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The Resurrection of Magolor

Happy Easter, or as I like to call it, Magolor Day!

Keep reading

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remember to leave out some milk and apples for Magolor this fine Magolor Day Eve

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i put this in my drafts for tax season but then i forgot it was tax season. i have to do my taxes

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taranzolor? 👉👈

do not make me tap the sign

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It's the man the myth the legend Sir... Arthur? Othur? Which of these several IDs that came tumbling out of his pockets is real

He's not a fighter by any means; his skills lie in Talking, Handling Resources, and Scheming Strategy. If the general public found out his real personality it would make this job of Talking much more difficult and potentially make the entire rest of the GSA look bad. So. You'll keep quiet, right. Right

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sketching back into the swing of things. maybe. perhaps

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i hope people had a good last few days of the year I've been thinking about how you should maybe not go to bed fully equipped. have a restful new year

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for the record, i am less interested in, say, evidence for kirby being one gender or another, and more interested in how people define canon/fanon when it comes to a matter like this

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last night i was reminded of one of my extremely few Hater Moments (lighthearted) about this series and i never got around to fully articulating my thoughts on it, so it is once again time for our regularly-scheduled kirby rant:

the spider sectonia reveal was poorly-executed on every level.

to start with, this plot element was introduced when the series was in its worst throes of Not Putting The Fucking Lore In The Fucking Games, but I will happily concede that this reveal was at least in a game; just not the game it should have been in.

I almost wonder if the Sectonia Clone as a whole was a leftover from the fact that Robobot started out development as Triple Deluxe 2, but considering that a) TD2 was dropped pretty early on and b) Robobot is just full to the brim with fanservice and callbacks anyway, I don't feel there's much evidence for such a theory.

at any rate, reducing the otherwise very intriguing reveal of Sectonia's prior form to a blink-and-you'll-miss-it easter egg in an entirely different game is pretty... underwhelming. we've had plenty of "reveals" or cool nods and expansions to other lorebits in similar easter eggs, but none of them were nearly as important as "oh, by the way, here's what the character whose whole arc revolves around personal and physical image used to look like! in a totally unrelated game!"

but that's the tamest complaint. that's just the accessibility of this information, which could have been better but certainly could have been worse.

the biggest problem is Sectonia's design. it's bad. it is just not good, fellas. she is literally just genderbent Taranza. it fails visually, it fails conceptually, and it fails really hard story-wise.

this design was so uninspired that when people in the EN sphere first saw it, tons of people thought it just was Taranza. then when we got screenshots, model rips, etc., it was still so painfully similar to Taranza that it made people assume HAL was saying Taranza and Sectonia were related - which turned into just as much of a shitfight as you might think.

even if this weren't attached to such a crucial character reveal, it's just downright a bad design! instead of taking even the slightest efforts to differentiate Sectonia from Taranza, they did the laziest, most barebones "uhhhhhh what if taranza But Girl" design shift possible. she's wearing the exact same outfit as Taranza, just palette-swapped. so little effort went into both the concepting stage and the modelling stage. she's just Taranza's model with the merest tweaks to make sure you know this is a Girl Spider.

genuinely, I would be a hundred times more amenable to this entire plot point if HAL had just bothered to give her an actual design.

but the problem is, making Sectonia a spider kind of just fucks everything about her story and contradicts itself at multiple points.

the aesthetic and theme language in TD is very clear. this is one of the biggest strengths that both it and Robobot share - the identity and literary through-lines of both games pervade every single visual element of them. Robobot tells its tale of capitalistic tech-fuelled colonialism through every part of the game from level backgrounds, to enemy designs, right down to surgical decisions like mechanising the pinwheel tree that was such a fond image from KRtD. every tiny thing bore the mark of the HWC, whether metaphorically or literally, such that you spent the entire game never forgetting that there was one unified force behind all of this, and Haltmann at the end of the game was the culmination of this aesthetic.

TD did the exact same. every part of TD sells that it's a fantastical fairytale romp through a series of themed locations with a connecting thread of the invading Antr* force.

*(this is a way better romanisation than "antler" this is my hill)

if anything, I'd argue that TD's design language in this respect is tighter than Robobot's, because Robobot had a fairly broad theme of "industrialisation and hi-tech space future sci-fi" to draw its foes from, whereas TD had to condense its antagonists under the stricter banner of "evil insect army".

and they did incredibly. every point of design about the Antrs points straight to Sectonia and draws from her in some way or another. it's absolutely seamless. she's the perfect logical endpoint of Antr design from every angle: she's the literal queen bee of this insect hive and the perfect expression of their anatomy. she's bigger than the biggest Antr. she's more developed. she's more powerful. they were so careful and thorough about this design conceit that Antrs have multiple stages that all march straight up to Sectonia. we go from the tiny bronto burt and waddle dee clones with their little wings and eyes that seem so familiar, to the Antr soldiers, all the way up to the Lord Antrs who are one step away from Sectonia. they have stripes and facial markings to echo hers. it's all wrapped up with the genius bow of combining ants, bees, and wasps: they're all hymenoptera! the metaphor goes even deeper than that because there's a species of wasp that parasitizes spiders! controls them, even!

... except no actually, we've decided she's a spider too and all of that buildup and artful design means nothing.

it's awful. it's taking what is far and away one of the best-executed designs in the series and saying that all of that buildup and blatant connection of ideas meant nothing.

but that's just the visual end of it. Sectonia actually being a spider makes no sense in the lore, either.

first of all, TD's incredible design sense and artistic direction applies to Taranza as well. while he's obviously derivative of Magolor, within the context of TD he's clearly meant to evoke the sky fairies. he's designed to look much more like them than any of the insect characters. he's got the same body type, he moves the same way as them, he's a sky fairy with a spider theme. the game draws visual parallels between him and the sky fairies more than once; this is not unintentional.

this is part of what makes Taranza's role as Sectonia's right hand more impactful: he's only insect adjacent, and the design language would have you believe he's more closely related to the fairies than the insects, so him being with the bad guys is notable and interesting.

so why would a spider character be the ruling monarch of the insect hive? why would the line go ant, bigger ant, fancy ant, armoured ant, spider, wasp?

I mean, shit dude, the miiverse posts directly tell us that Sectonia used to "look like her insect underlings". it really feels like the decision to make her be a spider was a total spur-of-the-moment one, between how badly it interacts with the rest of the story and how lazy the design was. Sectonia's backstory had a couple of holes in it regarding the actual timeline of things, but those were just mysteries regarding what order everything happened in. she was both a bodyjacker and a good queen at one point, which don't exactly jive, so it becomes interesting to think about how those two facts coexist. on the other hand, her being a spider just gets shoehorned in there for no apparent reason other than to... heighten her connection to Taranza?

and that just dovetails into the complete mockery HAL made of Taranza's character development after TD, and THAT is a rant for another time.

there was just no point to it all. Sectonia being a spider adds nothing, removes a bunch of nuance and intrigue, and muddies both her story and the background world of TD.

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Introducing: Irunova and Kuitikkantra, Ancient lovers or besties or colleagues or whatever the fuck you know

Irunova is bold, brash, and tbh kind of a nosy ass sometimes. Despite the deliberate, elegant air it tends to put on, Irunova is pretty impulsive and is often quick to dive into new projects for the hell of it. If it gets in over its head uh no it didn’t, it meant to do that. 

Kuitikkantra (aka Tikka) might say it belongs in the trash, but that’s its anxiety talking. It’s kind of shy and doesn’t like face-to-face interaction so it genuinely has no fucking idea how it ended up with Irunova. Tikka likes to stay organized and prefers to carefully gather as much information as it can before getting into a situation, which… does not always happen when it is with Irunova! Whoops! But that’s ok

I drew these two so much during June and didn’t know how to introduce them so just take this for now lol

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“Whoaaa get a load of this guy he reacts negatively when strangers come to their house and say something annoying to them about the little drawings they shared with them for free what a loserrrrr I’m gonna hide behind an anonymous toggle and completely OWN him” do u hear urself

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oh i see im gettin weirdos because someone’s reblogging the ship post. I forgot I made that post and I still 100% stand by that LOL always remember when you add tags to a post you are still interacting with an entire human being who can see everything you are saying to them. Yes. Saying To Them.

why do you let the way other people tag things bother you

They’re my fuckin posts dude i see all of them. Also did you check how many years ago the last post I made complaining about it at all was from before revealing how much of my blog you’ve lovingly read through

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why do you let the way other people tag things bother you

They’re my fuckin posts dude i see all of them. Also did you check how many years ago the last post I made complaining about it at all was from before revealing how much of my blog you’ve lovingly read through

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ive been thinking about it all day im going to have dreams about it. your honor i love him so much. obviously inspired by @winged-eggers glorious thing. sorry if this is uncool ive just been sitting here thinking about it for hours so i had to do something shkwnd

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hi. hello. just dropping in to say im in love with your work and i owe you my life and im sorry if im weird and cringe in your notifs i am mentally ill and just so so so silly and i see a lot of your stuff and my brain explodes into confetti. which is a good thing. thank you so much for sharing your stuff. im so grateful that i get to see something that beings me so much unadulterated and soul-deep glee. i hope you have an incredible day and pet several cute and friendly animals and find money on the ground and get a tasty little treat !!!!!!!!!

hehe I'm glad you're having fun here <3

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Is there really any shame in fucking around and filing off serial numbers and replacing them with new ones if you’re just putting him right back into a different fanwork setting. Is it all that bad to see a freak and go “I want to play with a similar freak in this other setting”. I want whatever diseases THAT guy has but in this other context. Putting him in a rock tumbler organically adjusting him into what makes sense in this other environment. It’s not serious

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important Irunova fact to consider is that it is 8ft long. It weighs a lot. Might be lowballing it even

Tikka is about 6ft tall and that weight is super duper bullshit math based on ground beef, which Tikka is not made of. Might have overshot it but the point is all my kirby characters are fucking big and sometimes I remember and it scares me. I should do a size chart (has been saying this for 3 years)