.” There were a lot of lesbians for me to pick and choose between as faves.

Not only that but I find none dating sim video games difficult cuz I get easily frustrated and rage quit. Cold Steel was turn based combat and never made me feel like rage quitting because they had a function called “Retry but easier” where if you died you could start the same battle but make it easier. That made it so I only had to die five or so times on things I was really stuck on and then I could move on with the story. And the game never felt like a grind fest and I could make the game faster in combat.

This series I may have discovered in 2020 but it’s become just as beloved to me as any other series. It’s one of my faves.

2.       My second favorite game in 2020 was 13 sentinels : Aegis Rim. I love time travel so much and everytime a new time travel anime or game comes out I get super excited. Aegis Rim was a game that had all sorts of cool tropes, like time travel, memory loss, androids, different realities, and psychic dreams and it just sounded cool. Not only that but there were 13 different protagonists to play and I had seen it reviewed in LGBT+ articles, saying it had a canon gay character and a canon nonbinary character! It was a very fun game and part of the story followed a point and click formula and the other half followed a kinda strategy blowing up giant robot monsters formula, and I enjoyed it. Also the music and the art was amazing.

3.       The House in Fata Morgana was my third favorite game I discovered in 2020!!! It was a visual novel I had gotten in 2019 but never started because “They didn’t have anime eyes so IDK if it’ll be interesting.” I had seen a lot of horror visual novel people review it though with stellar reviews. I ended up playing it when I was sick and man was it an amazing story. It gave me a lot of respect for people who write short stories that wrap up nicely, and a lot  of the characters were flawed but I really enjoyed reading their stories.  The story was pretty basic in the beginning of a maid telling you several different stories of the previous owners of the mansion she worked in, and the tragedies that befell them throughout her time there, and I really liked the sort of tragedy feel. One of the stories reminded me of Greek tragedies like Oedipus, and as the story got deeper and deeper and connected plot threads of the previous owners it became very cool. Also the game was very LGBT+ friendly with trans and bi characters and possibly an aro character too???

4.       Hades was my fourth favorite game in 2020!!! A lot of people have already talked about Hades before and what it’s about but I’d like to talk about why I liked it. As mentioned before I have a problem with video games that rely on skill. I get so frustrated that I either start yelling or crying because I don’t believe that the muscle memory will ever get into me or that I’ll ever be good enough to get past the hard part. It’s incredibly distressing and it makes me feel bad because I’m like “why can’t I do a simple thing other people can easily do?” Hades is one of the few games that taught me that eventually I will succeed, and the muscle memory will come to me. As you probably know Hades has god mode which increases your damage resistance every time you loose. I got to the max god mode very quickly of 80% and for about 10 runs even that wasn’t enough to beat the first boss and I was incredibly frustrated. I was like “they should have raised it to 90% cuz if even their worst players couldn’t beat the boss on easy mode then they’re missing out.” But as people have probably told you, Hades rewards failure. Each run you learn a bit more and get better skills and friendships with people due to grinding. And eventually I stuck to it and beat the first boss, and then all the other bosses. The muscle memory finally hit and I beat Hades and got the true ending and I’m really glad the developers made it accessible enough that even the worst players could beat it and I’m glad they rewarded failure.

5.       My next favorite is Chaos;Child, which wasn’t made in 2020, but I did discover it in 2020. It’s another horror visual novel but by the people who did Steins;Gate. I absolutely adore Steins;Gate because of the time travel so I was curious about the other games in the series. Everyone said Chaos;Child was the murder mystery of what Steins;Gate did to time travel and they were right. It was a psychic murder mystery story and although it was very gorey it was very fun and I really liked the characters

6.       Sixth favorite was Café Enchante a new otome dating sim released in 2020! You run a coffeshop for monsters basically and I adored it!!! I was a little worried before I got it that it would be boring because what kind of plot can you make in a coffeeshop? But it was very cute and I loved the monsters and the lore. Despite my misunderstanding the entire game did not take place in the coffeeshop and instead went into various monster worlds and expanded on the lore of each world in each route. The art was wonderful and I just love fake monster lore about Fae and beasts and angels and stuff and it was just a wonderful game and is one of my new fave otome titles.

7.       I played Ai: the somnium files in 2020! I knew it would be a favorite of the year because it was made by the same people who did the zero escape series. It had a very different tone of the zero escape series of course, instead of being about psychics it’s about the inner workings of the mind. You play a detective going into people’s psyche’s to try to catch a murderer basically. It reminded me a lot of ID;invaded an anime that I think came out this year? Anyway it was a cool story and I liked the graphics but I did not like the timed missions. Without a guide I would have died.

8.       The dark horse of 2020 was Untitled Goose Game. I did not expect to get it but my friend gifted to me and I hadn’t played it yet. And as everyone can tell you it’s just a fun time harassing people as a goose. It has 2 player mode so my sister and I played it together and it was great. I liked feeling like grand theft robbers and saying “BOOK IT” as we stole people’s stuff.

9.       My ninth favorite game I played in 2020 was Little Busters! It’s by the same people who did Clannad so I knew I would be crying by the end. Clannad’s team is known for their great story telling and heart wrenching characters. It’s about a team of friends who start a baseball team and then it gets sad and time loop-y from there. I played Clannad too in 2020 but it was a little too homophobic for me to let it make it to this list and I don’t remember any homophobia in little busters, so little busters gets its spot.

10.   Finally we get to Persona 5 Royal. I didn’t play much of the original persona 5 besides at my friends apartment so I was able to finally have a copy of this game on my own!!! I loved the idea of going into mean people’s minds and changing their hearts so they could understand the wrong that they did, it was just a good concept. I also loved that Persona 5 royal added a safety mode so you can loose and yet not die. It was a great game of 2020 and it only makes it so low because I spent way too many hours on it (135) and it was a great amazing game that I loved and enjoy talking about but would not replay because it’s just so long and I’m not quite sure what would be different on  replay. Also I’m sad that you can’t date the boys because I love them. They are good beans. Either way though I’d recommend it if you haven’t played before and it was very fun, and still one of the best games of 2020.

If you want me to talk about any of these games in more depth instead of just a short review tell me!!!

[reblogthiscrapkay]

Persephone in “Women Who Run With Wolves” by Clarissa Pinkola Estes

The Persephone well will never run dry. When I started doing this over two years ago, I worked at a bookstore and I managed to run through all the books I could find in the store that mentioned her. Now, admittedly, I come across new stuff less often but even as I say this I have three books I own that I know I’m going to write about that I just haven’t gotten around to reading yet. Also now all my friends are very aware of this and will direct me to new stuff if they come across it. 

This one, however, was just a book I was reading for fun. In general, I just love mythology and folklore so I often read books about it. Regardless, I wasn’t surprised to find some Persephone, but how she appeared was definitely surprising.

For the reference, I enjoyed the heck out of this book. It involves an archetypal and Jungian psychological analysis of various tales as they relate to the female psyche as a means of, I guess, empowerment? Self help? I don’t know. I just love reading deep dives of stories. Why else would I do THIS?

So based on this introduction about Baubo, who I had never heard of before, I was definitely not expecting the Persephone myth. This is a chapter on sexuality so when I looked in the index and saw that Persephone was mentioned in it, I had a different thought. When I read “Narcissus and the Pomegranate” it talked a lot about how you can read the story not just about budding adulthood but budding sexuality as represented through the seeds. This was. . . not that.

I have straight up never heard this before in any of the - what?- fifty or so versions of this myth that I’ve consumed in my thirty years. I immediately noticed the shift to Demeter over Persephone, common enough in print myth retellings that use the Homeric Hymn as a basis, but then we have Demeter at the well, presumably the same well in Eleusis that is often mentioned in myth, the same well I’ve actually seen in Eleusis, but instead of being approached by Callidice and the other daughters of the king, we have Baubo. And then it just glosses over the rest of the story, which for the purposes of this chapter makes sense because it’s literally a chapter about sexual humor specifically, but still, what the heck? The author of this book says where she gets a lot of her stories but I’ve read the damn Homeric Hymn. I’ve read books about the damn Homeric Hymn, specially ones written by women who address the female aspects of the story. Show me Baubo. Seriously. I don’t doubt her existence in general as a goddess, but I doubt it in this narrative. [EDIT: I had an anonymous reader tell me that Baubo is more commonly known as Iambe and NOW IT MAKES SENSE. She was a servant of Metanira (the queen) in tellings of the myth. Now my question becomes: why is she so rarely represented? She’s never even appeared in any of my Persephone Project posts even though I’ve heard of her from one of the many versions I’ve read (I think the Robert Graves version since that’s one of the only sources I can find and I have some definite Thoughts about how he presents information).]

Later on Persephone is mentioned a bunch again in a chapter about specifically women travelling to the underworld tales. Makes sense.  The red lines indicate the important part.

Now this is some stuff I can back up!  “Narcissus and the Pomegranate” talked about this a bunch although it often focused more on the goddess being both a land and underworld goddess who had a male consort who travels to her, but still. Either way you flip the genders, the basic formula being older than Persephone and being a consensual union is accurate.  “Narcissus and the Pomegranate” hypothesized that this change with the Hades and Persephone myth was to give Zeus more power by having him approve the marriage (and carry out the wedding practices of the time). 

So a few points here: 1. I don’t recall ever hearing the thing about the two trees before. And as a giant Tolkien nerd (I said I like mythology! Let me tell you about The Silmarillon for 11 hours) I would definitely remember a reference to two trees. 2. The reborn from Elysium concept I have heard before, but it’s definitely not common. I’ve heard it specifically as an element of initiation into the Eleusisan Mysteries rather than standard belief of the masses, thereby making it a specific Persephone/Demeter/Hades worship thing.

Uh, that thing about hanging from the World Tree? Wasn’t that Odin in Norse mythology? That’s definitely not a Persephone thing. I guess otherwise, I like the comparative mythology thing happening here with the orchards. Anyway, this was a weird one that I am skeptical of. The book itself is good though. The initial chapter on the Life/Death/Life cycle with women and “The Skeleton Woman” story (Chapter 5, Hunting: When The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter) is my favorite and does a better job of explaining the importance of Persephone than any of the bits that actually mention her.

[thesteadydietofeverything]

Top 10 Games of 2019

This was an extremely good year for games. I don’t know if I played as many that will stick with me as I did last year, but the ones on the bottom half of this list in particular constitute some of my favorite games of the decade, and probably all-time. If I’ve got a gaming-related resolution for next year, it’s to put my playtime into supporting even smaller indie devs. My absolute favorite experiences in games this year came from seemingly out of nowhere games from teams I’ve previously never heard of before. That said, there are some big games coming up in spring I doubt I’ll be able to keep myself away from. Some quick notes/shoutouts before I get started:

-The game I put maybe the most time into this year was Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn. I finally made the plunge into neverending FF MMO content, and I’m as happy as I am overwhelmed. This was a big year for the game, between the release of the Shadowbringers expansion and the Nier: Automata raid, and it very well may have made it onto my list if I had managed to actually get to any of it. At the time of this writing, though, I’ve only just finished 2015’s Heavensward, so I’ve got...a long way to go. 

-One quick shoutout to the Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney Trilogy that came out on Switch this year, a remaster of some DS classics I never played. An absolutely delightful visual novel series that I fell in love with throughout this year.

-I originally included a couple games currently in early access that I’ve enjoyed immensely. I removed them not because of arbitrary rules about what technically “came out” this year, but just to make room for some other games I liked, out of the assumption that I’ll still love these games in their 1.0 formats when they’re released next year to include them on my 2020 list. So shoutout to Hades, probably the best rogue-like/lite/whatever I’ve ever played, and Spin Rhythm XD, which reignited my love for rhythm games.

-Disco Elysium isn’t on this list, because I’ve played about an hour of it and haven’t yet been hooked by it. But I’ve heard enough about it to be convinced that it is 1000% a game for me and something I need to get to immediately. They shouted out Marx and Engels at the Game Awards! They look so cool! I want to be their friend! And hopefully, a few weeks from now, I’ll desperately want to redact this list to squeeze this game somewhere in here.

Alright, he’s the actual list:

10. Amid Evil

The 90’s FPS renaissance continues! As opposed to last year’s Dusk, a game I adored, this one takes its cues less from Quake and more from Heretic/Hexen, placing a greater emphasis on melee combat and magic-fuelled projectiles than more traditional weapons. Also, rather than that game’s intentionally ugly aesthetic, this one opts for graphics that at times feel lush, detailed, and pretty, while still probably mostly fitting the description of lo-fi. In fact, they just added RTX to the game, something I’m extremely curious to check out. This game continued to fuel my excitement about the possibilities of embracing out-of-style gameplay mechanics to discover new and fresh possibilities from a genre I’ve never been able to stop yearning for more of.

9. Ape Out

If this were a “coolest games” list, Ape Out would win it, easily. It’s a simple game whose mechanics don’t particularly evolve throughout the course of its handful of hours, but it leaves a hell of an impression with its minimalist cut-out graphics, stylish title cards, and percussive soundtrack. Smashing guards into each other and walls and causing them to shoot each other in a mad-dash for the exit is a fun as hell take on Hotline Miami-esque top down hyper violence, even if it’s a thin enough concept that it starts to feel a bit old before the end of the game.

8. Fire Emblem: Three Houses

I had a lot of problems with this game, probably most stemming from just how damn long it is - I still haven’t finished my first, and likely only, playthrough. This length seems to have motivated the developers to make battles more simple and easy, and to be fair, I would get frustrated if I were getting stuck on individual battles if I couldn’t stop thinking about how much longer I have to go, but as it is, I’ve just found them to be mostly boring. This is particularly problematic for a game that seems to require you to play through it at least...three times to really get the full picture? I couldn’t help but admire everything this game got right, though, and that mostly comes down to building a massive cast of extremely well realized and likable characters whose complex relationships with each other and with the structures they pledge loyalty to fuels harrowing drama once the plot really sets into motion. There’s a reason no other game inspired such a deluge of memes and fan fiction and art into my Twitter feed this year. It’s an impressive feat to convince every player they’ve unquestionably picked the right house and defend their problem children till the bitter end. After the success of this game, I’d love to see what this team can do next with a narrower focus and a bigger budget.

7. Resident Evil 2

It’s been a long time since I played the original Resident Evil 2, but I still consider it to be one of my favorite games of all time. I was highly skeptical of this remake at first, holding my stubborn ground that changing the fixed camera to a RE4-style behind the back perspective would turn this game more into an action game and less of a survival horror game where feeling a lack of control is part of the experience. I was pleasantly surprised to find how much they were able to modernize this game while maintaining its original feel and atmosphere. The fumbly, drifting aim-down sights effectively sell the feeling of being a rookie scared out of your wits. Being chased by Mr. X is wildly anxiety-inducing. But even more surprisingly, perhaps the greatest upgrade this game received was its map, which does you the generous service of actually marking down automatically where puzzles and items are, which rooms you’ve yet to enter, which ones you’ve searched entirely, and which ones still have more to discover. Arguably, this disrupts the feeling of being lost in a labyrinthine space that the original inspired, but in practice, it’s a remarkably satisfying and addicting video game system to engage with.

6. Judgment

No big surprise here - Ryu ga Gotoku put out another Yakuza-style game set in Kamurocho, and once again, it’s sitting somewhere on my top 10. This time, they finally put Kazuma Kiryu’s story to bed and focused on a new protagonist, down on his luck lawyer-turned-detective Takayuki Yagami. The new direction doesn’t always pay off - the added mechanics of following and chasing suspects gets a bit tedious. The game makes up for it, though, by absolutely nailing a fun, engrossing J-Drama of a plot entirely divorced from the Yakuza lore. The narrative takes several head-spinning turns through its several dozen hours, and they all feel earned, with a fresh sense of focus. The side stories in this one do even more to make you feel connected to the community of Kamurocho by befriending people from across the neighborhood. I’d love to see this team take even bigger swings in the future - and from what I’ve seen from Yakuza 7, that seems exactly like what they’re doing - but even if this game shares maybe a bit too much DNA with its predecessors, it’s hard to complain when the writing and acting are this enjoyable.

5. Control

Control feels like the kind of game that almost never gets made anymore. It’s a AAA game that isn’t connected to any larger franchises and doesn’t demand your attention for longer than a dozen hours. It doesn’t shoehorn needless RPG or MMO mechanics into its third-person action game formula to hold your attention. It introduces a wildly clever idea, tells a concise story with it, and then its over. And there’s something so refreshing about all of that. The setting of The Oldest House has a lot to do with it. I think it stands toe-to-toe with Rapture or Black Mesa as an instantly iconic game world. Its aesthetic blend of paranormal horror and banal government bureaucracy gripped my inner X-Files fan instantly, and kept him satisfied not only with its central characters and mystery but with a generous bounty of redacted documents full of worldbuilding both spine-tingling and hilarious. More will undoubtedly come from this game, in the form of DLC and possibly even more, with the way it ties itself into other Remedy universes, and as much as I expect I will love it, the refreshing experience this base game offered me likely can’t be beat.

4. Anodyne 2

I awaited Sean Han Tani and Marina Kittaka’s new game more anxiously than almost any game that came out this year, despite never having played the first one, exclusively on my love for last year’s singular All Our Asias and the promise that this game would greatly expand on that one’s Saturn/PS1-esque early 3D graphics and personal, heartfelt storytelling. Not only was I not disappointed, I was regularly pleasantly surprised by the depth of narrative and themes the game navigates. This game takes the ‘legendary hero’ tropes of a Zelda game and flips them to tell a story about the importance of community and taking care of loved ones over duty to governments or organizations. The dungeons that similarly reflect a Link to the Past-era Zelda game reduce the maps to bite-sized, funny, clever designs that ask you to internalize unique mechanics that result in affecting conclusions. Plus, it’s gorgeously idiosyncratic in its blend of 3D and 2D environments and its pretty but off-kilter score. It’s hard to believe something this full and well realized came from two people. 

3. Eliza

Eliza is a work of dystopian fiction so closely resembling the state of the world in 2019 it’s hard to even want to call it sci-fi. As a proxy for the Eliza app, you speak the words of an AI therapist that offers meager, generic suggestions as a catch-all for desperate people facing any number of the nightmares of our time. The first session you get is a man reckoning with the state the world is in - we’ve only got a few more years left to save ourselves from impending climate crisis, destructive development is rendering cities unlivable for anyone but the super-rich, and the people who hold all the power are just making it all worse. The only thing you offer to him is to use a meditation app and take some medication. It doesn’t take long for you to realize that this whole structure is much less about helping struggling people and more about mining personal data.

There’s much more to this story than the grim state of mental health under late capitalism, though. It’s revealed that Evelyn, the character you play as, has a much closer history with Eliza than initially evident. Throughout the game, she’ll reacquaint herself with old coworkers, including her two former bosses who have recently split and run different companies over their differing frightening visions for the future. The game offers a biting critique of the kind of tech company optimism that brings rich, eccentric men to believe they can solve the world’s problems within the hyper-capitalist structure they’ve thrived under, and how quickly this mindset gives way to techno-fascism. There’s also Evelyn’s former team member, Nora, who has quit the tech world in favor of being a DJ “activist,” and her current lead Rae, a compassionate person who genuinely believes in the power of Eliza to better people’s lives. The writing does an excellent job of justifying everyone’s points of view and highlighting the limits of their ideology without simplifying their sense of morality.

Why this game works so well isn’t just its willingness to stare in the face of uncomfortably relevant subject matter, but its ultimately empathetic message. It offers no simple solutions to the world’s problems, but also avoids falling into utter despair. Instead, it places measured but inspiring faith in the power of making small, meaningful impacts on the people around you, and simply trying to put some good into your world. It’s a game both terrifying and comforting in its frank conclusions.

2. Death Stranding

For a game as willfully dumb as this one often is - that, for example, insists on giving all of its characters with self-explanatory names long monologues about how they got that name - Death Stranding was one of the most thought provoking games I’ve played in a while. Outside of its indulgent, awkwardly paced narrative, the game offers plenty of reflection on the impact the internet has had on our lives. As Sam Porter Bridges, you’re hiking across a post-apocalyptic America, reconnecting isolated cities by delivering supplies, building infrastructure, and, probably most importantly, connecting them to the Chiral Network, an internet of sorts constructed of supernatural material of nebulous origin. Through this structure, the game offers surprisingly insightful commentary about the necessity for communication, cooperation, and genuine love and care within a community.

The lonely world you’re tasked to explore, and the way you’re given blips of encouragement within the solitude through the structures and “likes” you give and receive through the game’s asynchronous multiplayer system, offers some striking parallels for those of us particularly “online” people who feel simultaneous desperation for human contact and aversion to social pressures. I’ve heard the themes of this game described as “incoherent” due to the way it seems to view the internet both as a powerful tool to connect people and a means by which people become isolated and alienated, but are both of these statements not completely true to reality? The game simplifies some of its conclusions - Kojima seems particularly ignorant of America’s deep structural inequities and abuses that lead to a culture of isolation and alienation. And yet, the questions it asks are provocative enough that they compelled me to keep thinking about them far longer than the answers it offers.

Beyond the surprisingly rich thematic content, this game is mostly just a joy to play. Death Stranding builds kinetic drama out of the typically rote parts of games. Moving from point A to point B has become an increasingly tedious chore in the majority of AAA open world games, but this is a game built almost entirely out of moving from point A to point B, and it makes it thrilling. The simple act of walking down a hill while trying to balance a heavy load on your back and avoiding rocks and other obstacles fulfills the promise of the term ‘walking simulator’ in a far more interesting way than most games given that descriptor. The game consistently doles out new ways to navigate terrain, which peaked for me about two thirds of the way through the game when, after spending hours setting up a network of zip lines, a delivery offered me the opportunity to utilize the entire thing in a wildly satisfying journey from one end of the map to another. It was the gaming moment of the year.

1. Outer Wilds

The first time the sun exploded in my Outer Wilds playthrough, I was probably about to die anyway. I had fallen through a black hole, and had yet to figure out how to recover from that, so I was drifting listlessly through space with diminishing oxygen as the synths started to pick up and I watched the sun fall in on itself and then expand throughout the solar system as my vision went went. The moment gave me chills, not because I wasn’t already doomed anyway, but because I couldn’t help but think about my neighbors that I had left behind to explore space. I hadn’t known that mere minutes after I left the atmosphere the solar system would be obliterated, but I was at least able to watch as it happened. They probably had no idea what happened. Suddenly their lives and their planet and everything they had known were just...gone. And then I woke up, with the campfire burning in front of me, and everyone looking just as I had left it. And I became obsessed with figuring out how to stop that from happening again. 

What surprised me is that every time the sun exploded, it never failed to produce those chills I felt the first time. This game is masterful in its art, sound, and music design that manages to produce feelings so intense from an aesthetic so quaint. Tracking down fellow explorers by following the sound of their harmonica or acoustic guitar. Exploring space in a rickety vessel held together by wood and tape. Translating logs of conversations of an ancient alien race and finding the subject matter of discussion to be about small interpersonal drama as often as it is revelatory secrets of the universe. All of the potentially twee aspects of the game are balanced out by an innate sense of danger and terror that comes from exploring space and strange worlds alone. At times, the game dips into pure horror, making other aspects of the presentation all the more charming by comparison. And then there’s the clockwork machinations of the 22-minute loop you explore within, rewarding exploration and experimentation with reveals that make you feel like a genius for figuring out the puzzle at the same time that you’re stunned by the divulgence of a new piece of information.

The last few hours of the game contained a couple puzzles so obfuscated that I had to consult a guide, which admittedly lessened the impact of those reveals, but it all led to one of the most equally devastating and satisfying endings I’ve experienced in a video game recently. I really can’t say enough good things about this game. It’s not only my favorite game this year, but easily one of my favorite games of the decade, and really, of all-time, when it comes down to it.