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lazzledazzler · 3 years

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Lazzle's Rune Factory 5 Review

Alright so here are my thoughts and experiences with RF5! This is a big boy so buckle in earthmates...

Obviously this review will contain spoilers, read at your own risk.

Initial thoughts upon playing...

Great opening! I enjoyed the jazz music~ I did feel like it leaned a bit more towards the male player though. It definitely feels like a rune factory game. It's familiar, and controls are easy to get accustomed to for the most part. The mold is there and rf5 doesn't stray too far from its predecessors which is comforting for veterans. That being said, I'm not going to pull any punches and will critique this game harshly. Keep in mind as updates for the game are released not all things discussed in this review will be as relevant overtime!

Let's hear some thoughts on...

The story/plot. The plot is enjoyable overall. I'm not crazy about the whole Seed organization thing but it was a neat idea. They address the Sechs Territory and it is confirmed that the game takes place some decades after RF4. But by the end of it, I didn't feel like I really accomplished anything because it felt like I barely did anything really. Also they left a lot of stuff unanswered. I'm not even sure I understood the message they were sending, if they were trying to send a message at all. The main story is too short, and it doesn't involve enough of the townsfolk. You're basically doing everything yourself in secret the whole time and the townsfolk barely know what's actually going on. Out of the love interests, Lucas plays the largest part in the story, followed by Priscilla and Scarlett. The story feels targeted at male audiences--at least that's how I felt. You, the player, have a larger role in the game, much like in RF3 and I was glad to see this. As of right now there are only two arcs. Praying for DLC 3rd arc...!

Protagonists. The latest protagonists to join the crew of Earthmates are...decent. Their designs are nothing special unfortunately, though I appreciate Alice's more than Ares's. Appearance-wise they lack personality and creativity. Personality wise I am pleasantly surprised with how sociable they are. They're not exactly quick witted and sassy like Lest/Frey were in rf4, or as endearing as Micah in rf3, but they have a certain realness to them that makes their reactions to things believable. I'm certain Xseed will see to making them a bit more sarcastic in their localizing efforts, so let's all look forward to that. Overall though, while I appreciate their mannerisms, they don't really measure up to all the previous amnesiacs we've grown to love over the decades.

Characters. Overall I enjoy all the characters introduced in Rune Factory 5! I feel like there is someone for everyone in this game on some level. The voice acting was pretty good for every character. The designs are very much Rune factory. Like OG runefa, compared to rf4 ( 4 kind of strayed from their usual style) which I like. Characters still have their own signature quirks that you find endearing. Although I would have liked to see more variety? Like we've had mermaids, univir, half monsters, vampires, etc in previous titles but rf5 only gives us the usual (half) elf, dwarf, and then a succubus (physically she doesn't have unique features aside from the ears and heart eyes), and some were-people. I was hoping for something more unique to really give that classic runefa vibe.

Dungeons/Battles. I'm pretty split on this one. On the one hand, the dungeons have more depth due to the 3D aspects. They've included more contraptions that are very fun to see even if they aren't executed that well. So I'm grateful for that. On the other hand, the dungeons are insanely short imo. It doesn't take long at all to get to the boss. The puzzles are also pretty subpar and few compared to RF4. Fighting monsters is similar to the other games. You can lock on now but I only use it when I'm trying to use my Seed Circle. The lock on feature is actually counter-intuitive and makes it harder to dodge. Weapon mechanics have shifted a bit. There’s a feature that makes you invincible to damage if you time the R button dash correctly. Axes and Hammers are significantly slower than in older games? Like. I thought I was in slow motion it was so slow. Lances are also harder to use as well? I'm questioning my sanity here. I don't know if it's a bug or intentional either.

Farming. Not much has changed from previous games mechanics wise. They added new types of special crops which is neat. The camera view changes to overhead when you go near your fields though, and it can make you dizzy/uncomfortable. It actually makes it a bit difficult to see at times so I wish there was a way to adjust the angle. If you are tilling corn or dried weeds to improve the soil, you need to place them separately if you don't want to use the entire stack. Otherwise, it will till the entire stack on the land if you place them all down at once. The flower shop is unlocked late in the story. Weird thing to do considering you need flowers to make medicine. Not to mention the fact that you wont have access to the fertilizer that increases defense against typhoons? During typhoon season? Thinking emoji...

The town. I have to say Rigbarth's design is poor compared to Sharance, Selphia, etc. It's too big and it takes too long to get around. Everything is too spaced out and there aren't enough warp points to make it easier on players. I don't want to walk an entire mile up a hill to talk to one person and then walk all the way down to the beach to speak to another. It doesn’t really feel like a ‘town’.

OST/BGM. Music was good, though nothing really stood out to me where I'd go "damn this slaps" or something. I think they might've had some old soundtracks from rf2 or something because it felt really nostalgic at times.

We need an exterminator. (Bugs Bugs Bugs)

Marvelous, I don't know how to tell you this buuut...your customers are NOT your testers. When you release a game, you need to make sure it's not littered with glitches because customers don't enjoy dealing with them and will drop the game!

Here are some of the types of glitches I encountered:

Crashing. Game would randomly crash or freeze and close at any moment. Sooooo frustrating! Sometimes you get lucky with the autosave feature, but the autosave only activates every morning at 6am in your room and then when you warp to a dungeon level/floor. So when you're in the middle of your daily tasks in town and it crashes, you have to start all over. Marveloussss no one enjoys losing their progress in a game I promise you that much.

Lag. The dialogue bar is seriously slow, especially after loading your file. Crafting/Cooking screen lags. When you press the Y button to skip through dialogue it lags like hell. Pretty much after every time you load the game will lag, the audio will lag if you're in a battle, everything is just. so. slow.

Repeating dialogue. So if you close your game entirely (or if it crashes) naturally you'll reload your file to continue where you left off. There's a bug that will cause all NPCs to repeat the last dialogue that occurred from whatever plot related thing you did last. So for example, if the last thing you did in the story was unlock Ludmilla, everyone in town will naturally have some dialogue about her. But even after seeing all this dialogue and even saving, if the game is closed and reloaded you'll have to read all that dialogue again from townsfolk. It got really annoying after a while.

Monster taming. One time I tamed a monster but once I named it and hit 'ok' the monster never showed up in my barns? Just. gone. Okaaaay then...? Additionally, I expanded one of my monster barns but all of the monsters I tamed wouldn't appear in the added room. You get 4 monsters for each room but the monsters I tamed would show up in the original room. Meaning I had like 7 monsters in one room! I tried to bring them into the newly added room but they would just warp back to the other room. Sad.

Pond Glitch. I fished in the pond located in Sasayaki Forest and left the fish I caught but didn't want laying around the water's edge. If you leave fish around the pond's edge and go to sleep, the next morning you will be teleported to the pond and trigger the fairy dialogue as if you had thrown all of the fish into the pond??? So the dialogue of her telling you she wants 'X item, not this!' will trigger over and over for all of the fish you left at the water's edge. RIP.

Party member Bug. I had Martin in my party and I made him leave. Then when I went into my monster barns to get a monster pal to join me instead it showed me Martin's portrait???? Also I've encountered a bug where I can no longer ask anyone to join my party for some unknown reason. The R &L button prompt was just gone when I reloaded.

Errors. When cooking or crafting, the dialogue box shows up sometimes...

Typos. Random average typo here and there. Not a real biggie but there is one instance where the heroine will use the japanese male pronoun "boku" instead of "watashi" which really convinced me that this game was completely intended for men lol.

Let's talk about Pros

The good stuff. The stuff that makes you all warm and fuzzy inside.

Plot Advancing. Now I'm gonna put this as a pro because I'm certain the average player will enjoy this even though I do not. There are now markers on the map to show you where to go to advance the plot. This is all well and dandy, but it also made the story less appealing for me because you don't need to go around town and speak to residents for clues or assistance to advance anything in the story.

3D Graphics The 3D models are all amazing. The interior designs of the houses/buildings are also incredibly detailed and realistic.

Collecting items. Now there's a feature that will allow you to collect items into your inventory just by walking over them. This is pretty neat and welcome for the most part. Once the item is sparkling, you can walk over it and it'll go into your rucksack automatically. This also makes lumbering and mining go much faster. Yay!

The miraculous L pocket. Now you can customize the categories that appear in your L pocket by going to the rucksack tab in the menu. This is a super neat feature that makes things easier on players who want to manage their items in a format that suits them.

Weapon/Tool Toggling. You can now toggle between your equipped weapon and tool by pressing the left or right buttons on the trackpad.

Collecting lumber/material stone. Oh lord this is probably the most welcome improvement moving forward from the previous game. You can now put all of the lumber and material stone from your inventory into its storage at once. This also applies to fodder for tamed monsters. Well done Hakama.

Autosave. This feature is a welcome addition to the series. The game will save your data every morning and every time you enter a dungeon. Autosave has really saved my ass a few times when I made a huge error in judgement so I'm incredibly grateful for this feature. And it doesn't save over your actual save file--there's a separate autosave file at the very top. So if you messed up something but already saved on your main file, you can still salvage your mistake by reloading the autosave! I just wish it activated a bit more often sometimes.

Warping. Now we can warp to each level in a dungeon as well as certain places on the map in town. It's pretty convenient for the most part.

Increased party members. Now you can have up to 3 members in your party! Hooray! Party members act more intelligently than in older games. Scarlett can use the Seed circle to assist you in fights. I think she also tosses healing potions at you occasionally. So far, no one has tossed a dish at me if I haven't eaten like Kiel and Clorica did in rf4. But I have been hit by a failed dish (from reinhardt?) and a healing potion (from scarlett). Scarlett, Priscilla, and Reinhardt are the most helpful when dungeon crawling in my experience. Some of them however, (looking at you Doug) don't shut the hell up with their one line of dialogue they have and repeat it constantly.

Seed Circle. This neat feature allows you to capture monsters. By charging it and releasing you can capture monsters for the bounty system or add them to your party temporarily. If you throw it without charging it, you can stun monsters in place momentarily or grab things from far away. When stunning monsters, it can also give you the monster's drop item occasionally. Unfortunately it uses a lot of RP so it can be difficult at times.

Combo attacks. This is a neat feature that I appreciate and use often for boss fights. They do some serious damage so it's good to save them for the bosses. The actual cutscenes aren't that impressive, and feel kind of subpar when you get down to it but I think it's a start in the right direction.

Farm Dragons. I'm listing this as a pro although I really just see it as a new feature. Farm dragons have fields on their backs that you can place monster barns on and farm on. Giving them certain crystals will give your fields boosts in certain criteria, like length of growth, soil quality, you get it. I personally don't use the crystals because I couldn't give a shit lmao I have men and women to woo here. But if you're into this kinda thing then it's a pro.

Storage. When opening your storage box, fridge, etc. you can actually hit the R & L buttons to switch between ALL of your other storages. Looooove thissss. Great addition. So much faster to put items away in their respective places.

Crafting/Forging. Now we can also use the R & L buttons to alternate between the different weapon types/accessory/gear types instead of having to exit the menu and going back in each time you want to make something different.

Cooking. More recipes have been added. Yay!

Days are longer now. More time to get shit doneeeee ayyyy

Fishing. They've added many more fish to the game! Now the player will shout something when you get a bite, making it easier for you to hit B at the right moment. Nice. Also if you fail or press B too early, the fish doesn't vanish most of the time. Also nice. There is now a feature to fish with another person's assistance. Once a day you can investigate the sign near the fishing station and someone might offer to lend you a hand. Press the B button at the right moments on the slider and you can get a rare fish that can't be caught normally.

Monsters. New types of monsters! Love the designs. Even the monsters that are the same but just have different skins are really neat. They look great in the 3D format too. You can even ride with up to two people on certain monsters! Some bosses had awesome designs while others...were bad.

New Types of Furniture. The carpenter store has a wide arrange of furniture you can buy for your home. It also has wallpapers and stuff which is really neat. Though unfortunately you can't even sit on some of the furniture so that's a shame.

Events. Now there is a system where events are triggered by approaching an icon on the map. This is probably an improvement to RF4's randomized system, though personally I found it annoying because it meant that I had to see the events before I could just enter a building normally. Sometimes I just wanted to get shit done and not have to read through walls of text for someone's love event when I just want to buy something.

Voiced Lines. The protagonist seems to have more voiced lines, as do other characters. Good!

Let's talk about Cons

Not including glitches. Oh boy. So many cons. Where do I start?

Dialogue. Probably the most notable con in the entire game. The dialogue is drastically minimal in comparison to previous games, especially rf4. There is probably a quarter of the amount of dialogue compared to rf4's insane amount of content if not less. Townsfolk repeat themselves. Often. Too often. Am I playing Harvest Moon? Originally I thought it was because the dialogue is randomized, but I think it's actually because more dialogue is unlocked as you raise townspeople's FP. Despite this, there's no linear build up where you start off as acquaintances and eventually become very close like in rf4 because of how sporadic the LP/FP is. Townsfolk don't even talk to each other. One of the greatest perks about runefa is the conversations townsfolk can have with one another. Residents randomly gathering in small groups to talk about anything. Previously you could add someone to your party and sometimes a dialogue will occur if you speak to the right person at the right time with that person in your party. This is nonexistent now. The only time they do this in rf5 is during the festivals. But, it will only trigger if you have unlocked all the characters in each marriageable lineup and they can't be in your party. The residents will talk about one another but that's pretty much it outside of town events. They got rid of all the minor dialogue that occurs too. Trying to sleep in someone's bed while they're right there? They wont comment. Inspecting objects in stores while the shopkeeper is present? Wont say anything. Take a character with you to a dungeon/boss fight? Their lips are sealed. Where's my sense of community? :(

FP/LP This ties into the dialogue issue. The rate at which LP/FP increases is sporadic as hell. You can go from 1FP/LP to 4FP/LP just by giving a gift sometimes. I wouldn't even speak to people and their affinity increased by like triple for no reason. Then it increases by like 2% for the longest time. Argh!!!

Graphics. I don't consider myself very picky when it comes to graphics. I don't really mind that the foliage and scenery are at the level of a ps2 game at best. I tried playing on my television initially, but the lag and camera operability was too much so I fully switched (haha puns) to handheld. One thing that sucked is that I literally cannot tell the difference between medicinal herbs, antidote grasses, and green grasses without the captions because the graphics are so indistinguishable. So when you're trying to pick up multiples of those items by holding the A button, you're just randomly walking over anything green in the hopes that you'll get the right ones...

Lack of Sound Effects. Something I noticed is they got rid of the sound effects that will play when you complete a puzzle or add someone to your party. When you try to brush a monster there's no sound for the '♪' they make when you successfully brush them. So it was hard for me to tell if I had actually brushed them or not. I was a bit saddened by the lack of cute sounds.

Too much free range. From the very beginning of the game, you're allowed to go pretty much wherever you want when leaving town. It was too easy to stumble into high enemy level territory without knowing, so when I was like level 5 so I got KO'd immediately.

Artwork. The portraits seem to be lower in quality somehow. Runefa has always had shitty portrait art imo but this time it's even worse. Many character's eyes looked fucked up. Though the 3D models are insanely good for mostly every character except Terry. Terry's 3D model looks Terryfying and I prefer his portrait.

Festivals. They've added some new festivals. Some I enjoy. Some not so much. They changed the format of the eating contest. It's horrible. Good luck with that one.

L pocket + R button? They got rid of the feature that lets you skip to the other end of your items when opening the L pocket by pressing R button. I really liked that feature because it made it faster to reach my items so I was bummed that they got rid of it.

Gotta go fast. Now when you speak to someone, it doesn't 'stop time' as you might say it did in previous games. So people are still moving about as you speak to someone, making it harder to catch up to people! Annoying!!!

Catch and release? Not in my farming simulator! Say goodbye to being able to toss a fish you caught back into the water. In fact, say goodbye to tossing anything you don't want anymore into the water. Now you just have an army of fish flopping on the ground around you. And with the auto pick up feature, they're probably going to end up in your inventory anyways once you try to move. There are still certain ponds with fairies that you can toss stuff into, but you'll have to deal with the fairy harping at you for giving her something she doesn't want.

Shop Hours. Oh god. The shop owners don't even open their stores at the correct hours? It says open at 9am. If you speak to them they won't open their store until like 9:07??? But Priscilla and Lucy will show up to work their part-time jobs at around 8:30am and you can buy stuff through them before 9am. So the actual shop owners (for the bread shop and general store) are pointless usually. Additionally, if the store is empty (but open) you can no longer add a shopkeeper into your party and then enter their store with them to buy things from them. Why. Just why. When you want to buy something that only a specific person sells (Only Hina sells fish, only Heinz sells misc items) you have to wait for them to finally decide to work in their own store. Wonderful.

Monster Item drops. Maybe I'm crazy but the monster drops are seriously a lot harder to get than in previous games. Especially boss drops. It's almost impossible to get the rare drops now. I don't even want to try anymore. And as far as I know, the only place to buy monster items is through Heinz, but his items are actually misc. items, not specifically monster drops. So you'll be lucky to check his store (whenever tf he decides to actually work) for any monster items you might want instead of farming for the drops. Sighs.

Difficulty. This game is too easy. There is little to no challenge whatsoever. I had to increase the difficulty setting to hard mode and it was still too easy. I beat it at level 139, never once did I need to grind or level. In fact, your character levels up way too quickly for the pace of the story. I had zero trouble with any of the bosses and even the final boss was a breeze. Quite sad. Though because I am not new to the franchise, it's likely that newcomers would have some trouble in the later parts of the story.

Fishing cons. Idk how you fck up fishing but they sure did. You have to stand further back now because the pole is so long that you'll miss the fish you're aiming for. In fact, it's seriously hard to aim period. You'll end up recasting more often than not. Fish come in the various sizes but they don't seem to have the darker or faded characteristics that can indicate whether it's a rare fish or not. The graphics make it hard to tell. The pros that i've already mentioned are welcomed but it doesn't negate the fact that I do not enjoy fishing like I did in previous games.

Mining/Lumbering Cons. You can no longer strike three times consecutively when mining/lumbering. This sucks lol. Even when you upgrade your axe or hammer, powering up the tool does nothing for getting wood and material stone--it only expands the area of your strike. So it takes longer to get wood/stone from stumps and rocks now since you have to strike the full 9 times but it's not too bad. It's also harder to aim now as well so that's also unfortunate.

Seasonal Fields? Kiss them goodbye! That's right, there are no seasonal fields in rf5 because devs are insane! You instead have the farm dragons that seem to look seasonal based on the fact that they are designed after elements like earth, water, and fire. But no, these dragons are simply extra fields for you to use. Here's a spoiler: you're not going to use those fields. You're just not. They're kinda useless unless you're obsessed with farming. Now you have to grow your crops out of season like the sad farmer that you are.

Farming cons. Seeds no longer tell you how long it takes to grow the crop. Why. As of June 29th, they fixed this with an update. But I still had to play the whole game without it so fuck you marvelous. The joystick is really sensitive? So when you're trying to use a fertilizer or something on your field you're likely to place it on the wrong 4x4 tile, wasting your fertilizer. So it’s best to hold down the R button when farming. Also the crops look uglie as hell.

Sleeping and warping cutscenes. Just like in rf4 there's a cutscene when you go to sleep that can be skipped easily by pressing A. In rf5, there's a cutscene to sleep and a cutscene when waking up. It takes a bit more than a second to skip these scenes so it gets annoying after a while. Warping is this new feature that replaces our beloved escape spell. Overall I appreciate the feature but I hate it for two reasons. One: there's an annoying ass cutscene for it each time you use it that could be much shorter. And Two: townsfolk now use warp even when inside the town. In previous games, someone exiting your party in town would just manually run to wherever they need to be. So you could easily chase after them if you need to talk to them or give them something. Now, party members use warp regardless of where you are at the time. So say you have someone at 7 hearts and you want to try confessing to them. You would have them join your party, save your game, and then have them leave your party and immediately speak to them and confess before they can run off. If it doesn't work you reload until it does. In RF5 this wouldn't work anymore because they will warp. Now you would have to save, run around town trying to find this person and hope they accept the confession. Otherwise you'll have to play hide and seek again because reloading your file will randomize the resident's locations (if they are not working in a shop)!!!! I often just waited until a festival day because then they will be at the plaza for most of the day and it has a warp point there.

Crafting/Forging/Cooking. They've removed the feature where you can press Y on the ingredients in the menu to add more of that particular item. I miss this feature :'(

Lacks incentive. There is no trophy room from my knowledge. The final dungeon that is meant to be like the sharance maze/rune prana isn't that hard to beat for skilled players and is only 20 floors. After you beat the main story and this dungeon there's not much else to do really.

Request Board. Unlike in rf4, you need to make sure you have accepted requests before you complete them or else it will not count. Previously, you could complete all sorts of tasks and Eliza would still recognize your work even if you accept their request after the fact. ie, shipping goods, harvesting crops, etc. So make sure you don't harvest your special crops before accepting the request it's for!

Return of the "Loli" Dragons... Yeah you read that right. We got more dragons in children's(???) bodies with skimpy clothes. I don't know anymore????¿¿¿

Can't marry the Milfs or Dilfs. Tragic.

Still no homo. Grow up Marvelous.

Reverse Proposal? Reverse Uno card-- Laid low by the patriarchy. You now have to buy the double bed and craft an engagement ring to propose to your man if you're playing as Alice. Marvelous this isn't what we meant when we said we wanted equal rightsssssss This can be seen as a pro if you're a softhearted babey who doesn't like rejecting bachelors' proposals because you feel bad :'( But this is a con for me because I don't want to spend money and materials on a double bed dammit!!!

Misc. Still can't stack dishes or fish. There's no green elemental fairy???All the other elemental ones are there except the green one? why??? Still can't tame the giant Wooly. Some bosses that have insanely awesome designs cannot be tamed and makes me wanna eat glass.

Let's talk about Love~

Relationships. We want them. And half of us only play these games for them. I've only played as the female heroine so far but I'll be updating this review as soon as I finish with the bachelorettes as the male hero.

Confessions

As usual, we must raise the love points of our beloved to 7 hearts before we can attempt to date them. However unlike in rf4, if you fail at a confession once, you will need to raise the LP up an entire level before you can try again with any chance of success. It's imperative you save before attempting a confession now.

Love Events

Each love interest has two love events that must be seen before you can date them. They're reminiscent of older game's style but I felt they could have been a biiiit more interactive or so? Or involved the town a bit more for some of them.

Dating

Once you get your honey to be your bf/gf, you get to choose the nicknames as usual. Then you can go on dates. The first three (non-festival) dates are actually events. You need to see all three events to get married.

Marriage Event

The final event you need to clear before you can marry your sweetie. In my honest opinion, so far for the boys, these events were rather disappointing. They lacked the drama and angst that sort of 'test' the love between the two when compared to rf4. Also this is a huge con for me personally and a minor spoiler but there are no special cutscenes at the end of the marriage event like in rf4. Instead, the cutscene takes place during your actual wedding. I was saddened by this because it took away the depth from the marriage events and the actual character? As it is just a cut and paste type of thing instead of an original cutscene for each person. They lack individualism this way. Also it kinda felt like a way for devs to avoid gay relationships and cut corners :^/....sus.

First comes love, then comes marriage, then comes...

Children!!!!!! This is actually one of the coolest additions in the game. Just like in rf3, you can have up to 3 children again! Your first child will resemble you, and you will have the option to choose its gender as well as its personality. There are 6 different children, (3 boys and 3 girls), all with different hairstyles, mannerisms, and seiyuus. Your answers will determine which child you get. A year after your first child is born, you will get the option to have a second child. You'll end up with twins, both resembling your partner. You won't get to choose the genders (it will be a boy and girl) but you will get to choose the personalities once more. The children all have canon names too and each kid is incredibly cute. And of course, you're still able to take your kid with you in your party~ ...Though you can only take one kid with you at a time.

So is RF5 good?

Yeah it's a fun game! My theory is that Marvelous forced the devs to release the game earlier than they were ready for, and that's why it's so lacking. But that doesn't mean it's not worth playing! I'd rate it 3.5/5 stars hehe. Not nearly as good as RF4 (full stop 5/5), or RF3 (4/5) but enjoyable nonetheless. I wouldn't recommend it as a first game to play from the series for newcomers though, I feel it's best for vets who can overlook all the cons thanks to loyalty and nostalgia. By the time it’s released in the West, the bugs should all be dealt with too.

So! Definitely buy this game! We want the series to continue and we want RF6 to be better than this--and hopefully Marvelous will make sure of that next time. If you're not a picky person I think you'll enjoy rf5 a lot. If you're like me and have high standards then, well, still pick it up and let it run its course. Then dust off rf4sp and cleanse your gaming palette >;^)

#rune factory 5 #rf5 spoilers #rune factory #rf5 #spoilers #review #rune factory 5 spoilers

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glitchydyke · 2 years

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omg i just started danganronpa… i have No idea what to do or what the game is abt <3 can u summarize it or give me any hints for playing??

HI YES YES YES DANGANRONPA IS EVERYTHING TO ME HELLO

SO. there’s five games total: three visual novels, one third person adventure, and one that’s kind of a visual novel board game type deal?? i haven’t played that yet but it’s non-canon so it’s not vital. there’s also an anime adaptation of the first game and an anime you watch after playing the first two and the adventure game!! i’ll talk abt the visual novels here since those are the main three (+ honestly it’s been a while since i watched the shooter game)

the three visual novels all have the same plot essentially: a class of “ultimates” (kids who are designated The Best At Their Specific Talent) are trapped somewhere (school in the first game, an island in the second, then a different school for the third). for a while, everything is fine, and although they’re understandably freaked out by the prospect of not being allowed to leave, they’re relatively calm. that is, until a robotic bear named monokuma shows up, tells them they they really ARE all trapped, and that the only way to escape the place they’re being held is to kill another classmate and get away with it. there’s also a motive each chapter, to give the kids even more incentive to kill, incase being trapped forever wasn’t enough to tip them over the edge.

so each chapter, things are okay for a few days. people are stressed, but no murder happens - in these sections, you get what are called “free time events”, which is where you can go find your favourite characters and spend time with them! by spending time with them and giving them gifts that they like (gifts are gotten by exchanging coins, which you find around the game and earn from trials), you level up your relationship with them. the highest level of relationship gets you both a gift from them and a bonus you can use in the class trial (better aim, more time, etc). and it’s also just fun to hang out w the characters and talk to them!! you can also skip free time events if you’re not interested, though.

THEN there’s the murder. a death happens, and you get the monokuma file - a little document w basic info abt the body: location, method of death, time of death, etc (the specific info differentiates from case to case). you then get time to spend investigating, which is a point and click type activity, you click on evidence to get a little bit of dialogue about it and then it’s added to your “truth bullets”, which are what you use in the class trial. sometimes during investigations you’ll be forced to investigate with other characters, since each game has a designated antagonist + helper character.

THEN there’s the trials!! the living classmates are all gathered in a trial room, and based on the evidence you’ve collected, you have to solve the murder. if you find the culprit, the culprit is executed. accuse the wrong person? everybody else is executed, and the culprit gets to leave. during the trial you use your truth bullets, the pieces of evidence you’ve collected, to refute statements - i.e. a character will say something along the lines of “well, the death happened at midnight”, and you’ll have to cycle through your bullets to find the evidence that contradicts that. there’s also minigames in the trials, that differ from game to game. some of them include hangman’s gambit, where you have to spell out a word relevant to the case, and logic dive, where you’re in an astral-projection type world, and you’re asked questions about the case and have to steer towards the correct answer. there’s also ones that are in every case, like bullet time battle, a rhythm game where you break through statements, and closing argument, where you put together a manga of the events of the case.

after you’ve found the culprit, you then watch their execution - they’re dragged to an elaborate stage, and brutally killed in a way that’s usually a sick joke or irony on their ultimate talent. the executions (barring a select few), are FASCINATING to watch and analyse.. there’s a few that i think about regularly <3

through all of this, the protagonist and the surviving classmates also slowly put together information they’ve collected to discover “the mastermind” as they call it - the person who locked them up and is forcing them to kill each other.

so through each game, you’ll get to hang out with the characters and learn more about them, investigate their deaths, find the murderer in the class trials, and uncover the mystery of why you’re trapped with no hope of escape <3

for advice?? honestly just… do free time events with your favourite characters and learn more about them. don’t be afraid to look up solutions for the class trials if you need them, but try your best to stay away from spoilers about the murderers and the masterminds, it’s way more fun that way. i spoiled a lot of the games for myself and i rlly wish i could go back and watch/play them for the first time again.

also danganronpa has a lot of flaws, so be aware of that. it’s a product of it’s time and it wasn’t made by great people. it’s genuinely a wonderful game and it’s dearly important to me, but it’s important to note going in that there’s a decent amount of gross stuff. don’t let that ruin it for you though, it is a rlly fun game series !!!

#SORRY. THIS GOT SO INCREDIBLY LONG. THE AUTISM KICKED IN #i just. danganronpa means so so so fucking much to me and i really truly adore it #it’s just a fascinating series i think the concept and the characters are amazing and interesting to analyse and think about #i love the set designs and the character designs #i love the mystery and the gameplay #I LOVE DANGANRONPA <333 SO SO MUCH #asks #sorry if there’s any typos also. it is 2am. help me

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amuelia · 3 years

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How do you think Roose will meet his demise? Or will he survive? What's your best Roose end game predictions?

Thank you for the question! This will be a long post under the readmore, going into my thoughts on the show ending and exploring what the books may have set up in regards to themes and characterization, as well as a bit of general analysis of Roose' story arc in a Dance with Dragons (and some speculation about Ramsay as well).

If you click on the readmore i will have divided the post into sections with bolded Headers, if you want to only read my specific endgame ideas you can skip ahead to the "His Endgame?" section.

In The Show

The show had him get killed by Ramsay in s6, which informs a lot of the fandom speculation about this storyline.

I am not a fan of the show's scenario as it was both similar to tywin and tyrion as well as a mirror of robb's death; it would also be offscreen in the books since neither of the characters are PoVs and Ramsay would need to do the act in secret. This would ultimately undercut Roose' role and impact, being a death scene that is not very unique and also isn't shown to the reader directly. Since no PoV is even in Winterfell currently, we would just hear of it from afar and not witness the consequences.

The show also has a different dynamic in the Bolton storyline, emphasizing Ramsay as the "main character" of this arc, and elevating him to the main villain for s5-6 to fill Joffrey's shoes as an evil character played by a very charismatic actor. Ramsay's show writing is informed by the needs of a TV setting that wants shocking moments and capitalizes on "fan favourite" actors; his rising importance in the show thus is not necessarily an indicator of his book importance. The show was also missing many central characters like the northern lords and the Frey men in Winterfell.

The show had a tendency to kill off characters early when they wanted to cull storylines or had no plans to adapt more of the character's story (like Stannis, Barristan, possibly the Tyrells...); In Mance Rayder we have the most obvious example, where they killed him off for real in a scene that in the book was a misdirection. We also have characters like Jorah where it appears the showrunners had their own choice of how they want his storyline to end, even if Grrm has his own ending in mind.

"For a long time we wanted Ser Jorah to be there at The Wall in the end," writer Dave Hill says. "The three coming out of the tunnel would be Jon and Jorah and Tormund. But [...] Jorah should have the noble death he craves defending the woman he loves." - Dave Hill for Entertainment Weekly

So a death in the show does not need to be an indicator that the books will feature an equivalent scene, even if it gives a hint as to what may happen. By s5 the show has become its own beast, and the butterfly effects from radical changes they made as well as the different characterizations results in the show having to cater to its own needs in many cases when it gets to resolving a plotline.

"We reconceived the role to make it worthy of the actor's talents." - Benioff and Weiss for the s5 DVD commentary, on Indira Varma's casting as Ellaria

In The Books

(Since this post was getting out of hand in length a lot of these arguments are a little shortened/not as in-depth as i'd like! Feel free to inquire more via ask if something is unclear or you disagree)

In the books i find it hard to make a concrete guess as to how it will end. Occam's razor would be to assume the show sort of got it right and that it will vaguely end the same, which could very well happen and i will not discount the possibility; Ramsay is cruel, desires the Dreadfort rule, and is a suspected kinslayer and has no qualms to commit immoral violence.

"Ramsay killed [his brother]. A sickness of the bowels, Maester Uthor says, but I say poison." - Reek III, aDwD

Reek saw the way Ramsay's mouth twisted, the spittle glistening between his lips. He feared he might leap the table with his dagger in his hand [to attack his father]. - Reek III, aDwD

Arguments against this or for a different endgame come down to interpretations of the themes in the story arc and opinions on dramatic structure/grrm's writing, and are thus very subjective.

The way the story currently is going, Ramsay killing Roose treats Roose almost as a plot device; his death brings no change or development to Ramsay's character as we already know his motivations and cruelty align with such an act, and we can assume that he would feel no remorse about it either. The results of such a scene would be firmly on a story level, as it brings political changes and moves the plot along into a specific direction. Roose himself cannot have any relevant character development about it as he does not have a PoV and we would not be able to witness his reaction from the outside.

“The only thing worth writing about is the human heart in conflict with itself.” - William Faulkner, often quoted by Grrm

Further, killing his father is very difficult to pull off in secret (Roose is frequently described as very cautious, and employs many guardsmen). And even if Ramsay pulls it off (people often interpret Ramsay as Roose' blind spot, assuming he might be caught by surprise, not expecting Ramsay would bite the hand that feeds him), Roose is the one that holds his entire alliance together; The Freys would be alienated by Ramsay who would antagonize Walda and her son as his rivals, The Ryswell bloc appears to dislike Ramsay (especially Barbrey), and the other northmen are implied to not even like Roose himself. Killing Roose would quickly combust the entire northern faction, and hinder Ramsay's further plans (another reason why I am not convinced of a book version of the "Battle of Bastards"). Though this might of course, if we look at it from the other side, be grrm's plan to quickly dissolve this plot and move the northern story forwards.

"Ramsay will kill [Walda's children], of course. [...] [She] will grieve to see them die, though." - Reek III, aDwD

"How many of our grudging friends do you imagine we'd retain if the truth were known? Only Lady Barbrey, whom you would turn into a pair of boots … inferior boots." - Reek III, aDwD

"Fear is what keeps a man alive in this world of treachery and deceit. Even here in Barrowton the crows are circling, waiting to feast upon our flesh. The Cerwyns and the Tallharts are not to be relied on, my fat friend Lord Wyman plots betrayal, and Whoresbane … the Umbers may seem simple, but they are not without a certain low cunning. Ramsay should fear them all, as I do." - Reek III, aDwD

Roose' death at Ramsay's hand also removes him thematically from the Red Wedding, as we can assume such a death might have happened regardless of his participation in the event (seeing as Ramsay is getting provoked by Roose constantly in normal dialogue, and has a general violent disposition). Roose already took Ramsay in before aGoT started, and married Walda very early in the war, which is already most of the buildup that the show's scenario had. It also has little to do with the The North Remembers plot except set dressing, since the northmen are presumably neither collaborating with/egging on Ramsay nor would they appreciate the development.

Themes: Ned Stark and the rule over the North

Roose is treated as a foil to Eddard; They are often contrasted in morals and ruling styles, while also having many superficial similarities that further connect them (they are seen as cold by people, grey eyed, patriarchs of rivalling northern houses, etc...).

Pale as morning mist, his eyes concealed more than they told. Jaime misliked those eyes. They reminded him of the day at King's Landing when Ned Stark had found him seated on the Iron Throne. - Jaime IV, aSoS

They both have a "bastard son" that they handle very differently; Roose treating Ramsay in the way that is seen as common in their society. Ramsay and Jon as a comparison are meant to show that Catelyn had a reason to see a bastard as a threat (since Domeric was antagonized by his bastard brother), but also shows that her suggested plan for Jon would not have stopped any danger either (as Ramsay being raised away from the castle didn't help).

And if his seed quickened, she expected he would see to the child's needs. He did more than that. The Starks were not like other men. Ned brought his bastard home with him, and called him "son" for all the north to see. - Catelyn II, aGoT

"Each year I sent the woman some piglets and chickens and a bag of stars, on the understanding that she was never to tell the boy who had fathered him. A peaceful land, a quiet people, that has always been my rule." - Reek III, aDwD

It appears to me that Roose' story functions in some ways as an inversion to Ned. He makes an attempt to grab a power he was not destined to (becoming warden of the north), where Ned did not want the responsiblity thrust upon him ("It was all meant for Brandon. [...] I never asked for this cup to pass to me." - Cat II, aGoT). Where Ned rules successfully and his northmen honor his legacy ("What do you think passes through their heads when they hear the new bride weeping? Valiant Ned's precious little girl." - The Turncloak, aDwD), the Boltons are largely hated and there are several plots conspiring against them ("Let me bathe in Bolton blood before I die." - The King's Prize, aDwD).

It seems possible to me that in terms of their family and legacy, Roose might also live through an inverted version of Ned's story; where Ned died first, leaving his family behind, Roose already lived to see the death of his wives and trueborn heir, and might thus also live to see Ramsay's death. Ned leaves behind well raised children and a North who still respects his name, and even though he dies it will presumably all be "in good hands" in the end (in broad strokes, obviously this is all much more morally complex). Roose however built up a bad and toxic legacy, and also built his way of life around evading consequences; it makes sense to me that he would be forced by the story to finally endure all the consequences of his actions and witness the fall of his house firsthand. After all we already have Tywin who fulfils the purpose of dying before his children while his legacy falls to ruins, and a Feast for Crows explores this aspect thoroughly.

Roose' arc in A Dance With Dragons

The story repeatedly builds up the situation unravelling around Roose, and him slowly losing a grip on it and becoming more stressed and anxious.

Reek wondered if Roose Bolton ever cried. If so, do the tears feel cold upon his cheeks? - Reek II, aDwD

Roose Bolton said nothing at all. But Theon Greyjoy saw a look in his pale eyes that he had never seen before—an uneasiness, even a hint of fear. [...] That night the new stable collapsed beneath the weight of the snow that had buried it. - a Ghost in Winterfell, aDwD

Lady Walda gave a shriek and clutched at her lord husband's arm. "Stop," Roose Bolton shouted. "Stop this madness." His own men rushed forward as the Manderlys vaulted over the benches to get at the Freys. - Theon I, aDwD

It also directly presents him as a parallel to Theon's rule in aCoK, who similarly experienced a very unpopular rule and his subjects slowly turning against him. Presumably, the point of this comparison will not just be "Ramsay comes in at the end and unexpectedly whacks them on the head". Both Theon and Roose invited Ramsay into their lives, giving him more power than he deserves, and causing Ramsay to make choices that increasingly alienate others from them (the death of the miller's boys for example has repercussions for both Theon and Roose). Grrm is likely steering this towards a difference in how they will deal with this situation.

It all seemed so familiar, like a mummer show that he had seen before. Only the mummers had changed. Roose Bolton was playing the part that Theon had played the last time round, and the dead men were playing the parts of Aggar, Gynir Rednose, and Gelmarr the Grim. Reek was there too, he remembered, but he was a different Reek, a Reek with bloody hands and lies dripping from his lips, sweet as honey. - a Ghost in Winterfell, aDwD

"Stark's little wolflings are dead," said Ramsay, sloshing some more ale into his cup, "and they'll stay dead. Let them show their ugly faces, and my girls will rip those wolves of theirs to pieces. The sooner they turn up, the sooner I kill them again." - The elder Bolton sighed. "Again? Surely you misspeak. You never slew Lord Eddard's sons, those two sweet boys we loved so well. That was Theon Turncloak's work, remember? How many of our grudging friends do you imagine we'd retain if the truth were known?" - Reek III, aDwD

Roose' arc is deeply connected to the relations he shares to the other northern lords, which has been heavily impacted by the Red Wedding. It stands to reason that they are going to be an important part of his downfall, and we see many hints of them plotting to betray him.

The north remembers, Lord Davos. The north remembers, and the mummer's farce is almost done. My son is home." - Davos IV, aDwD

Themes: Stannis and kinslaying

The books set up Roose and Stannis as foils as well; Both lack charisma and have trouble winnning the people's support, Stannis and Roose both parallel and contrast Ned, Stannis appears as a "lesser Robert" where Roose is a "lesser Ned", Stannis represents the fire where Roose represents the ice, both struggle over dominion in a land that doesnt particularly want either of them, etc... What i find interesting is how they are contrasted over kinslaying:

"Only Renly could vex me so with a piece of fruit. He brought his doom on himself with his treason, but I did love him, Davos. I know that now. I swear, I will go to my grave thinking of my brother's peach." - Davos II, aCoK

"I should've had the mother whipped and thrown her child down a well … but the babe did have my eyes." [...] "Now [Domeric's] bones lie beneath the Dreadfort with the bones of his brothers, who died still in the cradle, and I am left with Ramsay. Tell me, my lord … if the kinslayer is accursed, what is a father to do when one son slays another?" - Reek III, aCoK

Stannis is set up as someone who is very thorough and strict in following his own code and his "duty", even if he does not like what it forces him to do.

Stannis ground his teeth again. "I never asked for this crown. Gold is cold and heavy on the head, but so long as I am the king, I have a duty . . . If I must sacrifice one child to the flames to save a million from the dark . . . Sacrifice . . . is never easy, Davos. Or it is no true sacrifice. Tell him, my lady." - Davos IV, aSoS

The armorer considered that a moment. "Robert was the true steel. Stannis is pure iron, black and hard and strong, yes, but brittle, the way iron gets. He'll break before he bends." - Jon I, aCoK

Roose however is frequently characterized as someone who tries to get as much as he can while avoiding negative consequences, and who does not have a consistent moral code and instead bends rules to his benefit to be the most comfortable to him.

It is often theorized that Stannis will end up burning his daughter Shireen; the Ramsay issue might then serve to contrast the two men. If Grrm intends it to be compared by the reader, I can see it going two ways: Either Roose will be forced to finally act in a drastic way after avoiding his responsibility in regards to Ramsay and he will be forced to get rid of his son, making him break the only moral hurdle he has presented adhering to during the story (though analyzing his character, the kinslaying taboo is probably less a sign of moral fortitude and more him using the guise of morals to explain a selfish motivation). Or he might not act against Ramsay and suffer the consequences, presenting an interesting moral situation where some readers might consider his action "better" or more relatable than Stannis', breaking up the otherwise very black and white moral comparison between the two men. It serves as an interesting conflict of the morality of kinslaying compared to what readers might see as a moral obligation of getting rid of a monster such as Ramsay; contrasting Shireen whose death would not be seen as worth it by most. Ramsay as a bastard (who was almost killed at birth if he hadnt been able to prove his paternity) also makes for an interesting verbal parallel with the bastard Edric Storm, and might be used for a look at the utilitarian principle of killing a child (baby ramsay/edric) to save countless people from suffering that underpinned Edric's story.

"As Faulkner says, all of us have the capacity in us for great good and for great evil, for love but also for hate. I wanted to write those kinds of complex character in a fantasy, and not just have all the good people get together to fight the bad guy." - Grrm

"Robert, I ask you, what did we rise against Aerys Targaryen for, if not to put an end to the murder of children?" - Eddard VIII, aGoT

"If Joffrey should die . . . what is the life of one bastard boy against a kingdom?" - "Everything," said Davos, softly. - Davos V, aSoS

However Grrm decides to present these conflicts or which actions the characters will take in the end, it will result in interesting discussion and analysis for the readers.

His Endgame?

Looking at the trends of the past books, it is probably going to be hard to predict any specific outcome; every book introduces new characters and plot elements that were impossible to predict from the last book even if their thematic importance or setup was aptly foreshadowed.

Roose has a lot of plot importance and characterization that has, in my opinion, not yet been properly resolved in a way that would be unique and poignant to the specific purpose his character appears to fulfil. However I also have a bias in that i did not like the show's writing of that scene which makes me averse to see a version of it in the books, and i really like Roose as a character and want to see him have more scenes in the next book(s). This leads me to discount plot speculation that cuts his character arc short offscreen early. Roose is only a side character; however, i have trust in grrm's writing abilities and that he would give him a proper sendoff that feels satisfying to a fan of the character.

"…even the [characters] who are complete bastards, nasty, twisted, deeply flawed human beings with serious psychological problems… When I get inside their skin and look out through their eyes, I have to feel a certain — if not sympathy, certainly empathy for them. I have to try to perceive the world as they do, and that creates a certain amount of affection." — George Martin

Considering my earlier analyis, there is a case to be made for Roose killing Ramsay; however it appears grrm might have a different endgame in mind for Ramsay, foreshadowed in Chett's prologue:

There'd be no lord's life for the leechman's son, no keep to call his own, no wives nor crowns. Only a wildling's sword in his belly, and then an unmarked grave. The snow's taken it all from me . . . the bloody snow . . . - Chett, aSoS

I tend to think something might happen to Roose/the Bolton bloc later in the book that would cause Ramsay to attempt to flee the scene again like he did back in aCoK fleeing Rodrik's justice; perhaps Ramsay is sent out to battle but then flees it like a coward, or he sees his cause as lost. This time, the fleeing and potentially disguised Ramsay would not make it out to safety though, and get killed without being recognized as Ramsay, dying forgotten. This would serve as dramatic irony since Ramsay so strongly desired to be recognized and respected as a Lord of Bolton, without being too on the nose.

As for Roose, i could see him getting captured and somehow brought to justice (either when someone takes Winterfell or in some sort of battle). I see it unlikely that he will be backstabbed like Robb was, because it seems very "eye for an eye" and ultimately doesn't teach much of a lesson except "he had it coming"; But the various people conspiring against him could lead to his capture by betraying him (giving a payoff to the northern conspiracies and the red wedding). I would find a scene of him standing trial interesting since i believe we didn't have one of these for a true non-pov villain yet, and it would be an interesting confrontation that he cannot escape from (he also loves to talk so it would be a good read to see him make a case for himself).

I assume Roose will be out of the picture when the Other plot finally properly kicks into gear (whether dead or "in prison"). With Stannis as a false Azor Ahai and Roose as a false Other (with his pale, cold features), their struggle in the north seems to be a representation of the false "Game of Thrones" that distracts people from the "real threat" of the Others.

As always this is just my opinion, and it could all go very differently in the books! There could always be something that completely uproots my analysis and goes into a direction i did not expect from the material we had; But i have fate that Grrm as a writer will deliver and give me something i can be satisfied with.

#asks #asoiaf #asoiaf meta #roose bolton #valyrianscrolls #a song of ice and fire #not art #anonymous

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hopeymchope · 3 years

Text

Parascientific Escape: The sci-fi “escape room” visual novel-style series nobody talks about

I can’t help thinking that Parascientific Escape would probably have an active fandom somewhere on the Internet if it wasn’t TRAPPED ON THE 3DS ESHOP.

I mean, it’s an escape room-centric visual novel-style sci-fi Japanese game that is clearly inspired by Zero Escape and very anime in its style. There are endearing characters, including optimal waifus/husbandos, plus a gradual buildup of an interesting fictional world full of political intrigue, its own countries, its own companies, and of course... psychic powers. Because you can’t have a trilogy of Japanese visual novel-style games featuring escape room puzzles without mental powers, now can you?

But as I said... they’re trapped as download-only titles for the 3DS. That’s fucking brutal.

Even so, there’s a pretty big 3DS/2DS user base still in existence. It’s not like they’ve never been translated or something, so at least we have the capability to play them. So if you look into them, what are you getting?

A basic overview: Parascientific Escape is a trilogy of anime-style games about solving escape room mysteries and tracking down evildoers via the use of psychic powers (obvious Zero Escape influences). There’s an overarching plot about a mysterious mastermind who believes it’s time for the recently emerged psychics of the world to take their place as the next evolution of humanity and get their own nation (obvious X-Men influences).

They don’t work very well as standalone stories; each story relies on information from the last one, culminating in a game that stars the protagonists of both parts 1 and 2 together as they finally unravel the motivations behind the events of the whole series and face off with the people behind everything. In addition, the escape room puzzles start out pretty easy in the first game build to be pretty frustratingly obtuse by the tail end of the third. And on top of all that, each game taken on its own only contains about 3-4 escape rooms. So when you bundle all three together, that’s when it all works as a single satisfying package.

Don’t worry about burning a lot of cash to play the whole series, however. The three games are $5.00 US each on the 3DS eShop and are usually on sale for $2.50 each these days. I got the entire trilogy for $7.50 US!

So let’s break down the gameplay and setup in a little more detail. Don’t worry; I won’t give any spoilers that go beyond the first five minutes of any game in the series. The twists and turns are part of the fun here.

The first game is Parascientific Escape: Cruise in the Distant Seas. You play as Hitomi Akeneno, a high school girl (because of course she’s a high-schooler) with the dual abilities of mild telekinesis and a type of clairvoyance that lets her peer past barriers or into the insides of objects. She finds herself trapped on a sinking cruise ship where some mastermind keeps systematically locking her into isolated sections while she’s trying desperately to escape.

I really liked how you could look inside of an object with clairvoyance and then use her telekinesis to manipulate the various switches and levers within, gradually pulling some object you need out from within a maze. I also thought it was clever how the solution to a new escape roomight require you to backtrack to a previous escape room to investigate some object or area that wasn’t relevant to that previous room’s original puzzle.

(One of the things I found most fascinating about this one is the ethical debate raised by Hitomi’s friend Chisono regarding how Hitomi got herself involved in all this. Chisono offers a perspective that is extremely unusual to see in most fiction. You can even say it’s pretty cold, but it’s not without having some merit to it. I don’t want to say too much about what I’m talking about, though; it’s better left as a surprise.)

The second title, Parascientific Escape: Gear Detective, almost seems standalone at first. You play as Kyosuke Ayana, a private detective and actual adult (!) who is 22 years old. A young woman shows up at his office and asks to hire him for protection. See, there’s a serial killer on the loose, and she believes she’s the next target.

We are swiftly told that Kyosuke was once in an accident that necessitated the replacement of his left arm and right eye. He volunteered to be a guinea pig for some very special prosthetics that granted him artificial psychic powers. As such, he now has “chronokinesis” — to the power to look back in time. However, he can only look back for five days, and he only has limited ability to move or manipulate the things he sees in the past.

Naturally, Kyosuke’s investigation winds up trapping him within some escape rooms that require use of his unique abilities to solve. Some of the hints at the proper timestamps or exactly where you should be looking when you peer into the past are a little vague, though, which can cause momentary frustration. Because I like to always be making forward progress, I actually preferred Hitomi’s telekinesis/clairvoyance powers from the first game. Still, Hitomi had some pretty basic puzzles in her rooms. I can’t deny that these puzzles took more thought.

Outside of the escape rooms, everything is undeniably a huge improvement. The first game presented strictly linear segments of storytelling between the rooms, but this one is more of an adventure game. You can choose where you go, select from a limited menu of things to do when you get there, and do all of it in any order you like. There’s usually a correct sequence order to progressing the story, but it’s typically pretty clear what the next step is, so it’s not like you’re just flailing about and trying a bunch of locations blindly. Besides, there’s no way to get stuck, so don’t stress it. There are even a lot of actions you can take that have no impact on story progression at all — they’re just there to generate additional dialogue that further develops the characters.

The tradeoff is that you actually get fewer escape rooms overall. The first game had four, but the second only contains three. This is also the first game in the series to introduce multiple endings; you get a number of dialogue choices throughout, and unfortunately, it’s far too easy to trigger the “bad” ending. There are guides online to help you trigger the Gold Star “true” ending, however. Just hit up GameFAQs. You might want to use the guide on your first playthrough, because I can say from experience that it’s annoying to have to replay all the dialogue sections just to make the correct choices. (Luckily, you can skip over any irrelevant sections of each chapter — including the escape room puzzles.)

In spite of my above whining, the second one is probably my single favorite story in the Parascientific trilogy. It’s a lot of fun.

The final game in the trilogy is Parascientific Escape: Crossing at the Farthest Horizon. Mysterious characters who were plotting offscreen for the previous two games are finally given faces, locations that were talked about extensively in both are finally visited, and the two protagonists of the first couple games finally meet and team up. It’s absolutely a culmination of what they set up in the first two.

The narrative jumps around from the perspectives of many different characters, but the most time is undoubtedly spent with Hitomi and Kyosuke. Sadly, there is no gameplay usage of Hitomi’s powers this time; the escape rooms are all done with Kyosuke, and they are more devious now than ever before. Personally, I found the next-to-last one to be incredibly obtuse and frustrating. I ultimately had to consult a video playthrough on YouTube for that. (The YouTuber in question didn’t seem to have the same issues figuring things out that I did. So I guess your mileage may vary.)

The “adventure game” segments make a return here as well, although they’ve also become a bit tougher to figure out. There are a couple of times when you might find yourself wandering the various location options, clicking on every possible action to try and progress. Luckily, there aren’t so many default options that you’re left flailing for very long. Even the longest period of clueless wandering lasted me a maximum of 15 minutes.

Once again, you have to make the correct dialogue choices if you want a positive ending. And once again, GameFAQs is your friend and co-pilot.

Ultimately, even the gated endings and occasional puzzle frustrations did little to curb my enthusiasm. I really had fun with these characters and their stories, I greatly enjoyed the majority of the escape rooms, and I was pretty satisfied with how it all wrapped up. The character designs/artwork get better and better as the series goes on. The selection of music tracks may be the same throughout the whole series, but I really dug on them, so I can’t complain. Do I have any other misgivings? Well, just one; the English localization is pretty sloppy. There are a pretty large number of typos, and the dialogue can sound stilted and awkward at times due to being a direct translation. It’s actually at its worst at the start of the first game. Luckily, after about 30 minutes of playtime, it settles in and finds its voice.

Seriously, they should really figure out a way to re-package these games for another system that doesn’t use the the dual-screen setup. Put all three of them together, and it’d easily be satisfying as a full retail release!

But for now, if you have a 3DS/2DS, they’re only $7.50 in total most of the time (and $15.00 at the worst). Do you like adventure game-style mysteries and visual novel-esque progression and, of course, escape rooms? You should give these a shot! And I hope these devs get to make games with bigger budgets and better localizations in the future.

#parascientific escape #parascientific escape: gear detective #parascientific escape: cruise in the distant seas #parascientific escape: crossing at the farthest horizon #3ds #2ds #3ds games #2ds games #video games #visual novels #Kyosuke Ayana #hitomi akeneno #escape room games

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rottenappleheart · 4 years

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I finished “Heaven’s Vault,” that archaeology/alien translation game that everyone was so excited about before it came out, and then I never heard of again. I think I know why.

Short version: it seems as though it was made by people who were very good at the worldbuilding/linguistics parts, and not very good at making a video game.

Long version: I did enjoy the game, eventually. Beat it in just under 20 hours, feeling fairly good that I hadn’t missed anything major and had done everything I could find to do before the end. I also see now that there’s a New Game+ which gives the opportunity to spin things out again in a different manner, with more information, and this really neat article (spoilers ahoy) talks about how the mere concept of a NG+ is part of the worldbuilding (the Loop religion centers around the idea that everything that has happened will happen again.)

The learning curve was very steep at the beginning, because of the aforementioned gameplay problems getting in the way of the “meat” of the game. Some low points:

The controls are extremely janky and remained frustrating throughout. I had to turn the mouse sensitivity to its very lowest setting to avoid spinning like a top, and the restricted camera angles often send you walking off in a direction you never meant, leaping back and forth through doorways when you just wanted to enter (or exit) a room, etc.

The mandatory and constant “sailing” minigame, while beautiful, is aggravating and not as fun as I assume the developers thought it would be, given how much you have to do it. Whereas Wind Waker’s equally mandatory and equally constant sailing is a feature of the game, here it was mostly a lengthy interruption between the snippets of actual content. Except that bits of the story are also spun out in conversations between Aliya and the robot Six on these sailing interludes, so you’re encouraged not to skip them, the few times you are even given that option.

The graphics are... odd and awkward, unfortunately. The developers tried a very neat thing with (beautiful and detailed) 3D rendered environments, populated by (also beautiful, but jarringly animated) 2D hand-drawn characters. Who don’t have feet, but kind of fade into invisibility just below the knees, so as to avoid rendering walking animations, I guess. It’s very strange. There’s also no “collision sensor,” so your 2D player character is constantly clipping through other 2D NPCs, which sometimes interrupt everything you’re doing for a 15 second animated scene where they greet you, then walk away. There’s no way to avoid this. And when that happens, it overrides and cancels any ambient but plot-relevant discussion you were having with Six, which was deeply frustrating.

Speaking of which - there are a lot of strange, time-consuming transitions. Walking out of one section of the Elboreth marketplace into another takes another 10 second scene triggered by you entering a doorway, just to show you walking through a side alley. Every single time. When you show artifacts to a colleague, he will walk all the way to the other side of his office and walk all the way back before offering the same dialogue as every time before. Realistic, to grant him time to check his data? Yes. Extremely frustrating as an element of gameplay? Also yes.

Also, my game glitched multiple times, everything slowing to an infinite limbo as a triggering event failed to trigger, requiring a full reset. Any interaction with Oroi, for whatever reason, had a 33% chance of glitching.

All of this adds up to a game that creaks and clunks, and is deeply frustrating to play. These are all things which seem fueled by bad design/poor planning, and it takes away from the GOOD parts of the game. Namely:

It’s really beautiful (once you get over the 2D/3D intersection.) The music is lovely, and all the designs are top notch. I really enjoyed spending time in these various worlds and discovering their history. (Actually WALKING through the worlds, less enjoyable, but...)

The development of the story and the character interactions is mostly organic and nuanced. Like a Bioware game (I’m sorry to reference them but it’s the easiest comparison), your responses to different plot events and side characters, and the order in which you discover things (or even what conclusions you draw! there isn’t necessarily a single right answer!) shapes the narrative. Unfortunately, it quickly becomes obvious when the NPCs have run out of interactions for you... such as when you take a twenty-minute sail to revisit your home planet, suffer through endless clipping issues and mandatory transitions, only for your contacts there to have zero dialogue options. (Whoops, this was supposed to be the “good” section.)

The translations, which are the heart of the game, become really fun after the first few. Initially, you have ZERO information when you are given your first line of text to interpret, and have to guess blindly. In a little bit, you are given more information to determine whether that first guess was right or wrong. It’s a little frustrating, but I think what the developers were going for is that Aliya is already roughly familiar with Ancient script, and whatever initial guess she makes is about 50/50 correct. Each new line of text you uncover builds on the glyphs you already know. It became very fun to make more educated guesses - ah, I recognize the symbol we identified as “Gods,” so maybe combined with this other symbol, it might be “Prayer” or “Temple” - something related. Or when you start breaking down the “me/you/we/my/your/our” glyphs, it all makes SENSE. That was the fun part I eventually couldn’t get enough of - parsing out what Ancient meant, and piecing together the story behind the Nebula.

I genuinely did gasp when I figured out A Big Thing about the world story.

I really love stories about robots. Long-suffering, mildly sarcastic robots who are trying very hard to keep you alive while you do stupid things like climb down cliffs they can’t follow. I am very glad I was warned about the risk of losing Six forever and could avoid that particular path, because I think the last third of the game would have been a real bummer without Six as a companion.

Do I recommend it? Yes... mostly. Yes, with the caveats above about how clunky and frustrating the gameplay is. I probably will replay it in a while, taking advantage of the NG+, but not right away - I need to play something less inherently frustrating.

I wish there were more games like this, but I also wish it had been better developed, so that the good parts of it could really shine.

#heaven's vault

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rawliverandcigarettes · 4 years

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Mass Effect Retribution, a review

Mass Effect Retribution is the third book in the official Mass Effect trilogy by author Drew Karpyshyn, who happens to also be Lead Writer for Mass Effect 1 and Mass Effect 2.

I didn’t expect to pick it up, because to be very honest I didn’t expect to like it. 9 years ago I borrowed Mass Effect Revelations, and I still recall the experience as underwhelming. But this fateful fall of 2020 I had money (yay) and I saw the novel on the shelf of a swedish nerd store. I guess guilt motivated me to give the author another try: guilt, because I’ve been writing a Mass Effect fanfiction for an ungodly amount of years and I’ve been deathly afraid of lore that might contradict my decisions ever since I started -but I knew this book covered elements that are core to plot elements of my story, and I was willing to let my anxiety to the door and see what was up.

Disclaimer: I didn’t reread Mass Effect Revelation before plunging into this read, and entirely skipped Ascension. So anything in relation to character introduction and continuity will have to be skipped.

Back-cover pitch (the official, unbiased, long one)

Humanity has reached the stars, joining the vast galactic community of alien species. But beyond the fringes of explored space lurk the Reapers, a race of sentient starships bent on “harvesting” the galaxy’s organic species for their own dark purpose. The Illusive Man, leader of the pro-human black ops group Cerberus, is one of the few who know the truth about the Reapers. To ensure humanity’s survival, he launches a desperate plan to uncover the enemy’s strengths—and weaknesses—by studying someone implanted with modified Reaper technology. He knows the perfect subject for his horrific experiments: former Cerberus operative Paul Grayson, who wrested his daughter from the cabal’s control with the help of Ascension project director Kahlee Sanders. But when Kahlee learns that Grayson is missing, she turns to the only person she can trust: Alliance war hero Captain David Anderson. Together they set out to find the secret Cerberus facility where Grayson is being held. But they aren’t the only ones after him. And time is running out. As the experiments continue, the sinister Reaper technology twists Grayson’s mind. The insidious whispers grow ever stronger in his head, threatening to take over his very identity and unleash the Reapers on an unsuspecting galaxy. This novel is based on a Mature-rated video game.

Global opinion (TL;DR)

I came in hoping to be positively surprised and learn a thing or two about Reapers, about Cerberus and about Aria T’loak. I wasn’t, and I didn’t learn much. What I did learn was how cool ideas can get wasted by the very nature of game novelization, as the defects are not singular to this novel but quite widespread in this genre, and how annoyed I can get at an overuse of dialogue tags. The pacing is good and the narrative structure alright: everything else poked me in the wrong spots and rubbed how the series have always handled violence on my face with cruder examples. If I was on Good Reads, I’d probably give it something like 2 stars, for the pacing, some of the ideas, and my general sympathy for the IP novel struggle.

The indepth review continue past this point, just know there will be spoilers for the series, the Omega DLC which is often relevant, and the book itself!

What I enjoyed

Drew Karpyshyn is competent in narrative structure, and that does a lot for the pacing. Things rarely drag, and we get from one event to the next seamlessly. I’m not surprised this is one of the book’s qualities, as it comes from the craft of a game writer: pacing and efficiency are mandatory skills in this field. I would have preferred a clearer breaking point perhaps, but otherwise it’s a nice little ride that doesn’t ask a lot of effort from you (I was never tempted to DNF the book because it was so easy to read).

This book is packed with intringuing ideas -from venturing in the mind of the Illusive Man to assist, from the point of view of the victim, to Grayson’s biological transformation and assimilation into the Reaper hivemind, we get plenty to be excited for. I was personally intrigued about Liselle, Aria T’loak’s secret daughter, and eager to get a glimpse at the mind of the Queen Herself -also about how her collaboration with Cerberus came to be. Too bad none of these ideas go anywhere nor are being dealt with in an interesting way!!! But the concepts themselves were very good, so props for setting up interesting premices.

Pain is generally well described. It gets the job done.

I liked Sanak, the batarian that works as a second to Aria. He’s not very well characterized and everyone thinks he’s dumb (rise up for our national himbo), even though he reads almost smarter than her on multiple occasions, but I was happy whenever he was on the page, so yay for Sanak. But it might just be me having a bias for batarians.

Cool to have Kai Leng as a point of view character. I wasn’t enthralled by what was done with it, as he remains incredibly basic and as basically hateable and ungrounded than in Mass Effect 3 (I think he’s very underwhelming as a villain and he should have been built up in Mass Effect 2 to be effective). But there were some neat moments, such as the description of the Afterlife by Grayson who considers it as tugging at his base instincts, compared to Leng’s description of it where everything is deemed disgusting. The execution is not the best, but the concept was fun.

Pre-Reaperification Paul Grayson wasn’t the worst point of view to follow. I wasn’t super involved in his journey and didn’t care when he died one way or the other, but I empathized with his problems and hoped he would find a way out of the cycle of violence. The setup of his character arc was interesting, it’s just sad that any resolution -even negative- was dropped to focus on Reapers and his relationship with Kahlee Sanders, as I think the latter was the least interesting part.

The cover is cool and intringuing. Very soapy. It’s my favorite out of all the official novels, as it owns the cheesier aspect of the series, has nice contrasts and immediately asks questions. Very 90s/2000s. It’s great.

You may notice every thing I enjoyed was coated in complaints, because it’s a reflection of my frustration at this book for setting up interesting ideas and then completely missing the mark in their execution. So without further due, let’s talk about what I think the book didn’t do right.

1. Dumb complaints that don’t matter much

After reading the entire book, I am still a bit confused at to why Tim (the Illusive Man’s acronym is TIM in fandom, but I find immense joy in reffering to him as just Tim) wants his experimentation to be carried out on Grayson specifically, especially when getting to him is harder than pretty much anyone else (also wouldn’t pushing the very first experiments on alien captives make more sense given it’s Cerberus we’re talking about?). It seem to be done out of petty revenge, which is fine, but it still feels like quite the overlook to mess with a competent fighter, enhance him, and then expect things to stay under control (which Tim kind of doesn’t expect to, and that’s even weirder -why waste your components on something you plan to terminate almost immediately). At the same time, the pettiness is the only characterization we get out of Tim so good I guess? But if so, I wished it would have been accentuated to seem even more deliberate (and not have Tim regret to see it in himself, which flattens him and doesn’t inform the way he views the world and himself -but we’ll get to that).

I really disliked the way space travel is characterized. And that might be entirely just me, and perhaps it doesn’t contradict the rest of the lore, but space travel is so fast. People pop up left and right in a matter of hours. At some point we even get a mention of someone being able to jump 3 different Mass Relays and then arrive somewhere in 4 hours. I thought you first had to discharge your ship around a stellar object before being able to engage in the next jump (and that imply finding said object, which would have to take more than an hour). It’s not that big of a deal, but it completely crammed this giant world to a single boulevard for me and my hard-science-loving tastes. Not a big deal, but not a fan at all of this choice.

You wouldn’t believe how often people find themselves in a fight naked or in their underwear. It happens at least 3 times (and everyone naked survives -except one, we’ll get to her later).

Why did I need to know about this fifteen year’s old boner for his older teacher. Surely there were other ways to have his crush come across without this detail, or then have it be an actual point of tension in their relationship and not just a “teehee” moment. Weird choice imo.

I’m not a fan of the Talons. I don’t find them interesting or compelling. There is nothing about them that informs us on the world they live in. The fact they’re turian-ruled don’t tell us anything about turian culture that, say, the Blue Suns don’t tell us already. It’s a generic gang that is powerful because it is. I think they’re very boring, in this book and in the Omega DLC alike (a liiittle less in the DLC because of Nyreen, barely). Not a real criticism, I just don’t care for them at all.

I might just be very ace, but I didn’t find Anderson and Kahlee Sanders to have much chemistry. Same for Kahlee and Grayson (yes we do have some sort of love-triangle-but-not-really, but it’s not very important and it didn’t bother me much). Their relationships were all underwhelming to me, and I’ll explain why in part 4.

The red sand highs are barely described, and very safely -probably not from a place of intimate knowledge with drugs nor from intense research. Addiction is a delicate topic, and I feel like it could have been dealt with better, or not be included at all.

There are more of these, but I don’t want to turn this into a list of minor complaints for things that are more a matter of taste than craft quality or thematic relevance. So let’s move on.

2. Who cares about aliens in a Mass Effect novel

Now we’re getting into actual problems, and this one is kind of endemic to the Mass Effect novels (I thought the same when I read Revelation 9 years ago, though maybe less so as Saren in a PoV character -but I might have forgotten so there’s that). The aliens are described and characterized in the most uncurious, uninspired manner. Krogans are intimidating brutes. Turians are rigid. Asaris are sexy. Elcors are boring. Batarians are thugs (there is something to be said with how Aria’s second in command is literally the same batarian respawned with a different name in Mass Effect 2, this book, then the Omega DLC). Salarians are weak nerds. (if you allow me this little parenthesis because of course I have to complain about salarian characterization: the only salarian that speaks in the book talks in a cheap ripoff of Mordin’s speech pattern, which sucks because it’s specific to Mordin and not salarians as a whole, and is there to be afraid of a threat as a joke. This is SUCH a trope in the original trilogy -especially past Mass Effect 1 when they kind of give up on salarians except for a few chosen ones-, that salarians’ fear is not to be taken seriously and the only salarians who are to be considered don’t express fear at all -see Mordin and Kirrahe. It happens at least once per game, often more. This is one of the reasons why the genophage subplot is allowed to be so morally simple in ME3 and remove salarians from the equation. I get why they did that, but it’s still somewhat of a copeout. On this front, I have to give props to Andromeda for actually engaging with violence on salarians in a serious manner. It’s a refreshing change) I didn’t learn a single thing about any of these species, how they work, what they care about in the course of these 79750 words. I also didn’t learn much about their relationships to other species, including humans. I’ll mention xenophobia in more details later, but this entire aspect of the story takes a huge hit because of this lack of investment of who these species are.

I’ve always find Mass Effect, despite its sprawling universe full of vivid ideas and unique perspectives, to be strangely enamoured with humans, and it has never been so apparent than here. Only humans get to have layers, deserving of empathy and actual engagement. Only their pain is real and important. Only their death deserve mourning (we’ll come back to that). I’d speculate this comes from the same place that was terrified to have Liara as a love interest in ME1 in case she alienated the audience, and then later was surprised when half the fanbase was more interested in banging the dinosaur-bird than their fellow humans: Mass Effect often seem afraid of losing us and breaking our capacity for self-projection. It’s a very weird concern, in my opinion, that reveals the most immature, uncertain and soapy parts of the franchise. Here it’s punched to eleven, and I find it disappointing. It also have a surprising effect on the narrative: again, we’ll come back to that.

3. The squandered potential of Liselle and Aria

Okay. This one hurts. Let’s talk about Liselle: she’s introduced in the story as a teammate to Grayson, who at the time works as a merc for Aria T’loak on Omega, and also sleeps with him on the regular. She likes hitting the Afterlife’s dancefloor: she’s very admired there, as she’s described as extremely attractive. One night after receiving a call from Grayson, she rejoins him in his apartment. They have sex, then Kai Leng and other Cerberus agents barge in to capture Grayson -a fight break out (the first in a long tradition of naked/underwear fights), and both of them are stunned with tranquilizers. Grayson is to be taken to the Illusive Man. Kai Leng decides to slit Liselle’s throat as she lays unconscious to cover their tracks. When Aria T’loak and her team find her naked on a bed, throat gaping and covered in blood, Liselle is revealed, through her internal monologue, to be Aria’s secret daughter -that she kept secret for both of their safety. So Liselle is a sexpot who dies immediately in a very brutal and disempowered manner. This is a sad way to handle Aria T’loak’s daughter I think, but I assume it was done to give a strong motivation to the mother, who thinks Grayson did it. And also, it’s a cool setup to explore her psyche: how does she feel about business catching up with her in such a personal manner, how does she feel about the fact she couldn’t protect her own offspring despite all her power, what’s her relationship with loss and death, how does she slip when under high emotional stress, how does she deal with such a vulnerable position of having to cope without being able to show any sign of weakness... But the book does nothing with that. The most interesting we get is her complete absence of outward reaction when she sees her daughter as the centerpiece of a crime scene. Otherwise we have mentions that she’s not used to lose relatives, vague discomfort when someone mentions Liselle might have been raped, and vague discomfort at her body in display for everyone to gawk at. It’s not exactly revelatory behavior, and the missed potential is borderline criminal. It also doesn’t even justify itself as a strong motivation, as Aria vaguely tries to find Grayson again and then gives up until we give her intel on a silver platter. Then it almost feels as if she forgot her motivation for killing Grayson, and is as motivated by money than she is by her daughter’s murder (and that could be interesting too, but it’s not done in a deliberate way and therefore it seems more like a lack of characterization than anything else).

Now, to Aria. Because this book made me realize something I strongly dislike: the framing might constantly posture her as intelligent, but Aria T’loak is... kind of dumb, actually? In this book alone she’s misled, misinformed or tricked three different times. We’re constantly ensured she’s an amazing people reader but never once do we see this ability work in her favor -everyone fools her all the time. She doesn’t learn from her mistakes and jump from Cerberus trap to Cerberus trap, and her loosing Omega to them later is laughably stupid after the bullshit Tim put her through in this book alone. I’m not joking when I say the book has to pull out an entire paragraph on how it’s easier to lie to smart people to justify her complete dumbassery during her first negotiation with Tim. She doesn’t seem to know anything about how people work that could justify her power. She’s not politically savvy. She’s not good at manipulation. She’s just already established and very, very good at kicking ass. And I wouldn’t mind if Aria was just a brutish thug who maintains her power through violence and nothing else, that could also be interesting to have an asari act that way. But the narrative will not bow to the reality they have created for her, and keep pretending her flaw is in extreme pride only. This makes me think of the treatment of Sansa Stark in the latest seasons of Game of Thrones -the story and everyone in it is persuaded she’s a political mastermind, and in the exact same way I would adore for it to be true, but it’s just... not. It’s even worse for Aria, because Sansa does have victories by virtue of everyone being magically dumber than her whenever convenient. Aria just fails, again and again, and nobody seem to ever acknowledge it. Sadly her writing here completely justifies her writing in the Omega DLC and the comics, which I completely loathe; but turns out Aria isn’t smart or savvy, not even in posture or as a façade. She’s just violent, entitled, easily fooled, and throws public tantrums when things don’t go her way. And again, I guess that would be fine if only the narrative would recognize what she is. Me, I will gently ignore most of this (in her presentation at least, because I think it’s interesting to have something pitiful when you dig a little) and try to write her with a bit more elevation. But this was a very disappointing realization to have.

4. The squandered potential of Grayson and the Reapers

The waste of a subplot with Aria and Liselle might have hurt me more in a personal way, but what went down between Grayson and the Reapers hurts the entire series in a startling manner. And it’s so infuriating because the potential was there. Every setpiece was available to create something truly unique and disturbing by simply following the series’ own established lore. But this is not what happens. See, when The Illusive Man, our dearest Tim, captures Grayson for a betrayal that happened last book (something about his biotic autistic daughter -what’s the deal with autistic biotics being traumatized by Cerberus btw), he decides to use him as the key part of an experiment to understand how Reapers operate. So he forcefully implants the guy with Reaper technology (what they do exactly is unclear) to study his change into a husk and be prepared when Reapers come for humanity -it’s also compared to what happened with Saren when he “agreed” to be augmented by Sovereign. From there on, Grayson slowly turns into a husk. Doesn’t it sound fascinating, to be stuck in the mind of someone losing themselves to unknowable monsters? If you agree with me then I’m sorry because the execution is certainly... not that. The way the author chooses to describe the event is to use the trope of mind control used in media like Get Out: Grayson taking the backseat of his own mind and body. And I haaaaate it. I hate it so much. I don’t hate the trope itself (it can be interesting in other media, like Get Out!), but I loathe that it’s used here in a way that totally contradicts both the lore and basic biology. Grayson doesn’t find himself manipulated. He doesn’t find himself justifying increasingly jarring actions the way Saren has. He just... loses control of himself, disagreeing with what’s being done with him but not able to change much about it. He also can fight back and regain control sometimes -but his thoughts are almost untainted by Reaper influence. The technology is supposed to literally replace and reorganize the cells of his body; is this implying that body and mind are separated, that there maybe exists a soul that transcends indoctrination? I don’t know but I hate it. This also implies that every victim of the Reaper is secretely aware of what they’re doing and pained and disagreeing with their own actions. And I’m sorry but if it’s true, I think this sucks ass and removes one of the creepiest ideas of the Mass Effect universe -that identity can and will be lost, and that Reapers do not care about devouring individuality and reshaping it to the whims of their inexorable march. Keeping a clear stream of consciousness in the victim’s body makes it feel like a curse and not like a disease. None of the victims are truly gone that way, and it removes so much of the tragic powerlessness of organics in their fight against the machines. Imagine if Saren watched himself be a meanie and being like “nooo” from within until he had a chance to kill himself in a near-victorious battle, compared to him being completely persuaded he’s acting for the good of organic life until, for a split second, he comes to realize he doesn’t make any sense and is loosing his mind like someone with dementia would, and needs to grasp to this instant to make the last possible thing he could do to save others and his own mind from domination. I feel so little things for Saren in the former case, and so much for the latter. But it might just be me: I’m deeply touched by the exploration of how environment and things like medication can change someone’s behavior, it’s such a painfully human subject while forceful mind control is... just kind of cheap.

SPEAKING OF THE REAPERS. Did you know “The Reapers” as an entity is an actual character in this book? Because it is. And “The Reapers” is not a good character. During the introduction of Grayson and explaining his troubles, we get presented with the mean little voice in his head. It’s his thoughts in italics, nothing crazy, in fact it’s a little bit of a copeout from actually implementing his insecurities into the prose. But I gave the author the benefit of the doubt, as I knew Grayson would be indoctrinated later, and I fully expected the little voice to slowly start twisting into what the Reapers suggested to him. This doesn’t happen, or at least not in that slowburn sort of way. Instead the little voice is dropped almost immediately, and the Reapers are described, as a presence. And as the infection progresses, what Grayson do become what the Reapers do. The Reapers have emotions, it turns out. They’re disgusted at organic discharges. They’re pleased when Grayson accomplish what they want, and it’s told as such. They foment little plans to get their puppet to point A to point B, and we are privy to their calculations. And I’m sorry but the best way to ruin your lovecraftian concept is to try and explain its motivations and how it thinks. Because by definition the unknown is scarier, smarter, and colder than whatever a human author could come up with. I couldn’t take the Reapers’ dumb infiltration plans seriously, and now I think they are dumb all the time, and I didn’t want to!! The only cases in which the Reapers influence Grayson, we are told in very explicit details how so. For example, they won’t let Grayson commit suicide by flooding his brain with hope and determination when he tries, or they will change the words he types when he tries to send a message to Kahlee Sanders. And we are told exactly what they do every time. There was a glorious occasion to flex as a writer by diving deep into an unreliable narrator and write incredibly creepy prose, but I guess we could have been confused, and apparently that’s not allowed. And all of this is handled that poorly becauuuuuse...

5. Subtext is dead and Drew killed it

Now we need to talk about the prose. The style of the author is... let’s be generous and call it functional. It’s about clarity. The writing is so involved in its quest for clarity that it basically ruins the book, and most of the previous issues are direct consequences of the prose and adjacent decisions.The direct prose issues are puzzling, as they are known as rookie technical flaws and not something I would expect from the series’ Lead Writer for Mass Effect 1 and 2, but in this book we find problems such as:

The reliance on adverbs. Example: "Breathing heavily from the exertion, he stood up slowly”. I have nothing about a well-placed adverb that gives a verb a revelatory twist, but these could be replaced by stronger verbs, or cut altogether.

Filtering. Example: “Anderson knew that the fact they were getting no response was a bad sign”. This example is particularly egregious, but characters know things, feel things, realize things (boy do they realize things)... And this pulls us away from their internal world instead of making us live what they live, expliciting what should be implicit. For example, consider the alternative: “They were getting no reponse, which was a bad sign in Anderson’s experience.” We don’t really need the “in Anderson’s experience” either, but that already brings us significantly closer to his world, his lived experience as a soldier.

The goddamn dialogue tags. This one is the worst offender of the bunch. Nobody is allowed to talk without a dialogue tag in this book, and wow do people imply, admit, inform, remark and every other verb under the sun. Consider this example, which made me lose my mind a little: “What are you talking about? Kahlee wanted to know.” I couldn’t find it again, but I’m fairly certain I read a “What is it?” Anderson wanted to know. as well. Not only is it very distracting, it’s also yet another way to remove reader interpretation from the equation (also sometimes there will be a paragraph break inside a monologue -not even a long one-, and that doesn’t seem to be justified by anything? It’s not as big of a problem than the aversion to subtext, but it still confused me more than once)

Another writing choice that hurts the book in disproportionate ways is the reliance on point of view switches. In Retribution, we get the point of view of: Tim, Paul Grayson, Kai Leng, Kahlee Sanders, David Anderson, Aria T’loak, and Nick (a biotic teenager, the one with the boner). Maybe Sanak had a very small section too, but I couldn’t find it again so don’t take my word for it. That’s too many point of views for a plot-heavy 80k book in my opinion, but even besides that: the point of view switch several times in one single chapter. This is done in the most harmful way possible for tension: characters involved in the same scene take turns on the page explaining their perspective about the events, in a way that leaves the reader entirely aware of every stake to every character and every information that would be relevant in a scene. Take for example the first negotiation between Aria and Tim. The second Aria needs to ponder what her best move could possibly be, we get thrown back into Tim’s perspective explaining the exact ways in which he’s trying to deceive her -removing our agency to be either convinced or fooled alongside her. This results in a book that goes out of his way to keep us from engaging with its ideas and do any mental work on our own. Everything is laid out, bare and as overexplained as humanly possible. The format is also very repetitive: characters talk or do an action, and then we spend a paragraph explaining the exact mental reasoning for why they did what they did. There is nothing to interpret. No subtext at all whatsoever; and this contributes in casting a harsh light on the Mass Effect universe, cheapening it and overtly expliciting some of its worst ideas instead of leaving them politely blurred and for us to dress up in our minds. There is only one theme that remains subtextual in my opinion. And it’s not a pretty one.

6. Violence

So here’s the thing when you adapt a third person shooter into a novel: you created a violent world and now you will have to deal with death en-masse too (get it get it I’m so sorry). But while in videogames you can get away with thoughtless murder because it’s a gameplay mechanic and you’re not expected to philosophize on every splatter of blood, novels are all about internalization. Violent murder is by definition more uncomfortable in books, because we’re out of gamer conventions and now every death is actual when in games we just spawned more guys because we wanted that level to be a bit harder and on a subconscious level we know this and it makes it somewhat okay. I felt, in this book, a strange disconnect between the horrendous violence and the fact we’re expected to care about it like we would in a game: not much, or as a spectacle. Like in a game, we are expected to root for the safety of named characters the story indicated us we should be invested in. And because we’re in a book, this doesn’t feel like the objective truth of the universe spelled at us through user interface and quest logs, but the subjective worldview of the characters we’re following. And that makes them.... somewhat disturbing to follow.

I haven’t touched on Anderson and Kahlee Sanders much yet, but now I guess I have too, as they are the worst offenders of what is mentioned above. Kahlee cares about Grayson. She only cares about Grayson -and her students like the forementioned Nick, but mostly Grayson. Grayson is out there murdering people like it’s nobody’s business, but still, keeping Grayson alive is more important that people dying like flies around him. This is vaguely touched on, but not with the gravitas that I think was warranted. Also, Anderson goes with it. Because he cares about Kahlee. Anderson organizes a major political scandal between humans and turians because of Kahlee, because of Grayson. He convinces turians to risk a lot to bring Cerberus down, and I guess that could be understandable, but it’s mostly manipulation for the sake of Grayson’s survival: and a lot of turians die as a result. But not only turians: I was not comfortable with how casually the course of action to deal a huge blow to Cerberus and try to bring the organization down was to launch assault on stations and cover-ups for their organization. Not mass arrests: military assault. They came to arrest high operatives, maybe, but the grunts were okay to slaughter. This universe has a problem with systemic violence by the supposedly good guys in charge -and it’s always held up as the righteous and efficient way compared to these UGH boring politicians and these treaties and peace and such (amirite Anderson). And as the cadavers pile up, it starts to make our loveable protagonists... kind of self-centered assholes. Also: I think we might want to touch on who these cadavers tend to be, and get to my biggest point of discomfort with this novel.

Xenophobia is hard to write well, and I super sympathize with the attempts made and their inherent difficulty. This novel tries to evoke this theme in multiple ways: by virtue of having Cerberus’ heart and blade as point of view characters, we get a window into Tim and Kai Leng’s bigotry against aliens, and how this belief informs their actions. I wasn’t ever sold in their bigotry as it was shown to us. Tim evokes his scorn for whatever aliens do and how it’s inferior to humanity’s resilience -but it’s surface-level, not informed by deep and specific entranched beliefs on aliens motives and bodies, and how they are a threat on humanity according to them. The history of Mass Effect is rich with conflict and baggage between species, yet every expression of hatred is relegated to a vague “eww aliens” that doesn’t feed off systemically enforced beliefs but personal feelings of mistrust and disgust. I’ll take this example of Kai Leng, and his supposedly revulsion at the Afterlife as a peak example of alien decadence: he sees an asari in skimpy clothing, and deems her “whorish”. And this feels... off. Not because I don’t think Kai Leng would consider asaris whorish, but because this is supposed to represent Cerberus’ core beliefs: yet both him and Tim go on and on about how their goal is to uplift humanity, how no human is an enemy. But if that’s the case, then what makes Kai Leng call an Afterlife asari whorish and mean it in a way that’s meaningfully different from how he would consider a human sex worker in similar dispositions? Not that I don’t buy that Cerberus would have a very specific idea of what humans need to be to be considered worth preserving as good little ur-fascists, but this internal bias is never expressed in any way, and it makes the whole act feel hollow. Cerberus is not the only offender, though. Every time an alien expresses bias against humans in a way we’re meant to recognize as xenophobic, it reads the same way: as personal dislike and suspicion. As bullying. Which is such a small part of what bigotry encompasses. It’s so unspecific and divorced from their common history that it just never truly works in my opinion. You know what I thought worked, though? The golden trio of non-Cerberus human characters, and their attitude towards aliens. Grayson’s slight fetishism and suspicion of his attraction to Liselle, how bestial (in a cool, sexy way) he perceives the Afterlife to be. The way Anderson and Kahlee use turians for their own ends and do not spare a single thought towards those who died directly trying to protect them or Grayson immediately after the fact (they are more interested in Kahlee’s broken fingers and in kissing each other). How they feel disgust watching turians looting Cerberus soldiers, not because it’s disrespectful in general and the deaths are a inherent tragedy but because they are turians and the dead are humans. But it's not even really on them: the narration itself is engrossed by the suffering of humans, but aliens are relegated to setpieces in gore spectacles. Not even Grayson truly cares about the aliens the Reapers make him kill. Nobody does. Not even the aliens among each other: see, once again, Aria and Liselle, or Aria and Sanak. Nobody cares. At the very end of the story, Anderson comes to Kahlee and asks if she gives him permission to have Grayson’s body studied, the same way Cerberus planned to. It’s source of discomfort, but Kahlee gives in as it’s important, and probably what Grayson would have wanted, maybe? So yeah. In the end the only subtextual theme to find here (probably as an accident) is how the Alliance’s good guys are not that different from Cerberus it turns out. And I’m not sure how I feel about that.

7. Lore-approved books, or the art of shrinking an expanding universe

I’d like to open the conversation on a bigger topic: the very practice of game novelization, or IP-books. Because as much as I think Drew Karpyshyn’s final draft should not have ended up reading that amateur given the credits to his name, I really want to acknowledge the realities of this industry, and why the whole endeavor was perhaps doomed from the start regardless of Karpyshyn’s talent or wishes as an author.

The most jarring thing about this reading experience is as follows: I spent almost 80k words exploring this universe with new characters and side characters, all of them supposedly cool and interesting, and I learned nothing. I learned nothing new about the world, nothing new about the characters. Now that it’s over, I’m left wondering how I could chew on so much and gain so little. Maybe it’s just me, but more likely it’s by design. Not on poor Drew. Now that I did IP work myself, I have developed an acute sympathy for anyone who has to deal with the maddening contradictions of this type of business. Let me explain.

IP-adjacent media (in the West at least) sure has for goal to expand the universe: but expand as in bloat, not as in deepen. The target for this book is nerds like me, who liked the games and want more of this thing we liked. But then we’re confronted by two major competitors: the actual original media (in ME’s case, the games) whose this product is a marketing tool for, and fandom. IP books are not allowed to compete with the main media: the good ideas are for the main media, and any meaningful development has to be made in the main media (see: what happened with Kai Leng, or how everyone including me complains about the worldbuilding to the Disney Star Swars trilogy being hidden in the novelization). And when it comes to authorship (as in: taking an actual risk with the media and give it a personal spin), then we risk introducing ideas that complicate the main media even though a ridiculously small percent of the public will be attached to it, or ideas that fans despise. Of course we can’t have the latter. And once the fandom is huge enough, digging into anything the fans have strong headcanons for already risks creating a lot of emotions once some of these are made canon and some are disregarded. As much as I joke about how in Mass Effect you can learn about any gun in excrutiating details but we still don’t know if asaris have a concept for marriage... would we really want to know how/if asaris marry, or aren’t we glad we get to be creative and put our own spin on things? The dance between fandom and canon is a delicate one that can and will go wrong. And IP books are generally not worth the drama for the stakeholders.

Add this to insane deadlines, numerous parties all involved in some way and the usual struggles of book writing, and we get a situation where creating anything of value is pretty much a herculean task.

But then I ask... why do IP books *have* to be considered canon? I know this is part of the appeal, and that removing the “licenced” part only leaves us with published fanfiction, but... yeah. Yeah. I think it could be a fascinating model. Can you imagine having your IP and hiring X amount of distinctive authors to give it their own spin, not as definitive additions to the world but as creative endeavours and authorial deepdives? It would allow for these novels to be comparative and companion to the main media instead of being weird appendages that can never compare, and the structure would allow for these stories to be polished and edited to a higher level than most fanfictions. Of course I’m biased because I have a deep belief in the power of fanfiction as commentary and conversational piece. But I would really love to see companies’ approach to creative risk and canon to change. We might get Disney stuff until we die now, so the least we can ask for is for this content to be a little weird, personal and human.

That’s it. That’s the whole review. Thank you for reading, it was very long and weirdly passionate, have a nice dayyyyy.

#Mass Effect #mass effect retribution #me critical #writing #mass effect novels #anderson #kahlee sanders #Aria T'loak #paul grayson #liselle #salarians #IP conversation #omega #mass effect lore #reapers #book review

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autumnblogs · 4 years

Text

Day 16: Preoccupied by the same things as trolls

https://homestuck.com/story/2792

Not actually a whole lot of substance for all this dialogue, but we’ve got a few things.

I forgot how hostile Kanaya became toward Vriska, and it sounds to some extent like that’s how it is toward Tavros too? Girl really knows how to hold a grudge - Kanaya is a generally sweet girl, but she’s got a pretty uncontrollable temper when it comes to matters of the heart.

More after the break.

https://homestuck.com/story/2805

Rose is not a Prince, and if the inversion theory is true, she wouldn’t invert into one either, but the parallel between them here is about as clear as it can get. By Trolling Rose, Eridan makes it irritatingly obvious to Rose just how dangerous and uncooperative she’s becoming in her pursuit of knowledge and power by drawing these comparisons between the two of them. Ridiculous as they are, Eridan is right - Rose is becoming something of a villain, or at least a dangerously unstable anti-hero.

Rose, unlike most of the main characters who might be called antagonists, does not actually do anything especially heinous. She doesn’t kill anyone who doesn’t deserve it like Vriska does.

But she’s definitely turning into an antagonistic force nonetheless, and one whose actions will ultimately lead to the creation of the Green Sun - something which has to happen, but which nevertheless makes her Scratch’s dupe just like Vriska.

https://homestuck.com/story/2809

If Rose is a parallel to Vriska, and Aradia is a parallel to Vriska, perhaps there are some parallels between Aradia and Vriska. Not the least of which is being severely pessimistic young ladies who engage in reckless, self-destructive behavior to cope with their feelings of helplessness.

https://homestuck.com/story/2818

Gamzee is the reverse of Dave here, in a way.

Gamzee and Dave have both been under the influence of Lord English, more or less directly, their entire lives, and in time, Gamzee inherits Lil Cal. Gamzee’s crisis of faith turns him into a villain, and he exits the story as a character, becoming more or less a plot element.

Dave will also get to enjoy his crisis of faith before long when Bro dies, and separated from him, he’ll have the opposite experience - becoming a far happier and more chill person, but pretty irrelevant to the plot.

https://homestuck.com/story/2825

Dave gets trolled by Trolls along the same basic lines Rose does. Equius’ preoccupation with Hierarchy may not seem like it reflects on Dave, but Dave is clearly unsettled by his relationship with John as second banana in terms of power - there’s no way he can catch up. Dave is not the hero, in spite of all the symbols associated with him that should make him the hero. He’s the sidekick.

https://homestuck.com/story/2836

Here’s a fresh take. Dave’s Broken Symbol, and his Broken Sword, are both emblematic of the fact that he “flunked” Bro’s training. Dave is not the strongest. He is not the most badass. He is not even all that cool.

But what Dave is is genuinely creative. He’s a cunning lateral thinker. Practical, to the point, reliable. Dave isn’t the aloof guy who always wins that Bro tried to turn him into, and having his sword broken and his disc scratched are both symbols of that failure - but they are also symbols of transformation, and of coming into one’s own strengths after becoming disillusioned with a false sense of pride.

Dave might not be able to pull the sword out of the stone - he’s not the destined King. But there’s more than one way to skin a cat.

https://homestuck.com/story/2848

Let’s do some more theme association.

If the Squiddles are the Dark Gods, and Squiddles are also symbols of intimacy, maybe there’s some degree to which the impulses stoked by the Dark Gods are unifying impulses - the desire to become tangle buddies with your pals are at basic odds with the fact that you are a separate individual with your own body and your own will. The union of the real, one, unique self, Skaia, with the realm of all unrealized possibility, the Furthest Ring, is what the Dark Gods are after, but that union would be destructive to Skaia - perfect unity with the Horrorterrors would have it cease to be Skaia at all.

https://homestuck.com/story/2850

Following the same pattern to analyze this set of troll-human relationships.

I wonder if Jade comes across as cloying and condescending as Feferi does to her friends? Is she afraid that she does?

https://homestuck.com/story/2853

If we’re paying attention to these particular conversations because of the Trolls’ preoccupations with the same things that the characters are anxious and preoccupied about is any indication, Jade’s psyche is in way worse condition than just about anybody’s right now.

What I’m saying here is that the Trolls almost certainly contact the kids and have far more conversations in general than we get to see - Act 5 has already started to play around with skipping conversations and interactions that aren’t mission critical, and only paying attention to the ones that are relevant to the overall character arcs.

Karkat contacts Jade and airs the grievances that she’s currently feeling internally - Karkat all but literally is Jade’s monster headache. The two of them are frustrated over their sleeping situation and have had the exact same response to encountering the Dark Gods.

Jade is, in pretty short order, going to have to confront the same self-loathing and anger issues that Karkat has too, and this conversation serves as an immediate prelude to that.

And while it’s a pretty short line, Karkat is right - Jade suddenly understands Jack Shit.

Prospit’s destruction has completely shattered her expectations.

https://homestuck.com/story/2868

Wow! And just like that, those anger issues come right to the surface. Jade is noticeably nastier to John than she’s ever been to just about anybody but Karkat in this conversation!

https://homestuck.com/story/2880

Jade and John are task-focused, and don’t really talk much with each other about what’s going on inside of their heads - they talk about the events that are happening to them, and what they’re doing.

Which is to say that of the pair Problems and Feelings, Prospit Dreamers are more about Problems, and Derse Dreamers are probably more about feelings.

https://homestuck.com/story/2887

Now that we’re getting a chance to know the real Jade, one of the character traits I’m immediately finding she shares in common with Feferi is their sort of motherly disapproval of their friends’ choices - one of the conversations I’ve had recently with some friends about this (including @bladekindeyewear) has pegged one of Jade’s flaws as being “smothering” and it comes out in the way that she dunks on John’s preferences.

I’m going to show my ass here a little by making this reference, but it reminds me of Rarity from Friendship is Magic just a tiny bit. Maybe Rarity is a Witch too, although of what Aspect, I wouldn’t be able to tell you right now.

https://homestuck.com/story/2922

It’s extremely easy to forget that Rose pretty much unilaterally decided on the behalf of the rest of the team, more or less without consulting them, to sabotage their game of Sburb, and while it was always destined to fail, the fact that Rose chooses to destroy the game instead of playing the game is suggestive of the fact that she bears some level of accountability for the misfortunes throughout.

I’m not trying to play the blame game so much as I am trying to draw connections to help explain why I see Rose and Vriska as being fairly alike, and not just by merit of being Light Players, but also in terms of the role that they play in Act 5 - they are both manipulating and organizing timeline events in order to get the other players to do things that are contrary to their seeming interests, neither of them listens to the pleas of the people who love them to stop, and their actions ultimately lead to (at least temporary) catastrophe.

Rose is dangerous to herself and her team, and she doesn’t much care.

Or she at least tries hard not to feel too bad about it while having serious and obvious misgivings about her own actions. Knowing that there is a problem and ignoring it anyone is like looking at your face in the mirror and immediately turning away and forgetting what your face looks like.

https://homestuck.com/story/2927

And with that, we’ll pause for the evening. Not as many pages as usual, but a hell of a lot of text.

Cam signing off, Alive and not Alone.

#liveblogging #commentary

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philologer-mosaic · 4 years

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Hey! Fellow writer here! I was curious as to how you learn to write characters and /keep/ them in character without it being overly stereotypical or stiff? I've read your work and I'd love to learn from you ;^;

Hi! Glad to meet you, and wow, I am so flattered to be asked this. Happy to help out a fellow writer, and I’m always down for rambling about writing-related stuff! I’m not sure how helpful some of this will turn out to be, but here goes.

I’m not sure if you’re asking about characterisation in general including crafting OCs or specifically about writing canon characters, and a lot of this advice will be relevant to both, but I will say this straight off: I’ve seen a fair amount of quibbling about how fanfiction won’t teach you how to worldbuild and maybe that’s true, but there is nothing like writing fanfiction for teaching yourself how to craft character voices. Especially when your source material is a movie/ TV show/ whatever definition RWBY falls under. So: rewatch! Pay attention to all the little details. What turns of phrase do they use? How do they stand, how do they move? What’s their usual emotional range? Pick a line they speak, think about what descriptors you’d use to get across their tone of voice or their emotional state if you were writing the scene in a fic. When you’re writing new dialogue for them, try to hear it in the actor’s voice (if that’s a way your imagination works; some people don’t have great auditory imaginations. Mine can be kind of hit and miss!).

Rest of this advice is going under a cut, because this got looong!

With canon characters: start from what you know, then extrapolate. Especially with characters we don’t see all that much of, boil them down to a handful of personality traits/ ways-they-present-themself first, then consider what might underly them. And in reverse: take the things we know about their status and backstory, consider what that implies about them as a person.

So, Clover: I think I boiled him down to ‘confident, friendly, professional’, and what’s underlying ‘confidence’ is really obviously his semblance: he’s never had to hesitate about anything, he always knows he can rely on himself. So in his internal monologue, he’s not going to second-guess his decisions. He calls Qrow out on deflecting compliments, so he’s good at reading people and also wants to help them; I assume that applies more broadly than just to Qrow. He’s leader of Ironwood’s flagship team of Specialists, and semblance or not I made the assumption he didn’t get there without working for it [that is an assumption, though! People less inclined to think well of Clover will make a different assumption, in-universe as well as out, and how he responds to that is also something to consider], so he’s got to be smart, dedicated, a good tactician, a good leader. And building from that: he’s smart and perceptive but we know he’s also loyal to the bitter end (very bitter); what sort of personality can we project that reconciles those two, what sort of person would respond like that? What I went with is that he trusts the system because he understands enough pieces of how/why it works that he trusts the bits he doesn’t understand are also created with the best interests of the people at heart. (Even when that’s really not true.) So then that’s a consistent philosophy-like thing that underlies a lot of how I write him: he understands the reasons for a lot of why things are how they are and then assumes the best of all the rest.

– This looks like a lot, now I’ve written it out. I thought all this out while working on the early chapters but I never put it some of it into words really. In coming up with the plot or story idea you’ll have made plenty of these assumptions and extrapolations already. Take a second look at them; take them further, find places to link them together or pit them against each other.

And remember, these are your interpretations. There’s not a right or wrong way to flesh these out. Work with semi-canon stuff like the mangas or discard it as you wish; follow fanon or argue with it or throw it out entirely. I interpreted Yang as ‘normal outgoing teenage girl in a non-homophobic world’ and wrote her as having dated people from Signal before she got to Beacon; the other day I came across a tumblr post interpreting her as “a rural lesbian”, by which standard she definitely didn’t have any romantic experience before canon; they’re both entirely plausible takes! Where we don’t know stuff for sure, slot in whatever your story needs, or whatever you think seems interesting. I settled on Clover’s backstory for Soldier, Spy mostly by going ‘ok, what’s an interesting way to contrast him with Qrow?’ And in some of my other fic ideas, he’s different.

Limited third person perspective (or first person, if you can pull if off) is the best for dropping in characterisation smoothly. Though I’m probably biased because I love it so much. Omniscient third person POV is when the narration’s impartial and uninvolved, and skips between person A’s thoughts and person B’s thoughts and pure description of what’s happening, objectively speaking; limited third person is – when the camera’s always over one person’s shoulder in a given scene. It’s less close in than first person, but we get the POV character’s thoughts and no others, we only see/notice what they notice and pay attention to, descriptions are coloured by the way the POV character thinks about the world. I don’t want to be setting you homework, but, a neat writing exercise, if you want it: pick an object, place or person, and consider how two different characters would see it differently. Write those two descriptions. For fun, pick something that at least one of the characters is going to really look down on or dislike parts of! (Qrow’s snark is so much fun.)

This is cynical, but: people lie to themselves a lot. When you put yourself into a character’s head, they’re going to be telling themself a narrative in which what they’re doing is the best thing to do and makes them a good person. (With a few exceptions, the big ones being depression- and anxiety-brain, which instead do their best to convince you you’re the worst.) Get your characters to justify themselves to you.

Goals, motivations, priorities. It feels like a massive oversight to write about how to characters and leave that one out, but honestly I can’t think of anything I can say here that hasn’t been covered better by tons of other writing advice. [Incidentally: https://www.writersdigest.com/ . Subscribe to their email newsletter, it’s free, they will try to get you to buy their how-to courses but there’s no need to, the website has all kinds of articles about the craft and details of writing and the newsletter will send you all the new ones plus curated picks of what’s already there. And also: https://springhole.net/writing/index.html . There’s some stuff specific to fanfic in there, and also general writing advice.] Just: keep it in mind.

Related to that, but a separate thing and one that I haven’t seen other writing advice talk about so much: how does the character try to achieve their goals? What are their skills and resources? And more than that, what’s their preferred approach? In the simplest terms. It’s a matter of mindset, and what options they see as available to them. So the things I would keep in mind for this are: Who’s got social skills/ is good at thinking in social terms, and who isn’t/doesn’t? (Not just interpersonally speaking. James “not really concerned about my reputation” Ironwood is a good example of a character who always thinks in terms of hard power over soft power; even when public opinion is an important strategic consideration he only thinks about it in the broadest and most simplified strokes.) Who would rather work within the system, and who prefers to do an end-run around it? (That doesn’t have to correlate with who’s actually got power, though obviously there are trends. I’m writing Clover as tending to take charge even when he officially shouldn’t because he’s more concerned with solving the problem than with rank, and that’s a case of circumventing the system, it’s one of the things he’s got in common with Qrow.) Who’s more analytical about their approach and what they’re trying to do (which means their failure mode is overthinking and decision paralysis) and who reacts with their gut instinct (which means their failure mode is getting in over their head)?

… I could talk about this one at length. There’s a whole framework I use to categorise characters in this way (I came across it in, of all things, the flavourtext of a supplement to an RPG no one’s ever heard of and it just stuck with me, and I’ve made it my own in the years since) and I could go into all sorts of detail about how it works/ what it means. But I think this is enough to be getting on with, on that topic. If you want to know more, send me another ask? But no one else talks about this thing in writing advice, it might be completely orthogonal to the writing process of anyone but me.

So! Related to the topic of characters’ skillsets, a really great tip I can’t remember where I picked up: how do you write someone who’s smarter/wittier/better at tactics than you? Spend minutes or hours turning something over in your head that the character is going to come up with in seconds. The great advantage of writing: it’s so much easier to be eloquent when you’ve got time to think. [If you had asked me this question in person you would have got ‘i don’t know?’ and then half an hour later I would have thought of half of this stuff and kicked myself. A week and change later, you’re getting the other half too :p ]

And lastly: you said you were worried about your writing getting “overly stereotypical”. And my immediate response to that was stereotypes bad, yes, but archetypes great. The difference being: stereotypes are lazy and offensive writing that let ‘membership of a social category’ stand in for ‘actual characterisation’ and if you’re asking for advice on characterisation you’re obviously too thoughtful to commit them; archetypes are pre-made sketched-out personalities that you can take as your own and flesh out into your own thing. Tropes are tools. No one ever said ‘They were roommates? Ugh, how unoriginal’. By the same token, ‘lone wolf who pretends he’s fine and doesn’t dare trust anyone no matter how much he secretly wants to’ is a fantastic trope that exists for good reason, the CRWBY used it for good reason, and when we found out Qrow’s semblance I went yes please I will have some of all that angst and then laughed at myself because when it comes to fictional characters I have A Type. I’m pretty sure I’ve never written the exact scenario ‘pushes themself way too hard and passes out, wakes up in unexpected safety and immediately condemns themself for not sticking it out longer’ before the opening of Soldier, Spy, but I know I’ve come up with plenty of things that were like it, and if they’d made it to a state of publication you’d be able to see that.

It’s like artists using references. Just because they looked up how to draw that hand and that pose doesn’t mean the final product’s not their own. There’s no reason not to start with your ideas of the character (no matter how ‘stereotypical’ they feel) or a collection of traits you’ve grabbed from other characters that seem like they’d fit – or, for OCs, an MBTI type or a roleplaying class/background combo or one of these or some other personality type you feel like you can find your way around the basics of – and just take it from there. When you start writing/outlining/daydreaming-about-ideas you’ll run into scenarios/setups you can’t copy across from but you can see what responses might come up, and that’s how the template becomes your own unique iteration of it.

… Because really all writing advice does come down to: just write. In your head or on the page, try things out, see what works, see how it goes. I’ve been doing this a long time; most of it never made it to words on a page, let alone to the internet at large. Read across genres, read things people write about themselves and how they live and think and feel, and just – go for it.

I hope this helps! Once again, I was really glad to be asked; feel free to ask me to elaborate on any of this, or about anything else you want advice about. I wish you all the best in your future writing!

#writing #my thoughts #posting into a void

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isocrime · 4 years

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How do you do research for the kinks in your writing? You explore a variety of things with different dynamics, and manage to track the action very closely without any ambiguity. I'm gay so I only really understand the dynamics of the genderswap fics, but it's impressive how confidently you navigate the kinky terrain that is SteveTony gay sex (ft. BDSM).

Thank you!! I try hard to get authentic-feeling BDSM (not quite realistic, i’d say -- i’d rather capture the feelings than the precise how-to) and whenever i hear it’s coming through i’m really happy, it’s a lovely compliment!

for tracking action: i learned how to do that by writing fight scenes. the physical action of a sex scene is a lot like a prolonged sword fight, even when it’s not about characters hitting each other. it’s a series of specific body things that need to be clear but not so exhaustively described that it gets dull and crowds out the emotional parts.

one big thing about writing sex scenes is that while some readers are slow and careful, a lot of readers are fast and sloppy and will miss stuff. i think everyone should watch the episode of every frame a painting about jackie chan, but in particular this bit about cutting between hits, about five minutes in. basically jackie chan cuts his action so that every hit lands twice. the viewer gets setup, cut, setup, payoff. i think that paragraph breaks are a lot like cuts between shots in a movie. it’s very useful to end on a beat that contains the action that will start the next beat. that way if someone is reading fast they don’t miss an important movement and get confused. if i want the reader to know a specific thing for later, i’ll try to refer to it multiple times and i absolutely will not put it in a dialogue tag. here’s a bit from tLDoM:

“Look at you,” Tony says, raising his voice as he strikes Steve again. “Taking it, doing only what I want, giving in to the thing you need. You’re so good, Steve, you’re almost done, let go, it’s just pain, let it happen!”

the action in there isn’t that important -- he’s hitting steve before the dialogue and he keeps hitting steve afterwards. if it was critical for understanding the next bit, i’d move it because it’s really easy to skip over.

so that’s my philosophy on clear sex choreography, now about research -- i do a couple different kinds!

- i read a lot of kinky fanfiction, and try to make note of why things are hot and what i think the motivation is behind trends in fandom. it’s good to know what makes a kink tick, like, is the thing that makes subspace attractive to people the same thing that makes drugged sex and sexy hypnosis hot? what’s the overlap there? this bit is definitely not a chore, lmao

- mainstream porn is useful too! if i want to know what something looks like or how it’s used, i’ll head on over to kink.com and check it out. the people who make porn are extremely creative. it’s great for research (and recreation)

- my google search history is kind of nuts -- i have looked up a LOT of reddit and quora posts about what it’s like to have a dick. i definitely check out sex toy reviews, too -- those tend to be surprisingly detailed about sensation and usage. i google a ton of stuff while writing, not just directly related to the sex things. for instance i did a bunch of research on leather and expensive watches. a good trick for googling obscure, specific stuff is to google image search and then go to the webpage that the picture links to. you can scan really fast for what’s relevant and i find you often get better results.

- and then there’s personal experience. i do some kink stuff in real life, so i have a baseline of what’s hot to me and how it feels. if i haven’t done something, i have betas and other friends who are also into kinky sex and i’ll ask them intrusive questions lmao.

overall i write kinky smut the same way i write everything else! i think a lot about what’s going on internally with the characters and try to imbue everything with satisfying emotional moments in between the plot/fucking. writing BDSM is really fun because so much of it is psychological -- i love the interplay of trust, vulnerability, and taboo. it’s a blast, and i enjoy the challenge a lot.

#me: but how long CAN a normal person do that gymnastics move #guess i'll have to watch a bunch of men's gymnastics on youtube #oh noooo #what a burden #Anonymous

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rigelmejo · 4 years

Text

Ok so I’m still reading this fanfic, still on chapter 3. In my defense I am reading DAILY and this fic is well written and also complex ah.

I do think me pushing through the first few chapters helped immensely though. Authors do have a “style/particular word choice preference” and I think I’m through the bulk of it. Now I can pick up a lot more of this author’s usual adjective choices and ways of describing. Like which words are used to express things like sigh, look, gently, weakly, expressionlessly, warm, cold etc. As for the nouns - I think that is a hurdle whenever there’s new exposition, but once that introduction is over the same nouns are repeated again and again because they’re plot relevant. (In this case, the home Zhang Qiling owns and it’s furniture and layout objects, the silk clothing shop and embroidery/tailoring items he interacts with regularly, photography related words, ghost/blood related words). Now that those parts of the world have been established, the narration just keeps repeating those same words in new contexts as the plot progresses. So it’s gotten easier - I’m now recognizing a lot of those words without looking them up. I imagine I’ll keep getting repetition on these words as I read, which is helping me learn them. And there shouldn’t be another huge hurdle until the plot switches to a new ‘arc’ with new main nouns (idk maybe a bank? An isolated river bank? Who knows what will be next).

I do think I’m learning some words, I do think the repetition is helping me learn some words. Thankfully, I am also picking up a bit of new Hanzi recognition too - this part is slower going, but for the very frequent words (and words with very intuitive radicals like 飘 and 瞟) I am starting to easily recognize them.

I do think this read through is benefiting me. This novel is so “hard” to me, so it takes like 40 minutes a chapter. But I have no doubt my reading speed will be way up once I go back to easier material, and my dictionary lookups will be less frequent. Easier stuff being: less intense plot fanfics, stories I’m familiar with (Silent Reading and Guardian might well be easier after this), dmbj might well become easier (dmbj is WAY LESS descriptive than this fic), slice of life novels will Definitely be easier.

So, like usual: I do something too hard for me, and it makes the things actually-my-level suddenly much easier. My current reading method for this novel: reading through and thinking the pronunciation, clicking any new words I need to understand (I’ve just been looking up all new words cause I’m not I’m a rush), and clicking any new words I don’t know the pronunciation of to listen to it. So basically, intensive reading. I normally prefer to do extensive reading and only look up as necessary to follow the main gist, but I am using this fic to drag my vocabulary up more - so more lookups. Also, this fic is really good, I don’t want to skip any details. I noticed with this fic: I’m very good in general with reading dialogue without dictionary help, compared to other parts of a novel.

—-

Other activity I’m doing for study/etc: Listening-Reading Method with Silent Reading by Priest.

Goal is to drag up my listening comprehension, and hopefully learn some new words/phrases by listening. Ideally this method eventually gives you some “natural learning” base ability so that you can hear simpler audio and fully comprehend it afterward (or mostly, to the point you can then pick up new words from context when listening to easier content). And so that you can have better ability to comprehend listening when watching shows/talking etc. I very much want to drag my listening comprehension at least up to my reading level. And I’d LOVE if I picked up new words too - since i am fairly good at recognizing Hanzi in reading, if I had more audio base of words I think I could pick up overall words in reading a bit easier (as in remember their pronunciation faster).

For this, I have been doing Step 1 - reading a chapter in English for context. Then step 3 - listening to chinese audiobook and skimming the English to attach meaning to what I hear and follow along. It’s been working very well.

I skipped step 2 since I already have listened to the audiobook with the chinese text for some chapters before, and I listen pretty decently already. I might do step 2 AFTER I’m done with the book in step 3, in order to attach Hanzi spelling to the audio words I’m picking up in this Step 3 read through. In that way, I can use Step 2 to improve my reading comprehension a little (to try and match both reading and listening levels a bit more).

Step 3 has been very easy. But it is critical that: I read each chapter in English first (otherwise, I try to read the English instead of skimming for meaning when I do step 3). And also that the audio matches the translation content wise! As in the paragraphs roughly are the same! This makes all the difference in if step 3 can even benefit you!!! On if step 3 is even possible as a study method!!! For Silent Reading, a few lines of dialogue are switched or ordered differently, but all of the paragraphs are still there in some form, and all the descriptive paragraphs mostly have the same exact sentence order. (And dialogue being varied is less of an issue for me - unknown words still seem to match the English so I can attach some meaning to them, and I can already understand dialogue pretty well when listening without any text so these changes don’t make me lost). Also, the person reading aloud tends to pause a little after each paragraph, giving me time to realize we’ve moved on (if I somehow did get lost mid paragraph), and giving me a chance to figure out if a paragraph was skipped in the audio (it almost never is, but if so, this pause gives me time to skim and figure out where I am in the text again). The audio being so compatible with the text means step 3 is very easy. I do NOT have to waste some of my concentration to struggle to match audio to text, I can use all of my focus on listening to the audio and glancing for the definition of unknown words. Which is the main goal of Step 3. (I tried L-R Method with a novel with highly mismatched audio, and it was so bad I couldn’t even do a chapter all the way through, and most of my focus was just keeping my place in the text - not even focusing on the audio’s meaning). For Silent Reading I have been able to easily breeze through Step 3, simply following along. The readers voice is also very clear, so I can easily locate the sentence I’m hearing based on the words I know WELL.

I imagine doing this for Guardian, with Avenuex’s audiobook, would be equally “smooth” as an experience. Her audiobook matches the text almost perfectly, her reading voice is clear and a good normal pace (I can follow the gist just listening to the audio on its own twice or so), and she naturally pauses with the flow of the story shifts.

#rant #study progress #reading progress #happily yes my word lookup alone #is improving my vocab #which is great since i am avoiding flashcards for a while #progress #listening reading method

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svtskneecaps · 4 years

Text

i’ve been enabled

here’s the sitch on the goddamn harry potter hogwarts mystery app game

it fucking sucks

here’s my main issues in a handy list i’ll go down later:

the gameplay

energy

art / visuals

the story

the writing

the choose your own adventure like elements (technically gameplay since there isn’t much else l m a o)

and i have receipts for most of this stuff. fun fact, i’ve been taking videos of all plot relevant events since year 1.

some context:

i’ve played up to year 3 myself. i have watched up until the very beginning of year 5 in someone’s youtube series (will bits? that was his main character [henceforth referred to as MC]’s name, however that was a year ago and it was in the background like a podcast so the details are sort of fuzzy. i have not played the game since march (it’s september, ish), but i’m loading it up as i type this just to get a feel for it

idk whether to assume my audience has or hasn’t played the game. i’ll keep my complaints as clear as possible.

i’m mainly an author so the storytelling sections are where i’m really going to pop off, since that’s something i have the most experience with and passion in, but i’ll be touching on everything else because compounded it’s all pissing me off lmao

[a couple hints at spoilers for maybe an event in year 1, and year 3, but nothing major]

let’s start with: THE GAMEPLAY

there isn’t any

literally. there’s like. zero gameplay.

you tap some highlighted figures, and then sometimes you get to trace a little shape, and sometimes you get to play rock paper scissors to fight somebody (they did manage to make duelling slightly better but it’s still not good by any standard)

sometimes you get to choose between three dialogue options, but those have barely any impact on the story or on your character. any impact they have is limited to a couple stat points, or maybe some house points, or like. some event at the end of the year. but like barely any make any real serious difference (but i’ll touch on that more later)

and then there’s the factor of stat points (and this gets kind of mathy, so feel free to skip to the bolded sentence)

for those who haven’t played the game, you have three stats (empathy, courage, and knowledge) that you can level up by taking classes, 1, 3, or 8 hours, for various rewards

back when i stopped playing, i had gained 8914 points in courage. if i recall correctly i was only about halfway to leveling up that stat. if you take an 8 hour class, you receive consistently 200 stat points, with a possibility of extra rewards that i can’t count for since those are randomly generated.

to get those 8914 points, i would have had to take 44.57 8 hour classes (while 8 hour they only take about 7, counting for the 2 hours it takes my energy to recharge to full). with 44.57 classes taking 7 hours each, to get halfway to level 24, i would have had to have done:

THIRTEEN STRAIGHT DAYS OF GRINDING, ASSUMING THAT ALL I HAD BEEN DOING WAS CHECKING ON THE HARRY POTTER HOGWARTS MYSTERY APP

and again, I WAS ONLY LIKE HALFWAY TO LEVELLING UP

I AM BARELY BEGINNING FOURTH YEAR. I AM NOT EVEN HALFWAY THROUGH THIS GAME.

i think they’ve fixed this now; it said i had 8914/1550 courage and when i got stat points it fixed itself and jumped me from level 23 to 28, so thanks for that jam city.

but it doesn’t change the fact that the grinding is fucking horrible and i’ve done my fair share of hours, and who knows what it’s going to look like when i get to a higher level again

the energy

yes, i know it’s an app game. i know they want my money. but holy FUCK the energy recharges disgustingly slowly, and every bit they expand my energy bar is an insult

“here, have another energy capacity!” they say, and then add to the amount of energy it takes to complete a task at the same time, so now shit just takes me even damn longer

it’s an insult. don’t think i didn’t fuckin notice jam city.

since it’s an app game, naturally, energy requires paying real world money or the (semi) rare in-game currency to get more if you blow through your bar. they want your money. i know they want my money, but it doesn’t make me any less disappointed by how damn blatant they’re being. app games like bakery story probably also want my money, but at least those are still fun to play.

the art / visuals

now i’m not an artist. nor am i a 3-d modeller. but if solo indie devs and 10 men teams can make video games that have to have models with a much fuller range of motion (since there’s ACTUAL GAMEPLAY and not just little cutscenes of characters moving around) and that don’t make me sick to watch, then jam city working on a HARRY POTTER GAME should be able to (jk rowling fucking sucks but her books have brought in so much goddamn money that they can afford to pay their devs enough to make the game look good; in this case i’m not entirely sure where the blame lies)

there’s like. 10 motions characters can use while in the cutscenes and talking. like 10. and i can recognize every one of them, and there is not a single motion unique to a character. the characters are something i’ll touch on later in the storytelling sections, though. just, please god give them SOMETHING even SLIGHTLY different. like make two versions of a couple of the crowd animations at LEAST, so that when people celebrate at the end of the year there’s not twenty people in the shot doing the same “pump my fists in the air in celebration” motion at the exact same time. PLEASE.

sometimes animations in story events and classes sync up too, which is. beyond distracting. like it’s completely immersion breaking and i mean please, please jam city, if you haven’t fixed that please fix it. please.

the animations that roll in flying class are fun, ONCE. when you’ve seen them eight hundred thousand times because you’re grinding up your courage stat, they get hella boring. all of the classes are like this to some extent but flying is the biggest offender since those were the longest animations. if they haven’t implemented a skip button since i last played it, they should. they fuckin should.

also the fertilizer animation in the greenhouse scenes is gross. you pick up a deformed cone of dirt with your shovel like a slice of cake and then shove it clipping through the edges of a pot, where it disappears without a trace. i hate it. jam city please make the game look good.

if you still play the game please tell me it looks better; i’ll be playing through a couple things after i post this but it’s hphm. it’s gonna take me a goddamn long time to hit all the points and confirm whether what i complained about has been fixed or not

also also, wearing dresses is so distracting, especially while dueling. the way the dress flexes around your legs is like you’re wearing clothing made from jello and when my character does the idle animation her hands clip through her skirt, and there’s all kids of glitches with hair where it clips through outfits (and why in the fuck do the necklaces float a full foot from the character’s body)

the storytelling

alright there’s a lot to cover so strap in

i’m not mad about the story having some of the same beats as harry potter. whatever, right? if it worked, it worked. having a big climax at the end of the year just works well for storytelling. having a school bully antagonist also works well for easy storytelling (it’s kinda cheap, but whatever works, right?) it’s what you DO with the archetypes you use that makes or breaks your story

jam city broke it

i don’t know how to organize my thoughts so here’s a bulleted list

it is very clearly obvious they wrote this as they went along (ex. a previously unseen character pops up in year 3 and was supposedly the best friend of your greatest enemy in previous years) and didn’t think to fix the plot holes

there’s too many goddamn characters (i love them, but with a big cast comes a whole host of problems [I WRITE FOR A KPOP GROUP WITH 13 MEMBERS, I HAVE A LOT OF EXPERIENCE WITH THAT], and we’ll get there)

there’s too much goddamn filler for the sake of forcing us to spend time and in-game energy (yes i KNOW it’s an app game and they want our money but THEY COULD BE A LITTLE MORE SUBTLE ABOUT IT)

what honestly pisses me off the most about it is that IT COULD BE GOOD

IF THE STORY WERE GOOD, I WOULD FUCKIN IGNORE ALL OF THAT OTHER SHIT

but it’s not, and here’s the biggest gripe i have:

none of the choices you make matter. none of them. to the point where it’s immersion breaking at BEST

for example, while my MC is a hufflepuff, i know a lot of people play in slytherin. scenes where snape gets upset with your character and takes away house points no longer make sense for a slytherin MC, because snape would be infinitely more likely to give you three years of nightly detentions, or pitch you off the astronomy tower, than he would be to take house points from slytherin

honestly, they should have waited. if they wanted to put choose your own adventure elements into the game, they should have planned out every single one of those story arcs in detail, and THEN released the game. they could leave some of the more basic choices in and those choices only mattering for short term effects wouldn’t irk me as much as it does right now because THERE WOULD BE CHOICES THAT MADE A DIFFERENCE.

your very first choice over how you felt about your brother’s disappearance only matters for what wand you get (which i immediately forgot which really says something about the impact of that choice :)))) ). no matter what you pick, you still end up chasing after him for the rest of the game, so who cares?

story beats don’t land different based on your house. you could absolutely play it that merula hates you regardless of your house, that’s fine. just remember that if your MC is slytherin and lives in the female dorms, she probably shares a room with merula. which makes things fucky for all kinds of reasons, none of which jam city addresses in the current game, as far as i’m aware

also, there’s the deal with rowan

rowan is a character that goes into your mc’s chosen house no matter what (and as rowan changes pronouns with your player, i’ll be using “they” [or “she” as my player is a she and that’s what i’m used to; i’ll try to refrain but i might slip up occasionally] ). as far as i can tell, rowan’s personality remains the same no matter what house you’re in. they don’t try to play up the traits that match the house, rowan is just usually a sweet bookworm. why would the hat have put them in gryffindor? rowan khanna for me has never seemed to display any gryffindorish traits; or at the very least, no traits that should be prioritized over, say, the ravenclaw traits they have VERY STRONGLY (since rowan fills a sort of hermione role; rowan knows things about things and is your go to for research)

can we just put rowan in ravenclaw? sure, it would make it hard for fans in different houses to communicate between each other about the story for a time since certain sequences of events would play out differently, but here’s the thing:

if events play out differently based on your choices, people will want to play your game multiple times to get every ending

that’s the fun of a choose your own adventure game. if events play out distinctly differently if you’re a hufflepuff or a ravenclaw or a slytherin or a gryffindor, then people will want to play through the game four times at LEAST, once for each house, to get all the fun pieces of story (WHICH MEANS, they’ll be spending more and more time and using more and more energy, so you can make the same amount of money off people buying energy and watching the ads and maybe MORE while being able to cut out some of the more shitty pieces of filler)

in the current version, your house is just, what color are your robes and who is your prefect. i haven’t watched anyone who wasn’t a hufflepuff, but i’m sure that certain scenes and conflicts play out the exact same no matter what house you’re in

as an example, your house should affect how the duelling confrontation in year one should have gone. snape and flitwick should have different dialogue based on whether you’re a slytherin, or a ravenclaw, or a gryffindor, or a hufflepuff. snape fucking hates gryffindors, so he should be far less lenient against gryffindors, and on the flip side he should be battling between himself with how strict to be if you’re a slytherin; maybe he hates your guts because of a grudge against your brother, but you’re still in his house and we all know snape plays favorites. flitwick should be more disappointed if you’re a ravenclaw, because that’s his house and he had higher expectations for you. neither of them have many ties to hufflepuff that would skew the confrontation in a drastic direction, but had this been the first version of the game, then the confrontation that plays out in the current version we have would work fine for hufflepuff; you’re one of flitwick’s favorite charms students and he taught you this skill, and he’s disappointed to see you use it in this way, but not nearly as much as if you were one of his own

AND NOW PEOPLE WANT TO PLAY THE GAME MULTIPLE TIMES TO GET ALL THE DIALOGUE, WHICH MEANS MORE TIME, MORE ENERGY, AND MORE MONEY, JAM CITY, ARE YOU HEARING THIS??? MORE MONEY!!!!! IT’S A WIN WIN FOR EVERYONE

while we’re at it, change jacob to match his house. if you’re still gonna make him have the same house as the MC, make him match it. from how all the characters describe him that bitch is as slytherin as they come, if you’re gonna make him a hufflepuff with me then give him a clear, hufflepuff motive god damnit

finally,

the characters

there’s too many.

the problem with a big cast is no one gets enough screen time and some characters end up getting shunted to the side. that’s just what happens. you HAVE to zero in on four or five side friends and let the rest of them slip to the side. looking at my friends menu there are 17 characters you can befriend, not including hagrid, the quidditch crew, dobby, talbott, and chiara (since those are, as far as i know, unlocked via side quests, which are... fine. i don’t have any particular gripes about the side quests except for the thing with lupin being twice the size of tonks which, if you’ve read the seventh book i don’t need to explain how weird that is to you)

and BECAUSE there are so many, a lot of them have to be defined by one trait. ben is a coward, rowan’s clever and booksmart, penny has her hand on the school’s pulse and makes potions, liz likes creatures, charlie fuckin loves dragons, tonks likes pranks (seriously that’s her whole personality), andre likes clothes, barnaby is a dumb jock that likes creatures

like, traits are fun. but if that’s ALL THEY HAVE, that’s when things get a little fucky

how many of these characters have dimensions? i’m in year 4 chapter 4. the first screen recording of the game i took was on december 5 of 2019, and assuming i played about a minimum of 8 hours a day (”““played”““) until the final screen recording [may 20, 2020] before i dropped the game for about six months (i know for certain it was more than that, since i had some kind of activity going on at just about all times for at least a month of that, but i’ll take the generous estimate), at bare minimum that makes 1344 hours i spent playing this game, or about 56 days (keep in mind, this is a LOW estimate)

in those 56 days of gameplay, i don’t know ANYTHING about the characters other than their utility in my quest. i don’t know penny’s favorite color or even her favorite potion to brew, or how and why she started and when [there’s a reveal in third year that i watched someone play through, but i don’t know if i ever played through it myself; i don’t have any screen recordings of the event]. i don’t know anything about ben or his family aside from the fact that he’s muggleborn. i know some basic facts about barnaby’s family, and that he’s tough and likes creatures. rowan grew up on a tree farm and i have a vague recollection of her mentioning siblings. do we know anything about them?? do i know anything about how the characters interact with each other?? are barnaby and liz friends? they both like creatures. do they talk to charlie?? do ben and penny hang out while we’re not there? are ben and jae friends?? are jae and charlie??? DO THESE CHARACTERS EXIST WHEN THEY AREN’T NEEDED FOR THE CURSED VAULTS???

why in the fuck don’t i know these characters?? why don’t we know anything about tonks other than her affinity for pranking?? there’s a sharp bias in who the writer’s favorites are (they like the characters with angsty pasts they can twist around; what do we know about ben aside from his blood status? and he’s been around since first year; he’s the second friend you unlock. i know more about barnaby and i’ve known him for a much shorter time)

if you separate the routes, you get a chance to zero in on certain characters and actually develop them. if you’re a gryffindor, you befriend ben, charlie, and jae much more quickly and they make up the closest of your friends, along with rowan, if jam city is determined to keep their tutorial character constant across all plotlines (i still think rowan should be solely a ravenclaw, but i’ll allow rowan’s house to change so long as their personality shifts to emphasize certain qualities in order to match the change in house; your house should not just determine the color your robes are)

if you’re in slytherin, maybe you befriend barnaby in place of ben in the original game, or maybe there’s an arc where you clash heads with merula (who can still be an enemy even if you’re both in slytherin; merula doesn’t like competition and the MC is exactly that) and the rest of the slytherins in your year find themselves caught in the middle; maybe there’s an arc where your MC finds themself totally alone without allies due to the conflict between them and merula (might i suggest year two, while coming up on the climax of the year?)

hufflepuffs get to focus on tonks and penny much closer. ben can also be in this plotline, but he shouldn’t take center stage (characters should cross over plotlines, but only take center stage in one, aside from perhaps rowan if rowan remains constant). maybe chiara can get implemented into the main plotline to fill out the roster, and if not, diego caplan can get implemented earlier (i haven’t met him yet and know nothing about his character)

and ravenclaws get the ravenclaw characters BUT YOU GET THE POINT, i don’t want to bore anyone by repeating myself; this is long enough as is

what i’m saying is, these characters all have a different enough base that each route will be different just by focusing on different characters; ben and jae will respond to a situation much differently than penny and tonks might, which would ALREADY shake up the storyline of each house based on which house you choose in the beginning, and then characters overlap plotlines so you could leave hints in each route to the other characters’ unique backstories and motivations that leaves the player wanting to get to know the rest of your WELL DEVELOPED CAST (((MAKE SURE THEY’RE WELL DEVELOPED OR THIS WILL NOT WORK)))

WHAT I’M SAYING IS, THIS GAME COULD HAVE BEEN SO GOOD

if they put more effort into the story then maybe i would have gunned through the hufflepuff route so quickly and then restarted to go through all the rest of them. if you want people playing your game for longer then THAT is the way to go

yes, it will take time. yes, it will take effort. but you know what?

IT’LL ALSO MAKE YOU A FUCKTON OF MONEY FROM PLAYERS PLAYING EACH ROUTE IN FULL AND THEN PLAYING THEIR FAVORITE ROUTES AGAIN SO WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU WAITING FOR

anyway, what i’m saying is, i hate this game so much because of the potential it had to succeed, and the potential it had to be a really good game. even if they didn’t change the gameplay much, even if they didn’t change the models, i could get past ALL OF THAT if the story was interesting

so uh. jam city, if you’re reading this, please. i will let you take away all of my days of playing this. i will let you render all of my progress obsolete and send me plummeting back into my first year at hogwarts to go through the game again, if you JUST, MAKE, MULTIPLE, ROUTES!!! MAKE MY CHOICES MATTER DAMN YOU!!!!!!!!

i’m also willing to let you use the ideas i posited here without credit or payment. because that sounds like a legal hassle and i am far too lazy to deal with that sort of thing, i just want to play a good game. please. please give me a good game to play.

also, make energy take 3 minutes to recharge. please.

so uh

TL;DR : i hate this game. and i wish i didn’t hate this game.

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imaginaryelle · 5 years

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Okay, @tonyglowheart , here is that promised response:

@three--rings already brought up some points I was going to mention so I’ll skip over going into detail on those and just say that I agree with the use of caution and thoughtfulness in approaching works produced by other cultures (of whatever language), and I, too, love a mash-up of MDZS and CQL for ideal storytelling. Accepting genre tropes in general is really important as well. I once showed my grandfather a piece of my writing based on pulp adventure stories like Indiana Jones and his main reaction was “All these secret chambers and codes and gadgets, isn’t that all very convenient?” and I just had to shrug and say, that’s the genre, it’s part of what makes it fun to read. Also, based on reading about various medicinal histories I’ve been exploring, I can say that the coughing up blood thing is a trope based in Ancient China’s traditional medicine. Lots of pre-understanding-of-blood-circulation societies thought expelling old or stale blood was important for the body (possibly based on how menses works and reflected in Western medicine’s several-century-long obsession with bloodletting), and I recently read that having it caught in your chest and needing to cough it up was part of China’s take on things. I’m still not sure about all the other face bleeding, but if it’s not actually based in something historical it seems like a reasonable extension for the genre.

Okay, so the thing I want to respond to most is the translation bit, because I… okay. I understand that people are going to find works in translation less accessible than works written in a language they can read, and especially works written in their native language and of their own culture. Because obviously there are a ton of underlying ideas that inform word choice and symbolism and character arcs that most people just don’t really think about until they make a serious study of writing or literature (or they travel and learn more about other languages and literature traditions). On a linguistic studies level, language literally shapes the way humans in different cultures think, and what they pick out as important (an academic article that compares English and Chinese specifically can be found here). Even the distinctions between British English and American English, on a word choice and theme or syntax level, can have an impact. I have seen it turn kids off a book, because there are just too many elements they don’t get (this is, for example, why there are two English versions of Harry Potter). Same thing with different decades even. I’m talking about kidlit and YA here because that’s a lot of what I work with, but in that realm, the way we approach stories today is just incredibly different from how they were approached even 50 years ago, even in the same language and the same country. Think Judy Blume or The Dark is Rising vs Diary of a Wimpy Kid or Percy Jackson. And I’m fascinated by those changes, and by the effects of culture and bias on translations (I am extremely hyped to read Emily Wilson’s Odyssey translation, for example), so I tend to approach them as puzzles, where I’m reading the work, but also looking for clues that will tell me more about both the translator and the author to hang in balance. I enjoy that part, and I enjoy figuring out aspects of the two languages that can contribute to how a translation evolves.

I’m a language and literature nerd, and I know not everyone is going to take the approach I do. I’m not going to fault anyone for saying they don’t enjoy or can’t get into a translation. That’s a perfectly valid opinion. Reducing a work to its translation and judging it only on that impression of it, however, seems pretty shortsighted to me. Here are some things that I think are important to keep in mind when reading a Chinese work in translation, just based on my own extremely limited knowledge:

1. In Chinese storytelling it’s an established practice to reference idioms, poetry, folklore and historic events as a sort of shorthand for evoking the proper tone. Chinese writing tends to be extremely allusive, and much more understated than what we’re used to in English-language storytelling. We can see hints of this in some of the MDZS translator notes, and it’s likely that this difference feeds into a lot of dissatisfaction with the translation. Either the allusions are not translated in a way that adds meaning for an English-speaking reader, or the standards for detail are different. Indirectness and subtly are huge parts of Chinese literature, and so different words or scenes will have very different connotations for Chinese vs. English speaking audiences. And this isn’t even touching on the use of rhyme and rhythm in Chinese writing, which are all but impossible to translate a lot of the time, or the often extremely different approaches to “style” and “genre” between the languages (an interesting article on comparative literature is here at the University of Connecticut website). Given this knowledge, it’s entirely possible that, for example, the smut scenes are more effective in Chinese than in the English translation. In fact, I find it difficult to believe it would be popular enough to get multiple adaptations and a professional publishing run if they weren’t. In translation, smut is a lot like humor: every culture approaches it a little differently. Unless a translator is familiar with both writing traditions and the relevant genres (or they have editors or sensitivity readers who can offer advice), something is going to get lost in the process. And sometimes that something is what at least one of the involved cultures would consider to be the most important part. It’s unfortunate, but it happens.

2. Chinese grammar is slightly different from English grammar (and I’m focusing on Mandarin as the common written language here. For anyone interested, a very basic rundown of major differences is available here). Verb tenses and concepts of time work differently. Emphasis is marked differently – in English we tend to put the most importance on the start of a sentence, while in Chinese it’s often at the end. Sentences are also often shorter in Chinese than in English, and English tends to get more specific in our longer sentences. From what I understand, it’s also a little more acceptable to just drop subjects out of a sentence, and that is more likely to happen if someone is attempting to be succinct. I’ve been told that it’s especially common in contentious situations, as part of an effort to distill objections or arguments down to an essential meaning (if I’m wrong about this or there’s more nuance to it, I’m happy to learn more). As one example of how this affects translation, let’s take that and look at Lan Wangji’s dialogue. I’m willing to bet that most of his words are direct translations, or as direct as the translator could manage. But his words don’t work the same way in English that they do in Chinese. If you continuously drop subjects and articles (Chinese doesn’t have articles) out of a character’s speech in English, they start to sound like they have issues articulating themselves, and I see that idea reflected in fic a lot. The idea that Lan Wangji just isn’t comfortable talking or can’t say the words he means is all over the place, but I don’t think the audience was intended to take away the idea that Lan Wangji speaks quite as stiltedly as he comes off in the English translation. He’s terse, yes. But I at least got the impression that it’s more about choosing when and how to speak for the best effectiveness than anything else, because so many of his actual observations are quite insightful and pointed, or fit just fine syntactically within the conversation he’s part of.

3. Chinese is both more metaphorical and more concrete than English in some ways. In English we use a lot of abstract words to represent complex ideas, and you just have to learn what they mean. In Chinese, the overlap of language and philosophy in the culture results in four-character phrases of what English would generally call idioms. Some examples I found: “perfect harmony” (水乳交融) can be literally translated as “mixing well like milk and water” and “eagerly” (如饥似渴) is read as “like hunger and thirst.” If these set phrases are translated to single word concepts in English, we can lose the entire tone of a sentence and it’ll feel much more flat and... basic, or uninspired. The English reader will be left wondering where the detailed descriptive phrase is that adds emotion and connotation to a sentence, when in the actual Chinese those things were already implied.

As translations go, MDZS in particular is an incredibly frustrating mixed bag for me, partially because of the non-professional fan translation, and partially because my knowledge of Chinese literature and especially Cultivation novels is so minimal as to be nearly non-existent. But I have enough exposure to translations in general and Chinese language and literature in particular that I could tell there were things I was missing. The framework of the plot and scenes was too complete for me to ever be able to say that any particular frustration I had was due to the author, not the translator. There’s a big grey area in there that’s difficult to navigate without knowing both languages and the norms of the genre extremely well. At one point I was actually able to find multiple translation for a few of the chapters and I loved that. It was really cool to see what changed, and what remained essentially the same, and I was actually really surprised to find that rant you mention, because to me, more translations is always better. I think it was probably about wanting to corral an audience, and possibly also about reducing arguments from the audience about whether a translation was “wrong” or “right.” And that is an issue that’s going to crop up more in online spaces than it has traditionally. Professional translators don’t have to potentially argue with every single reader about their word choice. But then, professional translators also tend to have a better grasp of both the cultures they’re working with as well, and be writers of some variety in their own right, and while I can’t know how fluent (linguistically or culturally) the ExR translator was at the time, the translator’s notes lead me to believe that at minimum their understanding of figurative language use was incomplete. So I can’t fault people for not enjoying the translated novel as much as CQL, for example, because it can be quite choppy and much of the English wording feels like a sketch of a scene rather than something fleshed out fully, but I don’t think it’s fair to apply that impression to MXTX herself or the novel as a whole in Chinese.

More about ExR: I also got the sense that they have a strong bl and yaoi bias as you mentioned, mostly from the translator’s notes. And in general, okay, that’s fine, they’re working with a particular market of fans and I’m just not as much a part of that market. I knew going in that I wasn’t the target audience. I’m okay with that. What I was less okay with was getting to the end and reading the actual author’s notes in translation and finding that the author herself expressed a much more nuanced, considerate, and balanced approach to the story and her writing process than I had been led to believe by the translation and the translator’s notes. And so when people want to criticize the author for things that happen in the translation…. I just think it’s very important to remember that the translator is also a factor, as is the influence of the cultivation genre, and the nature of web novels, and the original intended audience. As you said, white western LGBT people were never the intended recipients of this work. It comes from a totally different context. But I think it’s also important to remember that, again as you noted, it wasn’t first written as a professional work. It was literally a daily-updated webnovel, which works a lot more like a fanfic than a book in terms of approach. And on top of that, it was the author’s second novel (if I’m reading things correctly) and one that they experimented with a lot of new elements in. Those elements earn a lot of forgiveness and benefit of a doubt from me.

About MXTX herself: Most of the posts or references to posts that I’ve seen that judge or dismiss her have to do with the stated sexuality of characters who are not Wei Wuxian and Lan Wangji. And it just kinda baffles me, because this is fandom. Most of us spend our time writing about characters who are stated to be straight all the time. Why is anyone getting up in arms about this? How can anyone in fandom just summarily dismiss an author for producing original work that centers around a gay relationship when that’s… literally what most of us write, to some extent or another? Again, I’m not saying there’s aren’t aspects that can be criticized in her stories, but the hypocrisy is kind of amazing. I think that fandom, as a culture overall, has issues with treating gay men and their relationships as toys rather than people, and individuals can address their own behavior on that as they learn and grow. That doesn’t mean that every work about gay men having sex is fetishistic, and honestly I’d say that the translator demonstrates more of that attitude than the actual story ever does. The smut is such an incredibly tiny part of the world, plots and character arcs in MDZS that it could be taken out without significantly changing the main narrative very easily. That’s… not fetishistic. That’s smut as part of an overarching romance plot.

Which leads me to the tropes discussion. Yes, obviously there are tropes in MDZS. There are tropes in every story. It’s not a failing, it’s part of writing. Are some of those tropes BL or Yaoi tropes? Sure. Wei Wuxian denying his own sexuality for much of the novel and his tendency toward submission and rape fantasy are some of the very first tropes mentioned in relation to the genre. That Wei Wuxian just sort of seamlessly moves from “pff, I’m NOT a cutsleeve, I’m just acting like one” to shouting “Lan Zhan, I really want you to fuck me” in front of friends, enemies and family without much of a process for dealing with the culture of homophobia around him also seems to be characteristic of the genre. But I think that’s about where it ends. You and @three--rings both made some good points about the nature of the actual relationship, which I agree with: There’s not much of a power play element, or an assigned gender roles element. They’re both virgins who only partially know what they’re doing from looking at illustrations of porn, and they do enthusiastically want to have sex with each other. They’re just bad at negotiating their kinks clearly and could use a decent sex ed manual. The trope I actually have the most issue with is the use of alcohol. I personally despise the trope of “I’ll get someone drunk on purpose for reasons that benefit me personally,” due to my own real life experiences. But it’s an exceedingly common trope in Western media (Idk about Chinese media, but my guess would be it exists there too), and it’s not exclusive to mlm smut scenarios. It’s pretty much everywhere. And, thankfully, Wei Wuxian does seem to eventually realize that he’s fucking things up by using it. That said, despite knowing what happens to him when he drinks, La Wangji keeps doing it. So they’re both contributing to that mess, no matter how much I dislike that it exists, and the narrative doesn’t actually condone it. No one says “Oh, Wei Wuxian, that’s such a good idea, that’s definitely something you should keep doing.” He is consistently warring with himself over it but unable to resist. It’s still dubcon and manipulation, and I certainly understand people not wanting to read it. I just also think that reducing the entire relationship down to “bad, terrible, fetishistic BL tropes” requires the reader to ignore large parts of the story and pretty evident intent on the parts of both the characters and the author.

On purity culture: Yeah, that’s obviously been cropping up all over the place the past several years (I have indeed been in marvel for ages :P). It does seem like there are places in fandom (to some degree any fandom), where “I don’t like how this idea was executed in this context” gets conflated with “This entire work is terrible,” which is a disservice to everyone involved. I agree that there are many things that can be legitimately criticized in MDZS, but I also just… really don’t understand where this attitude comes from that because something is not perfect, it’s trash. Wasn’t fandom essentially invented out of the desire to respond to canon? To make it more your own? Isn’t picking out the parts you like and ignoring the bits you don’t (or writing around the bits you hate until you can fit them in a shape you like better) pretty much what all fic is about? Aren’t those holes people are sticking their fingers into and complaining about opportunities for more fan content? But even more than “purity culture” I would term it “entitlement culture,” because a lot of it seems to be about the idea that media should fit into and support a certain set of beliefs at all times. A lot of fandoms are no longer an atmosphere of “I don’t like the way this is presented so I’m going to create my on version that works for me.” Instead there’s a growing element of “I don’t like the way this is presented so that means it’s wrong and bad and the original creator should admit that it’s wrong and bad and fix it to satisfy me.” And honestly? That’s just sad to me. More and more, we’re not having a conversation with canon, or even with each other. We’re not building what we want to see we’re just… tearing other people down. I really don’t understand what anyone finds fun in that, and I’m going to do my best to keep creating the things I actually do want to see instead.

#blah blah alex #this is about mdzs #and translation #and fandom #alcohol mention #dubcon mention

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teaveetamer · 5 years

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My Issues With TFioS (and Other Elements of John Green)

Alright I’m just going to preface this with two things.

It’s been about six years since I’ve read the entire thing through, so my points are probably not going to be as detailed or precise as they were when I first read it.

If you enjoyed the book, identify with the fanbase, or like John Green in any capacity... Great! You might want to skip this one. This is definitely not the post for you. I’m going to put all of my more controversial thoughts under the cut so if you don’t want to see them you can just move on.

I brought up the book in that other post because I felt it had relevance to the discussion of “authors using characters as a mouthpiece”, but that’s only a small part of my issue with the book itself. I suppose I could have used a fanfiction example, since there’s more than enough fodder there, but I brought up The Fault in our Stars specifically because I feel comfortable criticizing a book in a way that I don’t feel comfortable criticizing fan works. John Green is a public figure that produced a paid product, made money, and does this professionally, while most fanfic authors are amateurs that provide free entertainment and just do it for fun.

Now with that said, we move on to the meat of the post.

Some Background

Perhaps this is not a little known fact, but I absolutely adore love stories. I don’t have incredibly high standards for them by any means, and in fact I actively enjoy them even when they aren’t the deepest, most thought provoking pieces. Someone got me a copy of Red, White, and Royal Blue for my birthday this year and I read the entire thing cover to cover in a day (and I seriously recommend if you’re looking for a pretty easy read with a lot of gay).

The only thing I love more than love stories? Tragic love stories, of course. If anyone has followed my fanfiction or main blog for any amount of time then you know that I love a little bit of tragedy. Usually with a happy ending, but not always. So when one of my friends shoved (and I mean literally shoved) The Fault in Our Stars into my hands and billed it as a “tragic but heartwarming love story” I thought it would be perfect for me.

I was sixteen at the time, the target age demographic, and I was always looking for books with smart, well written teen characters. At this point in my life I’d never heard of John Green or his fanbase before. I tell you this because I disliked the book as I read it, but I think John Green and his fanbase are a major factor in why I disliked it so much I’m willing to sit down and write a blog post about it six years later. Granted, that’s not all on the book, but it is a factor.

Needless to say, I was not all that impressed by it. At some points I was downright infuriated, really.

My Issues With the Book

In summary, it feels very meh and overly pretentious. After about two chapters I just wanted to put it down, and the only reason I pushed through is because my friend insisted that it got better. She said it was funny, relatable, and intelligent, but I found it to be none of these things.

The impression I got was that the author, whoever he was, fancied himself terribly clever and he wanted everyone to know it. You know the type, the kinds of people that go around and assure everyone of how smart they are? It feels like it was made for haughty teens to brag about how intelligent they were because they read a “deep” book. The book itself, despite being a surface level of “witty”, didn’t really have anything to say. In the end it reads like a thirty-something year old man bragging about how smart he is and waxing philosophical about the nature of life (and... Breakfast food..?) and using a fictional teenage girl to do it.

That’s why I brought up the “mouthpiece” thing. I didn’t want to read a book about a thirty-something dressing up his thoughts as a teenage girl. I wanted to read a book about a teenage girl.

Speaking of Hazel Grace… I don’t know if this is a common experience, but can anyone else tell when a man writes a female character? I find that I usually can. Men have a particular voice when they write, and especially when they write women. Every single page hammered me over the head with the fact that this was a man who was trying (and, in my opinion, failing miserably) to write a relatable teenage girl. And, in my opinion, he parroted a lot of very upsetting, dangerous mentalities for young women.

There were quite a few “I’m not like other girls, and not just because of the cancer!” moments (a mentality that I find wholly problematic coming from other women, let alone a man writing for a woman) that just had me rolling my eyes straight out of their sockets. She doesn’t care about shoes, see! She reads books! Isn’t that awesome and unique? Because, apparently, women are not allowed to do both.

These problematic mentalities extend into the book’s romance plot, too. Augustus is, frankly, one of the creepiest motherfuckers I’ve ever had the displeasure to read about. Not only is his aggressive creepiness portrayed as romantic, but Hazel reacts exactly how men wish women would react to their advances. Unfortunately I don’t have a copy of the book in front of me so you won’t get much in the way of direct quotes, but some examples include:

He stares at her, completely unblinking, for the duration of their cancer kids support group meeting… before they’ve even so much as spoken a word to each other. Which also features this gem of a quote: "A nonhot boy stares at you relentlessly and it is, at best, awkward and, at worst, a form of assault. But a hot boy . . . well." which just perpetuates the disgusting misconception that women are okay with being creeped on as long as a guy is attractive. Spoiler alert: We fucking aren’t.

He repeatedly refers to Hazel as “Hazel Grace”, despite her introducing herself as “Hazel” and asking him to just call her “Hazel”. And not only does he ask for her full name, he demands she give it to him. This rings all kinds of alarm bells for me, because you know who else does that kind of shit? Christian Grey. And it’s manipulative, disrespectful, and downright rude. It is essentially saying “I hear your desires, but I would prefer to address you how I want to address you, not how you would like to be addressed, because my ego is more important than your comfort”.

Hazel is perfectly fine with getting into a complete stranger’s car and spending time at his house mere minutes after meeting with him and after all of the questionable shit he just pulled.

Continuing this book’s litany of problems with women, let’s talk about Isaac’s (ex)girlfriend. The book treats their breakup as this massive betrayal, then even goes on to justify vandalizing her property because of it.

I’m sorry, but no.

You, as an autonomous human being, have the right to end a relationship with someone else whenever, wherever, and for whatever reasons you designate, regardless of previously expressed emotions or promises. How and when she did it was not the most ideal, but she’s an emotionally immature teenager, and there’s never going to be a good time to do something like this. What was she supposed to do, keep pity dating him because she felt sorry for him? Wait until someone invented technology to cure blindness? Assuming she did actually break up with him because of his disability… Are her reasons shitty? Sure. But she’s allowed to have them.

And you know what? He’s allowed to be mad about it. His anger might be completely understandable, if not totally justified. But you know what else? That does not give him the right to take revenge on her by vandalizing her property.

I would have no problem with this scene if it were honest about what it was: a bunch of teenagers with under-developed frontal lobes that are angry and feeling vindictive. But it’s not that. It’s depicted as not only completely justified, but heroic. I’m sorry, no. You are never heroic for harassing another human being.

And Augustus’s dumb little speech to her mom is such garbage. You really expect me to believe that a grown woman was so pwned by some jerk teenager’s super witty justification for destroying her property that she just went inside and, idk, watched TV? Didn’t call the police to report the crime that he and his friends were actively committing against her? Bullshit.

Speaking of bullshit, that scene is pretty egregious, but that doesn’t even begin to cover my issues with this book’s pretentious dialogue. If you told me that they ran every word in this book through Thesaurus.com then I would believe you without hesitation. The one hook, the draw, the thing that kept me reading was supposed to be the relatable characters, but they just aren’t relatable. They’re not realistic in the slightest. Seriously, go read any line of this book out loud and tell me how ridiculous you feel. I kept expecting Augustus to pull off his skinsuit and reveal that he was secretly a robot trying to imitate human speech the entire time.

I’m not sure how far I can go into this point without giving you direct quotes, but half the stuff that comes out of these characters mouths is pseudo-intellectual nonsense. “Put the killing thing between your teeth so it can’t kill you”?

It’s not a metaphor.

Putting an unlit cigarette in your mouth is still stupid. I guess it won’t give you lung cancer, but really? It’s still not a great idea.

Augustus has to go buy these cigarettes, which means he’s actively going out and giving money to an industry that has been funding pseudoscience and suppressing health initiatives that would prevent people from suffering what he did (i.e. fucking cancer).

Here’s a clue: Tobacco companies don’t actually care about what you do with the cigarettes. Their transaction stops as soon as you put the money in their hands. I could purchase a hundred packs and throw them in the garbage, and the only thing they know is that they got about $600 from me. Way to “stick it to the man”, asshole. You’re not clever.

With the exception of the Isaac’s-girlfriend thing, all of that is in chapters 1-4, by the way. This book turned me off so thoroughly that early.

So by the time the Amsterdam trip rolled around I was already not enjoying this book, but then this thing happened and it was just the final nail in the coffin for me. You probably know what I’m talking about already, but if you don’t… The Anne Frank Museum kiss.

I honestly cannot even articulate how incredibly tasteless and disrespectful I find the entire thing, and not only does that happen, but it’s followed by an r/ThatHappened “and then everybody stood up and clapped!” Seriously?

There are smarter, more well-versed people than me that have covered this topic, so I’ll leave the analysis for why that’s all kinds of wrong to them.

Those are really my big gripes, though there’s a few smaller ones (like Augustus throwing a pre-funeral like are you a psychopath? Why would you put the people you love through that???) that I’m not going to touch on because they weren’t all that instrumental in putting me off. Instead I’ll move on to the external factors.

The Fanbase

So I finished the book, a little miffed at having just wasted my time, and immediately told my friend that I didn’t like it much, and that I would be returning her copy the next day. Feeling pretty meh-to-slightly-negative about it, but whatever, it happens.

I was essentially met with “wow I can’t believe you didn’t get it.” and “Oh well maybe you’ll finally understand how deep it is when you’re older” from my friend. Which is really just one step away from the wow can’t you read?! BS that I’ve been seeing more and more frequently these days. So immediately I was pissed. All that aside, I was sixteen, the target age demographic? If I didn’t ‘get it’ then John Green was doing a pretty piss poor job of conveying what it is.

So I went online seeking something. Either validation that I wasn’t wrong and that I didn’t miss the point, the book just wasn’t great, or an explanation of what this it was that I’d missed. And let me tell you... Spotting a negative opinion of this book was like looking for a unicorn. There were a few, and many of them were met with the same kind of thing I had experienced. Vitriol, insistence that they were stupid or that they didn’t get it (again, with no explanation of what it was), and, apparently, a lot of harassment and threats.

I discovered that John Green’s target audience had a tendency to be… A bit obsessive. Lots of young, impressionable teenagers that were willing to jump on an opposing opinion with zealous outrage. If I had any interest in pursuing any of John Green’s other works or John Green as an internet personality any further, then it died in that moment. Absolutely nothing turns me off like a rabid, spiteful fanbase.

Now by this point I was already in the rabbit hole, and I began encountering a lot of criticisms of John Green and the things he’s said and done in the past. I did not like what I found.

John Green Himself

To be extremely blunt, the guy put such a bad taste in my mouth that it retroactively soured my opinion of The Fault in Our Stars even more. Since this is a post about my opinions on the book, I’m only going to be discussing things that affected my view at the time I read it. These are all things that happened six years ago, and I have no idea what this man has been up to or what he’s said about any of these topics since.

Let’s just get this out of the way… John Green writes the same book over and over. There’s always a quirky, nerdy white boy that is invariably cisgendered, and almost always straight. He is always an outcast with only a few friends, though apparently never directly bullied. He always meets an edgy girl that he falls in love with the idea of. Usually there is a road trip somewhere in there too.

The Fault in our Stars admittedly doesn’t follow the exact same framework, but it’s close enough in a lot of ways. Instead of the Quirky, Too-Smart-For-His-Own-Good cisboi being the PoV character, it’s the love interest (Hazel also fits this description, albeit a female version). Hazel and Augustus are both still outcasts. Hazel is attracted to Augustus because he’s Deep and Edgy and A Little Larger Than Life. The road trip is a flight to Amsterdam.

Looking at the man... Yeah the entire premise starts to come off as some weird self-insert fanfiction. I can feel the “I was a quirky, bullied teen and I wish this is how my high school life had been!” energy coming through absolutely every pore and every molecule of ink. Every character reads like John Green. John Green has written book after book and the main character always appears to be John Green in a slightly different teenage skinsuit.

And that’s fine, I guess. A little lazy, but I guess it’s working for him since he’s making hella bank? It’s certainly not enough to put me off the guy, just not something I’m interested in reading, and not something I find compelling.

What put me off for good were some of his comments. Dude skeeves me the fuck out. I’ll just go over some of the highlights I found at the time, and why they upset me so much when I heard them.

“Nerd girls are the world's most underutilized romantic resource.”

As a nerdy girl that has been stalked and harassed by men because I’m “good girlfriend material” (aka I like video games and traditionally masculine stuff and I’m pretty! I must be a unicorn!), this statement is disgusting.

I don’t care if it was a joke. I don’t care if he wasn’t being serious. This is the kind of shit that men think is a compliment because they think it makes “quirky” girls feel “unique” and “special”, but that “complement” is also an insult. You know why? Because it makes female interests all about how men perceive their sexual or romantic viability.

John Green’s penchant for writing “special” and “unique” girls (while simultaneously shaming “typical” girls, but I’ll get to that in the next point) and depicting them as the ideal woman just reaffirms my feelings about this quote. I think, on some level, John Green has no idea why this is such a bad take. And that’s not even getting into the fact that he called human beings resources. Women are not objects that exist to be a plot device or for your gratification. Fuck right off with that shit.

“She was incredibly hot, in that popular-girl-with-bleached-teeth-and-anorexia kind of way, which was Colin’s least favourite way of being hot”

This is just one quote of many that shames people with eating disorders and weight problems (on both ends of the spectrum, “too fat” and “too skinny”. Another fun one being: “there’s the weird culturally-constructed definition of hot, which means ‘that individual is malnourished, and has probably had plastic bags inserted into her breasts.’")

Know what this line is? It’s called “negging”, and it’s a popular tactic of incels because it works. You make someone seek your approval by intentionally giving them backhanded compliments to undermine their self esteem. The idea is that the more you insult them, the harder they’ll work to try and impress you. It doesn’t work on everyone, but you know who it does tend to work on? Insecure younger people (usually girls). You know who John Green’s target audience is? Insecure teenage girls.

As for the actual substance of the quote… I hate it. He’s shaming a woman for the choices she makes over her appearance. Which are, fun fact, none of his damn business. Also the idea that “skinny” and “anorexic” somehow need to go hand in hand is just wrong, insulting women for a mental health disorder they have no control over is offensive, and using a serious mental health disorder (did you know that anorexia is the most deadly mental health condition?) as an insult is disgusting.

Coming back to my earlier point about shaming “normal” girls, this quote is just the tip of the iceberg. He repeatedly shames women in his books for looking or behaving “typically”, while quirky girls are lauded as the ideal. Quirky girls are “weird and interesting” and normal girls are “boring”. If this was intended as a compliment, it’s a shitty one. If you have to shame one group to make another feel better, it is not a compliment. You are lowering all women when you pull that shit. You teach them that in order to feel good about themselves another group has to be made to feel worse.

And hey, maybe the pretty girl likes her teeth bleached because it makes her feel confident? Why can’t bleached teeth girl and anime t-shirt girl both be beautiful and unique and confident in their own right? Why is it “powerful” for anime t-shirt girl to wear her nerdy clothes, but scorn-worthy for bleached teeth girl to like bleaching her teeth?

What John Green is doing is simply replacing one ideal (skinny pretty girl) with another (quirky cute girl), and then he pretends like his version is somehow “woke” because it’s not based on physical appearance (though all of the women in his books are also physically attractive. Hmmm. Guess “nerd girls” are only “viable resources” when they aren’t hard to look at?).

And trust me, I’ve been down this path. I’ve been taken in by guys who try to make me feel ~special~ by putting down other women, and it leads to absolutely nothing good. It doesn’t make you feel better. It just makes you feel angry and resentful, and that’s not a place you want to be in. In fact, this was a mentality I had recently escaped from around the time I picked up this book. Seeing someone with as much influence as John Green parroting this specific brand of toxic shit to exactly the audience that would be most likely to feed into it? I was never going to be able to like the guy, sorry.

I know some people are able to “separate the art from the artist”, and I might have been willing to do that had the book actually been good… but it wasn’t. So in the end the book just looked worse for all of the author’s shortcomings.

So yeah, in summary: The book was mediocre at best, the author pushed all of my angry feminist buttons, and elements of the fanbase were annoying, condescending, and spiteful. I didn’t like the book in the first place due to the myriad of problems plaguing it, but everything else just made it look so much worse in hindsight.

Anyways, this probably got kind of ranty, but it was cathartic and I did make this blog to vent about dumb stuff. I think this qualifies.

#Personal stuff #TFioS Opinion Piece #Sorry it took so long #I had a lot to say #A little ranty

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lunasilvermorny · 5 years

Text

End of year 4

(I know I’m not done with season 1 of the Quidditch story, but it seems like it’ll take a while, so in the meantime, I want to actually progress the story.)

Wait, he hasn’t came back yet? The hell is he doing?

Aww, she looks so proud.

That’s the look of- “At least it’s not Slytherin.”

(Unless you’re playing as one, but I’m not, so it works.)

Such a plot twist...

Yeah, you were only a 1,000+ points ahead. No big deal.

Me: Finally, I got to year 5!

Everyone who’s been through it:

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Conclusions:

(This is going to be a long one...)

In general:

I think year 4 was overall a good one. I liked the pace of the story (a bit slow sometimes, but never enough to make me completely disinterested.) and the fact that it was longer than the previous years made it better to really get invested in the plot.

Now for a deeper dive (with obvious spoilers):

The main plot:

I think the plot of year 4 is the most interesting we had so far. It was darker, but no too much to break the immersion. There were actual plot twists (the whole thing with Ben was very well executed.) and the new characters they introduced were really well made.

However, even though I thought the plot was pretty good, there were some really boring parts. For exampe - the part with sickleworth. I was really looking forward to it, but it was just tedious.

Let’s go search the arrowhead here. Oh, it’s not here? Let’s go there instead. No? Then let’s try this place...

Mind-numbingly boring and a waste of time.

New characters:

Rakepick:

As much as I think she’s a manipulative prick, she’s a great addition to the story. Her problematic methods are in perfect contrast to the other professors and I think it adds a lot to have an irresponsible adult around to enable MC’s behavior, when it comes to furthering the plot in a believable direction.

I don’t like the way she manipulates Merula into doing her dirty work, but again, it makes perfect sense that they would take this direction in order to keep Merula relevant as the antagonist.

Professor Kettleburn:

What more can I say? They nailed it. I love everything that has to do with him. I truly believe they made him justice the way they’ve portrait him. I went over the stuff that JKR wrote about him and they were very faithful to the source material. I think they’re way better at adapting characters that had no presence in the HP books and movies.

So yeah - great job, JC. Honestly.

Charlie Weasley:

Supported by my last statement about the way they adapt characters - Charlie is wonderful. I know that a lot of people find his obsessive talk about dragons annoying and one-dimensional, but in a game where most characters are not explored to a very deep level, I think it was smart to keep a simple and coherent character arc.

I like how calm and easy going he is and I just found myself enjoying almost every interaction MC had with him.

I really liked the fact that he was a huge part of the main story and that he automatically joined us in all the important parts, just like Tulip and Barnaby in year 3. His adventurous nature was very uplifting at times and he just made everything 10 times more interesting.

I can understand why he’s such a fan favorite. Again, great job, JC.

Andre Egwu:

I know that we technically already met him in year 3, but his presence was almost non-existent until year 4, so I consider him a new addition.

Anyway, like the rest of the new characters, I really like Andre.

At the beginning he was a bit annoying, but my impression on him changed very quickly once he had more screen time.

Proving that he’s more than a sassy background character, he showed that he’s a true friend in the main plot and the SQs. The fact that he’s our fashion-guy that always happy to help is already good enough, but his supportive nature in the main plot (giving MC his broom, join her to the forbidden forest) just made it so much better.

Liz Tuttle:

Even thought she’s still not our friend, she was in the background of a few SQ and was introduced in the Polyjuice Potion SQ. The problem is that... that’s it.

Anyone who’s been in my blog more than 10 minutes knows how much I like Liz and how her big of a presence she has in the headcanon, but she’s barely anywhere in the game and it’s such a shame.

I’d like to know her character better and I feel like there’s a missed opportunity. I adore her love and dedication for creatures and animals, and hope they wouldn’t just use it as a joke like- “look at that weird girl that cares way too much about animals” instead of showing it in a positive light.

Old characters:

Ben - I think I like the most what they've done with Ben. The fact that he was the masked “dark wizard” was a true plot twist and even though I suspected it, it still got me.

Rowan - I didn’t like the fact that Rowan was a judgemental arse and that in the end he was right, even though he had no proof and based his suspicions on gut feeling. That’s extremely out of character of him and I hated it.

Side quests:

There were many. Some were just brilliant (the Celestial Ball SQ and the First Date SQ), and some weren’t. (like the Nearly-Headless Nick one and.. I can barely remember, because they were so dull.)

But here’s a very quick recap (because I said all I had to say in the SQs posts):

Nearly-Headless Nick - So damn boring!

Unleash Your Patronus - Disappointing, but not a complete failure.

Polyjuice Potion - I wouldn’t have liked it nearly as much if Liz wasn’t in it... but she were, so I can’t say I hated it.

Celestial Ball - Brilliant! 10/10. Loved it. By far the best.

Rita Returns - Boring.

First Date - Amazing!

Become a Prefect - a bit boring at times, but in general it was a nice little SQ.

Magical Creatures Everywhere - Nice premise, I enjoyed all the creatures and characters involved, but it was just a fetch quest without anything too interesting. No stakes, very basic story. Not the best, but we had worst.

Also, I need to point out that I changed my opinion on Penny based on the SQs. (not only in this specific year.) They put her way too much in placed that she wasn’t belong and it left me more annoyed with her than anything. She was one of my favorite characters and now I just want to skip any dialogue with her, because I’m so tired of her.

The Vault:

This part was very disappointing. The build-up was promising, but there was barely a pay-off. It wasn’t nearly as interesting as the vault from year 3, even though I think it had greater potential.

Also, I hated the fact we had to fight the Acromantula instead of choosing between a fight and a conversation, like Kettleburn advised us.

Oher stuff:

Chimaera - I guess we’ll see it through next year? It felt more like a running gag than anything, but it’s a freaking Chimaera that’s running loose! There’s no way we’re not going to encounter it at some point. Anyway, I thought it was amusing as a background plot to show Kettleburn’s recklessness.

Studying - I know that most of the time it was to learn about things that have to do with the vault, but I still liked to see them sit and study, especially MC with Rowan. It’s a school after all.

Snape and Rakepiclk’s rivalry - it wasn’t written in the best way, but the presence of their rivalry was very much appreciated as a part of the plot. I like how Snape’s view of her stand in contrast to everything she did “to help” them and I think it adds a bit more depth to both of their characters.

The Weasleys - I loved all of their background plots. Such a wholesome addition.

Joking about Rakepick - it’s a very small thing, but I loved every mention of their fear that Rakepick is going to kill them. Very amusing.

Dumbledore’s absence - it just felt too convenient, so MC’d be able to do more things without supervision. It didn’t sit well with me and just felt like a cop-out.

Detention - Even though it was a shame that MC didn’t get her usual 100 house points at the end of the year, I do appreciate the fact that Dumbledore finally punished her bad behavior. Took him long enough, but it’s a start.

Quidditch:

I know it’s technically supposed to be in the second year, but since it’s started when MC was already in her 4th year, I treat it as if it’s part this year.

I think this addition improves the game significantly. The mechanics are fun and the plot is okay.

Penny’s role is very out of place and like I said before, it makes me love her character less and less. The new characters, however, are really interesting. I feel like each brings a new thing that no other character has brought before.

Skye - Although she left a very bad first impression, I think overall she’s okay. Her backstory is interesting and she makes the player want to win, for themselves and for her.

McNully - I think he’s great. Talk too much? Sure, but that’s part of his charm. He’s funny and interesting, and by far contributed the most to get MC in the team.

Orion - Again, it took me a while to like him, but his bs attitude became very comforting at times and I grew to like his weird dialogues.

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Final thoughts:

This year was interesting and much more than the previous ones, in almost any aspect. It wasn’t perfect, but if I take everything into consideration, I think it was a successful year and my new favorite.

I know year 5 is way messier and incoherent, so I don’t have a lot of expectations. I’m just glad that we got this far and the story was still interesting enough to keep me going.

#hphm #hogwarts mystery #hphm year 4 #end of year 4 #mc #hphm mc

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