#it's nice to do some of these writing prompts so i can get yara's personality across a little stronger rather than just her face lol

[supermarine-silvally]

Gooooood morning, I'm here to send you numbers 1, 2, 7, 10 and 13 from the Happy Together ask game for Yara and Ace, my beloveds. Hope you're doing well!

tysm for the ask!!! I am obsessed with these two fr (also tagging @oneirataxia-girl to share the brainrot heheh)

(ask game here!)

This got long so I'll put the answers under the cut!

1. What are your OTP’s love languages?

In terms of receiving, I headcanon Ace as a words of affirmation sort of guy-- we all know that between Garp and Dadan and all the adults in his life that Ace didn’t receive a lot of reassurance about his self-worth growing up. The only time he was probably ever praised was when he brought home dinner for the mountain bandits, and he definitely enjoyed that one time when Makino remarked on how well-behaved he was for her, so getting that sort of verbal affirmation helps chase away the doubts he feels about whether or not he deserved to be born in the first place. As for giving, Ace is always surprising Yara with little gifts he finds on his solo missions/adventures or on the islands they visit together. He just loves making her smile.

Though she may come across as a little distant and give off the occasional ‘go near me and I’ll bite you’ vibe, Yara actually loves being touched and held and getting that skin-to-skin contact with the people she trusts and cares about. She basically was never hugged or given much physical affection for the vast majority of her life, and has some pretty severe abandonment issues, so she’s very touch-starved. The first time Ace hugged her, she didn’t quite know how to react, but all she knew was that deep down, she never wanted him to stop. In terms of giving affection, Yara shows her love through acts of service. She might grumble about Ace leaving his stuff lying around, but she always picks it up and puts it back where it needs to be, and makes sure that he has clean clothes and enough food/water to last whenever he’s going to be away for an extended period of time. Whenever Ace falls asleep in the middle of a meal, she’s always patiently waiting with a napkin or a cloth for when he comes to again.

2. Is your OTP a battle couple? How do they work together?

They’re both on one of the strongest crews in the One Piece universe serving under a literal Yonko so they’d definitely fit the battle couple description! (Yara is technically second-in-command on 2nd Division under Ace, so they end up side-by-side in combat a lot). Now the fun thing about them working together in battle is their devil fruit powers. Yara’s Tōka Tōka no Mi (Pass-Pass Fruit) means that she’s basically untouchable to physical attacks, barring seastone or a strong application of haki (or the Yami Yami no Mi), and Ace’s Mera Mera no Mi, being a Logia, means essentially the same thing for him. So Yara doesn’t have to worry about accidentally hitting Ace with her sword (her devil fruit might give her an excellent defense but it has almost no offensive capabilities, so she has to make up for that with swordplay) and Ace can go wild without worrying about burning Yara. Being faced with them in combat is to endure both their terrifying powers and combat prowess as well as their (mostly Ace’s) insufferable flirting. 

7. Do they plan on getting married? Who proposes? What’s their wedding like? 

Oh, Ace was probably thinking about marriage even before he left the Moby Dick to chase after Blackbeard. He aims to live without regrets, and he’s found someone he wants to spend the rest of his life with, so why wait? (Yara probably doesn’t think much about marriage, but if Ace asked, she wouldn’t say no). In alternate universes where Ace manages to avoid his unfortunate canon fate, they get married shortly after Marineford, after they’ve recovered from their injuries. Ace wanted to come up with an elaborate proposal plan and spent weeks crafting something, scrapping it, and annoying the hell out of Marco in the process. In the end, Ace and Yara are probably doing something simple like looking up at the stars and talking late into the night and he finally just blurts it out unprompted. (Yara is a bit surprised at first, but she eventually responds with a smile and a “Yes, of course I’ll marry you, you wonderful idiot.”)

The wedding is kind of chaotic, but in the best possible way. It was one of those things where it was supposed to be a small wedding (at Yara’s insistence, she really did not want to make a big deal out of it), but more and more people kept getting added to the guest list out of concerns it would be rude to not invite someone, so the event turns into a bit of a who’s who of the pirate world. Whitebeard’s entire fleet is invited, as are the Straw Hats because of course Luffy wouldn’t miss his brother’s wedding for the world. Curly Dadan and the mountain bandits also come, and Dadan spends the entire time ugly-sobbing into a handkerchief. At some point, Shanks’ crew stops by and brings a fresh round of booze with them. Yara begrudgingly (after many long discussions) allows Ace to extend an invitation to Mihawk, who surprisingly shows up. They find a nice uninhabited summer island for the venue, probably one under Whitebeard’s protection. If Whitebeard is alive, he officiates. If not, Jinbei does. Ace definitely cries a bit at the altar, which makes Yara tear up as well. (Neither of them probably ever imagined finding someone who would love them this much). The celebrations last for a solid week, but partway through, Ace and Yara sneak away on Ace’s striker to start their honeymoon early. Afterwards, Ace takes every possible opportunity to refer to Yara as his wife. Saying it aloud never fails to make him grin.

10. What’s their sleeping arrangement? Who falls asleep first?

Ace can fall asleep anywhere, at any time, so Yara has had to learn to adapt to that. Whenever it happens, she just shifts around and tries to make them both as comfortable as possible until he wakes up. He pretty much always falls asleep first and will actively seek Yara out whenever he wants to take a nap. Ace’s devil fruit makes him the perfect person to nap with, so Yara almost never turns him down. It’s not an uncommon sight on the Moby Dick to find them curled up somewhere, having a rest. 

13. What do they love most about the other?

For Yara, loving Ace is like loving the sun-- he’s so bright and warm and passionate and all-consuming, but what she loves most about him is his kindness. He can befriend almost anyone and actively helps others even when it doesn’t necessarily benefit him to do so. (This is the man she watched spend days crafting a very large hat for a giant just to give him some protection from the elements, after all). Ace touches the lives of everyone he encounters, commanding such loyalty from his first crew that they were willing to come back and try to rescue him after he was defeated by Whitebeard, risking annihilation from a much stronger crew just to get their beloved captain back. She counts herself lucky to have been drawn into the orbit of such a bright, wonderful, absolute sweetheart of a man who brags about his little brother fifty times a day and manages to maintain his cheerful demeanour despite how much the world might hate him for the blood that runs through his veins. When Ace turned his kindness towards her, how could she not fall in love with him? 

Yara’s beauty might have first turned Ace’s head in her direction, but that wasn’t what held his attention there. He appreciates her steadfast loyalty to her crew and her sharp wit, but what he loves most about her is her honesty. Yara says what she means and means what she says, so he can always count on her to be straightforward with him. He was absolutely terrified of what she might think upon finding out he’s Gol D. Roger’s son, but when she smiled at him and assured him it changed nothing, he knew that she meant it. Whenever he has his self-doubts, he knows he can come to her and that she won’t just coddle his feelings, but will truly and honestly reassure him of the value that he brings to the world and to the lives of everyone around him. He trusts her opinion more than perhaps anyone else’s and feels like he’s found a partner who truly sees him for all that he is. His heart is in her hands, and he’s certain that when she says she’ll protect it with all her might, that she means it.

[periodicreviews]

Last of Us Part II

I went into Last of Us Part II without many spoilers and completed it today. I’m writing out my thoughts before reading any other reviews of the game.

Technical stuff

On a technical level, the game is a logical successor to Uncharted 4. The same great sound design is key to trying to locate where enemies are and I feel like playing with headphones is key. There’s a moment where if you fail a jump, your partner will say “hey you know if you run before the jump…” and the character you control says “yeah yeah, I know.” This is a great way of guiding the character without interrupting them with a prompt.

Returning from Uncharted 4 is the ability for characters to pause mid conversation when you walk away and for them to continue when you get closer. There aren’t quite as many chances for this to be triggered without vehicles but it’s good to see.

One of my big problems with the graphics in Uncharted 4 is that the facial models felt almost unrecognizable as they made them match the actors faces way too much. Nathan Drake just felt like Nolan North, as did Elena’s model. Maybe they learned their lesson because all the faces in TLOU2 felt like the characters I remembered from TLOU1. The only exception being the young Ellie model. At times, her eyes kind of felt dead. I don’t know if that’s a result of porting it from PS3 or not.

I also felt like the default control scheme was too hard to get used to. Dodge being mapped to L1 just did not feel natural coming from a first person shooter background. I eventually remapped it to the circle button, put crouch on the left control stick click, and other changes.

The number of options with respect to controls, which are fully configurable, and visual settings, particularly for motion sickness, are something that every console game should provide.

Speaking of motion sickness, the settings never quite eliminated it for me and although it became more manageable, there was this constant physical discomfort while playing the game. I believe Neil Druckmann said something to the effect that TLOU1 is about hope and TLOU2 is about hate. In that sense, I guess I felt more immersed by hating the game itself for causing my motion sickness.

 The plot

The game can be arguably be broken into two parts, Ellie’s story and Abby’s story. You play a tiny bit of Abby in the beginning of the game but then the focus is mainly on Ellie, until the two intersect at the theater confrontation. After the theater confrontation, you take control of Abby primarily, then finish things off as Ellie.

Once this midway switch happened, I figured they were going to have you play as Abby as you kill Ellie and Dina. I also wasn’t sure whether they would make you be the one to torture Joel. If you don’t know already, the game opens with Abby torturing and murdering Joel, which sets the plot in motion.

For a time, I was kind of upset that they were making me play as Abby. Your first big segment as adult Abby after you know who she is, is the slow walk through the WLF base. It feels like it drags on forever as you walk past children in classrooms, play with the dog, see all the animals, everyone eating in the cafeteria, etc.

Obviously, this is supposed to mirror the beginning of the game with Ellie as you walk through the Jackson level and see every single one of these same things. The level is supposed to get you to empathize with the people you have been murdering for 20 hours. “See? Abby’s not so bad, she wants pine scented soap at the commissary.”

But does everything need to be the same? There’s people running away from Jackson, the Seraphites, and the WLF. Characters on both sides are dealing with the internal power struggle. There just happens to be two pregnant women in Mel and Dina. It just happens to be that both Abby and Ellie are seeking revenge over the death of their father figures. Both WLF and Jackson engage in torture to get the info they need. At times all these coincidences just felt forced.

In the end, the game seems to be saying that this cycle of revenge is pointless because we’re all the same and it just causes more pain. The cycle plays out in this order in the game:

1. Joel murders Abby’s dad

2. Abby tortures and murders Joel

3. Tommy, Dina, and Ellie torture and murder Abby’s party members, in the search to find Abby

4. Abby murders Jesse, seriously injures Tommy, Dina, Ellie

5. Ellie attempts to murder Abby but eventually stops

But it bothered me the whole time that the game didn’t attempt to explain why Abby felt the need to torture Joel, when there’s no evidence that he tortured her father. Then it proceeded to make this equivalence between Abby and Ellie like they were equally guilty. Granted, Ellie tortured Nora in the hospital but that’s only after she egged her on by gloating about Joel’s screams.

Another thing that bothered me in the final pointless battle between Abby and Ellie is that they choose to portray Abby as the better person who doesn’t want to fight. Maybe it’s not necessarily a moral call, but just that she doesn’t think she can win in her current state.

 Abby’s redemption

I guess my bigger complaint is about Abby’s whole redemption arc. After being rescued from the Seraphites by two kids, Lev and Yara, she returns to Owen where the two argue about Owen leaving to find the Fireflies. At the heat of the argument, they decide to have sex, despite Mel being pregnant with Owen’s baby.

That night, Abby has a bad dream where she walks through the door of the hospital where she found her dad’s body and instead finds Yara and Lev dead hanging from a tree. When asked by Yara or Lev why she came back to help, despite all the protests from Owen, she says something like she had to do something or she couldn’t live with herself.

I guess there’s some indication of regret for what she has done in the past. But it’s never made clear if this is about Joel or just her life choices in general. Later on, after rescuing them, she has the same dream but this time, she sees her dad alive instead. That temporary peace is then destroyed by the murder of Owen and she goes on a rampage to try to kill everyone associated with it.

I feel like there’s both not enough of Abby’s past in order to sell the regret and/or not enough regret in the present to sell the shift in behavior.

 Trans representation

I should have done my research before assuming what I had heard was true. It turns out Abby isn’t trans at all, only Lev is (who is in fact voiced by a trans actor). I thought I remembered reading a paper in a Young Abby segment that mentioned “transitioning”. Maybe I read it too fast and it was about another character, not Abby. Thanks to the helpful commenter who corrected me.

It seems people are mad at Laura Bailey just because she voices a character and they don’t like what that fictional character did, which is absurd but unfortunately not surprising.

The game obviously takes a risk by featuring not just one trans character but two. By risk I mean both politically from a company standpoint and from a writing standpoint.

I’m writing this prior to reading any other reviews or to know what exactly the controversy is surrounding Laura Bailey, who plays Abby. I’m assuming the problem is that she is not trans and is playing a trans character. I’m unsure if the same is true for Lev or not. I understand the problem of trans actors being rejected from roles because of that identity. But I don’t think all of the blame for that should lie with Laura Bailey, rather with Naughty Dog for making the choice not to cast a trans actress. If the audition was blind and Laura was select purely based on performance, that would complicate things. But given TLOU2 is almost a movie in terms of all the motion capture that is done, I feel like that probably wasn’t the case.

As a straight man, I felt like Abby and Lev as characters were done tastefully. Their identity is never really centered around being trans, just like Ellie’s character has never been centered around her being lesbian/bisexual. The other characters in the world don’t seem to treat them any differently because they are trans. There also aren’t the usual “trap” tropes or accusations that they aren’t “real” women or men.

 Things that suck

I was kind of surprised at how emotional I got during the game. There have definitely been games that have scared me (Dead Space) and games that have made me cry both out of sadness and joy (Mass Effect 3 Citadel DLC). But I don’t think a game has made me feel the same combination of anger, despair, and disgust in quite the same way.

The game starts off with a very graphic torture scene where Abby murders Joel but that didn’t really affect me. The scene was for sure shocking and I empathized with Ellie. But what really affected me was first having to control Abby as you attack Ellie and maybe even more so, watching Ellie leave Dina to continue to pursue Abby. It just hurt so much to see her give up the perfect life in pursuit of this pointless struggle.

 Was it good?

But is it a good game? Did I enjoy it? Do I agree with the message it’s trying to send?

It’s hard to describe a game like TLOU2 as fun or enjoyable when it’s a horror-action-drama. There are some great scenes between Joel and Ellie, Ellie and Dina, and Ellie and Jessie. It was also nice to see characters like Lev and Yara who have grown up exclusively in this infected world.

I’m 100% on board with seeing a conflict from both sides. I just feel like they portrayed Ellie as evil, in order to make Abby more likeable, all to make both sides seem equal. On a technical level, the game is great, despite it crashing once and some other minor visual issues when the camera would clip through the level. I’d probably give it an 8/10.