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katyahina · 8 months

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Burial Blade and Blade of Mercy are made out of meteorite, but WHY? Inspiration and context behind them (+ the source of snake infestation)

This one is a reply on ask from @bobbyzombiegg that I decided to put here because I really keep forgetting to use THIS blog for lore and not my personal/shitposts one...

I know, and this is such a good observation! I am glad that you've noticed what else connects Burial Blade and Blade of Mercy! Even better - whereas Burial Blade severs the ties of a person with the Dream, Blade of Mercy, in a way, helps to create it!

The interesting thing about these blades is that, of course, they must have been created before the conception of the Hunter's Dream! It makes it oddly coincidental that both weapons are useful for the cycle of Dream and Hunt, doesn't it? Blade of Mercy is at least believed to contribute to this as of now; the more we hunt the more messengers get added in the Hunter's Dream, so, perhaps, Blade of Mercy is not necessary! My personal interpretation of this is as Paleblood Hunter, our character has the privilege otherwise special for these weapons! Regardless of which weapon they use, they can send those they killed to be messengers (or add them in the cycle of the hunt, like how Henryk or Yamamura will become summonable after we kill them)!

Still, it starts to look like too much was planned ahead? Blade of Mercy said to be made in an old workshop would imply Old Hunters, likely created by Gehrman himself, from the same material as his own weapon! But I think the answer here is that Messengers, something akin to Hunter's Dream and similar weapons existed since Pthumerian times!

Starting with the weapons observation here! Pthumerian Descendant, interestingly, displays the similar style of transforming their blade into two same as how Blade of Mercy does it! Meanwhile, Gehrman's blade is fashioned similarly to Mergo's Wet Nurse's blades! In isolation, I would not think this means anything.. but crows, according to Hunters of Hunters lore, ARE connected with taking the souls and passing them into Dream realm, which is also Nightmare realm!

(Link to my other post explaining why Vilebloods descend from Pthumerians ( x ) in case someone who doesn't know already finds this post)

Wet Nurse herself is very bird-like (crow-like, specifically), and very coincidentally, Baneful Chanters pray to those who "have no blood" as those who'd have enough power to curse the hunters (which is to ensure they go in the Nightmare realm). Wet Nurse not only coincidentally fuels at least one section of Nightmare by nurturing Mergo, the center of it, but also, Nightmare realm has Winter Lanterns whose heads are made of Messengers!

So we have: Wet Nurse already being quite Pthumerian with her accessories and fighting style, Pthumerians and their descendants (down to Cainhurst!) honoring symbolism of crows, Yharnam (a city named after Queen Yharnam, after all) having depiction of BIRD-like Messenger in its oldest part, superstition about crows taking souls of the murdered in Hunter's Dream, people praying to "bloodless ones" to take the souls into Nightmare instead + evidence of it happening with Winter Lanterns.. In my opinion it is fair to assume that the weapons Gehrman created had a pre-existing inspiration and their similarity to pre-existing Pthumerian weapons is not coincidental!

Alright, first - I want a Bloodborne prequel where I could make a Pthumerian Paleblood Hunter. Second, as you can see, concept of the Messengers, the "Hunter" symbol/rune (depiction of the hanged man of course), and even the MOONLIGHT Sword were a thing since Pthumerian times! (It is safe to assume Ludwig found this sword somewhere in the Dungeons, as obtaining Radiant Sword Hunter badge is what lets you buy Tomb Prospector set!)

^ The note already mentioning Laurence associating with Moon Presence, THE Great One of the Hunt and the Dream, is found in Byrgenwerth already! Basically? Without maybe predicting that he would be trapped in the Hunter's Dream one day, Gehrman already knew what he was doing with the weapons.

Conclusion: there was the clear idea in mind! Blade of Mercy, intended to kill people from the start, immortalises the hunters as the HUNTERS and brings them in "Heaven" of Moon Presence, before they turned into beasts, whereas Burial Blade, initially intended for hunting everyone that was no longer human (for example, poor Fish People), ensures they, on the contrary, never go to "Heaven". What later serves to sever a Hunter from the Hunter's Dream initially intended to sever non-humans from it, in a way sentensing them to "Hell". :) Gehrman is a fun person.

+ Also some bonus observations regarding the topic of Yharnamites still continuing Pthumerian traditions, likely brought back because of Byrgenwerth, and then Healing Church, diving into dungeons:

(Context for those that didn't play Bloodborne because Sony hates you and you in particular: both this trap in the dungeons and this bath in Yahar'gul warp you in another area, connected by the circle of candles)

Forbidden Woods, surrounding Byrgenwerth, are full of formations that resemble the Tonsil Stone very much! However, when you examine the woods, you will see that sometimes there are body parts near these "heads"! This could be another case of petrification upon strong arcane impact, similarly to petrified body of Rom near Ebrietas, to petrified bodies of other Kin in Upper Cathedrals covered by fabric, bodies of victims in Yahar'gul, all that!

Were they people living in the woods that started to turn into Kin (like Garden of Eyes that are also found in Byrgenwerth) but didn't live until petrification, or were they baby Great Ones born only to instantly die? I am not sure. Both can work.

But, snakes are an interesting clue here. Besides Forbidden Woods, they are only also found in Hintertombs - a dumping ground for corpses of Pthumeru Ihyll that became venomous! Forgotten Madman, who is a former Choir member as he uses A Call Beyond, is found in these dungeons + getting Cosmic Watcher Badge is what lets you buy Poisonous Knife. Doesn't it look strange for Choir members to pick so much interest in this? Snake infestation might be a strange result of burying cosmic Kin in the ground, a corruption of what would normally be a process of multiple parasites/phantasms settling in a corpse of a cosmic being, OR someone affiliated with one! We do have precedents:

Cosmic creatures, "downgraded" and "filthied", becoming something eartly instead, such as snakes! One of them was able to raise human children (Madaras twins), so sure they are unusual!

So, what I am trying to say is, it is possible that Tonsil Stone is a result of burial of a dead (and rapidly petrifying) cosmic Kin, one that was yet not rotted like what we see in Forbidden Woods! Maybe even more directly so, it is a petrified skull of a cosmic Kin, most likely of Amygdala's kind, and a "meteorite" in the sense of them coming from space! So, creating weapons both of which are connected with burial ritual from the buried Kin is appropriate! This or similar technology maybe also was discovered by Pthumerians long ago, so examining Hintertombs was a great help with figuring what material to use for Burial Blade and Blade of Mercy!

^ These disturbing dead cosmic Kin fetuses are found in Byrgenwerth in two forms: one depicts a petrified corpse, something we already knows happens with Kin, such as Rom and eldrich creatures in Upper Cathedral. Another is dead, rotting, showing horns, and has multiple tiny skulls on its head! The latter one gets my point about corpses of Kin, or maybe anyone touched by Kin, sprouting smaller life forms from within. People infected by snake virus sprout several snakes from their heads, rather than turning into a snake or something!

It is entirely possible that Byrgenwerth used to bury creatures like this in the grounds around the college, and that those gigantic graves in Forbidden Woods were for much larger Great Ones: "Hunt the Great Ones. Hunt the Great Ones." note is found in Byrgenwerth as well! They might have been able to resist the full rotting that results into snakes due to their size and development, hence their graves still show sluggish phantasms. Burying other ones, on the other hand, was a big mistake. Or, should I say.... a GRAVE mista- *gets sniped*

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These are my thoughts on the topic! You kinda got two theories at the price of one here, but snake infestation was somewhat relevant in the context of burial and my idea of what IS this "meteorite"! Thank you so much for prompting me to tie this theory together at last!!

#bloodborne #bloodborne theory #gehrman the first hunter #pthumerians #long post #not art #text post #bloodborne reference #screenshots #damn two years later I've found a proper answer on snake infestation situation...#too bad that an ex mutual will never see it now they sent me an ask about it and back then my answer was unsatisfying #why I figure this obvious shit so late..... sigh

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itsclydebitches · 4 years

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Welcome back, everyone!

We’re now on Chapter Eight and once again the story is told from Velvet’s perspective. So our starting question is: why is she getting the most attention so far? If memory serves, the PoV order has been Coco, Velvet, Sun, Fox, Yatsu, Velvet, Scarlet, Velvet again — meaning that in a text balancing eight main characters, so far four of them have received a single chapter, two (Sage and Neptune) zero chapters, and one three chapters. That seems rather imbalanced. I suppose it makes a certain amount of sense if we factor in RWBY viewers’ familiarity with Velvet, but I’d wager we’ve gotten far more screen time with Sun overall. My only point being, why Velvet? It’s not that you can’t make her a focal point of the narrative, I just haven’t seen anything to explain that choice in the first 100+ pages. Her perspective hasn’t brought anything unique to the story, something we couldn’t have gotten from the seven other characters involved in these events… but here we are, back with Velvet for the next six pages.

Yeah, this chapter is short. Silver lining?

We learn that Team NOVA is on their second mission — why bother showing us the first when they’re an entirely new, volatile team, right? That would be silly! — escorting a technician “through the Grimm-infested mountains just outside of Oscuro Combat School.” So Shade students regularly conduct real huntsmen work but throw a fit over having to spar with one another? Interesting. See, if I were a civilian who got even a glimpse of what goes on inside these schools, I would not trust these kids with my life.

Lo and behold, things go horribly! We learn right off the bat that “The technician had been knocked unconscious in a skirmish with a band of Dromedons.” For those of you with an iffy memory like mine, these are the camel-like creatures that spit acid and… that’s about all we know about them. That’s really all we need for this scene though because this grimm nailed the tech in his leg, a wound which now requires “serious medical attention.” Great. Gus Caspian, who I learn is a younger friend from the previous novel, is trying to treat the wound as best he can, clearly a little freaked out about being here, “but apparently Oscuro teachers didn’t coddle students any more than Theodore did.”

Do you expect them to? Despite Atlas being the only one who combines their academies with their military, we can’t pretend like these schools aren’t teaching teenagers to wield deadly weapons and kill things with them. There’s no institution on Earth (or Remnant) that should “coddle” those looking to take on that responsibility. I mean yeah, we had moments where Ozpin encouraged them to be kids, like after the food fight and during the dance, but he still took a hard stance whenever there was an actual lesson in the works: “No. You will be falling.” Based on the age of the students, the academies are akin to colleges. In real world college if you don’t do your work or don’t pay attention in class, well… nothing that bad happens. This is by no means a call to not do you work, merely an acknowledgement from a formerly grade obsessed student that individual test scores really don’t have the impact on your life that it feels like they will at the time. Trust me on this. So yeah, some leeway is great in the real world… but when the students are fighting monsters and defending others from death? Then the schools should absolutely discourage any slacker-esque attitude. The concept of any institution “coddling” huntsmen is horrifying.

Note though that the chapter starts after all the action has taken place. We skip the rest of reinitiation. We skip NOVA’s first mission. We skip the attack that landed Velvet in this predicament. It’s not automatically a bad technique provided you’re skipping over boring parts to get to the interesting bits… but this isn’t interesting. We learn almost nothing new from this scene: Velvet misses her old team, her new teammates don’t believe in her, Nebula is mean. Those are the emotional beats here — things we’ve known for at least three chapters now. The only thing that’s introduced is the advertisement on Gus’ scroll, which could have been been added to any other scene.

Let’s revise a bit:

We get to see the battle against the Dromedons wherein Velvet uses her camera, revealing her weapon to Team NOVA and earning more of their respect. Information about Gus’ improvement is shown through his combat abilities as he’s unexpectedly chucked into this battle (perhaps with him using his semblance to further his growth there too). While taking a hit he loses his scroll, slightly damaging it. In the aftermath Velvet retrieves it for him and finds this ad displayed, growing curious. Over the course of Gus’ explanations the rest of Team NOVA is clued into Velvet’s worry and suspicion. What’s wrong? It’s just an ad. But you’re clearly hiding something… Now, does she tell her new team about the Crown, or keep it silent and risk the tenuous trust they’ve just created?

Why is Myers skipping over all the action and potential growth?

Instead we get the boring stuff. Velvet admires Gus’ uniform because of how it’s built for the heat and recalls that “Coco had been messing around with new outfit designs for Team CFVY.” I swear though, 95% of my enjoyment with this novel comes from the throwaway details. I would actually like seeing how Coco combines her personal love of fashion with the necessity of designing combat gear appropriate for the environment. Maybe they frame it as merely a hobby outside of their huntsmen work, giving them an excuse to keep helping their former teammates. That could be cool!

Though of course, this is the series where Cinder, Neo, Hazel, and Emerald all walk into the ice Kingdom with skin bared, so...

(You all are going to freeze to death, have fun.)

“Velvet’s ears swiveled around, listening for danger.” That’s anything detail I like. At the very least Before the Dawn remembers that Velvet is a faunus and frequently incorporates that into her character. She’s on the lookout because other than Gus tending the unconscious technician, she’s alone “on the sidelines.” It’s framed simultaneously as the group rejecting her and as an unavoidable necessity: “it wasn’t like she didn’t have an important task of her own [repairing the relay], one that none of her teammates had the expertise to perform.”

Wait. Why does Velvet have this expertise?

The justification is that she’s “handy with electronics” and “Anesidora was incredibly complicated, and she’d designed it herself,” but that’s like saying “I built a computer so I’ll come fix your refrigerator. That’s easier.” I don’t know, maybe someone with the ability to build a computer from the ground up could figure out a refrigerator on the fly, but they feel like different skill-sets to me. All electronics are not built the same and claiming that because you understand one you automatically understand all others — even supposedly simpler pieces of tech — seems a little suspect. If that were the case, we’d have no need for experts who fix your phone, your television, your toaster, and your watch. Surely if you understand one you understand the others, right? It’s the same assumption here: If Velvet can understand building a hard light weapon, then she must understand relay communications too!

…right.

She even goes so far as to say that they “probably should have left the technician at Oscuro—she could have done this on her own” yet just a few minutes later it’s, “Velvet double-checked everything. She didn’t know what was wrong. She glanced back at the technician, Gus still at his side. The guy was out cold. He’d taken a pretty hard knock to the head. Well, she had tried.” So she’s confident enough to think that the technician is unnecessary one moment and then looking to him for help the next? Which of course isn’t followed by any sort of revelation. Velvet doesn’t acknowledge that her knowledge isn’t as specialized as she had assumed it was, or that huntsmen rely on non-combat experts for other things. She just shrugs and…

…kicks it.

Yeah. Velvet’s skill amounts to kicking the box until it works. Which, of course, it does.

I can’t with this novel.

More seriously though, that’s terrible characterization. Not only does it undermine Velvet’s actual skill to reduce it to being “handy with electronics” — isn’t every huntsmen “handy with electronics” then, considering they all build their gun/energy/dust weaponry in school? — but it adds another layer of supposed uselessness to the adult professionals around her. Theodore doesn’t teach them anything because, as their headmaster, he’s removed from everyday interactions. Rumpole can’t be trusted now and every lesson she tries to impart is rejected. The unnamed technician who is referred to only by his professional title is deemed unnecessary, knocked out, and then indeed proves useless when Velvet magically does his job for him. So why are any of them in school? Why aren’t they just running the world with their superior knowledge and skill-sets? Every time the RWBY franchise puts its characters in a position where they might actually learn something through failure, it pulls back at the last second. ‘Never mind, they actually knew this all along!’ Or, ‘Never mind, the things they’ve been taught are stupid, so best to forget them!’ I struggle to understand what kind of story I’m reading — or watching — when the characters are already framed as perfect. Or rather, flaws absolutely exist (as these recaps attest), but the story pretends they’re not there.

I hesitate to use the term “Mary Sue” here due to its origins and history. Meaning, the Mary Sue was conceived of as a parody, a deliberate exaggeration to comment on the types of characters written in the Star Trek fandom. Then people began using “Mary Sue” as a catch-all term for any female character that people deemed too talented (regardless of how talented their male counterparts might be), we started acknowledging the sexist undertones of that, then started reclaiming the term as something to celebrate and embrace… but we haven’t quite gotten there yet. “Mary Sue” is still a pretty loaded name to force on a character and it carries a lot of implications that I absolutely do not want to attach to Velvet. Yet it’s also the closest term I know to describe the act of an author giving a character what feels like a badly justified skillset. Such as “handy with technology” actually meaning “can fix anything powered by electricity or Dust as the plot needs.”

Velvet is the action movie hacker going, “I’m in” is what I’m getting at. It’s not a compliment lol.

During all this grimm watching and relay fixing, Gus wants to know why they don’t just high-tail it out of there. Especially since the person they brought to do a specific job can no longer do that job. Mission’s a bust. Velvet gives what sounds like a decent explanation: “Retreating from Grimm isn’t an option when you’re fighting this close to a settlement. If we leave without destroying them, the Grimm will just look for another target.” AKA the settlement itself.

Thing is, by this logic any grimm that are currently close enough to attack them are already close enough to the settlement to latch onto those people as the next target. They’d pick up on the civilians whether Velvet’s group was there to kill them or not. The group is there though, so they feel responsible, but why not just head to the settlement anyway? If the grimm follow you, fine. You can still fight them AND you now get the additional benefit of any other huntsmen/students who might be there. If they don’t follow you, great. If they were close enough to the settlement all along… again, this was always going to happen.

Which, to be clear, isn’t the worst stance to take. I understand them wanting to avoid any potential risk by leaving/leading the grimm towards anyone else. I only want to point out the additional stupidity of fighting them when you’ve already got an unconscious civilian in your care, a barely trained student, and the whole reason you came out here might now be for naught. Yeah, Velvet gets the relay working with her magic kick and yeah, the rest of the team handles the grimm just fine, but none of them are able to see into the future and know that both these events will occur. Gus’ ‘Why are we staying here? It’s dangerous and pointless’ question has merit.

But of course, no one in RWBY would ever consider retreat. It’s a very iffy characteristic at this point.

We learn — or at least I learn now — that Gus’ semblance is the ability to enhance others’ emotions, so basically the opposite of Ren’s. That would indeed be incredibly handy provided he has good control over it. We get another reference to Yatsuhashi’s “meditation exercises” that helped Gus’ grandfather in the last novel. Velvet theorizes that his improved memory has more to do with Yatsuhashi’s semblance than any generic meditation: “No one knew for sure what Yatsuhashi had done with his Semblance when he’d tried to heal Edward’s mind … even Yatsuhashi wasn’t sure. His ability was to erase memories, but it was possible that there was more to Yatsu’s Semblance than that.” Um… subtle yikes? Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad things have turned out well for the guy, but if I were the grandfather—or a family member of his—I wouldn’t really want a student messing around with my mind when he “wasn’t sure” what he was doing. Especially when the base skill is to erase memories, not recover or strengthen them. Honestly, I love taking a good look at fantasy series because half the time you realize how horrifying things actually are, once you strip away the common place aspects of these skills. An equivalent third year college student is running around experimenting with peoples’ memories to see if he can achieve something other than erasing them. Great!

The good thing is that Yatsuhashi is just as suspicious of this power as I am. Velvet things that he “hated messing with people’s minds.” Understandable, bud. I’d hate the ability too.

While they’ve got this time alone, Gus mentions that he had planned to contact Velvet soon anyway. Two of his classmates have gone missing and though his school has told Shade about it—there’s at least some of that additional info that Rumpole mentioned—he wanted to let her know too because remember, no one in this franchise trusts the professionals to fix problems. It’s a mindset I’d better understand if the professionals were actually inept. Or the protagonists weren’t training to be those professionals. It’s still exceedingly weird to me that there’s so little respect and trust for huntsmen while they desperately try to become huntsmen…

Something something broken systems, but RWBY isn’t interested in exploring that.

So yeah, Gus ropes Velvet in with the hope that she can help. He says that they were last seen attending a new club called Mirage that hosts one-on-one fights for a championship title. So… it’s not really a club, right? Sure, sure, we’ve all seen Fight Club, but generally that’s used to describe dancing, not fighting. It’s a rather misleading term for what they were actually looking for. No one else finds this odd though. Nor that the information was sent out to select, powerful individuals. Nothing shady about this, folks! Velvet obviously recognizes all these details—a club, powerful semblances, a crown in the advertisement—and asks Gus to pass it along to her.

Our plot forwarded ever so slightly, their conversation ends as Arslan calls Velvet on the now fixed connection. One of the first thing she says is that Octavia used the other students as bait for the grimm.

At least Velvet shares my reaction: “What?!”

Octavia then takes an already bad situation and makes it that much worse. Listening in, she defiantly says, “That’s right. And it worked. It’s called strategy.” She confirms that the students are “mostly” okay and taunts Velvet about inviting them to her “Baby Brigade and you can all cry about it!” I hope I don’t need to take up precious document space by explaining how awful this is. Overlooking the fact that these would-be huntsmen are willing to put their younger peers’ lives in danger like that—and then mock them for needing mental health resources after the fact—why is Octavia the one pulling the murderous Mean Girl act? Yeah, she was an asshole during reinitiation, but wasn’t the whole point of that to demonstrate that she and Velvet got a little closer? Even if she won’t admit it? She saved Velvet from flying down that hole, but now she risks the lives of students at least three years her junior? If anyone should be this violent and antagonistic towards Velvet, it’s Nebula. The most she’s done for Velvet is offer a hand up, otherwise we just watched her express glee in getting to fight her and mock her for not abandoning Beacon… the same sort of behavior we’re seeing from Octavia now. Does Myers think that these two characters are interchangeable? That he can just pick one willy-nilly per chapter and let her play at being Velvet’s Mean Girl?

As a lovely anon reminded me recently, these are also the girls that were created and backed by fans. If I had put money and creative energy into these OCs, I’d be pretty frustrated with how the RT team has been treating them.

Arslan at least is complimentary towards Velvet for fixing the relay—“Truly, great work today”— and Velvet herself is appropriately shocked at Octavia’s behavior. That’s more emotional consistency than I’ve come to expect of this book, so I’ll take whatever little bits I can get.

Arslan signs off with plans to meet back up soon and Velvet thinks about how “everyone was safe after the mission, which was no small thing.” I’d agree… except for Velvet’s early thoughts about how easy this mission supposedly was and Octavia’s decision to put her teammates in danger. It sounds like if anything did go sideways, it’s in part because you chose to enter this overconfidently and then actively made it more dangerous.

Finally, the chapter ends with Velvet believing that she might be able to make her new team work with time. Our final line, in its own paragraph is: “If they had time.”

Am I the only one who finds this weird? The line reads like an omniscient bit of foreboding. Velvet thinks about how she just needs time and we, the reader, hear that this won’t be possible. Except this chapter is told from Velvet’s perspective. So why does she think they might not have time? Because of the Crown? I assume there will be an attack towards the end of the novel—can’t have a RWBY story without the final, epic battle—but right now Velvet has no reason to believe that an attack is imminent, or that the teams will change back, or anything else that would interfere with her hopes of strengthening this relationship… so why the rather confident sounding pessimism? I don’t know. I don’t pretend to know anymore lol.

At least this chapter was short? As said, silver linings. We’re still treading water though: Velvet’s bond with her new team seems to have regressed after two missions, rather than improved, and Gus didn’t reveal anything we didn’t already know, just further confirmed it. I assume that next chapter Velvet and the others will visit Mirage. Let’s hope something actually happens then.

See you! 💜

[Ko-Fi]

#rwby #mymetas #Before the Dawn #BTD Recaps

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koteosa · 5 years

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👀 Muriel/Asra/Apprentice learning to coexist with one another 👀

This turned into something of a character study, because I apparently have a lot of feelings about this ship. It’s really meandering and kind of just ship-based ramblings, I hope that’s fine???? I have other things to add but I was trying not to go on for millions of years about this

ao3 link

Living arrangements were complicated, to say the least. While there was always the option of living separately, Muriel in his hut while the magicians stayed in their shop as they always had—a certain ruby-eyed magician hadn’t been thrilled, not loving the idea of reverting to the status quo. It wasn’t healthy. Everything they’d done to boost the reclusive man up would be lost if he just went back to isolation like he always did.

The shop, where Kamui had lived his whole known life with Asra at his side, was pitted up against the hut, where Muriel was the most comfortable, and where Asra spent most of his teenage years. The magician was always in the middle, easy to please with either option.

But Asra and Muriel remembered both of Kamui’s first exposures to the hut, and that opinion hadn’t really changed. To put it lightly, he hated the place. There was nowhere comfortable enough to sit, it was too dark, too small, too cold or too hot. Not decorated enough. Nowhere to store food, or all of his clothes. Hardly enough room for three people to sleep, much less go about their daily life.

And that wasn’t even bringing up the bugs. Oh, there were so many bugs getting in through the cracks, and Kamui couldn’t stand them crawling on him at night, getting everything dirty, biting him, chewing holes into his clothes. If they weren’t making a mess of things, Kamui wouldn’t mind them much at all. But this was bordering on an infestation, or so Kamui liked to claim in the midst of a neurotic episode of obsessive cleaning.

Muriel wasn’t bothered by any of it, having lived his whole life finding workarounds to problems rather than solutions, or just getting used to his lot in life. The only thing that bothered him was how much it bothered Kamui. But nothing he knew how to do would solve any of the man’s problems with his hut, so all he could do was apologize, and then Kamui would tell him it wasn’t his fault, and then Muriel would apologize for apologizing and it would all just cycle around forever.

The shop was considerably bigger. Not really appropriately sized for three, especially not when one of them was much larger than the others. It wasn’t overly dramatic, but Muriel still looked odd perched on one of their low-rise dining chairs. Their bed, while always large enough to fit a third, saw itself threatening to reach capacity once Muriel squeezed in alongside them. It didn’t help that he looked at odds with everything, in general, in his ripped clothes and scarred body, surrounded by crystals and smooth silks and all of Asra’s paintings or Kamui’s flower arrangements. He felt dirty, a living speck of filth in an art museum, afraid to touch anything.

And while the two magicians were used to lazing around the house, reading or practicing magic or just basking in each other’s presence; Muriel felt cooped up, awkward, and tense. He couldn’t relax the way they could, even with all the wards around the shop. He didn’t just… lay down on the floor like that. What was he meant to do on the floor? They seemed to know, but he couldn’t quite wrap his head around it. He had to be occupied, doing something with his hands, or up on his feet. They didn’t. He tried to join them, and sometimes it felt nice, but it always went on for too long, and he started to feel off, in ways they never did.

Maybe he was just doing it wrong. Kamui had promised to hunt down a bunch of books that Muriel would like, so he could read with them, or just have something quiet to do while the two magicians were busy napping on him. Which they did very frequently, for some reason. There were far better places to lay, but they didn’t care. Something about heartbeats or warmth, but they could get both of those in other ways, ways that were better, ways that weren't… him.

The shop spoke of comfort and serenity and he didn’t belong. The two magicians fit together perfectly, like two pieces of a puzzle; or two halves of the same heart, more accurately. They thrived on luxury, with their plush bed, six hundred pillows spread all throughout the house, incense and tea time and sweet food and silk clothes. They could spend days laying around in bed cuddling, exchanging sweet nothings and spoiling each other in various ways.

Their borderline hedonistic lifestyle didn’t suit Muriel. He didn't… he didn’t deserve it. It wasn’t for people like him, and he could never relax, doing what they did. He couldn’t let them do those things to him. He acted like he hated it, when in reality it was just the overwhelming guilt, a feeling that seemed to never go away. Lives had been destroyed because of him, why should he get to lie around in bed in fancy clothes, getting massages all the time, eating grapes out of someone’s hand? He wasn’t a prince, he was the speck of dirt on the prince’s boot.

Even despite all that, the shop still had some obvious incompatibilities with Muriel’s lifestyle. For starters, it couldn’t permanently house a bunch of chickens, and even after so much exposure to her, Kamui still got nervous when Inanna was around. His irrational fear of her was sympathetic, even if Muriel didn’t really get it. It wasn’t like Kamui was rude to her; he tried his best to get used to her, to pet her, to talk to her and get to know her.

But Muriel could tell that wasn’t the full reason Kamui didn’t quite want her in the shop. The man was convinced a wolf would make a mess of things. And considering how he reacted to the natural filth of living in a stone hut under the roots of a tree, Muriel wasn’t so sure Kamui would survive if Inanna so much as scuffed the floorboards.

It was ridiculous, in Muriel’s opinion. Inanna was perfectly well behaved, and anything she did, the three of them were capable of handling. Kamui fixed bloodstains and tears in his clothes all the time, he could do the same for anything Inanna accidentally damaged. But then Kamui would remind him she’d broken his window and pinned him to the ground, covered in blood, while growling, an event he still had nightmares about, and that didn’t leave Muriel with much of a leg to stand on.

Her, and the chickens, were allowed visits, but not permanent stays, not yet. There wasn’t space for them. Although Asra had made little beds for all of them anyway, which he put away whenever they weren’t around.

Kamui was slowly getting used to it, warming to the chickens much faster. He seemed appalled when Muriel had told him he never named any of them, and came up with his own names, over time. Mostly literary, although he’d named the chicken who seemed most attached to Asra Belladonna, because of course he did. Despite having never interacted with a hen in his life, he could tell them apart flawlessly each time he saw them, and easily picked up on their personalities.

Living in the shop often overwhelmed Muriel. Kamui did his best to be understanding. Kamui and Asra both tried their best to keep him as comfortable as possible while he was there. It was something Kamui had learned to do over time, yet was much better at picking up quickly than he was… before.

It was bizarre, the difference in temperment, yet sometimes the two versions of Kamui were indistinguishable. Asra would claim that was always the case, and while Muriel didn’t believe him in the slightest, Asra knew Kamui better than anyone.

Still. He liked this newer version better. The old one talked too much, was far prissier and had no concept of boundaries. This one picked up quickly on all his anxieties, pushed when needed and accomodated him when needed. The first time Muriel’d offered the man a plate of eggs, he expected to hear him complain about a lack of seasoning or fancy silverware or some other ridiculous problem. Yet he did nothing of the sort. He was grateful, even apologetic, thinking he might be inconveniencing Muriel. Him. Inconveniencing him!

Asra was blind. This man was a completely different person.

Although even this version of Kamui had his limits. He still had his vanity, his decadence, his… uh… libido. He didn’t like the hut, could only fall asleep there if someone held him. He practically trembled with stress upon waking up with any sort of dirt that wasn’t there before, worried that it was in his hair, or on his clothes. Muriel constantly turned to find him rubbing his hands on something, usually his pants, to get dirt off of them. The tables, though perfectly clean, he wouldn’t touch, and wouldn’t explain why. As if Muriel would get angry with him if he did.

It’s the ash, Asra had explained. Anything dirty and dry and cloying, like ash, put him in a bad place. It was probably all the dust from his woodwork that Kamui was feeling, even though Muriel thought it had been cleaned well enough. Apparently not. He’d have to try harder.

Though Kamui hardly wanted to touch anything, not after he’d learned what it felt like, and never seemed to get used to it.

But when Muriel grew too overwhelmed by life at the shop, he needed to run back to his hut for awhile, and Asra sometimes followed. At night, they would lay together. Asra would comb through his hair and help him prepare meals. They would check on the charms, play with Inanna, gather wild ingredients or take a dip in a nearby lake together. But Kamui wouldn’t, and when Kamui wouldn’t follow, that was a problem, because then Asra was less likely to follow. While Asra and Muriel functioned fairly well on their own, Kamui, apparently, started to break down after too much isolation, and Asra just couldn’t leave him alone to suffer through his damaging thoughts.

And without either of them, the hut was just… too empty. It had never been a problem before now—no, that was a lie. It was a problem when Asra left the first time, to move in with the old version of Kamui. Back then, he barely got to see the magician at all with how frequently he travelled, or camped out in the city with his fortune telling tent. Losing even more of Asra’s time and attention had felt… bad. He wasn’t sure how to phrase it any better than that, it was so much to think about, the way it felt like he was being left behind, or betrayed. How much he grew to resent Kamui’s entire existence for it.

But he’d gotten used to it. The hut was his safe haven, where nobody whose named started with an L could get to him, and he didn’t like letting people into it. Even now, after all the apparent “exposure therapy” the magicians had put him through, he still hated it. And for two people who supposedly disliked crowds and preferred to be alone, Asra and Kamui were sure big on having lots of friends, and bringing those friends around a lot.

Although, granted, “lots of friends” amounted to exactly three people, a bird, and a cat, but it was still a lot, and that wasn’t even taking into account Asra’s parents, who were… far too nice to him. Three people was a lot, and doubled to six… no way. No way. Especially not the tall one. His voice was far too loud and he got this look in his eye when he gazed at Asra that Muriel did not like.

Asra had laughed and called him jealous. …Maybe he was.

(He’d certainly felt that way about the old Kamui. And the new one, too, at first.)

They didn’t fit in the hut with him, and he had no idea how to fit in the shop with them. He couldn’t run it, no way was he going to have to deal with customers on a daily basis. Just his visage would drive away their business, much less his lack of customer service habits. He wasn’t pretty or charming like they were. Even still, Kamui had suggested he try doing readings with his runes for the customers, but there was just… no way. He’d sooner teach Kamui to do it than have to look a complete stranger in the eye, and then find his voice long enough to speak to them.

…But it was… a nice thought. Kamui really tried, and succeeded more than Asra ever did; he was too gentle, but Kamui lacked all of that. He’d tell you exactly what he thought without a care. While Asra made suggestions, Kamui made demands. When Muriel said or did something concerning, Asra gave him that sad look of his, but didn’t push; Kamui looked him dead in the eye and told him to “fuck off with that”, unafraid to call him out, to improve his behavior, to push him out of his comfort zone. Never too far, though, not after the sparring incident.

He was weirdly good about it. Must be all the books on psychology he kept in his—in… their shop. Asra and Kamui’s shop. Yeah. Not Muriel’s, never Muriel’s. He was a guest in their home, the addition, the third. The man who stood awkwardly off to the side while they cooked, who fidgeted endlessly wondering what he was even meant to do in a place filled with magic, and makeup, and books. God, there were so many books.

At first, he considered whittling in the kitchen, but after finding out about Kamui’s problem, that was a no-go. He wasn’t sure he wanted to risk triggering the man in his own home, so he had to find something else. Sometimes, it was nice to sit somewhere with one or both of the magicians in his lap, reading or daydreaming. That was the easiest choice, but it often felt like the only choice.

Every now and then, Kamui would take him into the city, to go shopping or just to talk a walk together. He’d hold Muriel’s hand, and tell him about how Asra used to hold his hand and lead him around the city when he wasn’t able to talk, and got overwhelmed in crowds. Told Muriel about how he’d panic, and start to cry, and Asra would promptly lead him into an secluded area to soothe him, with soft words, a gentle touch and a spell. A spell Asra taught him at his request, just in case Muriel ever wanted to try it. Just in case he ever needed it.

But Muriel could speak, and the crowds didn’t intimidate him that badly. He wouldn’t break down and cry. He meant no offense to Kamui, his situation was unique, but Muriel wasn’t a child.

Or so he thought, but when the crowds in the market grew dense and it seemed like they were all closing in on him, he felt like he was suffocating, and everyone saw right through him, and he couldn’t breathe and it was too hot and they were touching him and the spell didn’t work anymore and they all knew who he was and he couldn’t handle the hate in their eyes even though he deserved it and he deserved their hate and he deserved to feel hurt just like everyone he’d hurt and—

The spell glides over him like a light blanket, soft like silk and smooth. It’s colorful, not like Asra’s magic at all. It blackens out his surroundings and makes it appear as if they’re floating in the night sky, surrounded by fireworks. They pop and fizzle in the shapes of hearts, twinkling like stars, fluttering past him like lightning bugs. It’s easy to get lost in it.

Below him, arms wrapped around his waist, is Kamui, gazing up at him fondly as the lights glitter in his eyes, a warm smile offered only to him that has his heart fluttering. He’s warm, and not because of the anxiety, not anymore. That felt like a distant memory now. Everything was okay and it felt as if it had always been okay.

Muriel looks into Kamui’s glittering eyes and his heart begins to pound. That’s when he thinks, Oh. This is why Asra fell in love with you.

It was wrong to waste time on someone like him, but they did it anyway. Kamui hung scarves from his shoulders, held fancy, clip-on earrings up to him and told him he’d look beautiful in emeralds, or polished malachite, or a deep onyx and oh, but wouldn’t he let Kamui paint his face, or his nails, and plan a nice, comfortable outfit for him, with rich earthy tones, with deep greens and blacks, with smooth turquoise and soft whites.

Asra only encouraged it. Smoothed his baby soft hands over Muriel’s scarred body, called him precious, treasured, cherished. Joined him in the bath, massaged scented shampoos into his hair, kissed the shell of his ear and lathered fancy soap over his body like he meant something, like he was worth putting time and effort into. All the time spent brushing his hair, the money that went into tailoring the perfect robes for him to wear after his bath, in all the right colors and patterns and fabrics. They were both paying attention, and he didn’t know what to feel.

Sometimes it made him want to cry. He didn’t understand that either.

Maybe he should ask Kamui. The man cried for any reason. He could count on one hand the amount of times he’d seen Asra break down, and those were… usually tears of grief. But Kamui looked at a cat that was a little too adorable and got choked up. The first time Muriel had given him a gift for his birthday, a little carving of a cat made out of birchwood, Kamui had cried tears of delight, of love. Sometimes he got teary eyed over hypotheticals, things that hadn’t happened yet but could, and were so distressing he couldn’t handle it. For someone so arrogant, so headstrong, so aggressive, he was… surprisingly softhearted, too.

And a little dark, but Muriel was extremely hesitant to delve into that. Not Asra, though, but Asra would do anything for Kamui, and had taken the time and effort to study him. It was helpful, considering, to Muriel’s initial surprise, Kamui wasn’t as put together as he seemed, and needed someone who understood him to help him feel okay again after he started slipping.

There was an image of Kamui that had been burned into Muriel’s mind. When they had gone to the Scourgelands together, he had watched, out of the corner of his eye, as Asra held Kamui’s face, gazed into his eyes lovingly, and told him Kamui meant the world to him. That he couldn’t bare to lose him, (not again,) and right when the bitter tendrils of jealousy and resentment had started twisting around inside Muriel’s guts, he saw the look in Kamui’s eyes.

Complete and utter disbelief. Resigned, like no one could possibly love him, least of all someone so beautiful, so charming, so kind, so perfect, and everything Asra said to reassure him of the opposite just rolled right off of him. A wall had been built between them over years of abandonment and blocks in communication.

And it all looked so familiar, driving the bitter feelings away to be replaced with sympathy and guilt. It was… humanizing. Kamui was a person, and he had it in him to feel unloved, and unworthy, just like…

No, it wasn’t the same, it could never be the same. Kamui had never killed anyone, and despite what his mind told him was the truth, he had Asra’s undying love, and Muriel… didn’t. And he never expected to.

But Kamui was also very perceptive, and very nosy, and very determined. It barely took five seconds of seeing the two friends interact before Kamui had seen right through him, and started trying to get the two of them to date. It was like the concept of unrequited love was such an overwhelming tragedy to him that he wouldn’t stop until it was requited. Frustratingly, and amazingly, his meddling had worked out.

And now, here they were. There were times when Kamui would hold his hand and read his palm for him, or paint his nails, or braid his hair and teach him how to dance, not even getting mad when Muriel stepped on his toes. There were times Asra pinned flowers into his hair, and baked fresh bread for them to enjoy together, and cuddled up to him like a giant teddy bear and explained to him the romantic compatibility between geminis and virgos (or virgos and scorpios, for that matter).

Even though Kamui had the disturbing habit of forgetting to look after himself, he wouldn’t let Muriel do the same, and with the support of both men, Asra wouldn’t let either of them slack on self care. They liked to cook every meal together, turning it into a day-to-day activity whenever the magicians were at home, and not away on one of their many travels. Muriel didn’t often follow them on those; there were too many people they’d end up encountering, and too many noises, and bright lights, and just… too much.

But when the magicians were home, they took care of each other. Kamui and Muriel’s fears and insecurities were met with Asra’s unyielding love and the warmth of his embrace. The lack of care Muriel put into his own body was met with Asra dragging him into the bath, or Kamui putting in the effort to lather his entire body with lotion, or the both of them combing tangles out of his hair while the other worked on a princess braid to keep his hair out of his eyes.

Their bathroom was filling up with products in scents Muriel liked, alongside the spicy scents Asra liked, and the sweet, floral scents Kamui liked. There were homemade balms Kamui would spend hours making to soothe the throb of Muriel’s worst scars. Animal furs joined the silk sheets and thick quilts of their bedroom. Mugs were appearing in colors Muriel liked, with wolves drawn onto them in Asra’s paint, made out of the magic glass Kamui was getting used to working with.

And now there was a chest dedicated to his clothing in the bedroom. Before he was living with the same outfit everyday, washed and dried at the same time as his body and hair. A collection of scarves, robes, and the finery he wore to the masquerade have expanded into full outfits, jewelry, new pairs of boots and so much else. Kamui loved to decorate him, and Kamui was surprisingly easy to say yes to. Every time he bent to Kamui’s will, Asra would strike, pointing out that oh, Kamui, he doesn’t have any winter jackets either, maybe you could look for one? And his boots are looking a little worse for wear, how about a new pair? He needs more variety, don’t you think? How about a new belt?

In addition to that, Kamui had learned to bake bread just because he thought it would make Muriel happy, and nearly burst into tears of joy when Muriel had shown the slightest hint of a smile. And then Asra made them tea, as Kamui teased him over the story his parents had told him about Asra’s attempts at magically brewing tea. Asra would get flustered and try to defend himself, begging Muriel to back him up. Then Muriel would side with Kamui just to see what would happen, and feel something light and wholesome bloom in his chest when the man would be delighted with his support, while Asra pouted and then the magicians would tease each other and laugh.

It was moments like that that made him wonder if maybe he did belong here, with the two of them.

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jennamoran · 4 years

Text

The Horizon Campaign (40)

Link to the Chuubo’s Marvelous Wish-Granting Engine RPG, on DriveThru

Link to my storefront, on DriveThru

Let’s talk some more about the Horizon campaign(s)!

Previously,

We worked on our set of Main Characters and concepts, tied them to Arcs and colors and archetypes, built Rinley’s storyline, and got most of the way through their quests.

Then, we built quest 5,

Finished the quest set off,

And summarized what we had!

Before starting work on a new character: Sal.

And, flailing some more at his stories.

And, finally, getting them into somewhat acceptable shape.

Then we did a quick Sal quest before starting in on Entropy’s stories!

Then we updated those stories a bit!

Then we, basically, finished them up!

And started in on yet another new character: the Magical Detective.

And developed a bit more of a concept of who/what she was.

And started to pull in towards actual stories …

And hammered out most of the rest.

And put some rough synopses together for them!

And started work on Ogre-Sensei!

And struggled with her story and Estate!

And figured out the first book in her notional series!

And the second!

And started our work on the third!

Let’s see if we can finish that up!

But First

... why the *@$#*( does tumblr have two completely different and unrelated posting interfaces for new posts?

I somehow got onto the wrong one and thought I was stuck there and there was no option anywhere for a read more but there was the option to make my text pink and I was like, tumblr WHY

This is not to imply

that I would not value the option to make my text pink without going into the HTML interface I simply think that being able to add a read more line is more important

Honestly

I would just like an editing interface where I can add blank lines that are not secretly “space” “bold-face space” “space” “bold-face space” “space”

But Enough About Tumblr We Are Talking About Ogres

NO I am not done complaining about tumblr what if Zoë has to square off against her opposite number, the Primordial of Bad Life Decisions

OK, fine, I am done

Where Were We?

Right, we were working on Zoë’s third book, and were thinking about what it meant that it starts with the stars being jerks!

And Book 3 Looks Something Like This, Now

Ogre-Sensei’s life is already a mess. But it gets even worse when some star spirits get it in their head that she’s a villain who must be taken down to restore the sky to serenity!

(... I’m imagining them as Sailor Moon characters now, probably because of the word “serenity;” only, that doesn’t really fit the character of star spirits as we’ve seen them before. So possibly what we’re actually looking at is ... students empowered by the stars?

Other Celestian types?

Constellations?)

Actually

... actually, OK, I have to actually solve this before I write up book 3.

I had the idea, but apparently I’m not actually sure what stars being petty jerks to an ogre entails or how it would work.

My First Thought

My first thought is to turn back to that “voice of despair” thing we talked about yesterday.

Like: the Bleak Academy converted one of the stars that died in the war above into a creature that is the voice of despair, and they wander around in Zoë’s life (and elsewhere) being a liar in the way despair is a liar before ... getting scared off by ghosts?

That doesn’t seem right.

Maybe before this “voice of despair” finds a proper release for itself, in death?

That Could Work

But is not a very sympathetic or scary character.

Maybe ...

Maybe the problem is “star-mites.” They’re, uh ... an infestation that’s usually native to Celestia but has come down to Town at least in part because one of the Celestian refugee camps is dumping trash on Zoë’s house? which is difficult to do anything about because it’s way up in the sky and also she doesn’t actually know the details and also because even if she did they’d be pretty much sympathetic other than for dumping their trash on her house.

Maybe even that was just once or twice!

Anyway it’s led to her house being infested with sparkly star-mites and the occasional room opening out onto the valley of constellations and other celestial phenomena like that and it’s annoying; and it’s not until a grand night of death in Horizon—when the sun sets early and there’s a distant drumming and the streets go dark and the presence of the End sweeps through like a dragon made of mist, and time itself is for a while stopped; and when morning dawns, the place is emptier—that it starts to subside.

Whoa, What?

That’s a Death miracle, you see, to end Mystic 1.

And ...

It doesn’t actually have to fix the star-mite thing, it occurs to me.

It doesn’t have to be pat like that, like, wow! That vast horror that just swept by was the solution to my household inconvenience!

It just has to end the centrality of the problem, make it enough less of an issue that we can move on past the quest; as well, of course, as being a miracle, because I have realized, more or less simultaneously with all of this, that the miracle at the end of Mystic 1 doesn’t strictly have to be a positive one. It doesn’t have to be a delight. It can just be echoing and numinous enough to open a space within the chambers of the soul.

“Wow, the world is bigger than I thought, and I’ve seen a lot” ... even if the miracle itself is not a good thing.

This quest isn’t really so much about the star-mites then; narratively, they’d just be a random thing, with their only actual point being a thematic one, and even that being a subtle beginning-and-end-of-book linkage rather than anything that stands out. The quest isn’t, “Star-Mites!”

The quest would be, death is coming. The end of the world is approaching. Everyone knows it, everyone can feel it. People are concerned. People are freaked.

We got here, in case I skipped too many steps to follow it, because I was trying to twist the “youkai parade” or “ghost palace” into some other kind of dramatic death extravaganza that would look cool but mostly not do much except reduce the star mites ... but I don’t think we want to stay with that.

I think this apocalypse is cool enough to be thematically central.

The quest is that the end of the world is approaching; and the signs mount up; and then, one night, the world ends.

...

And in the morning, of course, like the world’s done every other time before that it’s ended, it gets its head back in the game. Pulls itself back together. And goes on.

Thus, the dawn.

So That’s Book 3

Tired already, grumpy already, she’s now got a house that’s getting trash dumped on it from the sky and an infestation of sparkly star-mites.

Oh, and ... the world is ending.

The trees will be made of bones, and break; and the winds will be full of miasmic smoke; and the streets of Horizon will run with blood.

And in the wake of that—

In the morning, when the world goes on, after something’s ended ...

A new lord is rising among the ogres, a king of Abandon, a jackdaw prince, and rapidly gaining power as their trust in Entropy and the Rosewoods is a little shaken. A dude who’s got some way to stop from being turned into an egg and then a human, all on his own, when he’s seen down in Horizon, but who isn’t quite ready to go to war with the King of Evil and the Rosewoods, yet, so who comes down to try to get her on board with him, first:

To tell her that she’s being left behind. To tell her that she’s being domesticated, broken, and held back. To tell her that she can try to show him that her life down among the human people is a better way ... but that that’s gonna be a pretty hard sell.

Probably

Probably she just rejects this.

Probably in a PC group, she’d just reject it, and the PCs would try to dispose of the guy immediately, and because he’s an NPC, they’d succeed, but because he’s a Main Character with Immortality and Wound system access and a role in a later quest they would only get so far; only do something temporary. Probably even though he’s got a better pitch than just “mm, human, tasty!,” I mean, a little better, anyway, he doesn’t get to hang out with her being friendly.

But ...

I think that ... may be fine. I think that this particular Mystic 2 wrestling-with-the-opposite-number can go kind of the other way:

Like, maybe instead of someone hanging around her tempting her, it’s just, her trying to turn the tide. It’s her trying to stop this movement that’s rising among the ogres, it’s her trying to persuade people that her way’s the right one.

I think that maybe the end of Mystic 2, then, is when there’s the first casualty.

Let’s say, the first ogre death.

I Mean

A human death is bad for her too; a human death is a serious issue for Zoë and any ogres trying to fit into Horizon (like the train-ogres) in a non-eating-people way ... but a human death is out-tribe and doesn’t give the same feeling of death betraying her that is needed for the end of a Mystic 2 quest.

... heck, it could even be that to the best of her knowledge, it’s preceding actual human deaths, that whatever human escalated self-defense to the point of killing an ogre, they were jumping the gun; although the likelihood is that she’ll find out during quest 3 when everything is falling apart anyway that that’s wrong and at least a handful of humans were already eaten.

Admittedly a Conflict with More Visceral Stakes than Most Chuubo’s Conflicts Have

I’ve been hesitant to pull the trigger on things that would make the potential ethical conflicts among cast members irreconcilable—that would force an escalation of arguments to the point where having a Shared Action/Shared Reactions scene with some other PC might be unworkable; that might make it difficult to do a Ghibli adaptation of a particular game.

This right here ...

It’s, at minimum, an uglier situation than I ever had Principal Entropy II deal with in GMD, for instance; in GMD, I mostly implied that he was succeeding in balancing everything so that the evil island was not a threat requiring hostile response, not really, and thus any hostile human response was alarmist

... but GMD was also Pastoral, and this game is Gothic.

So, things are bad.

Mystic 3

Because it’s what you do in Mystic 3, Zoë puts together some sort of plan for the situation ... and, for the same reason ... it falls apart.

Mystic 4

Here, things get a little tricky, because stretching things out from here for two quests needs more meat for the situation than just “here’s a conflict, most of which is about currently nameless, faceless NPCs, plus one named dude’s there as well.” The whole conflict is currently not actually a tricky situation for a PC to navigate so much as a box labelled “Tricky Situation Inside.”

It’s missing the friction, the tactile feedback, that it would need to last until the end of quest 4.

It’s also missing the inspirational jump that lets her extract death from things, that would let her plausibly get to Primordial 3, but …

I Think

I think maybe the solution to both of these things is if the guy has a legacy from Lord Entropy/Principal Entropy I. If the guy has indications of genuine authority. That ... probably, for simplicity, means support from a Sin?

Which works well because the Sins are a generic campaign enemy, as I recall.

So she puts together a plan to settle the conflict. That is going to need some extra depth to what’s going on, some people that are not faceless crowds, but, like, just the people directly involved in the death on both sides and a few threatened-feeling humans are probably enough. And then, probably, her plan might have worked if it weren’t for the intrusion of …

I’d guess Mourning?

Or, the Exultant?

...

The Exultant seems more like the kind of guy who’d back this jackdaw prince. Including giving him a legitimacy in the evil world that, if not equal to Principal Entropy II’s backing, is not that far below. And the Exultant is probably able to pop out and ruin whatever Zoë’s plan is.

So, OK, let’s go with that.

And Then

Then there’s a struggle.

I don’t think we can do a quest-long fight scene. So, what does their struggle look like?

Traditional Chuubo’s comedy is to have the jackdaw prince teach a rival class and have students vote but I’m not quite sure how to get there. (“I’m sorry, Zoë, I know he’s going to bring a bunch of ogres down to eat everybody, but I never felt this excited about English literature when I studied with you!”)

I guess maybe ... he gets “defeated,” in the evil world, but not imprisoned or game-mechanically-defeated, and instead he heads down to Horizon to try to figure out what stopped the world from “properly” ending or at least staying ended back in quest 1, and to call back the moment of the end to finish things right this time?

I like that because that bit was kind of ... floating around unconnected to the rest of the book anyway.

I don’t know his motivation, quite, yet, but ... I like that.

So Maybe

So maybe she dethrones him, or the Exultant does, or the group shows up to kick him off the ogre throne and he’s already left; and the problem is, while he’s still out there, while the conflict is unresolved, he’s still got huge amounts of sympathy in ogre society.

And he’s down in Horizon trying to trigger a second coming of the apocalypse, presumably at the Exultant’s urging—

The Exultant? Weird.

This does suggest Mourning, again; or possibly I have this all wrong Sin-wise, really, since they’re all trying to create new worlds, which one is closest to this modus operandus here?—

Enh, we’ll figure that out when the full plot is revealed, if it still needs a Sin there at all.

A More Precise Thought on What the Plot Is

So the guy, the ogre prince guy, is a representation of Hunger/Abandon, right?

So maybe the plot here is all about the enemy here trying to stir whatever the apocalypse source was up into feasting on the world.

Maybe it didn’t do that the first time, and that’s why the world is still there?

...

It occurs to me that it might, then, work best if the nemesis here is not an ogre at all.

Instead, imagine ...

A force of Abandon, a divine thing, is pulling the strings; it jacked into the head of the jackdaw prince, and later escaped—still with sway over most of the ogres—to try to grab the apocalypse (creature?) instead.

It wouldn’t be the Exultant or Mourning; nor even Owler, I think, despite the possession, or any kin of Sin at all:

It’d be something with Awakening and Primordial, rather, so, basically, something Divine?

Once Again, from the Top!

We start with stars throwing trash down on Zoë’s house and an infestation of star-mites.

Then, apocalypse! This has the beneficent property of incidentally reducing the incidence of star-mites. Ultimately, the apocalypse is embodied in a high-end entity that opts either not to devour the world or to spit it back out.

Then, a very disappointed god of Hunger—hunger, and not abandon? ... enh, it’s a Divine Imperator or comparable Mystery, it can be both—

A very disappointed Hunger/Abandon being wakes up and is like, bruh. Bruh!

So it worms its way up to ogreville and sets up an abandon cult led by a jackdaw prince and it all totally takes off, particularly because the Exultant gets involved and is more or less pro-Abandon.

Zoë tries to convince everyone to just cut it out, particularly after their ability to fend off the whole turning-into-an-egg thing gets an ogre killed. And, ultimately, she manages to deal with things up there somehow ...

... but the Hunger god is still out there, moving among the people of Horizon or the Evil World, trying to summon the apocalypse thing back and get it to eat the world properly on take two.

(Possibly the apocalypse thing is an Apep equivalent, notionally?

So possibly what happened the first time was, it saw Sal, nodded to itself, and decided not to eat a world that had such upstanding Wriggling Teachers in it?

... though whether that would ever come out in play, if it were true, is unclear.)

Probably Zoë‘s own hunger is harder to control during the period when she’s dealing with the beast, just because, well, a hunger god is floating around, they tend to do that kind of thing.

Anyway, she finally puts it down, subdues the yawning void that lives inside people and makes them do these things, and can rejoin ogre or human society, ... but, like, her self-esteem has taken a battering. She looks at the bright lives (school, or in the evil world?) around her and is hesitant to approach; she thinks how she is dross, and they, shining stars.

Because of the possibility that she gets Primordial 3 at the end, probably a part of this is firming up her grasp on her position as an, at least local, ruler of Death—which will probably end up overlapping with some of the symbolism for the other characters, but whatever—

And so maybe it’s actually that, and not Sal (or not just Sal) that made the creature turn away in the first place.

It was like: ah, it is not yet time for death to swallow this world.

... which

Which suggests to me, in turn, that the final antagonist in the final book for Ogre-Sensei will be Death in the mode of the Headmaster, serving to highlight whatever distinction there may be between the kind of death he is and the death that runs beneath the surface of Horizon.

Whatever that might be. I don’t know what that is. *^_^*;;

Anyway!

Guh!

Finishing that up was more work than I expected!

Still, I think it’s a decent enough plot structure for Ogre-Sensei vs. World Hunger.

We also have most of the structure for the next two books:

Book 4

We know this one is flashback-heavy, with Lord Entropy’s death ending quest 1. I haven’t really decided at this point how she feels about Lord Entropy—probably positive, TBH, as awful as he necessarily was—but as noted earlier, Mystic 1 quest-end miracles don’t have to be good, they just have to amaze.

Presumably, given that we’ve used Abandon/Hunger, the “opposite number” for this book is going to be Time. I guess the question there is “should the past stay in the past?” which is an interesting companion to Rinley’s Lord Entropy Arc.

(In fact, these stories are matching up to Rinley’s in an interesting fashion in general.)

Presumably her life falls apart in Mystic 3 because of how she’s trying to process all of this.

Ultimately—because this ends with metaphorical Isolation 4—she realizes she’s in over her head, and has to reach out to someone.

Meaning ...

One path here is that all of this is about the burden of being created as a monster, but I don’t know that I want her to be tormented about that.

Grumpy, yes.

Isolated, yes.

... but I don’t know if I want it to be that kind, the tormenty kind, of personal struggle.

So maybe it’s just, a Jotun from the Walking Fields is trying to dredge the past back out of the river of death, as it were, and ... maybe it’s in stopping that, maybe it’s in whatever she opts to do in quest 5, but she realizes that she’s a bit too small, being an ogre and not an actual deity, to be Death.

She needs help. (Isolation 4.)

But she’s not going to get it just yet.

... Beginnings to Endings ...

I suppose that makes the beginning of the story a discussion by Lord Entropy about how death is as large as galaxies and small enough to fit in the palm of one’s hand?

... I dunno.

TBH I don’t know that I’m as on point in my beginning-ending game this month as usual. But we’ll see!

Book 5

And finally book 5 has her putting off dealing with that revelation, possibly even failing to find help, until she finds something amazing in the ghost world. Something she thought she’d lost forever. We’ll have to work a bit more on just what that is.

In quest 2, the Headmaster argues with her a bit about Death. At the end of the quest, she loses whatever it was that she found.

Possibly she does a sabbatical to the Bleak Academy? But I don’t think I want to go that route, everyone going off to the Bleak Academy at the end of their quest sequence, this time around. Maybe I do. I dunno. Anyway, the idea is there, but I am not yet convinced.

Her Life Falls Apart

Because Mystic 2 ends and Mystic 3 starts.

That’s pure Doylist, though. From the Watsonian perspective, I have no idea yet why her life falls apart here. I don’t quite know what the enemy in quest 4 will be, either, except presumably something from or about the Bleak Academy.

What I Know

I do know that when it’s all over, at the end of quest 5, some Bleak power will have her mind, soul, and heart within its grip. That when it’s all over, she will be lost, until a miracle comes. Lost; forsaken.

Because that’s how Isolation 5 works.

Now ...

It doesn’t technically promise it, but the presumption of Isolation 5 is that in actual play, and perhaps in actual life, such a miracle will eventually come.

Presumably that would be the epilogue.

We can see the book beginning with, I dunno, “death is an empty field”

And ending with “I drift through the endless emptiness; forever, bleak, alone” or whatever

... and then the epilogue is, like, “Chuubo, what the f*** is your entire class doing in the middle of my endless emptiness?”

Cue party horn

Pulling Back a Moment

So, that given, all of this, all book 5, is probably the story of how Death subsumes her; of how the river or the Headmaster consumes her, and how her best efforts fail; how either she succumbs, or, sacrifices all she is to resist—

Maybe there’s stakes beyond just her, to make the second option more palatable and heroic, like, some sort of intermural politics and she’s doing it to keep the Headmaster from taking over her class or something?

—only, after all that, it turns out that her students won’t abandon her; that they don’t leave her behind.

(Unless they’re all PCs, and do, and/or she’s played as a really terrible teacher, in which case, well, someone, the Principal or Hugh or a random Cerberoid dog met on the way, someone does not.)

I should probably poke around for good Egyptian myth to tie this to when finishing up but ultimately it’s not critical if nothing is found.

Next Time!

We’ll flesh those out!

And figure out how she transforms when she acquires new limbs!

When?

Probably next month, but I don’t know for sure; I may finish IOSHI or do more Glitch instead. That’s why I made sure you had at least a solid idea of how all five books would work! ^_^

(Quick spoiler on limbs, too, for the same reason:

I think I’m bugged by her having extra arms, but obviously some level of shapeshifting is OK for ogres since Indomitable lets her turn into a crow or a mouse and the train-ogres are physically changing ... so I think we’ll be talking about minor changes, structural changes, material changes ... and, where Jasper Irinka would have arms or tendrils, and only those would really do, Zoë will have floaty companion magics that are roughly as self-motivated as Thing from the Addams Family or Bit from Tron but not as likely to travel as far away.

That’s where I am this month, anyhow!)

And That’s All For Now!

I will see you next month!

#patreon-supported posts #the horizon campaign #ogre-sensei

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dgcatanisiri · 5 years

Text

So... Let’s see how this works. We’ll adjust the format as needed if this doesn’t work, but hey, here we go.

Welcome to DG’s Listing of Wish These DLC Existed, where I theorize, speculate, and just kinda generally throw ideas at the wall about DLCs for games I love that never happened and never will happen, but damn, I’d like to see them anyway.

Because I have ideas, I can’t get them made as mods, I don’t have time to make them into fic, and they’re never going to happen anyway, so why not put them up in a public place? After all, they’re tie ins to games I have no control over anyway, so it’s not like I’ll ever make money off of them anyway.

Our first installment takes a look at Star Wars - Knights of the Old Republic. Obviously, as this game predates the modern DLC model (there was the Yavin market, but that was maybe a grand total of ten minutes tops of content, if we’re generous), so there are some awkwardnesses involved in making DLC for this - if nothing else, when the game ends, it ends, to keep playing, you have to start a new character. On another, there’s the level cap, stopping our leveling up after hitting Level 20. As the game presently exists, that should happen after being locked into the endgame combo of the Unknown World/Star Forge, but adding more content means that cap gets hit sooner.

So understand that we’re assuming that there is the ability to play post-game and a higher level cap, as well as other quality of life style additions (in this case, probably among them are various additions from KOTOR 2, but that’s a subject for another day). I’m also willing to assume that there is content for characters (even if the respective voice actors have passed, retired, or just wouldn’t return), in the same style as modern games. The assumption here is that these DLC ideas would have been written, produced, and published during the active production cycle of the respective games.

As this is the inaugural edition, let me explain the format. There will be a name for the DLC, a brief synopsis, a reference to when this hypothetical DLC would become available/if and when it becomes unavailable (unless it’s part of a hardwired point, like the above mentioned point of no return of travelling to the Unknown World, as an example), and then an expansion/write up of the ideas going in to them. Some ideas will have more expansion than others, because I’ve just plainly put more thought into them - in a lot of cases, I wrote them down just on the basis of ‘this idea seems pretty cool,’ and then gave them more context later on.

And a further note - I reserve the right to come up with more ideas for any given game that I have already written up, naturally. I haven’t decided how I’ll handle that yet, but it’s entirely possible there will later be more ideas.

Okay, housekeeping matters out of the way, let’s get down to business!

The Yavin Excursion

Yavin 4 was the site of Sith Lord Exar Kun’s power base. In understanding more about him and his fall, the Jedi Council believe it may be able to shed light on the fall of Revan and Malak. But the secrets of the Massassi temples hold more than just the ghosts of the past, but a threat for the present...

(Available after Dantooine)

Tack this on to the existing content of the market in orbit of Yavin, I suppose. But the connection to the Tales of the Jedi comic seems like a good starting point here – investigate one Sith Lord to examine the motivations of another, find out why the first guy fell to the dark side, which will hopefully explain why the other guys did.

I see this as both a lore exercise – to offer the players more exploration of this era, considering that the Tales of the Jedi comics have been harder to come by as time as gone on, so allowing some more in depth portrayals of the time – and a chance to kind of approach the question of what drives someone to the dark side. Exar Kun fell by an overwhelming curiosity, Ulic Qel-Droma, his apprentice, fell by a desire for revenge, and later lost his connection to the Force (put a pin in that fact – we’ll be back to that come the DLC for KOTOR 2). Millennia later, Anakin Skywalker falls because of his fear of the loss of those he loves. Two of these people were redeemed, one refused to give up his power.

If anything, this would be a good chance for some foreshadowing of Bastila’s eventual fall (so perhaps this would be locked to before the Leviathan catches the Ebon Hawk), on top of asking the question that later drives KOTOR 2 – what were Revan’s motivations in turning to the dark side? Obviously, this is up in the air from a character perspective (and, honestly, so far as I care, from the player’s too, because I despise the whole “the Sith Emperor warped their minds” BS, and I’m ready and willing to disregard it, even in acknowledging The Old Republic). The first KOTOR never really focuses on the why of Revan’s fall, since Malak is the game’s big bad, and the Revan reveal is a plot twist – since this is DLC, the player would probably be expected to know it going in, so why not explore that, right?

As for what this threat is... I’m a little shakier on this. I’m thinking a Massassi warrior/beast of some kind, the same kind of Sith alchemical abomination we see in the terantatek or hssiss, only a much more powerful end boss kind of thing, a living relic of Exar Kun’s evil (given that, canonically, Exar Kun’s spirit survived to the Jedi Academy novel trilogy, he certainly can’t be the final boss), perhaps fed and kept alive by the powers of the remaining Massassi who worshipped Exar Kun as a god – in this case, looking to take advantage of the Ebon Hawk’s arrival to spread their master’s will across the galaxy and speed his return. Sith alchemy played a part in a lot of the Sith portrayals from this timeframe, and it’s kind of disappointing that KOTOR never really utilized these mutants, just had them as mindless high level bosses.

Vector

The rakghoul plague infested the lower levels of the planet of Taris. When the planet was bombed by the Sith, it managed to escape among the many refugees as well. With their experiences on Taris, facing the rakghouls, the Jedi Council sends the crew of the Ebon Hawk to investigate its spread to the planet Ralltiir – and stop the Sith from obtaining it as a weapon!

(Available after Dantooine)

The rakghouls were just kind of dropped into KOTOR with no explanation – they were a threat as a creature and as a plague in the Undercity of Taris, but no one ever spoke about what the plague’s origins were or where the rakghouls came from. And then along came the Vector mini-series of comics (hence the name for this) that put the creation of the rakghouls down to a Sith Lord, Karness Murr. Sith alchemy, the gift that keeps on giving.

But either way, considering that the rakghoul plague is something that even the Upper City of Taris was concerned about, that clearly says that it could easily have gotten off planet, especially in the panic of the evacuation. And really, with the added knowledge that this was originally Sith alchemy, it’s almost certain that some aspiring Sith would discover this and try to twist it to their advantage.

I pretty much pulled Ralltiir’s name out of a hat, primarily because it’s a fairly common named planet, but with little actually associated with it. It also makes a great place where the Republic would demand an immediate concern, because it’s a Core World and an economic hub. It’s a great place to have a plague that Republic heads would say would draw in the Ebon Hawk, whose crew had familiarity with the rakghoul plague, despite the threat of Malak and the search for the Star Maps.

I also see this as a way to give Mission and Juhani more content – Mission is a hard character for me to really justify remaining with the crew after Taris, given that she’s a teenager, I feel VERY uncomfortable taking her around on what is effectively a commando mission, while Juhani was very nearly hacked out of the game. Both of them grew up on Taris, in the lower levels of the planetary city, where the rakghouls aren’t just a distant threat. So give them this additional portrayal and focus because they’re familiar with the plague, maybe even knew some people who were infected and transformed by it.

The villain would be a Jedi-turned-Sith, someone who had turned to the Sith at some point after being a Jedi historian. A part of me wants to draw on one of the Jedi who would later show up in the Exile’s vision on Korriban, mostly because those were the Jedi we see recruited by Malak, and so less aware of Revan’s face, though that seems a touch much. Regardless, they’d previously acted as a historian, and is driven by the potential power of the rakghoul plague – Muur’s talisman is lost by this point (again, see the comics), but the rakghouls themselves remain, and, while I’m ignoring the whole “the Sith Emperor did it” thing with Revan, I also like the concept of the rakghouls evolving into the nekghouls, gaining sentience.

This is also a way to add a little bit more of a question to the results – do these evolved rakghouls deserve the consideration of being considered more than mindless beasts? Are they at all a continuation of the person they once were? Or are they just violent creatures that need to be put down? Is the guy trying to control them being corrupted by the dark side, or was he always evil?

So the central question here would be asking “what makes a monster?” Is it the mindless savagery of beasts, or the knowing cruelty of intelligent beings, and where is that line?

Sleheyron

The volcanic world of Sleheyron holds a Star Map. The Ebon Hawk and her crew set out to discover the secrets hidden there, but must be cautious, for the planet also holds a group of Darth Malak’s most powerful apprentices, who have, in their isolation from their leader, created their own plan for the fall of the Republic...

(Available after Dantooine)

Sleheyron was planned to be part of the hunt for the Star Maps – six environments are described in the Rakatan ruin on Dantooine, the life-giving worlds (oceanic – Manaan, grassland – Dantooine, arboreal – Kashyyyk) and death-giving worlds (desert – Tatooine, volcanic, barren – Korriban). Sleheyron was the volcanic world, but got cut for time, early enough that there really wasn’t a lot of material that made it out, with the planet just becoming part of Yuthura Ban’s back story. So, hey, free reign to develop something here.

Honestly, one of my big questions is, if Malak was with Revan as they travelled the worlds to find the Star Maps, why doesn’t he do something about the fact that these locations led to the big secret weapon that gives the Sith Empire its power and forces? Wouldn’t he have thought that maybe some form of guard or another would be a good idea? Sure, the Korriban one was guarded by virtue of being in the tomb of Naga Sadow, but the others? Here, we get a chance to have a group of Sith having taken control of this planet where there is a Star Map that can add to what our heroes have assembled (but, being DLC, this isn’t required to take on). They’re specifically there to guard the Map.

This becomes a bit of a game of cat and mouse – how to act before the Sith apprentices (probably former Jedi themselves) can find them, capture or kill them, hand them off to Malak. (Probably also means that this should be a later stage planet to visit, but hey, player choice of direction, right?) How do these Jedi move around a planet while the people in charge are out to get them? Draw on the mechanic from KOTOR 2, where the people on Dantooine recognize if the Exile goes there while a lightsaber is equipped, maybe.

Actually, I’d like to see some mechanic that tracks how much the player uses the Force while wandering around – the more they use the Force, or the more powerful the Force effects they use, the more likely they are to summon Sith execution squads or something. Sort of like KOTOR 2 and Nar Shaddaa, where the Exile’s actions drew the attention of the Exchange and Visquis, only in reverse – the player and company need to avoid catching the attention of the Sith until they’ve raised a rebellion against the Sith overlords, or at least gained enough public goodwill that the Sith can’t just openly take them away and execute them, something like that.

I like this idea because it allows an opportunity to play more with non-violent approaches, alternatives that aren’t “murder everyone because combat gives more experience!” Here, the idea is that you WANT to fly under the radar, avoid combat. And, if combat happens, you also have incentive to not use the lightsaber for a stretch – gives players a reason to put points into blasters or non-lightsaber melee combat, because I don’t know about anyone else, but the second I get a lightsaber in these games, I don’t ever use a different weapon. Here, the player is in the position of HAVING to switch up their play style, or, if they don’t, have to be that much more cautious in their actions here. This is a story piece that hinges on what you do with your words.

The ultimate confrontation with the Sith and the Star Map, in my mind, takes place in a cavern of an active volcano (or maybe one that has been dormant, but, because what’s the Sith without random acts of evilly evil, they’re managing to coax back to life). Here’s where there’s a pretty big question in the construction of this DLC – are we working in the confines of the game engine of the time or with newer, more modern systems? Cuz I’d kinda like something that took place within the volcanic areas of the planet, given that’s what the planet is described as. But I don’t think that KOTOR’s original engine would really be able to explore that to its fullest, given the limitations on it. My big idea would be to have the climax of the planet’s arc have the threat of a volcanic eruption, potentially with the base of operations for these Sith being flooded by lava.

If that is an engine limit... I really have no idea what the alternative would be, but, hey, since this is pie in the sky as it is, why not call for the engine advancement that lets it be a thing, where we have to outrun a lava flow or something.

Echoes of the Past

The strike team that fought Revan is being targeted by Malak’s assassins. The crew of the Ebon Hawk take a journey to the graveyard of the attack on Revan’s ship, the battle that led to the defeat of the dark lord. But the dead don’t rest easy, especially amongst the ruins of the Sith Lord’s vessel...

(Available after the Leviathan)

The strike team that captured Revan is kinda the forgotten element of the game as is. This is a team, and yet we only hear about Bastila’s involvement. Which, sure, she is the member on our squad, she does have the Force Bond with Revan, but... Who were the others? Where have they been during the war?

And it seems like Malak would think of them as a threat period – they were the Jedi who were there to face off against Revan, the Jedi thought they’d have a chance against this great Sith Lord, the leader of the Sith forces of the time. But Bastila is the only one the game ever concerns itself with, and doesn’t even mention if the others lived, who they were, why they were chosen... None of that.

So here we get to explore them. The added bonus is that I see this as a post-Leviathan mission, one that we play with full awareness of our player character’s identity. How much of that awareness we pass on is one thing, and it really allows us to explore the idea “who was Revan before, who is Revan now?” Because that’s going to come into play when dealing with the people who were at one point sent in to kill Revan – sent to kill us, the player character.

I also like the set piece idea of a graveyard of ships, where the characters are walking through the husks of dead vessels – the Harbinger sequence in KOTOR 2 is still a favorite of mine. Granted, this would probably be a bit of a conceptual retread of that part of that game, but hey, why not get some variation of the same old gameplay, right? Plus, it’s different here for the fact that this will have some personal connection to Revan – this was their ship. Did they consider it a home? Just a place?

That leads to the bigger plot element, though. These Jedi know Revan as a threat. They’re going to be suspicious of Revan the whole way through – “are you the Jedi the Council thought you to have become, or are you the Sith we were once sent to kill?” Like I’m sorta thinking this is a case where we’d get these teammates as companions proper now that I’m considering this in detail, and this all builds to the main confrontation. Like we wouldn’t take our Ebon Hawk buddies on this one, but two of these guys.

That confrontation would involve the assassins being revealed to be loyalists to Darth Revan, with their mission having begun with attempting to avenge their fallen Lord, but now, with Revan returned to them, having tested their skill over the course of their luring Revan back to them, they are willing to take up their banner once more, leading to the choice – be Revan, the Sith Lord, or Revan, the Prodigal Knight.

And yes, I know, this is the same thing we see with Bastila later. In some ways, that’s the point. Choosing the light or the dark is not one you make once and are one that path forever. It is a constant, repeated choice, one that must be made, again and again. It’s something that has to been affirmed and reaffirmed, because it will always come up again. Here, it’s just “we offer you power and loyal servants,” while Bastila has the offer of their Force bond – hell, if this were real DLC, I’d say patch in some element to the endgame of Bastila trying to use their bond to lure Revan over to her side on top of things.

What Remains

Darth Malak’s assault on Dantooine was meant to destroy the Jedi. The Ebon Hawk is the one ship that might be able to break the Sith blockade and rescue the people trapped behind their lines, as well as recover irreplaceable Jedi artifacts hidden away at the enclave. And Revan has a need to confront the Jedi Council...

(Available after Leviathan)

This one has always been in my mind as something that, in many ways, we needed to see happen. I look at this as being the necessary confrontation with the Jedi Masters that we need, because they’re using Revan. Revan was reprogrammed to be their weapon against the Sith, and what exactly were they going to do if and when the war was over and they’d no longer had need of Revan?

A mission to Dantooine, done by the ship that could escape the blockade of Taris, to attempt to rescue and recover the Jedi, break the people there out of the iron grip of the Sith, at first does seem somewhat at odds with the portrayal of Dantooine in KOTOR 2, but it still makes sense if you think of the first priority being to evacuate the Jedi and the relics they were saving – the Jedi become the reason that any rescue comes, not the people stuck there. The Jedi and their artifacts are prioritized over the people now under the thumb of the Sith.

Especially if the only real encounter we have is with the Jedi themselves, seeing them in the midst of their exodus, dealing with the Sith occupiers and executioners, all of whom would have once had friends here – I see this also including a Republic military outpost to Dantooine prior to the attack there, because there honestly should have been one anyway (this I chalk up as much to the more limited engine of the game as anything else), and that providing some extra characters to events, which makes it all the more devastating having their former comrades in arms now there to kill them.

As much as this is about confronting the Jedi for the way that they intended to use Revan, this is also an exploration of the divide of Republic and Sith, that those now calling themselves Sith were once the best and brightest of the Republic. Yes, the Jedi failed to come to the aid of the Republic in the midst of the war, but that doesn’t explain the violence these former soldiers engage in against their own people. What made the rank and file Sith soldier agree to this?

That examination of motivation would, I feel, be a part of why the resulting confrontation with the Jedi would matter so much – what drove Revan? What drove the Sith? What drove the Jedi? Because they mindwiped Revan and implanted them with a personality to use them as a weapon. They didn’t “turn an enemy to their cause.” They violated Revan in an effort to use them. When the war was over, what did they really think would happen?

Specifically, we need to confront Zhar, who, given Kreia’s utter disdain for him in KOTOR 2, I get the impression that he was the major proponent of this idea. His actions may have been justified as “for the greater good,” but it always seems like the greatest of morally questionable actions are justified with those words. Do we confront him with rage, forgiveness, or... something else? Because this is a case where I can see both condemning him to death and condemning him to live as a punishment. I could even see this being a case of him bowing to Revan’s judgment, and no option having a light side/dark side shift, because this isn’t about the Force. This is about justice.

Whether or not the Jedi admit it, a life was taken the day they implanted a personality into Revan’s body. The Jedi need to be called out and recognize that they do not have clean hands after what they’ve done.

Revan’s Shadow

Although Revan’s legacy, the Star Forge and the Sith army, have been defeated, there are still questions of Revan’s journey. There was more to it than Star Maps. The crew of the Ebon Hawk reunite on the planet Belkadan to find out more of the Rakatan Empire, and its ties to the dark side of the Force. And along the way, Revan will find more of their lost past...

(Post-Game)

The fact is, we get very little of Revan in the game proper, little about who they were as a person before the fall. This is conceptually to hide the fact that the player IS Revan, of course, but... It creates a lot of little issues for me – I mean, like half of these prospective DLCs are about expanding something of Revan’s motives and past. Obviously, this is a blank slate for the player, because they wanted to leave this open for us to decide, but they DID make a few definitions of who Revan was with the existing content, with the case of the Star Map on Kashyyyk.

And for me, personal identity is a big lingering question for this character – again, I’m choosing to ignore the handling of Revan as a character in The Old Republic, and I’m gonna include the tie-in novel in that, so no one is allowed to say “the novel said [x]!”

This is someone whose entire concept of who they are is in question once they learn that they are a constructed self, created by the Jedi Council as a weapon. Who ARE they? Who have they chosen to be, and, if they could reclaim the parts of themselves that they lost with the Jedi’s mind wipe, would they? Obviously, there’s no time in the main plot to focus on these questions, but I feel like this would eat at them afterwards, leading them to having to find answers. And what kind of friends would the others be if they let Revan do this alone?

I picked Belkadan pretty much because it’s an out of the way planet that has been identified as part of the Rakata’s Infinite Empire, so it made as much sense as any planet to be the site of this. I mean, the involvement of the Infinite Empire is certainly a good option for a place that questions who Revan is.

This would be a place where Revan had gone, after the Mandalorian Wars, a place where they were trying to connect to the Force, to understand the questions – why did the Jedi Council believe they shouldn’t be involved in an existential threat? Why is Revan drawn to these Star Maps and the destination they point to? What awaits them if they go, and what will change about them? What answers are to be found in asking an energy field that can offer no direct response?

Obviously, I’m thinking in terms of finding recordings of Revan, so requiring a voice for Revan – Rino Romano did the little soundbites when male Revan interacts with things, while I don’t know who did the voice bites for female Revan, so they’d be options, or new VA’s altogether. While part of me does want to go forward and make Revan a fully voiced protagonist (because I’m just used to that nowadays), I could accept this as being something only for old!Revan, not present!Revan.

The idea is simply to explore the driving motivations of Revan and decide plainly who Revan wants to be now. I kinda see the ending reach a point of ‘hey, you can reclaim your old memories, you can decide what personality is dominant, what do you want?’ and Revan being able to choose who they will be from here on out.

This is also a good place to require at least Bastila and Carth. Obviously I’m kinda leaning more into the light side ending for this, but... Well, the dark side endings tend to be untenable for future content anyway – Revan as the reclaimed Sith Lord, leading the army against the Republic was never really a viable future, because the Republic had to survive. So yeah, we’re gonna take the easy route and assume light side here. So Bastila and Carth, as Revan romances, would also have a contribution to make, building on the questions of “I’m in love with the person who was Darth Revan, can I accept this?” Like I said, a lot of questions that the game sidestepped, and this one matters for the sake of the relationship being able to continue after the ending of the game.

The Rakatan Prize

The Unknown World – Rakata Prime, Lehon – has become a subject of a great many conversations. Now that the Star Forge is gone, the planet is accessible, and many are eager to investigate its mysteries and forgotten technology. Having had firsthand experience, the Republic has asked the crew of the Ebon Hawk to return...

(Post-Game)

And then, there’s the Rakata. Not that Star Wars isn’t full of ancient empires that rose and fell millennia ago, but this was KOTOR’s contribution. And really, they’re almost superfluous – hell, if the Unknown World were rewritten so that the Rakata had gone extinct, the only thing that really would be necessary would be finding a way into the temple. I kinda think that would even tighten things up a little, especially given how often I’ve hit the level cap before meeting the Council of Elders.

The Rakata are a mystery, and the idea here is to investigate that. Build up the whole element of the Rakata having lost their connection to the Force, and the fact that they’re trying to explore this (because we’re assuming light side against here and that the Elders survived, including the scientists investigating this).

Because this is one of those things that stands out in Star Wars lore, when beings are stripped of their Force connections. Ulic Qel-Droma, the Exile, this is something that is traditionally a case of an individual, not a species.

We also have the remains of a galactic empire to examine here. If a species once ruled the galaxy, it’s inevitable that there are those who would see that empire be reborn. The threat of this DLC becomes this group who aspire to reconquer the galaxy using the mind transfer technology that puts the Rakatan prisoner in that white space box that would allow them to trap the minds of Jedi and other Force users to take their bodies and use them to go forth and conquer the galaxy.

Ultimately, the question’s going to be whether or not to restore their connection to the Force – do the Rakata, a race of dominators of the galaxy, whose humbling by the forces of nature has not managed to truly change them, deserve a second chance, or should they have their attempt to restore their own connections to the Force wiped out, leaving them vulnerable to an inevitable extinction?

Because this is one of the big things with Revan, the idea of redemption, change, second chances. Does Revan extend this chance to these people, people who clearly have more than a few members who have no interest in peaceful coexistence? But if not, do they deserve to be condemned to extinction?

And, as a bonus...

Romance Content – Bisexual Carth, Bisexual Bastila, Gay Canderous, extended Juhani romance

Because Carth and Bastila should be bisexual, and Juhani’s romance deserves to be more proper. Meanwhile, Canderous should totally be an option as well, and yeah, I’m gonna be selfish here and say that he should be gay, rather than bi (because, again, I’m ignoring the novel, there is no wife). Because this means that there’s a favoring for same-sex romances, and that never happens. My list, my way. Star Wars is gay culture.

#dg rambles #dg talks video games #dg's hypothetical dlc #knights of the old republic #kotor

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paladin-andric · 6 years

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The Lethal Tag

Tagged by @corishadowfang! Thanks, I enjoy doing these.

Rules: Answer these five questions for whatever characters you want, then tag some people.

I suppose I’ll be doing Blackheart, since nothing else I have on my mind is really tangible at the moment...

(Long post, so answers below!)

1) What is your OCs’ favorite weapon type (and if they don’t have one, then just answer hypothetically, and that goes for the rest of the Qs)

Alexander: Despite spending the entire story using a sword, it’s actually not his go-to! A sword and shield may be his primary pick on the ground, but he’s usually atop his horse (he doesn’t bring her to the infested city due to terrain, cavalry charges aren’t exactly effective in an urban enviornment). As a heavy cavalry knight, Alexander’s usually using a lance. The might of a lance charge atop his steed, Dragon, can fell even the toughest warriors in a single hit. Cavalry supremacy is the way the Geralthin army fights, and it’s led them to victory against foes on all sides.

Senci: He uses a longsword, though being a kobold, his size means he has to use it like a greatsword. He’s really good with it though, and becomes quite experienced in the art of combat during his journey!

Leianna: A spiked mace is her trademark. Though she’s a cleric, she uses it out of personal preference. Cracking skulls is just her style. She also uses a shield with it as well. She’s a pretty balanced warrior, though at times reckless.

Lexius: A short sword and small, wooden shield. Very plain and simple.

Razorwing: The great hero, a famous archer! He uses a longbow, it’s his staple! He also has a dagger as an emergency fallback, though as one of the avian koutu, his maneuverability means he shouldn’t really ever need to use it.

Paul: He’s a bounty hunter kitted out for any engagement. His primary weapons are his miniature crossbows. He also has a broadsword and daggers in case he needs to fight up close. He’s known to use tricky support weapons like smoke bombs and nets as well.

Wurie: The wolfman, and Captain of the Guard Wurie uses an arming sword, and nothing else! He’s spent plenty of time mastering its use, though. The same, old but maintained blade has brought him through many years of service, from his start as a caravan mercenary, through the height of his career as the founder and leader of a mercenary company, and finally to his years as a guard for the city of Palethorn.

Andric: A claymore! He’s strong enough to use it with one hand, though he tends to use both anyway. Having a free offhand is helpful with casting his holy magic though, being a paladin and all.

Tourthun: He’s a red, firebreathing dragon! Soooo...claws and fire.

Charles: Half-human, half-dragon, all magician! He doesn’t use any weapons at all! Not physical anyway, as he has an array of spells to choose from. If for some reason he couldn’t use any magic, he’d probably just use his claws.

2) Do they own such a weapon? How does it look like? (Add drawings or pictures pls!)

Alexander:

Senci:

Leianna:

Lexius:

Razorwing:

Paul:

Wurie:

Andric:

Tourthun:

I guess? That’s the closest I can think of a picture to his “weapons”. (He’s actually really nice though so don’t worry, he’s not actually plundering gold or frying people)

Charles:

3) How did it come into their possession?

Alexander: He commissioned a renowned blacksmith and armorer to forge his equipment.

Senci: A gift from his tutor and foster father, Andric!

Leianna: Granted to her by the Order of God, the religious order she serves.

Lexius: The monk scraped together the tiny bit of personal wealth he had and got his sword, shield and chainmail quickly made by a nameless blacksmith, hence their dubious quality.

Razorwing: After becoming a very skilled bowman, he put in a lot of time learning to how both make and maintain bows and arrows. His current longbow is one he made himself!

Paul: He was careful to have his armaments made by well-established blacksmiths with reputations for high-quality, reliable merchandise. Can’t have a breakage or malfunction in the middle of an important mission, after all.

Wurie: Part of a dual deal, actually. When deciding to become a mercenary, he mentioned his lack of armaments to the caravan company he wanted to sign up with. The head merchant actually pointed him to a company blacksmith, offering a moderate discount. This was to hopefully foster some loyalty so that Wurie would stay on with them for future trips. The wolfman did indeed stick around with them for a long time.

Andric: Meticulously crafted by a master blacksmith, and then enchanted by himself. The top quality steel is deadly and reliable, and the paladin’s own blessing makes the claymore tear through the scales and flesh of demons and evil monsters with ease.

Tourthun: All dragons are born with their claws and breath powers.

Charles: Everyone’s born with magic already innately inside of them. It’s simply a matter of training to draw it out and learn to use and control it...

4) Who taught them to use it?

Alexander: That would be Sir Gabriel Winthorperry! A knight that arrived to the house of Angelus to serve Alexander’s father, he took on the role of tutor when Alexander expressed interest in becoming a knight. He trained the child for many years in the use of knightly weapons, combat and conduct, until Alexander was finally able to set off as an knight on his own. He’s become a great tactician from his time commanding armies as well.

Senci: Sir Andric, the paladin and one who raised Senci! He drilled Senci vigorously. At first he didn’t want to, but Senci begged and pleaded, wanting to become a hero like him. He made sure the kobold would be strong and skilled enough to survive out in the harsh world that Senci still sees as a dreamland.

Leianna: She began training to become a cleric as she reached maturity. As a child, she had to run away from home for reasons. A priest found her out in the forest crying, and took her back to the monastery. There she grew up learning about the holy scriptures, church tradition, and God. After they accepted her request, she started training, and became proficient at channeling holy magic and using blunt instruments.

Lexius: No one! He has absolutely no combat experience or training! He’s totally out of his league...though he IS very skilled at healing magic, and has quite a bit of potential that will become apparent later down the line...

Razorwing: An archery tutor who turned out to be a pretty nasty man, actually. He started a toxic, abusive relationship with Razorwing while he was young and naive. A traveling human helped him break free from that, and Razorwing began training himself after that. He quickly rose to become a master archer in due time. and is pretty famous as an adventuring hero now.

Paul: Self-taught. He started small, but his natural combat awareness, sharp senses and streetwise nature helped him stay alive long enough to become VERY good at what he does.

Wurie: Trained by a barbarian tribe as a warrior at first. He ran away and fled to Geralthin, where he became a mercenary. He got a lot of training and firsthand experience with kobold raids on the caravans he protected. After becoming the head of his own company he set off on many missions against all kinds of monsters. By the time he became a city guard he was a seasoned veteran of war. In that time he became skilled in the art of mediation and diffusing volatile situations as well, since the job required it.

Andric: Trained by the church, and forged in the crucible of war. He’s spend decades fighting cults, monsters, and even slaying dragons. He’s one of the most battle-hardened and highly-skilled paladins in the world at the moment, and his mere presence can turn the tide of war.

Tourthun: He doesn’t fight, nor was he trained. He’s borderline pacifist, though certain events will force a change soon enough. As a great, mighty dragon though anyone but a great wizard or hero would be hard-pressed to defeat him if they wanted to...not that most would. He’s developed a fiercely protective attitude towards humanity, and wishes to defend them from other, more evil dragons.

Charles: He went to college for the magical arts. He’s still young, but his natural ability, great mind, and fast learning along the powerful desire to become better means it won’t be long before he’s a master sorcerer.

5) Does your OCs’ have a special boss-killer move? What is it?

I like to imagine this question as making a “Finisher” or “Ultimate” move from a videogame, so I’ll try my best to use that as inspiration.

Alexander: He’s just a knight. A good one, but still a knight, having no magic or superhuman abilities. I’d imagine his ultimate move would be him using a rallying horn, and an army of knights appearing and running down his foe in a crushing cavalry charge full of lances.

Senci: Some sort of reckless and wild flurry of swings, ending with a front-flip cleave.

Leianna: Beating the stuffing out of her enemy, knocking them over, and slamming her mace into their skull.

Lexius: The spell Destroy Evil! I’ve written some lore on magic before, so here’s an excerpt about the spell:

“Caster creates an aura around them of pure good, destroying anything evil, both physical and in concept. This will spell destroys not only beings born of evil, like demons, and tears the corruption from tainted objects, but also seeks out and destroys evil within normal beings. Selfishness, hatred, greed and jealously are burned away from people in the aura. This process is extremely painful, amplified by how “bad” of a person the target is. Even good people will feel great pain, but the truly wicked will be wracked with such horrific suffering that they will likely die of shock before the process is complete. Once these thoughts of darkness and wickedness are burned away, those affected will feel different, calm and at peace with themselves. They might no longer feel temptation to do bad, or may begin to see the faults with their old ways. Stripping away free will is a huge taboo in human society, so this spell is generally only cast on either the willing, on defiled objects, or in groups where demons are suspected to be hiding in human disguises, the holy person gauging the reactions of those affected. Demons will screech in horror before burning away completely. Sometimes used by holy men and women to purify themselves of temptation and sin. An extremely difficult spell to cast.”

Razorwing: A flurry of arrows fired while he’s flying in the air, followed up by a cinematic headshot.

Paul: A smoke bomb and him dancing around the enemy unseen, landing hit after hit, ended with a shot to the back while the enemy’s trying to find him.

Wurie: Rallying the Silver Shields, his mercenary company, to come in and overwhelm the enemy!

Andric: Calling down a pillar of pure divine energy, smiting his opponent and enveloping them in holy flames.

Tourthun: His *SPOILERS* appears and the pair drown the enemy in a sea of flames.

Charles: Probably the spell Ritual of Pain. Here’s a description from the lore excerpts again:

“The caster, before casting this spell, must draw blood. The more blood, the more powerful the spell. Generally, the sorcerer will stab their hand or arm with a knife, dig into the wound to let blood pour freely, and then hold up their hand and cast the spell. A torrent of acidic blood will pour from the caster towards the intended target, drowning the victim in boiling acid. This extraordinarily powerful spell costs the caster dearly, who will be terribly wounded afterwards. Anyone casting this spell is either desperate enough to risk death, or has a healer handy. Use of this spell is frowned upon in many places, though in antiquity it was one of the powerful death spells used to defeat the dragons.”

Tagging @lady-redshield-writes, @paper-shield-and-wooden-sword and @sheralynnramsey!

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julesplanb-blog · 6 years

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Don’t cross the themes!

The following note contains heavy spoilers about the plot of both 1984 & 2016 Ghostbusters movies, and a tiny one - a line of dialogue - from Ocean’s 8.

“Having only girls in the new Ghostbusters movie makes no sense and is as sexist as having only males, you -”

Ok so, this is where I’m gonna cut that quote from about 78 random dudes sharing their opinion on Paul Feig’s Ghostbusters with me (so much love I did not ask for <3), because this is usually where said opinion goes from PG to NC-17. I said in a previous note that arguing with people about movies was one of the greatest things in life... provided that people’s opinions were at least a tad respectful, and a tad built on something, ANYTHING, beyond basic casual hatred for women (oh hello, guys who want to remake The Last Jedi!). That being said, I’m going to be the bigger person here and still take time to answer those 78 gentlemen with a little piece on why, in my humble opinion, having women in the Ghostbusters reboot not only makes sense, but makes it a more functioning movie when it comes to characters and even themes. Ok, let’s do this.

First things first: while I’m interested in comparison, I don't think it's relevant to try and rank the 2 movies: I personally enjoy the 2016 more, but I can acknowledge its weaknesses. It’s just than what works in it is way more compelling to me as a viewer (and, yes, as a female viewer). On the other hand, I’ll admit the qualities of the original, mostly to be an effortless piece of good writing, but it’s weaker where the 2016 shines, and vice-versa. Ultimately, those are 2 different movies, actually telling two different stories. Yes, I know, both are about a team of semi-misfits chasing ghosts. But one story focus (1984) is around a philosophical idea, and the second is about human/women condition (2016). One is built around a (fun, entertaining and functioning) concept, i.e. busting ghosts, the other is about characters paths. To the point where I think there’s close to no character arc in the original Ghostbusters. I mean think about it: how did the characters changed between beginning and end? When the film starts, they already know each other’s, have a functioning relationship and it turns out all along that they were pretty much right on everything from the start. They’re not exactly challenged on their beliefs, way to see the world, behaviours or just plain personalities, not even Bill Murray’s Peter Venkman, when this character is actually both a jerk and a fraud. Sure, Sigourney Weaver’s Dana calls him a fraud at some point, but this is a Tchekov gun being flashed without being shot, since from there, Dana is possessed by Zuul and kind of written off the movie (which is a shame). Now, I won’t make this piece a full digression on why Peter Venkman is a jerk and how this fact could make us file the movie itself under “lovable but still a bit problematic”, yet this still deserves a couple lines because when you look closely: Peter Venkman is a jerk, borderline creepy (and the movie never gives us fuel to think otherwise, for real). Actually, Peter Venkman is pretty much what the bad guy of Ghostbusters 2016 (Rowan) could have become if he had any kind of power. We see Peter act just the way Rowan would if he had the upper hand on someone: he cheats on his own experiment, abuses a student as a faculty, make creepy innuendos to women who did not ask for this... I make this point because as the 2016 bad guy, Rowan makes perfect sense. Meanwhile, there’s no actual human big bad in the 1984 version, because there’s no specific reason for the events to happen when they happen.

Exactly, why is New York infected by ghosts in the original Ghostbusters? Ok, I wasn’t alive back in 1984 and maybe there's something I miss, a reference to a historical “mood” if you’ll have it, maybe an “end of the world vibe” I don’t not know about. But between some obvious referencing to Exorcist and the general comedic tone of the film, I’ve always watched Ghostbusters as some kind of parody or reappropriation of a genre, and not a reflection of its time. And it’s okay. All of the above (well, maybe not Venkman never being called on his jerkiness): the lack of proper character arcs, human villain or symbolic reason for the infestation to happen. First, because, thanks to great dialogues & great acting by already beloved actors, we still care for those guys. But more important: because you can have great stories without it. Stories propulsed by something else than character development, such as... a theme. And 1984 Ghostbusters statement is a pretty damn interesting one: science beats superstition, well, science can explain supernatural, science beats ghosts, science beats freakin’ Gods, so man can beat god. Seriously, This is a great theme, and the script is nicely built around it, up to an ending where we see nerds vanquish a god with scientific tech. 1984 Ghosbusters makes writing choices and works, and as a movie about defeating incarnations of both childhood and adulthood fears (monsters and gods) it turns out to be a smart and timeless piece of pop culture.

Now you can argue that if it’s timeless, did it really needed to be rebooted in the first place? But see, the beauty of this reboot is that it does not try to redo the same thing. Because the 2016 Ghostbusters makes completely different writing choices, revolves around something else entirely, and if its theme also features some universal / timeless aspects, its treatment makes it a very relevant piece to the time it came out. So let’s break it down:

First, I believe its writing to be deeply entwined with characters’ flaws and development. What they want, what they lack, is the main propulsion for the story. And if we agree to say Kristen Wiig’s Erin Gilbert is our main character here, what she wants is consideration by her pairs. You can argue she has that at the beginning: teacher in a decent university, about to get tenure, but remember that to get this far, she had to leave behind her best friend and what she actually believed in. She had to fit. Meanwhile Abby is still working on what she wants but in a D-list school and only because the dean has no idea who she is. Both have to hide what matters to them to be included. And this theme as well as Erin’s relationship with Abby is one of the pivot point of the movie: the past and the complicated present of the characters weigh into the script, introduce conflict, propulsion and ultimately, resolution.

But this quest for being legit really works for the 4 of our characters: Abby & Jillian get their a** fired as soon as the dean actually remembers what they’re working on. Patty too: while she works un ungrateful job below the surface, she actually knows the city above ground better than any other character, not only places and localisation but historical perspective, arts... (It’s also interesting to note, if we want to compare the 2 movies that in 1984, Dana sees a ghost and become a client of the Ghostbusters (then a victim of said ghost). In 2016, the woman who sees a ghost, i.e. Patty, joins the team as a Ghostbuster herself. Women are no more plot devices here: they have they own agendas & needs, they’re the engine of the story.)

So you have this characters trying to be acknowledged as professionals, which works perfectly with the concept “scientists turning into ghosts hunters”. But what’s even better: it works perfectly with an all-female group of characters. Why? Well, because in real life, you can totally be denied the legitimacy you deserve just. for. being. a. woman.

It’s also completely in resonance with a movie about sorority and the way girls have to stick out for each other (Abby & Erin reconciliation). Sexism could actually be seen as the villain here. It’s a picture paint with small brushes (and that’s something to add to the film credit) but it’s there: the little jokes about online comments - an obvious yes short nod to the guys who managed to troll the movie notation before it even came out (isn’t it grand though? I mean those douchebags are so freaking predictable Paul Feig managed to write them in before they even manifest themselves) - the dean behaviour... Apart from that, 2016 Ghostbusters does not state out loud the fact those women are depreciated for being women, for it doesn’t need to. Because you know what? Women knows. And it's their freaking film.

Of course the clearest illustration of that idea has to be the bad guy. Rowan is indeed a misogynist jerk, but beyond that, is the perfect incarnation of those women antagonist in 2016. So in 1984 Ghostbusters, we don’t know exactly why the wall between the worlds is getting thinner right now: the guy behind it is a god and well, gods work in mysterious ways. But in 2016, the grand master is a human. Because that version is not about god vs men, it’s about men vs men. Because not all men / humans are equal.

It makes perfect sense her to have the ghosts being summoned by a villain who happens to be a persona of entitled jerks feeling they’re not recognized for their true value (hey! theme again!). Except Rowan / those guys are not denied respect on an essentialist aspect of themselves (being a woman, black, gay...) but because they’re actually not as good as they thing they are.

It's a (lighter, more comedy-compatible) version of that awfully sad and way too real guy who randomly shoot at people because one girl turned down his advances one day, the guy blaming his lack of acknowledgement by the society on society being unfair to him, but deciding that the best course of action is to destroy said society instead of proving it wrong. While Abby, Erin, Jillian and Patty decide to take action and working their a** off on proving they ARE RIGHT (to extreme extend too, with Erin releasing the ghost to prove a point in her need for legitimacy), Rowan just wants to burn it all, to no one’s benefit but his own crave for power and destruction. Do you see why that guy nemesis needed to be a Erin Gilbert and not a Peter Venkman?

Having women serves the movie all the way, up till the end. And as a character-driven movie, its script does the best possible thing: giving characters, not what they wanted, but what they needed. For in the end, it’s not that much about acknowledgment (though the skyline scene is heartwarming <3) for the city still ask the theam to be super discreet, it’s about doing what you want regardless of people’s opinion, knowking yourself that you are good at what you’re doing, and doing it because you are good at it. Trust me boys, that speaks to every girl here.

In fact everything in the new Ghostbusters makes sense for the viewers of its time. Which is exactly what a good reboot should do. It’s all in the details, and mostly in the references to the previous one.

The Ghostbuster 2016 doesn't aim at telling the 1984 one is bad, but states that things have changed. The references are smart and symbolic but not too obvious that a new viewer would miss a plot point for not knowing it. It’s the perfect balance: taking what worked and was good and put it in a different time. And the times, they are a-changing, people. Sometimes for the better, such as Bill Murray being again a jerk but getting punished for it, sometimes for worse.

For instance : the brownstone that the guys get at the beginning of 1984 but the girls can’t afford before the end, stating, maybe, just maybe, that women or in this instance, that this new generation will have to work harder for stuff such as rent. And take the biggest symbol / reference to the original: the giant Stay Puft Marshmallow Man.

In this movie, he’s not being defeated by high tech, but by the Swiss army knife “every girl should have on her” (because, yes, being a girl is a source of danger just by itself). While the cast of the new movie is literally being smothered by the incarnation of the previous movie, by the “good old times”, the girl who finally came to believe in herself defeats it by "being a girl" If this not exhilarating metaphor, what is? This is both an homage and refusal to say "original is better because it's the first!" Nope, times change, women are here to claim their places in movies, in the real world, and that new Ghostbusters wasn't gender swapped for nothing, it was because it fits tis day and age, and it was because it fits the theme

Ghostbusters 2016 is grounded in its time, thus being not a useless reboot but a reappropriation of a great idea, playing it across a different era in terms of economy, society, women position...

It's not gratuitous. It's better this way.

Now, I’m aware this piece comes out a bit late to end it on “go see the new Ghostbusters ladies, it rocks and those trolls are just petty men realizing the world is not ENTIRELY them anymore”. So I’m going to end it on “go see Ocean’s 8 ladies, it rocks and those trolls are just...” you get the point. Truth is: Ocean’s 8 is a decent summer movie, functioning, fun, witty and supported by a great cast.

It also acknowledges, in *one line*, why the team is only women, in a very clever, resonant way: it’s smarter to make a heist with women, because women are ignored. That’s it. The movie doesn’t say more, doesn’t need to say more. Because women know that’s true, know they’re not as visible and considered as their male co-workers even when doing an equal or better job. Women will get it just hearing that line. And it’s their freaking movie. You know what’s the narrative justification for Ocean’s 11 (11!) or original Ghostbusters to be all male? Well, there isn’t any. Because that was just default setting. And boy am I glad to see this changing. Even if it’s just line by line.

#ghostbusters #jillian holtzmann #erin gilbert #Patty Jenkins #abby yates #paul feig #ivan reitman #sexism #movies #reboot #peter venkman #feminism #oceans 8 #writing #script #character driven

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dexcidium · 7 years

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So I’ve been meaning to write this for a while now… my review so far of Fate/Apocrypha. Keep in mind that I’ve read all the way up to the translated LNs, which is only up to the end of volume four, as well as this being written prior to the ending of the anime. As of now, it’s only up to episode 23. Let me preface this by saying that I love Fate. The lore and that distinct writing style ever so present within the series. The (mostly) well represented servants within the series. The character interactions, the relationship between servant and master, and everything else in between. That being said… I’ll keep this part short because I am prooooobably gonna go on and on forever on my thoughts later on.

TLDR: The concept was interesting, hype and it had some really great hooks. However, it felt flat on so many of its percieved promises and then… he happened. Sieg is a black hole that made Apoc so much worse than it actually is. Everything is fucking weak overall aaaaaand once again, FUCK YOU SIEG. YOU WASTE OF SPACE AND TIME.

I promise it’s not too long.

Not at all.

Right, let’s get this out of the way. I think Higashide can be a good writer. There were some good characterisation throughout Apoc, as well as some genuinely well written moments. However, there were many failures on his end as a writer. And it only became more evident in the anime. I’ll get to that later. First of all, let’s start with what I liked about it.

Jeanne(Light Novel): Those of you that know me know how much I adore Jeanne. And since FGO was a waifu game, I initially only liked her for her looks. No hiding that fact. But as I read more and more, getting sucked in to the hell that is the Type Moon wiki, I started to like her more and more based on personality. Again, those that know me know that I find these vanilla heroines extremely boring and bland. (SorryArturiaIjustreallydidn'tlikeyouoryourstoryarcinFSN). But of course, since this is TM, there was bound to be more than meets the eye. Like goddamn, she’s a literal saint. Probably the most well known in the world even. I expected her to be a goody-two-shoes and nothing more. But BOY was I wrong. Jeanne: *prays for hours everyday*. Also Jeanne: *exorcises 1000000 unborn children, suggests to crash a plane into the gardens without even blinking*. Her constant struggle of being called a saint and rejecting that very premise was frankly quite shocking because of the established facts about how much she loved God. There was divide in her character. And suddenly she wasn’t this benevolent, all-loving saint anymore. She was Jeanne. A religious girl who fought for her beliefs, and died fighting for them. The world imposed to her a title that she didn’t necessarily want. But her characterisation ends there… at least the actual interesting parts. Oh don’t worry, I’ll get to *that* later.

The Red Faction: Boy these guys were fun! The Red Servants felt much more organic and light hearted compared to the other faction. Granted that part made sense since Darnic is a literal Nazi. Anyway… these guys were just so much more fun. From Karna’s literal and metaphorical roasts, to Shakespeare’s loud and outspoken cravings for tragedy, to Achilles’ constant and flirtatious admiration towards Atalanta (AKA the woman who beat up his dad), to the crazy, fucked up and manipulative asshole that is Shirou (not Emiya) Kotomine. They were just fun to watch. I could go on about the tinier details but that’d make this shit even longer… MOVING ON!

Kairi and Mordred: Oh boy these two are just… perfect. A father son combo like no other. And an absolute joy to watch. They filled a void sorely lacking in each other’s existence. And you can clearly tell that by their interactions. Kairi was edgy and cool but unlike someone like Kiritsugu, he was easy going and didn’t take everything so seriously. A cool dad. And Mordred… god I love this little scamp of a knight. Mordred is adorable in her own little way while being cool and badass like her master/dad. They were just a fun duo to watch in the series where master and servant interaction was rather lacking of interesting dynamics. These two just worked. And they worked well.

The premise: basically any other HGW times two. Goddamn was the set up cool. That’s all, really.

Right, so this is the section where I shit on Apoc from both a viewer’s stand point, as well as from a narrative and structural stand point. To stop myself from going on an even further tangent, I’ll be talking about Sieg last. Other than this part. Let me just say that he is pretty much directly linked for like… 70% of this show’s major flaws. But again… that comes last. Lets start off with the stupid points in Apocrypha and the disastrous end of the first volume. I’ll also be comparing it to the anime, which was a hot mess. Not quite garbage. That came later.

So… the characters. Way too many of them. It was evident that Higashide could not handle such a large cast. It was basically what a normal grail war was times by a factor of two and then add a little bit more. So what did he do? Take out half of the masters by having Amakusa straight up manipulating the entire thing. A good move I’d say… but there was still too many for him to handle. It was all over the place. But frankly, he handled the earlier parts quite well in the LN. There was, however, a gigantic lack of characterisation for many of the earlier characters. Of course those were the same characters that pretty much needlessly died off for shock effect. For example, Siegfried (henceforth shall now be known as Siegfriend) had me going “this makes no sense" rather than “YOU KILLED SIEGFRIED. YOU MONSTERS". And as a writer, if you can’t make your audience feel the emotion that you intended them to – then you’ve failed. And the series is plagued with these rather stupid deaths. A lot of them felt pointless and held no significant impact on the overarching narrative. They just died. And I didn’t feel anything. The delivery felt weak and half-assed, played for fake emotion.

And speaking of deaths, Darnic and Vlad’s… no that, that was fucking stupid on top of a pile of stupid. Well, this felt like actual lost potential. Unlike a certain other character… Darnic was being built up to be the main antagonist… and he felt like he would have been a good one. If not for the structure being a battle royale-ish. And it is one because people pretty much did their own thing pretty early on in the story. Getting back on track, Darnic and Vlad had a relationship akin to Tokiomi and Gilgamesh from Fate Zero. And that is the servant being more of a master than the actual master. This was good as we were seeing a variety if servant/master dynamics. Darnic, however, was no pushover. This man had been established to do whatever it fucking takes to get what he wants. And he had been succeeding too. Just what grand scheme was he about to pull off- aaaaaaand he’s dead. Dude talked a lot of shit… nothing happened. Not even a lasting impact. He just became one with Vlad and that was it. What the fuck was that? There wasn’t any sort of intelligence or cunningness that he had displayed before. Oh and poor Vlad. Man, he was the real victim here. This part I actually felt for. Because he became what he didn’t want the most. The Legend of Dracula. A vampire. And not one of Nasu’s myriad of vampire OCs. The OG, Count Dracula. It was meant to be an actual tragedy… yet… it left no impact. So when Darnic’s BRILLAINT plan of fusing his and Vlad’s soul together, while activating his Legend of Dracula NP, he was made out to be this near unstoppable being that needed all these powerful heroic spirits boosted by a command seal to be stopped. But really… he wasn’t. Fuck, he didn’t even kill anyone important. And no one at all in the LN. I was expecting him to pull some Hellsing Ultimate bullshit and turn the entirety of Trifas into a ghoul-infested city. But nope. Nothing came out of it.

He ends up getting fucked over by the ACTUAL main Antagonist, Amakusa Shirou Tokisada via baptism rites. This was meant to make him look powerful or whatever. Except the entire fight scene is really dumb because if you know anything about vampires, they have very specific weaknesses. Two of those are the sun and holiness. And not just any weakness. Deathly weakness. AND WHO DO WE HAPPEN TO HAVE!? The most famous saint in the world and the son of a sun god who literally has sunlight woven into his skin. This whole thing was made even more stupid but the fact that the initial plan in the LN was to wait until dawn for the sun to come out. Also in the LN, Jeanne was poking away at Vlad using her holy spear which she did not do in the anime. By the way, Jeanne can do the exact same thing as fuckboi Shirou. Only even better because she’s an actual saint and a Ruler. Plus she used Baptism Rites to exorcise Jack as well. Seriously, Karna could have hugged Darnicula to death. This whole scene is stupid, man.

Continuing the stupid death trend, Avicebron and Adam… god that was stupid. Roche you say? Who? Kid was barely a character. He was made to be killed. He had no build up. No actual back story. And barely a personality. In short he didn’t matter at all. But dear god, this fight was meant to be the Cthullu fight equivalent. Yet again, this was somehow even more anti-climactic and even more boring than the Darnicula fight. Again, nobody important died. They’re killing for the sake of killing. And it was just fucking weak man. I barely felt anything. Other than the seething hatred and boredom of course. And again, it was meant to make somebody else look good. Our “protagonist". Anyway, this fight was dumb and boring. Some good animation in the anime though. I will give it that much.

And this was the point in the series that everything pretty much got thrown out the window and it was evident that it wasn’t going to get any better. Jeanne lost her neutrality, literally 2/3rds of the Ygdmillenia family didn’t even really matter in the end, the Red faction’s fucked off to cross the border or something, Sieg is a super special servant/master hybrid rolled into one with super special BLACK command seals because he’s the super special protagonist aaaaand Jack’s fucked off back to Reika. Who at this point also barely has a personality and back story. But still way less than most people that have already died. And that’s just sad man. I, as part of the audience, couldn’t give less of a shit about any characters except a set few. If I didn’t know most of them through Grand Order already, I would have dropped this shit ages ago. And dear god, Jeanne still doesn’t have an established personality besides existing for SHIGGU-KUN in the anime. The LN does a far better job with characterisation. Even if it is still a heaping dumpster fire. And then they do pretty much nothing except side quest to kill Jack and exorcise 10,000 babies. Which, despite feeling like a loose end that they had to tie up despite being in a rush to go after the Red faction, was actually my favourite scene in the LN due to the fact that it completely changes the reader’s perception of Jeanne. Of course the anime version sucked ass.

Right, continuing on… this scene. It did not work for the anime. And I’ll have to start by explaining that Jeanne’s characterisation does not exist beyond Sieg in the anime. A lot of her characterisation outside of that was cut. Which is a damn shame because she became what I hated the most in an anime character. Bland, generic, no real motivation, no established personality yet somehow still being out of character whenever that shithead Steve-kun is around. Not only was Jeanne no longer the Jeanne I knew, she was replaced by bumbling tsundere who blushes for a wet sock. It was cheap and boring. And this fucking harem Romanian romance BS that was happening was so fucking out of place. It was evident that Jeanne had barely become a character anymore. She was just waifu bait like Astolfo now. Putting that aside, even in the LN, Jeanne still becomes a mess. While I have not personally read the last volume since it has not been translated, I have read summaries. And my god is everything stupid. I’ll return to this part once I cover the long awaited shitfest…

WARNING. As this is my personal review, it is very opinionated. And as you can probably tell… this is very personal.

Sieg. Oh you waste of space, you don’t fucking deserve that name. Like every both of his being, it’s half assed. I mentioned that Sieg was a blackhole in the beginning. And that’s because he sucks up any bit of good in this series whenever he’s in a scene. Good characterisation from well established characters? NAH LETS BEND OVER AND LET SHIGGU KUN WIN AND HE WILL BE LOVED FOREVER AND EVER BECAUSE HE’S SO GOOD AND PURE AND INNOCCENT YOU GUYS. Right, now that that’s out of the way. It’s time to dive into exactly why this dude is such a demerit to the series overall.

First and foremost, he disrupts the entirety of the story structure. While it could have certainly worked, it most definitely did not here. Sieg’s role in terms of plot devices was to centralise the story as a whole. However, Higashide went too far and just… ended up giving Sieg far too big a role. This, in turn took away a lot from the rest of the cast. Not only their screen time but their whole character. Yet despite all this “development" he was getting, he still barely had a character. Some may say that was the point. Sieg is indeed a blank slate that was meant to learn as he grew. But the thing is – he never did. Instead, there was this identity crisis that was never really addressed in the actual narrative. However, as it stands… the whole fiasco was extremely pointless. Sieg remains a flat character and his entire goal was immediately solved the episode after he decided to do it. Worst of all, there was no sense of struggle. Not even a spec of it. He just sorta did it. And my god was it so boring to watch. Even after when he’s trying to get his morals straight, it basically boils down to him asking people if killing was bad. And it just kept dragging on and on and on and on! And in the end… nothing came out of it. By the time they were about to go and attack the Hanging Gardens, barely anything changed. Basically, it was a giant waste of time.

And of course, we have to address Siegfried. While certainly, yes, you could argue that tragedy is the very essence of Siegfried’s story. Even in his own legend we were only told of his story through a series of flashbacks. In Apocrypha, Siegfried’s suffering continues. He has a shit master, he can’t even fucking talk, his brotp moment gets cucked by the fetus, and he never actually gets anything that he wanted. And as a result; he was sorely undeveloped. Then he fucking dies. It was meant to come off as a heroic sacrifice but… there was nothing there to latch on emotionally, as well as making no sense. For one, at this point everything about Sieg was just to make the audience feel sorry for him. That’s it. Nothing else. Secondly, the homunculus and Siegfried had no real emotional connection. They literally just met. Hence, making the sacrifice feel… well, emotionless. They try to reason it off with some BS about Siegfried doing something selfish… but it was still a selfless action. So I never bought it as a proper reason. Now keep in mind, that I personally was trying to keep an open mind about Sieg when I began reading Apoc. I had heard bad things and the stuff that people were saying pretty much embodied everything I hated in a protagonist. Except… it was a lot worse. Sieg is a lot worse. At this point in time, I didn’t even hate Sieg yet. He just had little to no presence or relevance, nor even a semblance of a personality that I did not give a Rin’s ass. Then… Siegfried tore his fucking heart out – his own heart out, literally and made Sieg…. eat it? It was… really stupid. Because A: Servants’ spiritual cores are their hearts and they wouldn’t be able to even move without it the moment it gets torn out. And of course before he dies out Siegfried gets his only redeeming moment… chock one up to poor pacing…. yay. So just when I starting to give a shit about Siegfried, he’s out of the picture. For this… thing. And as someone who’s aware about the consequences of having a servant’s body part attached to another human being (AKA Heaven’s Feel), I was expecting some consequences. Horrible, horrible consequences. But…

Nothing.

But I’ll be generous and gloss that one over since it wasn’t established in the plot here.

Now I may be going on and on about expectations and shit but that’s because literally everything in Apoc was trying to outdo Zero/FSN. Let me go on a tangent for a bit and explain. Twice the masters, twice the servants, a more exciting and dynamic premise. But in actuallity, every bit of delivery was extremely weak. A lot of it was just below par. I was promised something great but even as I continue to lower the bar, Apoc continued to limbo under it.

Anyway, back to that useless sack of shit. The anime didn’t really have this but my god… the following moments is what made me hate Apoc right then and there. So in the Light Novel, Jeanne senses a new disturbance due to Sieg’s unique (*rolls eyes*) existence. So as she investigates, she goes and talks to the black faction (they fucking skipped the theological debate between Jeanne and Vlad in the anime btw), until she finds Sieg.

Then she collapses because of Laeticia needing food still cuz host body and all that. So far I was buying it. Then Sieg carries her. O..kay? Then blushing… Uhhhhhhh…. and when they finally reach a village and was allowed a room for the both of them… it devolved into a generic light novel plot.

They had to share a bed.

Girl blushes.

Dense protag is dense.

UHHHHH

WHAT THE FUCK? WHAT THE HELL IS THIS? You’d think I was kidding but this id exactly what happens. And it was this precise moment that my expectations drastically dropped to near zero. It came out of fucking nowhere. I don’t get why they’d not-so-subtly force this shitty romance between characters who just met in a primarily action-focused novel. It wasn’t even good. I could open SAO and whatever other clone and they’d do it just as badly. And it was at this moment that Sieg became the worst thing about Apoc for me. But ohohoho… just as you think it’s hit rock bottom, it somehow goes BELOW that.

GO BELOW AND BEYOND. MINUS ULTRAAAAA!

Okay, so skipping a couple of events, Jeanne fucks back off to the main battle where the Red Faction actually gets their shit together. She does nothing but run around for the entire volume. Like. Literally does nothing except save wet sock’s ass. Anyway, while everyone else is having rather personal battles with Chiron fighting his former pupil, Achilles, the two Lancers/Aces of them having one hell of a fight and arguing their religious beliefs, Fran confronts fuccboi Shirou and gets screwed over by Shakespeare’s NP (and we get to see her real struggles as well as a bit more on how Caules is as a master), Astolfo being a loser as always, Atalanta being… whatever she was doing, she doesn’t really get interesting until after, and Mordred being the shitty driver she is, giving Kairi a heart attack. Right so before this gigantic fight happens, Sieg finally decides that he wanted to save his homunculus buddies. Which is a fine motivation. …that got immediately solved because everyone else was too busy actually fighting. Zero tension or risk here. Anyway after one of his major character motivations gets solved so stupidly easily, he decides to pull a Shirou Emiya (only a lot worse and he doesn’t make sense) and fight the servants. In which Mordred immediately kills his ass but is the only one that does damage for some reason (gotta make him seem useful and interesting), despite Fran doing next to no damage. The servant. Doing no damage. But this guy did. O… okay. So he gets killed, I rejoice like Kirei when he hears an Emiya is participating in a HGW on Christmas day, the evil is defeated, the world is a better pla- and he’s alive. Once again. Not even an episode later. Absolutely no tension. Do you see what my problem is with wet sock as a character? There’s almost no stakes for him. No proper emotional connections to a lot of characters. Characters die for him to live. Said characters who have never even had a conversation with him prior. So tell me how am I supposed to feel? Certainly not satisfied or even happy. In fact I’m frustrated that a far more interesting character died so that this bland fucko could live. And it doesn’t even make sense! He gets a fucking power up too for whatever fucking reason. So Fran accidentally zaps him back to life when she sacrifices himself to kill Mordred. Now he has command spells that are black (because HE’S SO SUPER SPECIAL YOU GUYS). And he can now turn into Siegfried.

What kind of stupid writing is this? It makes no sense. Progression is fucking stupid. No explanation. No proper emotional connection. No proper stakes. No risks. And above all else… there’s no entertainment. I’m so goddamn bored. And I’m already sick of our main protagonist. And he takes up a lot of the time. I can’t connect to this character. Even if I can’t relate to his struggle, I should be able to at least feel for him. But I didn’t. Because I know that somehow, someway, he’ll BS his way through it with fake struggle that has no tension. Wet sock is lacking in every single area. And him being the protagonist highlights his shittiness as a character. Honestly, he could have worked if they didn’t have a forced romance or if he was the main character. He could have provided the view of the homunculus. Instead Toole, who barely appears, does a better fucking job of that more than the guy that takes up half the screen time. And at this point, I’d rather have him gone completely rather than try and make him even remotely interesting. Even his introduction was sketchy to me. It was just a whole lot of “FEEL SORRY FOR ME. ARE YOU FEELING IT NOW MISTER KRABS? ARE YOU REALLY FEELING IT??????”. But I didn’t. I didn’t know shit about this fucko. Why should I care? There was nothing to latch on to, no emotional hook. Not even an interesting characteristic. And he never develops one. Instead, I feel like he just steals shit. Just like him receiving Siegfried’s heart and taking half his name, his entire character is half-assed. Not quite a self insert because there isn’t a power fantasy to be fulfilled. That sort of fantasy is immediately ruined because he literally turns into someone else. Can’t really project yourself onto someone who turns into someone else. A terrible MC due to him bullshitting everything and surviving everything with no real consequence to him. He just makes the story terrible by his sheer existence.

Right, so going back to one of my earlier points. That scene with Jeanne, Atalanta, and Jack. A very pivotal moment for Jeanne and Atalanta. Jeanne, who was a revered saint decides to confront Jack the Ripper, who is the embodiments of one part of the legends where he killed pregnant ladies or something. I don’t exactly remember all the details with Jack. Anyway, the important part is that Jack is made up of a bunch of unborn souls. Children. And Atalanta, whose wish is for the happiness of all the children in the world, sees all this. The horror of the tormented children, not even a chance given to live. She’s hit right at the core of her being because she was abandoned by her own parents on a mountain for not being a male in her legend. So Jeanne’s decided that she can’t save these children. They’re already long gone. Of course Atalanta was forcing her own beliefs towards this revered saint. It seemed that to Atalanta, saints were miracle workers, they could do crazy things. And historically, yes, that was exactly who they were. And as Jeanne rejects the very notion of being pronounced as saint, saying that she was nothing more than a village girl who answered god’s calling, she demolishes Atalanta’s view. The Archer’s entire world. And with the baptism rites going, Atalanta screaming for her to stop, and Jeanne following her own set of beliefs… it was a very personal moment for all of them. In the anime, Sieg was there for some reason. He literally just took up screen time. He feels like he was just there. Added absolutely nothing and just wasted time. And this annoyed me because this was a very personal moment for two other characters. Yet this wet sock is just… there. Intrusive. Like he needs to be included in everything. It was an absolutely well done scene in the LN where Jeanne’s beliefs are far more established and she actually has personality outside of Steve-kun. Where he wasn’t there.

Basically what I’m saying is Apoc is really good when he’s not around. Seriously, it’s so much better. Achilles’s fight with Chiron was very personal, so was Achilles’ fight with Atalnta. When it’s personal, it’s good. Sieg has no personality or history with others. No emotion. No relations. Nothing. Just stale bread that’s winning against people who have nothing to do with him. And I can’t help but get frustrated at this goddamn show for that.

OKAY: Lightning round of shitty wet sock things:

Spends a fuck tonne of time asking people “are humans bad hurr durr” and comes out with the solution that he basically wants to be hero of justice and protect humanity or whatever. It’s never stated in the anime but this is what Siegfried wanted. So he’s stealing personal character motivations too. Waste of episodes that could have been used developing far more interesting characters.

Jeanne (in the anime ESPECIALLY) only exists to be his love interest. She isn’t allowed to be anything more. And her big character revelation is that she loves Sieg(big surprise). She acts against her neutrality a lot of the time because of him. When she strongly declines picking sides at the very beginning. The reasong for this is that he has nothing to do with the war. BUT GUESS WHAT? HE DOES BECAUSE HE DECIDES TO GET INVOLVED IN IT. So there is no reason to protect him. She acts against her own beliefs so that she could be waifu bait for this fucko. They say it’s all Laeticia or whatever but to NO ONE’S surprise, it was Jeanne all along (yaaaaay….).

He becomes more Siegfried than Siegfried. Well in life, Siegfried could spam Balmung as fast as he could swing it. But he can’t do that as a servant of the Saber class because it’s a big Noble Phantasm. But guess whaaaaaat? Sieg can do that because he apparently also has galvanism from Fran for some fucking reason, and to pour more salt on the wound, he can upgrade Balmung to EX Rank using a command seal. Which, mind you has never been done before nor foreshadowed. Karna’s Vasavi Shakti was still more powerful thought because this dude don’t play around for some ho. And ya’ll know how much of an asspull this was.

Speaking of that fight, from what I’ve heard in the LN, he actually had a clear shot of Siegfriend’s back but for some reason didn’t decide to take it. I can’t 100% confirm this but if that was the case, that’s another thing of making characters act OOC. Karna would never let someone win a fight. And this is him with a time limit while wet sock has a shroud from Jeanne that auto heals him, a bunch of help from a bunch of other people. Yadda, yadda, yadda, ass pulls. He wins the fight. Fuck off wet sock-kun.

Jeanne, for some ungodly reason is unaffected by really personal things like her mother talking to her and reasoning that she shouldn’t have gone off to war, seeing her fellow Frenchmen die in the hundred years war, and even seeing the room where her best friend murdered a bunch of kids after her own death. Yes, she knows it’s all fake. But when Shakespeare shows her images of Sieg burning at the stake instead of her and his decapitated head… she freaks the fuck out. Why? She knows it’s fake. She’s known this dude for like a week. You could argue that she feels personally responsible for involving him in the war. But once again. This doesn’t make sense. Sieg chose to involve himself. He chose to fight. He chose to fight a riskless war because he’s the main character. Of course in the shittiest reveal ever, she realises that she wuuuuuuuvs him. Fuck right off. AND DON’T GIVE THAT ‘LOVE WORKS IN MYSTERIOUS WAYS’ SHIT.

SPEAKING OF THIS BULLSHIT. There was this utterly stupid scene in the Light Novel where Sieg and jeanne see a couple or whatever. There was a baby or something. And Sieg asks Jeanne if servants could get pregnant. Of course, since she looooooooves him so much, her immediate thoughts were “DOES STEVE-KUN WANT TO IMPREGNATE ME!!??!?!?!?”. I wanted to hack out blood when i heard that was a thing. Thank god that it wasn’t in the anime.

He cucks Jeanne out of killing Shiroumine, the big bad antagonist of the series. The anime and promotional material is making them out to be rivals when they have zero ideological battles, have never even spoken to each other before, nor an allusion to some sort of rivalry at all. It just happens. At this point Sieg doesn’t even have any command spells and he pulls Blasted Tree(Fran’s NP, yeah he stole that too) out of his ass. Kill stealing bitch. Reported. Blocked. Emailed Harada. Email Jeff Kaplan. Perma-ban pls. Basically, Shiroumine was a shit villain because his plans weren’t really clear. Salvation of humanity was too broad in a sense on how the actual fuck he was gonna pull it off, and it wasn’t explained all too well. And with Sieg being the contender for the shittest protagonist I have ever had the displeasure of laying my eyes on, the main villain just became… fucking boring. I say villain but he was an antagonist. A direct result of bad character writing.

The so called romantic ending is an even shittier version of one of the endings in the Fate route in FSN. Like it’s a straight up copy. Imagery and everything.

Oh yeah, he turns into a dragon for whatever reason. Comes out of nowhere. Like zero build up. Then he fights monsters for the rest of his existence on the other side of the world or something. It’s really stupid. It’s meant to feel heroic but I don’t feel that at all. When a heroic sacrifice that’s meant to make me feel all sorts of emotions, makes me laugh instead, you’ve done a shit job at writing.

There’s probably more that I can’t remember at the top of my head. But there’s only so much that I can complain about. Oh who am I kidding, there’s a chat in one of my discord servers that we spend all our time at least a couple times a week on how shit this fuckhead is. He’s that bad, honestly.

To conclude, Apocrypha could have been great. It had a lot of promise. But it failed on nearly every end. The grandiose battles fall flat because nobody actually cares about a lot of the characters since more a lot of them are severely underdeveloped. And despite the narrative spending the most time with him, Steve-kun was a massive failure of a main character. He was a shounen protagonist in the wrong genre. Actually, he’s a generic light novel protagonist in Fate. And it didn’t work. Because fate is so much more deeper. So much lore. And I love that crazy, well thought out world. Wet sock-kun doesn’t have a place in it. Not in a narrative like this. Not in a world where depth can go seemingly forever. And especially not against characters who have actual strong personality and rich histories. And so, he fails. Sieg fails. The actual self-inserts of a character like Hakuno and Guda do a better job at fulfilling their role than an established character. And that’s fucking pathetic. I had more fun reading through Hakuno’s nurse fetish and Guda’s snarky attitude. Honestly, it is tiring. I was constantly frustrated at Apoc. I still am. The anime will be ending soon. And I’ll probably just laugh at how bad it is.

I won’t rate it or whatever. I’ll just say to not bother. But if you love fate, then go for it. There may be characters you saw in Grand Order that you want to know more about. And the servants are absolutely great. But honestly, just go read their source material. You’ll have more fun with that. But if you’re like me and are a salty piece of shit… the welcome to the club. There’s a lot to gnaw on.

Right so before I get massive flack for an opinion piece that I decided to write, and before anyone says that 'If you’re not going to say anything nice then don’t say anything at all'… I’ll just say to fuck off because it is my very right to speak about a creative piece. I’m not critiquing a person. I’m critiquing their writing in my own little colourful language. Critiquing a professional work, mind you. I wouldn’t do this to a fan work. And again, it’s an opinion. You don’t have to agree with it. If you liked wet sock then more power to you. I just personally thing that he’s the worst thing in the Fate franchise. Though people do say that Manaka is worse. I doubt you can limbo under something that’s like negative bajillion on any scale. Sieg just managed to offend me so hard when almost nothing does these days. And honestly, that’s an achievement on its own. Golf clap.

Anyway, I had a lot of fun writing this. But hey, maybe I’m just a petty little shit who got his waifu cucked by a fetus, amirite?

#[...ooc]#i had a lot of fun writing this #i'm probably gonna get alot of shit later on for this but fuck it #come at me bro #ok to reblog

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thementalattic · 6 years

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Last night I finsihed Darksiders III and instead of whooping and feeling excited across the playthrough, as I did with its predecessors, I could only ask myself: What the hell happened?

When I first saw the game, many moons ago, I felt excited, I wanted to play as Fury and meet another fun Horseman of the Apocalypse. I had enjoyed my time with War, watching him grow as a person, becoming wiser. I loved Death’s crusade to restore the souls of humanity and his fight against the corruption born from his own race, the Nephilim.

And then I met Fury and said, for the first time, “what the hell happened?” Where did the compelling characterisation go? Where did the humanity of these creatures vanish to? Fury is profoundly unlikable, and she kicks things off in a bad way by being a complete ass to a chained War. She’s arrogant, proud and pretty much embodies each one of the Deadly Sins she’s pursuing, but instead of weaving that into the game’s story and progress, the writers decided she would have an epiphany near the end of the game where she turns her personality, motives and goals around completely, so she becomes a better person, just not one with a defined personality.

There are glimpses of personal growth throughout the journey, but the writing is so inconsistent that she goes from contemplative and wondering about personality changes to reverting to the same traits she’s supposedly left only a few minutes later in a boss cutscene.

It’s wasted potential in storytelling. With every Sin forcing her to view her own desires and vices and confronting them, you could have had Fury become progressively more introspective and even weary, losing her namesake fury along the way or diminishing it, as she begins figuring out who she is and what she’s supposed to do, and perhaps the relationship with her brothers. It would have made that epiphany at the end at least a bit believable.

But Darksiders 3 wastes too much time on the Charred Council and Apocalypse conspiracy from the first game, a conspiracy we know all about and the game’s writers failed at giving us anything new about it. There aren’t any new revelations, something we hadn’t considered or even greater implications. It’s a complete re-tread. In trying to play it safe, I suppose, the writers failed to give us anything compelling in the plot. And of course, there’s a twist with the final boss but it falls flat because it’s something you expect to happen the moment you meet the character in question.

But my bewilderment with what the hell they did with Darksiders III extends beyond the narrative and characterisation into the gameplay.

Darksiders has always been a series that proudly wears its inspirations and even the most blatant adaptation is paid careful homage and used in a way that fits the game, gives it a unique spin and most importantly, feels amazing, engaging and fun. It’s why the first Darksiders mashed together Devil May Cry styled gameplay and The Legend of Zelda and gave us a portal gun without feeling like a complete ripoff, because it pulled the strange combination off so brilliantly that it became a completely new identity, something original despite the obvious sources of inspiration. Darksiders II continued the trend and even brought in loot systems and RPG levelling and talent trees to the mix to add gameplay variety.

Darksiders III’s two predecessors also opened the world to you. Darksiders II in particular features sprawling locales. This release, however, keeps the claustrophobic hallway infested places. Tunnels, caverns, underground crypts, etc. All enclosed, all quite short and severely lacking in the awe department, with the Maker Tree being the only thing even remotely astonishing. Worse still is how many times you go back to the same locales and fight the same enemies. Also, no horse, sacrificed for the sake of the plot. A wasted sacrifice, if there ever was one.

Speaking of enemies, combat can become a hassle. Most enemies are punishment sponges, the camera is a mess, even the lock-on is spotty, losing its target with surprising frequency. Darksiders III is a game where you’ll spend most of the time fighting against things you can’t see, from enemies attacking you just outside the camera’s range. Meaning that dodging attacks is often a matter of educated guesswork, especially when the arrows that notify you of enemy presence and attacks only tell you of the attack after the enemy has already carved their name on your back.

When you’re one-on-one, it’s not that bad, and it’s where the combat shines, as much as it can, really. But add more than one enemy to the mix, as this game loves to do, and it becomes a slog. And boss fights are all identical and uninspired. You versus a dude with a weapon. Nothing creative like the Darksiders 1 and 2 bosses. Where are the giant bats, the sand worms? Nothing.

I mentioned before that the Darksiders series had a knack for reusing and polishing other series’ core mechanics and for some reason, Gunfire Games decided it was time for Darksiders to become Dark Souls. You lose your collected souls when you die, pick them up from where you left them, and bank them at the reserved checkpoint spot for levels and the ability to improve on attributes. Only in this case, Vulgrim becomes the bonfire and you have three highly ineffectual attributes: Physical damage, Arcane Damage and Health. Even at high levels of each of these attributes I never felt stronger. It was only when I maxed out the weapon using the watered-down version of Dark Souls Titanite that I felt something change.

It also means that when you die, you go back to Vulgrim, forcing you to trek through the same area again and again if you die, which is fairly often when you consider the above combat issues and the worst offender of all, the fact that the dodge and counter mechanic is super finicky and dodging has no invincibility frames. I dodged out of a boss’s attack and then lost health because another creature’s attack hit me while I was in the dodge’s slow-motion animation.

The weapon enhancements you find, to socket into items are far too few in number, too damn hard to get and upgrading them is a thorough pain in the rear for very little gain. Also, what the hell happened to the Chaos Form? In the other games it was a devastating move but here it’s wildly ineffectual and barely deals any damage! And who decided that Wrath powers costing the entire bar was a good idea? especially with how slowly it builds up and how rare Wrath-recharging souls are. Also, if you don’t have a Stamina bar, a dedicate sprint button is unnecessary. Just enable it by default, anything else is poor design.

For a game that goes on and on about balance, Gunfire Games has no idea what the concept means. I spent most of the game playing on Challenging until I reached a spot so thoroughly unbalanced, where enemies I couldn’t see stun-locked me and took out chunks of my health and bosses one-shot me with attacks that happen right after a cutscene—which is another issue, too many cutscenes mid-boss—that I had to bring the difficulty down to the standard one, here called “Balanced.”

In essence, Darksiders III tries to do the Souls-like thing without an understanding of what makes those games work properly. So instead of taking those concepts and making them its own and creating a new identity for them as the predecessors did, Darksiders III feels like a bad ripoff, one so astonishingly poor that it reminds me of the first game I played in the Souls-like genre, Lords of the Fallen, which also missed the mark.

I wanted to like Darksiders III, I wanted this to be the game I’ve been waiting for ages on, but it has so many issues—including crashes—and faulty design choices and some intensely frustrating gameplay that just drained the fun out of me. Hell, the game doesn’t even have fun things to unlock like the Abyssal armour, only humans to find for a rather flimsy reward. And the small world means it’s a rather short game.

The only thing I got out of Darksiders III that I found worthwhile was Strife, the last Horseman, who makes a small appearance and makes me hope there might be a game with him. I only wish they would give the reigns back to Joe Mad and his people. At least they knew what the hell they were doing!

Also, nit-picking point, but Fury’s design doesn’t quite match the one we saw in the Darksiders comic from when the first game released and her character model makes her look plastic, literally.

Now excuse me while I go play Darksiders II as a palate cleanser.

I finished #Darksiders3 and I keep asking myself, WTF happened?

Last night I finsihed Darksiders III and instead of whooping and feeling excited across the playthrough, as I did with its predecessors, I could only ask myself: What the hell happened?

I finished #Darksiders3 and I keep asking myself, WTF happened? Last night I finsihed Darksiders III and instead of whooping and feeling excited across the playthrough, as I did with its predecessors, I could only ask myself: What the hell happened?

#Action RPG #Apocalypse #Bad Storytelling #Dark Souls #Darksiders #Darksiders II #Darksiders III #Featured #Four Horsemen #Fury #Gaming #Opinion #RPG #Souls-like #Video game

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pvshmina · 7 years

Text

to my dearest past

Hi Al. Sorry if this is all over the place but, as you know, my mind is pure chaos, always going off in a million directions at once. You understand.

It’s nice to be in a position where I can look back and reassure you that things are good for you now. I generally radiate a certain glow of happiness. I know you understand that this wasn’t always the case. In fact, I hesitate to even invoke your understanding because we both know how consistently fragile we are. But when I step outside of myself, I see so much growth. I see years of change leading up to this current version of me. I can connect the dots and see where they’ve led me. But please take note, Past Me: this transformation took YEARS. And often times, it went completely unnoticed, even by me; it’s only in hindsight that I see that long path I’ve walked to reach this leg of the race. I now see and understand you, Past Me, more clearly than you see yourself. In fact, I understand young Alya better than I understand current Alya. Your life has been a silent struggle; a roller coaster in the dark, sending you in directions that you least expect, and jerking you from side to side. And then, just as you see light at the end of the tunnel, you spiral back down into the abyss and keep on twirling and twisting in endless circles.

You won’t immediately realize it, but this tumultuous decade of growth that lies ahead of you—from twelve to twenty-two—is something you’ll be grateful for one day. Crazy, I know. But you will cherish the torture you put yourself through. You’ll live the highest of highs and the lowest of lows. You’ll know a level of fame and fortune that you only understand from the movies you see on Friday nights with your friends and family in your tiny, rural oasis. Along with that, you’ll experience intense self-loathing behind closed doors, bringing you within inches of doing something you know you’d regret. But these struggles don’t need to be validated in text. You know how far south things have gone, and only you can feel the feelings you feel. Only you can fully understand what those experiences did to you. No one else.

But you know what, gurl? I have a surprise for you: through it all, you’ll resurface stronger and wiser than ever before. I’m happy to say you’re still here, still kicking, still soaring into the year 2017. You’re thriving! Look at you! I’m writing to you from a point in time when you’ll be able to take a breath, look out over the horizon, and be thankful. You’ll get here, but it won’t be without a lot of effort, I might add.

Here’s the deal: the train tracks are taking you places that you didn’t think you’d go, so try to sit back and let the ride commence. Don’t fight it; enjoy it. On the way, you’ll entertain doubts and wonder what the hell you’re doing. Rest assured, these years—this inexplicable journey—will shape your future and, more importantly, your character, for the better and the best. Trust in yourself because, more often than not, you’ll be the only one who believes in your vision. Others will see what you do, but they might not see it so readily. They just need time. Don’t let them slow you down. Don’t let ANYONE slow you down. Stay on track. Stay true to your vision.

Because you were emotionally at war with yourself from a young age, you’ll have to learn how to see the world, not just look at it. This will be your greatest tool, and the only way you’ll be able to find your place in the world. You’re a soulful girl, and you have to trust your instinct to lead you forward the same way GMaps navigates drivers around Jakarta. Resist the urge to take a more traditional route; your path to happiness is a far different one that sometimes seems like it’ll be quicker but ends up just being an anxiety-ridden pain in the ass. But it’ll be worth it.

I see you now, in high school: a chameleon, molding yourself to fit whatever social circle you’re with at the moment: male, female, athletic, intellectual, political; heck, even religious. People say our teenage years are the most difficult years, and that’s most definitely true. For a lot of kids, that has to do with feeling like an outsider. Your problem is a little different. You’re so wonderfully naive, like a human version of Bambi (if you add green eyes and a mop of sandy blond hair), and people embrace you for your innocence and good nature. When you get to high school, you’ll have great friends, take extras, and help lead your cross-country team to state championships. But, to a certain extent, your trail was blazed for you by your sister and your brother. You’re being grandfathered into a nice life—at least on paper. None of this privilege will diminish your internal struggles. Beneath the surface, you’re a bomb ready to explode. And what’s sad is that you want to explode. You almost wish for it to just . . . happen already.

Insecurity infests your mind like a swarm of bees, buzzing too loudly for you to think straight (literally). From your small size, to your struggle with weight, to your constantly cracking voice, to your secrets about your sexuality . . . the sadness is heavy. I get it. And you’ve learned to hide it so damn well that no one has a fucking clue. You’re a good secret keeper—so good that Mom and Dad don’t have a single clue that you hate yourself, that you resent everything about who you are, and that a river of anger runs deep in your veins. Please. Please just listen and understand that they don’t check in with you and ask if you’re all right because, to them, you appear to be a near-perfect angel. They don’t know any better. They can’t hear what you scream in your mind 24/7. They can’t hear you yell “I HATE MYSELF” every night when the bedroom door closes and you remove that mask you wear, day in and day out.

And here’s the thing: they won’t hear any of it for a good 10 years. Which is why I’m here to remind you that I hear you, and that you will deal with it. I know how the self-hate reverberates off the walls of your cranium so frequently that it feels almost normalized within your already-cluttered head. You’ve accepted that “This is just how it is for you.” You’ve convinced yourself that “different” equals “broken;” that you are broken. Unfixable. A misfit toy that must be repaired or, better yet, trashed. To the naked eye you look fine, but under the microscope you are flawed. But I’ll let you in on a little secret: no one else is looking through that microscope but you. Not a single other person is fixating on the things you magnify in your own mind. It’s all in your head, so ease up on yourself and slow down with all the worrying.

You silently scream “WHY CAN’T I JUST BE LIKE EVERYONE ELSE?” without realizing that you already are; everyone else is doing what you’re doing but in different ways, with different hang-ups, and with a different microscope. Everyone thinks their monsters are visible to the world, but they’re not—they’re figments of our overblown imaginations, warped projections of our own self-image. Once you stop seeing them, they’ll fully disappear. Yes, it’s that easy. I know where you are. I also know how to stop being where you are. I wish I could reach out and tell someone to hear you sooner, just to relieve some of the pain. I wish you could know that everything is going to turn out just fine; not perfect, but okay. All these worries and anxieties are merely growing pains. You’ll carry the scars for a long time, unable to forget what it felt like to be you, at the age you are now. It hurts to think so poorly of yourself, doesn’t it? You start to believe yourself, allowing the sadness to eat away at you from the inside until you’re a hollowed-out shell. I wish I could take those thoughts away from you, but I think the mind needs to know its weaknesses before it can appreciate its strengths.

Please know that being “different” is okay. Your unique qualities—which you don’t appreciate yet—will be your source of greatness in the future. They make you who you are for the better, not the worst. Please trust me when I say that you’re built in a special way, but that doesn’t make you broken, worthless, or expendable. It makes you, you. And that’s wonderful. Believe in yourself. What a cliché, but it’s a phrase that packs a sucker punch of sincerity. There will always be someone better, but that’s not for you to focus on. You’re not the smartest—that’s for her. You’re not that fastest—that’s for him. You’re not the most successful—that’s for them. But you know what? You’re the greatest that you can be—and that’s for you. Everyone possesses a unique set of skills and contributes different kinds of qualities to this planet, including you. No one is your particular blend of smart, kind, thoughtful, expressive, creative, empathetic, and driven. You’ll see that one day. You’re a bud covered in snow in the garden of your mind. Just wait for spring.

In the meantime, don’t take it out on others. Your internal battles generate so much self-hatred that it occasionally leaks into the lives of loved ones. They don’t deserve that. They’re not doing anything wrong (most of the time). So perk up your ears when I say this: try your best to keep your anger to yourself, or at least let it out in a constructive way. You’ve got so much pride that when you hurt a loved one with your words and empty anger, you can’t muster up a meaningful apology. Work on that. Work HARD on that. The you of the future is kind, compassionate, and level-headed; don’t leave a trail of fallen trees in your wake. Relationships are hard to come by, so maintain the ones you have with care and consideration. Love your loved ones. They’re easily the best part of living.

Finally, consider this wild idea: do what you want to do. Insane concept, I know. You’ll waste so many years wishing and wanting to act in a play, or to take a painting class, or to sing at the top of your lungs in front of strangers, or to go to a school dance and actually dance like no one’s watching. My best advice? Just fucking do it. What’s the worst that could happen? Someone will laugh? At WHAT? You enjoying yourself? That’s messed up on THEIR part. Not yours. Don’t hold back on what makes you happy just because you fear it will make someone else uncomfortable. The more you tell yourself “no,” the more normalized it becomes and the more you become separated from the real you. You lost yourself for so many years by trying to become a person you never wanted to be: the jock, the college student, the stereotypical masculine male. None of those were you, so quit playing a fool. Leave the scene for another. Trust me, you won’t miss your old role for even a second. Literally.

Okay, Past Me, I’m going to leave you with one more thing before we dig deeper: You’ll be happy one day. You’ll be the you that your instincts always knew you could be. Take comfort in knowing that it will happen and better yet, you will make it happen. Take the pressure off yourself a little. Relax and just . . . be.

Slowly, you’ll make your way to me and you’ll feel great. It’s so amazing that you won’t even believe it if I tried to describe it. But this is your destination. Try your best to get here in one piece. You’re going to love it.

#connor franta

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