#its ultimate excalibur btw.

[starrysharks]

tfw i slightly changed an oc story title and I'll eventually have to go back and change the tag on every post i've ever made about the project

[farewell-superiors]

I’m having so many thoughts about @ammstify’s persona 6 idea for it being about nature and being based on Arthurian legend but as more of a spin-off but I’m in the “pacing while brainstorming” phase which means that I have too much energy to sit down and actually write down my ideas so I may as well start a post that’s like… just a bunch of ramblings about ideas. Have so at least it’s WRITTEN DOWN and I won’t forget anything. If I think enough I might even make a fanfic in the style of steal the truth (which you should absolutely read btw it’s genuinely one of the best video game adaptations with how well it integrates persona’s calendar mechanic and social links into its story structure) but that would require a lot of foresight and planning (hence why u want to WRITE SHIT DOWN)

Anyway here goes. Spoilers for something that I just made up but might make into an actual thing in the future I guess lol

The themes are about growth (there's LOTS of plant imagery), moving on, and how it gets better (the sun will always rise, darkest before dawn, etc. (there's a lot of day/night imagery as well)), and it looks at the relationship between humans and the environment.

The setting will probably be Kyoto, or at least some city, but I'm undecided about whether the characters are high school or uni students. Both have their pros and cons and I just have to figure them out. I'm leaning towards Uni?

The actual persona elements take place in the sea of souls, although it's more accurate to say the field of souls, as it's an undending field of grass, flowers, and the odd tree/hill, with every bit of flora representing a life. Select people will travel to the sea of souls in their sleep, but sleeping in the sea of souls won't get you out, so if someone is there without a way out, it looks like they're in a coma. If they happen to die in there (haven't completely figured out shadow mechanics yet, don't know if day/night cycles in the sos would be over a few weeks (to represent the collective unconscious) or over a characters journey (because it's cool imagery)) the body will start growing vines and leaves as their pulse slowly fades.

One way to get out is through the velvet room: In the sea of souls there is a battlefield, with velvet blue warbanners rising amongst the bloodstained foliage, and in the centre is a familiar long nosed man sitting on a particularly comfy looking rock, with a warrior clad in a deep blue leather armour brandishing a spear and shield. As neither protagonist is a wild card (whoops spoiler) Igor doesn't act as the guy who fuses your personas, he's like a guide both through your journey and on your way back to the real world. Maybe belladonna and nameless are also there, who knows.

Persona users have a body part wrapped in foliage, vines, flowers, and the like (the location can be thematic, it’s as if wrapped in chains), and when summoned the foliage chains break and rapidly grow into the summoned persona.

Protag A (who I shall refer to as Sun because that’s their arcana) is a kind young man who was diagnosed with cancer. This diagnosis comes shortly after moving to a new city to start university, so he rightly is in a lot of turmoil and feeling alone. One of the way he copes is by having a fairly dark cynical sense of humour, contrasting with his kind and caring personality. I’m not set on a subject he does, I’m thinking natural sciences, it’s got a wide range of topics and, most importantly, MATHS (this isn’t a joke). His starting persona is Arthur, his second awakening is Arturus Rex, both of the sun arcana, and his ultimate persona is Excalibur, of the world arcana.

Protag B (who I shall refer to as Moon) is a standoffish young woman in the year above sun. An abuse survivor, her father (her only living relative) recently was jailed for what he did, but she still holds a deep contempt for humanity who she thinks has failed her. Initially forced to interact with sun because of a scheme where second years help first years, she stays with him because of a shared goal once they enter the sea of souls. Her story arc is about growing to care for others, learning to see the good in people, and stopping seeking revenge. Her starting persona is Lancelot, who evolves into white knight, both of the moon arcana, and her ultimate persona is Galahad of the world arcana (I’m intentionally hiding some things but oh well lol. The personas are thought out, I’ll tell you that).

I’ve not settled on social links or party members, I’ve got a few ideas, like Sun’s maths professor (who would either be magician or hierophant) and the Lovers arcana, but nothing concrete.

Getting into real endgame spoilers now, the premise is that two gods, Pendragon and Morgan le Fay, are arguing over whether humanity should suffer or not. Pendragon thinks they're a stain on the world and should be wiped out, while Morgan le Fay thinks they should live in eternal bliss. Given that the themes are about moving on and growing, neither is very good, or rather, life is a combination of the two. They're represented by the moon and the sun in the sea of souls, when Pendragon is "winning" it's night, when Morgan is "winning" it's day. towards the end of the story the party beats Pendragon without realising that now Morgan le Fay is able to act unchecked and so the regular course of life grinds to a halt. During the course of the story each protagonist holds one in themself, Moon with her contempt for humanity holds pendragon, and Sun with his wish to live with his friends forever holds Morgan, but once Moon starts to see the good in humanity her mind boots out pendragon (hence why they fight him), and once Sun accepts that a life in stagnation isn't a life living at all, his mind boots out Morgan (hence why they fight her). Basically, I really really really like the ideas of third semester and am doing something similar lol.

At the start Sun and Moon are visited by a Doctor informing him of his cancer diagnosis and a chief prosecutor "congratulating" her about her father's loss in court respectively. Both talk about their fascination with/contempt of humanity, and end with "do you agree?", a cloaked agreement to a contract that makes them their champion, for these are Morgan le Fay and Pendragon in human forms. A side effect of tricking them into agreeing to a contract, however, is letting them into the velvet room, a mistake that would lead to both of the gods' downfall.

Ah shit I haven't even tackled how dungeons and stuff work. I know at least the last one is gonna be called Avalon.

I think I'm just gonna go ahead and post this for now, I might edit it later so uhhh stay tuned I guess

[kob131]

I really cannot emphasize just how excellent the reveal of Type ORT truly is.

The creature has been hyped as THE strongest being in the entire Nasuverse, matched only by the likes of Arcueid using the absolute peak of her power when her using the bare minimum still made her monstrously powerful. It has never directly shown up in any fight beforehand, only being mentioned in supplementary materials. All that’s known is that it has the ability to warp it’s surrounding to be like its home, which to anyone familiar with the lore of Nasu’s works knows this is already fucking insane.

At this point in time, Chaldea has killed literal fucking gods at this point. They defeated a divine King Arthur wielding a mystical lance. They killed the original mother Tiamat. They defeated the Demon King Goetia. They took down the bringer of Ragnarok himself, Surt. They fucked up about half the Greek Pantheon. They just got done blasting the fuck out of a walking god corpse that threatened to destroy the entire planet with world rending curses. At this point, no one would be surprised if they could take on anything. 

Of course, ORT is mentioned as being vastly more powerful than Chaldea. Even more powerful than the Foreign God aka the strongest of the Evils of Humanity. But given human being’s issues with scale that large, your average player isn’t gonna think it’s THAT bad. Surely everyone is just exaggerating, right? I mean, hell. It’s revealed in the first chapter that the Storm Border is basically a giant fucking Excalibur at this point so surely we can win!

And then some dumbass decided the best idea possible was to blow up a chunk of the planet. 

The soul of the planet, Gaia, screams in pain.

And the Ultimate One of the Oort Cloud rustles.

‘People die’ isn’t enough to convey what happens. The ground is covered with the bodies of the jaguar men you’ve been fighting. Nemo fucking died out of nowhere, during to dust. You see a shot of the planet outside, with about a fourth of the thing blown into bits.

And during all that, this is what you see.

This fucking...thing. You have to fight it.

And right before that happens, the last thing you see before the party selection is this.

The Foreign God, btw.

And the horror doesn’t stop there. ORT’s battlefield is a gigantic crater caused by its awakening. You’re fighting on a barely intact little island. Debris and embers are flying up in slow motion, as if ORT’s sheer power is influencing gravity itself. 

ORT’s HP bar is 1 million with a white break, rigged break bar underneath. The first of its kind. ORT’s class is Foreigner, obvious yes but said class is treated as a Beast class threat by itself due to the sheer power the Foreigners possess. ORT attacks by its body flashing and then green orbs connected to branches appearing and exploding with AOE damage. Any Servant that dies in battle turns into green crystal and is seemingly absorbed by ORT. The battle music is thus droning, oppressive but also strangely, unnervingly calm tract. As if to say that this creature does not see you as a threat.

But most creepy of all- ORT’s movement in the background is almost...calm. Just gently going up and down in place. Almost like...it’s sleeping still.

But hey, melting through 1 million HP isn’t too hard, especially with defensive options like Jeanne and Caster Arturia as well as all the stupidly powerful firepower you have. ORT doesn’t even have any boxed buffs- it won’t be that hard. And so, you blast through that 1 million HP, breaking open that health bar-

-Only to see a lightshow of nine differently colored lights freeze in mid break before becoming nine new Break Bars, with the next one having 10 million HP. (Note: Even including the Super Recollection quests, no enemy in the game has a total of 10 million HP or more. This is ORT’s second health bar out of ten.) Oh and the boss gets an ATK boost, full NP gauge every tick and Debuff Immunity on break. You can break the second Break Bar. Difficult but doable. 

To be met with a health bar of 100 million. 

And to make this all darkly hilarious?

A. ORT never uses any skills in battle. It only gets Break Bar effects. The thing isn’t even using any planinng or advanced tactics- it’s just hitting you.

and B. ORT is Level 1. This is Type ORT at it’s weakest.

ORT has been known as the single strongest being known in the Nasuverse. And everything in it’s appearences proves it.

[zenosanalytic]

Breaking The Wheel

A Summarized Analysis of the first three books of HoxPoX: House of X #1&2, and Powers of X #1

Ok so, I’ve been working on/thinking about this for awhile now, mostly because life just keeps interrupting and so I haven’t had the time to just sit down and finish it, but also partially cuz I’ve been struggling with the form I want to put it in. Honestly you could write multipage analyses of EACH of these books, as well as the Stuff they share and conflict over, but I’m going for something more condensed than that so that I can FINALLY move on to just reading the rest of the series! In later posts I’ll be getting into specific themes and instances of symbolism, but first I just want to get my basic observations&guesses abt the series(which everyone else has already read X|) down. So here we go:

Resurrection/Rebirth:

HoX#1 opens with the XMen emerging from some sort of plant-eggs. My guess(which is p much confirmed for me since I’ve read Excalibur #1) was that this is a resurrection. There’s a heavy cthonic tone to the whole Deal, and Xavier is visually placed in an ambiguously parental/godly role to the XMen as they emerge. Of course, in our culture resurrection and rebirth are heavily conflated and so the symbols INVOKING resurrection here --egg shapes, trees, chrysalises, golden light-- are all ALSO symbolic of fertility and rebirth and, as I love puns&multiple meanings, I absolutely think that’s important too. Beyond informing the action of the page, on a meta level this is obvsl also a powerful thesis & statement of intent for X Men, a long-running and hugely popular comic book property: a declaration of both reviving a moribund past, and the intention to do something new with it. The decision to bring back old costumes and classic art styles, and to center it on long-forgotten locations, plot points(like Krakoa itself), and typically overlooked or underwritten characters(like Moira McTaggart and Mystique’s supporting cast), absolutely suggests a dedication to this task, and the intention to accomplish it moving forward.

Cycles:

Related to this is the importance of repeating, “inescapable” Cycles to the work. HoX 1 moves from this scene of resurrection to scenes of planting and plant growth which cycle through both seasonal phases and phases of the day. HoX 1 then carries this forward by taking place over the COURSE of a single day.

PoX 1 repeats this with cycles of Time and information gathering: Mystique delivering the usb from Damage Control in (Year 10); Rasputin and Cardinal retrieving & delivering information from The Nexus in Year 100; The Librarian trying to recover information from Cylobel(a mutant bred, rebelled, then captured by the sentinels), now part of the Mutant Library, in Year 1000. This is supported subtly in the art of all three books(but made explicit in the opening scenes of PoX 1 where Moira meets Xavier) through cycles of color: Green/Teal, Gold, and Purple. The symbolic meaning of the colors are various and contextual, I’ll get more into it later, but the basic foundation seems to be Green=Naivety/Beginnings/Ambiguity, Gold=Power/Knowledge, Purple=Death/Endings/Rebirths. PoX 1 ends with Beginnings: The Librarian fondly regards an Eden-like Zoo for what remains of “pure-strain” homo sapiens, and Rasputin(a mutant freedom fighter in Year 100) delivers her information just as Mystique did in the first section after the introduction of the book.

Hox 2 continues and solidifies the pattern of cycles. It ends were PoX 1 began: with Moira and Xavier’s meeting at the fair(a mobius double helix reach around, perhaps :p). It begins with Moira’s birth and a recounting of her first, entirely human, life. It continues through the cycles of her lives and deaths as she grapples with her Groundhog Day existence(a personal struggle which parallels and microcosms the larger struggle within humanity over mutation), which in a tenuous way seems to be narratively structured around the stages of grief. First she isn’t aware&trying to understand what’s happening(denial), then out of resentment of what she has lost from her first life, she rejects mutation and tries to “cure” it(anger), then seeks coexistence, and increasingly tenuous proposition over lifetimes(bargaining), before giving up in despair and wallowing in mutually destructive conflict(depression). The color symbolism is retained: The sickbed where her resurrection powers manifest is bathed in gold light, her first human childhood surrounded by naive greens, with the death/rebirth of her 2nd life gestated in wombly fuschias, and continued with a pink-purple dress in her 2nd toddlerhood. The sentinels, the mechanical agents of death throughout her lives, are purple, as ever.

However, HoX 2 ultimately struggles against, and seeks to subvert, the cycles even as it repeats them, suggesting to me that Escape is the ultimate endpoint of the series. While HoX&PoX 1 are told from within the cycles, HoX 2 is an outside recounting of them. At least one of Moira’s lives seems to be missing, likely hidden, and the end of another is obscured in eternal war. Moira breaks the 4th wall to discuss her mutation, and it’s impact directly with the audience; literally displaying her ability and desire to break out of the cycles. Her actions within each cycle are either to carry information between them, or motivated by what she’s learned from previous ones, thereby breaking the boundaries btw them and flattening out the cycles into a single linear narrative. In fact by the time of the series, by her 10th life, ending the violent cycles of her lives and deaths(and thus, the cycles of intrahuman conflict over mutation) is Moira’s declared and explicit goal(and HoX2 presents the series as the story of Moira). Her 10th life is canonically either her last or second to last life. In the “stages of grief” model, the last stage is “acceptance”; synthesizing and integrate one’s grief and loss into a new, healthy life. Both narratively and thematically, HoX 2 positions HoXPoX as a Dune-scaled epic narrative; not as the story of a particular conflict, but as a Historical narrative; as the story of structural patterns of behavior reinforced by instinctive dispositions, repeated throughout time, and one attempt to escape them for something better.

Ambiguity:

The narrative takes the point of view, and thus also the side, of the mutants, but that isnt to say it presents the mutants as unquestionably the “good guys”, or the human-AI alliance as necessarily the “bad guys”. While the forces of ~Human Purity~ and supremacy, those rejecting the shared humanity of mutants(Orchis: a mega organization of Marvel’s secret societies&black-ops orgs), are clearly presented as fascist, both visually and narratively, supremacist talk ALSO abounds on the mutant side which, when combined with trophically sinister visual cues suggests the mutant-nationalist sepratist project contains its own dangerous contradictions(further lampshaded by setting one of the major plots of HoX 1 in Israel, thus drawing parallels btw the two). Meanwhile the AIs, who carry out the Purists’  genocidal campaign, are presented as a sort of blameless technological inevitability; aware of the wrongness of what they do, and yet unable to stop doing it due to their programming. In this way, I suspect, they are meant to act as a commentary on the mutant-non-mutant conflict itself; on the way in which humans(both mutant and non) are primed to reject each other as fully human by both instinctive impulse and cultural structures emphasizing competition-based interpretations of evolution. I suspect this is even further and more directly lampshaded in the series at two points: In HoX#1 with discussion of  “the cro-magnon problem”, and in HoX#2 through Moira’s off-hand reference to this idea in her 4th life(when she first decides to give Xavier and coexistence a shot). The idea both times that other homo species were “wiped out” by competition with Homo sapiens because they SEEM to no longer exist, but this is a false conclusion. In rreality genetic studies show significant admixture of the other homo branches within the sapiens line. The reality of pre-historical hominid interaction wasn’t genocide, but synthesis. The inability to conceive of this(in other words, the inability to conceive of all homo sapiens as equally human, and mutants as a new evolutionary stage; the drive to cling to “ethnic purity”) is, I believe, the core problem the series will posit drives human&mutant conflict, which needs to be gotten past in someway. Obvsl this guess could be wrong.

Alright that’s the first post on my read through of the first 3 books. Like I said I’ll be posting more detailed analysis later.