i see a lot of interpretations of zor being this otherworldly, anomalous presence- larger than life, practically non-human. and i, too, like perceiving zor through this veil of anonymity. i think making them too tangible or perceivable really detracts from what's been established about their character.
but, i personally really, really like the thought of zor being human. mortal. but terrifying to the point where you'd be forgiven for forgetting it.
i think one of the things that i adored about ieytd before the third game dropped (and honestly made me a little disappointed when it was changed later on) was the fact that the agency never had a face. it just... was what it was. it had facets- granted, the EOD was always the only one of any relevance. but, really, think about what we know about the agency between all three games. compare that to how much we know about zoraxis.
there's something really appealing to me about zor being who they are... they're probably the most wealthiest person on earth. they had a monopoly that quite literally gripped the world in their first- as their emblem would suggest. they hire some of the most lethal minds in the world- chemists, inventors, engineers.
and yet... despite it all, they're just one person. to me, their anonymity is a shield against the fact they are a person. they hide behind the lethality and prowess of their elite operatives- not to mention we've seen how clever they can be when it came to manipulating prism. they're by no means useless.
but what would they be without their anonymity? what would they be without the weapons they didn't design, the lairs they didn't build, the employees they use as human shields? the second zor is gone, zoraxis crumbles. they are the support pillar of their entire corporation.
... but what's the agency's equivalent? even post morales being a character, can we be certain that he's the glue holding the entire organization together?
think about zoraxis' most lethal schemes. seizing control of the world's atomic weaponry. striking targets anywhere on earth's surface with a giant laser. exploding the brain of every telekinetic agent on the planet. are they really seeking to cause as much damage as possible- to the agency specifically, collateral, or otherwise?
or do they not know where to strike. zor's tactic- for as high the stakes have been escalating- has always carried a similar motif. cleave and strike indiscriminately until the threat is neutralized.
but it never works. zor is lashing at a hydra- sprouting new heads where the old ones have been lopped off. they don't seem aware of how to destroy the agency other than exterminating each and every one of them off the face of the earth, in whatever way is most convenient at the moment.
i just think there's something to be said about zoraxis- and by extension, zor- always being seen as this oppressive, near-otherworldly force, constantly applying pressure on phoenix... when for all we know, zoraxis could be perceiving the agency in the exact same light.
zor, ultimately, has one beating heart. the agency has thousands. and all of them are dispensable.
31 notes
·
View notes
why do you see bkg as trans?
i've had this ask sitting in my drafts since like august BECAUSE i knew if i did the question justice it was gonna get VERY long and pretty personal - if i'm gonna talk about it then i gotta talk about it in all earnest. and you've given me the floor to talk about it. so!!
at first i had these typed out as two separate points but i think they go a lot more hand-in-hand than that, so to start - when i think about my own gender and why i can't bring myself to identify fully with womanhood a lot of it is because there's something that feels so free about masculinity. mostly just like because of womanhood on a societal level a lot of my experience as a girl forever has been "you need to think about how your existence makes other people feel. you really need to present yourself in a way that's pleasant for other people. the way you look, the way you talk, the way you conduct yourself - people are entitled to having a say in all that. and if any of that isn't living up to the way it's supposed to be, then that's a fault of yours." here's a vent post i made when i was 17:
which is mostly really superficial examples of the suffocating expectation of girlhood but it's also so blatantly about bkg. in the moment my thought process was more like "i'm so deeply unsatisfied with so many parts of being a girl, it sounds like there'd be so many less people to answer to if i were a boy" but it's funny reading back on it bc it's like "dude are you just talking about bkg". but then who's a better example of choosing to stomp through life exactly as loud and rude as he wants to be without answering to anyone than bakugou katsuki!! honest about his thoughts in any case!! free to speak as bluntly and rudely as he wants!! never putting up with shit that makes him feel unlike himself!! walks with big wide steps and wears stupid baggy clothes and doesn't care what people have to say about it and doesn't feel worse if they do disagree. grins crazy blasting himself through the air. fights with big windup swings and shouts all the while. huge huge presence and so unafraid to assert it. named himself great・explosion・murder・god dynamight. i think i project a big sense of defiance onto bkg's character because everything he is just feels so defiant to me. there's just a lot that i admire about boyhood and bkg feels like the embodiment of it to me
and then you've got bkg himself, who like- isn't even fulfilling the "doesn't feel worse about himself if he is genuinely not the greatest or kindest" part of it!! bkg's character is so centered around figuring out who he is and like navigating through the mortifying ordeal of existing and not actually liking the person you are and trying to figure out where to go from there- he really thinks he has so much to prove...both in the sense that he DOES want to project this big image and also that he really can't cut himself a break. and then he freaks out when he's not becoming the person he wants to be and picks a fight with deku over it and totally breaks down and picks himself back up and forces himself to seriously rewire the entire view of himself and others that he's had his entire life - he's 16 - and goes to all this teeth-clenching effort to be a better person and has highs and lows and wears himself raw and then comes back to life. well the quality of the later part of his arc is very debatable. but his character is so about just figuring out who he is and kind of failing at it a lot of the time. and then eventually figuring it out and getting confident and stable in it. he makes friends who rib on him because they know he's got a good heart under it all, and moreover he lets them. he gets good at shouting something back and carrying on. you see the amount of conscious thinking it takes him to take some of those steps - rethinking his relationship with deku, the god am i really fucking doing this scoff before he gives kirishima back the money - but a lot of it is just steady growth. growing up. genuinely getting more comfortable and more okay with himself over time. but there's also all these little failures along the way because he's just a kid figuring it out, and also genuinely this anger towards the world for not understanding it when he does assert himself (sports festival....where deku also specifically notes that he knows he's not as confident as he wants to be!)
i haven't really closely reread bnha in a sec so a lot of this is probably a lot of projecting (i know it's undeniably influenced by the picture of bkg i have in my head) and i probably also didn't really clarify anything, because in the end everything bakugou is feels very trans to me. "the image you have of bkg katsuki in your head can actually be so personal" etc. digging into my archives i found this post from years back where i described basically the same stuff about bkg being a teen figuring himself out and saying "so yeah he's trans" without being able to hit it more on the head. kirishima is my favorite most special boy of all time, and i love him in so many ways, but bkg is my cringefail stinky teen boy in w the unshatterable determination to actually go MAKE himself the person he wants to be, no matter how many missteps he makes on the way there. it brings me a lot of comfort to imagine him being a self-made man as a part of the because gender is so confusing and questioning can be so intense. i'm 23 and i'm typing all this about an anime boy so i hope it's evident what a soul-bearingly honest answer this is bc otherwise oh haha embarrassing. but yeah i love that kid. i hope every little victory and day where his voice sounds good to him and glance of his top scars in the mirror feels like one of the high points on the journey
25 notes
·
View notes
What is your favourite thing about Billie Lurk?
(Answers are obvious possibly but i love when people talk about her👍)
thanks for the ask!! YEAH ME TOO I love when people talk about Billie! I can't say I have a favourite thing specifically, but I can explain why she's my fav. apologies for not taking this qn literally, but -
short answer: she’s really cool
& you can stop reading there, or, for the maybe 2 mutuals who might have time to read this my thoughts on her as a character, her meta, and her character as raw potential...
long answer:
i considered making this entire thing a gush so you could read a gush about Billie. but, part of what draws me to her is that she’s not always well written, and in fandom she’s underrated for a literal protagonist.
since you ask...
billie is a cool character
when I played Dh2 (hadn't played Dh1), I was excited to see a black woman with disabilities who was captaining a massive ship by herself. wow.
then I discovered Billie’s backstory with Deirdre, the way she responded to that, then having to survive while living on the run, and her bisexuality. as well as her history with daud & delilah. fascinating!
she’s an outsider who has so much to lose, and knows what it's like to lose everything - having lost everything not once but three times - but nevertheless speaks truth to power. she's so brave! she went and helped Emily & Corvo and she must have known they might kill her! plus, she’s smart, she’s funny, she gets shit done, she’s gorgeous.
but... the meta
mild critique of fandom & arkane incoming.
skip this bit if you want - you've been warned twice now - jump to tired Hayao Miyazaki and read from there if you'd like my thoughts on writing her.
i thought Death of the Outsider was going to be amazing and then... well. *sad trombone* i've written about that before so i won't keep banging on. i figured others must be disappointed too, so I joined a few fandom spaces in hopes of finding camaraderie.
most people with complaints about DotO didn’t like how the Outsider and Daud were handled. which is valid & I agree. but it seemed like most paid no attention to Billie; when people talk about her it’s with respect to Daud, as opposed to in her own right. you could argue for fandom misogyny because people don’t talk about adult Emily Kaldwin that much either, but in Billie's case, it’s misogynoir (compare & contrast with the popularity of thomas, particularly the popularity of thomas portrayed as a white man for no particular reason that i've been able to discern - i keep asking around, is it in the books???).
i think this is a LOT better now than it used to be, which is fantastic. or perhaps i have found the correct echo-chamber? ha.
ultimately, The Fandom is a fraction of the entire picture, and not even the important bit since The Fandom is not who these games are made for. you can't make money relying on only your hardcore fans even if all of them spent a fortune on merch, this is true for any AAA game.
while it's true that Billie is underrated from a fandom perspective - but Billie as an underwritten protagonist is squarely Arkane’s fault.
it was reasonable when she was a side character - the lack of info in Dh2 makes perfect sense (if anything there was more lore in Dh2 which is kind of wild)-
- but as a protagonist in Death of the Outsider?
.... there’s lousy writing, and there’s whatever is going on with Billie Lurk, a black woman who mostly exists as a foil or saviour for light-skinned characters. In her own game there’s barely any of her own lore except where it's relevant to saving two dudes.
lore hints at, but barely touches on what race means in the Dh universe (xenophobia is stronger in Dh1; separate essay i guess), but Arkane has patted themselves on the back for portraying non-white characters, which feels like the same thing as the aesthetic of diversity we're seeing in advertising currently because it’s in marketing trend guides. it's self-congratulatory and it's a missed opportunity for deeper storytelling.
you can see an example of diversity at its most shallow in the way that Billie’s written: there’s little engagement with her as an entire person with history & wants & preferences, and the world she walks through in that game feels like it has nothing to do with her. you could make a case for alienation as a theme, but then, how do you handle the titular premise of 'Dishonored' without ever letting Billie make changes in an environment without a chaos system? it's disappointing from that angle too.
in my opinion, whatever it's worth, it was an accident Arkane created such an awesome character - they needed someone to betray daud. congrats billie.
all this said, it makes her an underdog as far as characters to enjoy & create art & stories for. it's nice to find so many like-minded, switched on people! <3
billie's character potential
she’s got a wealth of unexplored lore, being deeply intertwined with both Karnaca & Dunwall’s fates & criminal underbellies, as well as her connections to the witches & whalers, and three Empresses.
she’s lived a few distinct lifetimes and in the games we get to meet her at two peaks (KoD & DotO) & a low (Dh2 as Meagan).
her voice is very distinct, her dry & often dark humour is entertaining & fun to write. her perspective is really interesting - she’s had the widest variety of void-powers of anyone canonically, and she’s also lived through the highest highs and lowest lows.
she's got everything going for her :) i couldn't really pick a fav thing!
32 notes
·
View notes
Listen, I am 100% on board with the concept of Link and Zelda living together. The thing is, I headcanon Link as an ace neurodivergent gremlin running around with a sword (because it just feels right to me) and Zelda as having a similar brand of brain soup as him—so my concept of them living together is kind of uhhhhhh specific?
I mean, I like to imagine it starts with Zelda just coming over to Link’s house to work on research while he’s learning new cooking techniques or something so they can body-double each other. Then it gets late and Zelda crashes for the night because she knows Link feels safe around her and she feels safe around him, and anyway they just like being in each other’s presence. And in the morning Zelda wakes up and Link’s already outside climbing trees or fishing or something. (He was going to make breakfast for her but remembered that Zelda mentioned at some point that she dislikes eating too early in the morning, but he made her a snack just in case.)
Then Link says he’s going out to the nearby forest later to gather some mushrooms (because some lady in town said wanted them for inspiration but was too busy to make the trip herself) and asks if Zelda wants to come with him. He says maybe they’ll find some frogs because he knows Zelda really likes frogs. Link does these sorts of odd jobs a lot and Zelda almost always tags along, except sometimes he’ll say he’s going to visit the dragons or go check up on the goddess statues or visit Oaki out in Korok Forest. He just needs to stretch his legs, maybe scale a mountain. He’d love it if she came with, but he gives her the option since he might be gone for a few days (and he offers to get one of their friends to stay with her for her safety). He tells Zelda that she’s welcome to use the house while he’s out. Whenever Zelda opts to stay at the house, Link brings back something random he found because he thought it was neat and wanted to share it with her.
This goes on for a while, and then one day Zelda realizes that the sign says “Zelda’s House” instead of “Link’s House.” She asks Link about it, and he tells her that he just thought it would be funny since she spends more time at the house than he does. (He actually changed it several weeks ago and Zelda just hadn’t noticed.)
Some time later, someone happens to ask them about it.
They both look at each other, and Zelda goes, “I completely forgot you did that.”
33 notes
·
View notes