#I guess this counts as analysis but it's more like me pointing out stuff I found insteresting | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

flanpucci · 2 months

Text

I already talked about why I love Pucci on a logical sort of level but I didn't get in depth about what I think and feel about him as a character and why he stuck with me enough to get him permanently tattooed on my skin so I'm gonna get into it a little bit. Feel free to skip this one because it's not really analysis and delves a tiny bit into interpretation/headcanon so I guess it's more blogposting than anything.

To be honest although I really liked his design and the cool black representation he is, and Whitesnake was instantly my favorite stand, I didn't like him right away, I thought he was a little bit of a weirdo in his introduction scene with Miraschon, and it took some time for him to grow on me. His design and themes land right in the middle of stuff I've been interested in since forever (Christianity, the moon, space, technology, arts, science...) so of course I had an interest in him. I remember that I really liked the fact that even though he's a priest he's knee deep in the occult with the green baby and making Foo Fighters etc, I thought that was super interesting. It took me til the end of the part to root for him, and then when he was defeated, I realized that I wasn't as happy as I should have been lol.

I guess one of the first reasons why I was touched by Pucci on a personal level is that I felt really strongly empathic towards him, and his behavior and actions just let me feel like I caught a glimpse of his many emotions inside, even though he has a thick facade. For example, his loneliness felt very real to me. Having lost most of his family, and his dear ones by his own fault, them being taken away from him, him choosing to live a celibate life in the clergy, shutting himself in a prison for the biggest part of his life... His self inflicted suffering just saddened me a lot deep down inside. He's also got big existential dread, wondering about the greater purpose of his life from his childhood. Isn't this something that touches everyone at some point?

But not many people have their entire beliefs about their existence and identity crushed at a young age in their life. Pucci, when his brother is found out to be alive, has everything that he built himself upon, his justification for being alive, completely shattered. It then turns into tragedy, yet he seems to find a little hope and comfort with Dio, only for them to be crushed again when he dies. And then he holds on to this impossible grief for 22 whole years, unable to accept that his fate in this world is to suffer so much loss. We don't see him sad after his sister died, we don't see him cry or flinch. Living his life in this manner, he surely had to have a lot of pent up emotion, which he surely dealt with by dissociating them from himself and pushing them onto Whitesnake. But not entirely, it's a little 'see-through'. When you think of it, he's amongst the most 'perfect' characters in the series, he's superior, composed, poised, tightly upkept, articulate. He has both an advantage in status and seniority in age over almost everyone in the part. He seems to be well adjusted and respected by people working in the prison, and in the city. Yet he's also very faillible, often prone to panic, he begs for his life at multiple times. Scenes like the frog scene where he slips and messes up the prime number count because there are frogs on his expensive pants make him reek of humanity when otherwise he could easily feel 'out of reach' and inhuman because of how superior he is (like let's say, Kars is, which is a lot of his appeal though!). Same when I recently discovered his watch is worth several thousand dollars. It felt like peeking into his true self right through the wall of righteousness that he built to protect himself and further the plan. His bad sides and inclination towards cardinal sins are really fun to watch and try to notice. That's also why I don't like when people pass him off as a good person, because to me he's really not, he wouldn't be half as interesting if he was! But he's not completely evil either, and as Weather tells him, being so sure that his evil is necessary for a greater purpose is what makes it even more heart breaking to me.

On top of that, his quirks and unique traits make him both very endearing and relatable, especially if you happen to have similar ones! In my case counting has been my primary means of shutting down anxiety attacks for years now, and when I saw him do it too, I automatically felt really drawn to him. Same goes for his ramblings in the worst moments, they made him really stand out, and I felt drawn to him because of some examples he used that hit close to my interests. If you've read my other analysis maybe you know that I tend to interpret him as autistic and so this hits close to home too. In the same manner, the fact that such a cool and powerful character grew up with a canon disability (in his foot) made me feel happy as a disabled person.

There are scenes where he expresses love and devotion very directly and in a raw way, which is very rare, and was also surprising because of how indirect he usually is to make a point... His love for Dio however you wish to interpret the nature of it is deep and sincere and rooted in both despair towards his impossible situation and the hope that maybe another miracle could occur and turn things around for him. I thought the evolution of the way he talks about Dio was really interesting and it moved me to see him very attached to his dear friend. Also the scenes with Dio let us see how sweet and interested he is when he's with someone he gets along with, and how different Dio behaved towards him made me like Dio a lot more too.

When I watched Stone Ocean I had just finished The Outer Wilds and FFXIV Endwalker, and in a way these 3 pieces of media hit the same nerve in me. I was thinking a lot about the purpose of existence and the end of the universe, so I really wanted Pucci to fulfill his potential and go as far as he could, taking the entire universe with him, breaking every rule of his world and becoming bigger than the story itself. It's still how I see him and why I admire him a lot. I was very shaken by his death and the part it played in the entire series. In a sense I get the feeling that he was obsessed with destiny because he knew he was created to do something, and he was right, he was created by Araki only to suffer his horrible backstory, to have everything taken from him. But his extraordinary inability to accept it pushed him to break the wall of the story and try to subtract himself from it, while opening everyone's eyes on the cruelty of the (fictional?) world they live in, and giving humanity the possibility to be at peace with it. The first time I saw the ending, I was completely crushed by the weight Araki put on him, making his total erasure from the world the only condition for everyone's life to suddenly become better, almost perfect. I was disgusted that it was expected from me to be happy that the world was finally rid of him when it all started with an impossible to predict chain of events. Now that I look back at the ending, I think maybe I misunderstood it, and I've decided to believe that he maybe was freed from the curse that was his existence in the story, and that he took upon him many of all the 'wrong' that was in the original world, making it all right for the other characters. I hope Perla is happy in the new universe... Even though this is probably just delusional coping...

Although I feel sorry for Pucci and wish he could have solved his problems differently, I'm glad the story is sad as it is because otherwise I wouldn't have felt so deeply for him. In a sense I felt his pain so strongly that I was instantly drawn emotionally to find a way to 'solve' his situation, he's like I tormented soul that I have to appease, and that's why I pick up a pen and draw, write, or spread love and wholesomeness. That's also why I draw him peaceful or sleeping most of the time, why I bring my plushie to see nice things 😔🫶 I also get a lot of different feelings coming from Araki's way of drawing him throughout the part, and I think Pucci was a character that Araki learned to love and understand along the way too, instead of liking him from the start like he did Dio or Jolyne, but he probably was a lot to handle even for him lol.

Jojo's been one of my favorite mangas for more than 7 years now and I'm so glad Pucci was the last boss for it, embodying and carrying in him the legendary Dio without being overshadowed by such a legendary character, while giving the story and Dio's character the last missing piece of the puzzle to truly tie things up nicely. Saying goodbye to him and to Stone Ocean after watching it also meant saying goodbye to the universe that I had loved and enjoyed for many years so it was bittersweet. In any case he's the peak, the climax, the strongest and has permanently changed the course of one of the best mangas in existence with his actions, and I take a lot of pride in my taste and the fact that my favorite character is the one who did all that haha 😫

And lastly I'd like to say that even if it's not really related to Pucci as a character, this last year that I've been active in fandom, liking him as pushed me to develop my skills, I started drawing, got back into writing, went on trips cause I wanted an excuse to bring him to the Louvre, go out of my way and explore new places when I made that collection of pictures representing the 14 words, made friends, I'm going to Japan soon and I'll be bringing him with me to meet them, he has fueled my imagination and given me more inspiration than I've ever felt, and I'm forever grateful for that. It is not easy nowadays to feel very intense positive emotions, life can be stressful and tiring, so I'm thankful that liking him has given me the push I needed to start doing many new things, interest myself in the wonders of the world, go to church, explore my city, go see art, travel, feed my mind with knowledge and beauty. Heck I even listened to that Handel's CD, it was wonderful. And read an essay on prime numbers when I have math dyslexia!?

I don't know how much deeper I can get without sounding completely off my rocker so I'll leave you guys here, hope you enjoyed and feel free to tell me how you relate to your favorite characters and how much they mean to you!

Fame redraw for illustration by me~

#enrico pucci #pucci #jjba #jojo's bizarre adventure #stone ocean #jojo #wild as fuck post #i might be crazy #as you can see i dont relate at all with being an obsessive person too /s

27 notes · View notes

flecks-of-stardust · 4 months

Note

what are those mods that were cooler than MSC? if they're that good i have to try them out

So upon further thought of this topic, I think i’m misrepresenting my thoughts on my enjoyment of MSC. A more accurate way to put it would be that I had more fun with a lot of other mods. However, I don’t think it’s necessarily fair to compare MSC to them, because the goals of MSC are different from that of other smaller mods. I guess this counts as an analysis post; this will be long.

TLDR: I had more fun with a number of region mods and I think some modcats are cool, but Rain World’s design makes having a DLC that stays true to its core ethos difficult, so I find it hard to really blame the MSC team for MSC being a lackluster DLC.

Regions

When I say that I enjoyed other mods more than MSC, I think a lot of it is in the level editing (ie, lediting), in the sense that region mods have consistently wowed me far more than MSC’s regions ever did. Conceptually, the regions that it added were incredible; I loved seeing Moon as close to her prime as she could ever be shown in Spearmaster’s time (ie LTTM the region; DM), but also finding her ruined structure (MS) as Rivulet, and the idea behind Silent Construct (CL) is also fantastic. But gameplay wise? I didn’t particularly enjoy any of these regions, especially not CL. I hated the spider clogs that I had no way of dealing with, and overall I really just bumrushed it and cheated to get to the story. Metropolis (LC) and Outer Expanse were okay in terms of gameplay, but LC’s tiling and geometry is just kind of boring, if I had to be honest. It’s quite repetitive and not particularly unique, except for maybe Atop the Tallest Tower at a stretch. OE was fine by virtue of not really having another region to compare it to and also being comparatively more plant focused, but honestly, other mods have still wowed me more. So I dunno.

Like when it comes to having regions that feel interesting to explore and are also nice to look at, there’s always Pilgrims’ Ascent and Scorched District, both by Myrmice, and these two also fit so well with vanilla Rain World’s vibe to me. These two, along with the Mast from Snoodle, are all but canon to vanilla to me, because they just fit so well and add to vanilla while still maintaining their own identities as regions. And even beyond having to feel vanilla necessarily, because that’s not always the point of mods, there’s regions like Stormy Coast, Coral Caves, Howling Rift, more that I won’t list because of how long the list will get, but the point is that all of these regions give me more engaging gameplay and paths for exploration than I felt I got for any MSC added region. Granted it’s been a while since I played MSC’s content in full, and my memory of this stuff is generally poor, but I’d rather explore Aqueducts (OA) again than do MS. OA was big and I kept getting lost even with a map, but it was big and disorienting in a way that just felt better to me than MS. The same goes for Deserted Wastelands and CL, personally.

MSC regions feel very vanilla-like to me, in that they’re kind of easy to filter out of your conscious processing so you can focus on other things. I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing, but for the price that you have to pay for Downpour, I think it falls a little short. The thing is that MSC is very much story-focused, putting more emphasis on the slugcats you play as and their stories rather than the lediting of the regions exclusive to them (in my opinion anyways. I ain’t a leditor). Which brings me to my next point:

Modcats and Story

This might be a bit of a hot take, but I think Rain World is inherently a gameplay focused game that doesn’t support much overt story or plot. The lore in all three vanilla campaigns is entirely optional, and if you kill Moon? Fuck you! No lore for you! And even if you wanted the lore, you have to figure out that pearls have to be taken to her to be read, and that the colored ones have unique lore, and you have to find them and hope the scavs don’t take the pearl first. Even with Hunter, you can choose to toss the green neuron and do your own thing. It doesn’t even stop you from ascending either. The story is entirely optional in Rain World. So then to add any story focused campaign at all inherently takes it away from Rain World’s initial design. And on top of that, you’re playing as a slugcat. It’s really hard to add any sort of story in Rain World that doesn’t circle back to iterators in some way. But then what else do you do besides ascend? Eat a few specific types of food? Gourmand does that. Kill a specific creature? That’s Artificer’s thing. Talk to all the echoes? That’s Saint, and kind of Hunter in a way. What else can you do without radically changing the structure of Rain World itself? And to that end, would that still be Rain World? I’m not saying it’s impossible to have a story based campaign that doesn’t involve iterators, but I do think that it’s really difficult to have them be completely irrelevant to the story and still have an engaging story, because Rain World itself is so not story focused. But if you don’t add story, then what do you do in the campaign that doesn’t make it just a rehashed version of Survivor’s campaign?

So like. I can’t really take issue with MSC’s story based focus that much, because genuinely, what else do you do? And basically any modded slugcat available in 1.9 that I think is worth trying falls into the same category. I think Pitch Black is really promising, but it introduces A Lot of changes to the world, and there’s currently almost no story. Vinki isn’t iterator focused necessarily, but their story still hinges on pissing Pebbles off and is overall very silly (not in a bad way! But it doesn’t fit the vibe of Rain World). And Gravel Eater,, you can’t get more intertwined with iterators than with GE’s story, but they’re still my favorite modcat because of how detailed their story is and how interesting their mechanics are. And if you just have a scug with abilities and no story, that’s… not really interesting to play, because then it’s essentially just Survivor, but you’re able to like, say, make spore puffs for free.

Maybe I’m just not creative enough in this aspect, idk. But genuinely I can’t think of much else to do in this game that doesn’t involve iterators in some way. If you know me, you’d know I’m Iterators McGee who has written 70k+ words about a character who has literally no canon dialogue. I fucking love iterators, but I think their stories should be separate from that of slugcats, but in game, just. How? I genuinely don’t know.

Other Thoughts

I think in some ways I view MSC as more of a framework that has allowed other people to build their own stories off of it. The only other mod that has a scale even remotely comparable to MSC is Drought, which is also iterator centric in story. I can’t speak to its lediting since I haven’t played Drought myself (but I’ve heard the quality… fluctuates?), but story wise… yeah. I don’t know. I just don’t think Rain World can really have a DLC that doesn’t pull it away from its original ethos in some way. I would not want Drought to be a DLC either, as cool as I think it is, and I still value a lot of things about MSC. It’s lackluster as a DLC because again, what sort of campaign can you add that doesn’t add a story that isn’t iterator related in any way?

I guess the way to summarize this is that I think MSC tells some really interesting stories through its gameplay. Even the parts I hated are part of the story it’s trying to tell, and on that front I think it does well. But by virtue of being story focused (and, by virtue of story in this game being very iterator centric), it doesn’t feel as much like Rain World, and so it’s not as good as a DLC as it would have been as just a mod. And now that it exists and is widely used, other people have been spurred to make their own ideas and show their creativity, going bigger and bolder than MSC in some aspects. And regarding me enjoying region mods more than MSC’s lediting, I think enjoying the region for being a region is kind of the fucking point of playing a region mod, whereas that isn’t exactly MSC’s focus. So some things are hard to compare.

This is kind of an incoherent ramble but I hope I got the main points across. I still like MSC and I won’t tolerate anyone bashing it here. You will get blocked.

#not adding any tags really but. up it goes i guess

12 notes · View notes

cascadiums · 2 years

Note

Ooh, come back here and tell me more about Quincey never needing to be woken up (I am 80% sure I am aware of the Thing with Quincey Morris)

(under a cut because I'm talking about the end of the book so first time readers, please skip. also forgive me, I got distracted and ended up on a wider thing of what the hell is up with Quincey in general)

I first encountered the Something Is Wrong With Quincey Morris theories in university. My seminar tutor was convinced that Bram Stoker had been to the US between drafts of Dracula and something happened to make him disillusioned with the politics of the country, and so he edited Quincey Morris to be more ambiguous and less heroic. Before that I hadn't noticed Quincey was sort of weird, but once it got pointed out, I couldn't drop it, and that led me to this:

Simmons, James R. “‘If America Goes on Breeding Men Like That’: ‘Dracula’s’ Quincey Morris Problematized.” Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, vol. 12, no. 4 (48), 2002, pp. 425–36.

I don't have the pdf but jstor gives you free online access to so many papers per month if anyone wants to read.

It's not the first published text on the topic, but it's the first one I read that argued Quincey is a vampire. It's a very entertaining read, it sets up all the evidence like an Agatha Christie plot and makes Quincey seem really suspicious, for reasons such as:

There is no evidence in the novel that he sleeps because he's always patrolling for bats or happens to have already got up when people go to wake him

His transfusion doesn't help Lucy

It's never explained who drugged the servants in Lucy's house right before he coincidentally appears

He fired a gun into the house, what the hell Quincey

Why the hell is a cowboy here anyway? Seems suspicious, he must be undead

For me it veers between very compelling and verging on silly, but it's definitely fun. It sort of feels like the middle ground between literary analysis and a conspiracy theory. But let's face it, there is definitely something wrong with Quincey.

So many people don't even know he's in Dracula. He barely ever makes it into adaptations despite being the man who kills the Count. Arguably, the Big Hero of Dracula. The first guy to mention vampires in Dracula. He should be iconic. Instead, even a lot of gothic lit textbooks forget he's even there. He just sort of.,, falls out of the narrative. I don't know what it is, but something about the way Quincey is written makes him lose significance. His death scene is actually really fucking interesting too! Ties in with some major symbolic themes, is really sad, and yet doesn't make much impact outside of the text. Something is Weird with him.

Some of the theories I've seen include him being a double agent and he's Dracula's real assistant (I guess Renfield is just the distraction?), he's undead, he's a werewolf (okay, I can't find any evidence of this one now but unless it was a weird dream, I swear I read it somewhere), and that he's the result of a passive aggressive character assassination of the US by Bram Stoker because he fell out of love with the notion of cowboys.

I have to confess, I am obsessed with all these theories. I don't really think most of them work, but I am obsessed with them regardless. Because whatever is going on, Quincey Morris is an Outsider. He's like the Count and Van Helsing but in some ways moreso. They get so much more dialogue than him to give you an idea of their mindset, so however separated from the other characters they are, the reader can access them. But Quincey is laconic. His past is ambiguous, his necessity to the plot is apparently debatable, and his actions are kind of baffling. The story treats him very strangely, and theories like that try to bridge the gap.

I don't know, I guess this is sort of reader-response theory? For me it's less about the content of the theories and more about the existence of the theories. Something Is Wrong With Quincey Morris is evidence of some weird stuff going on in the text with the narrative not knowing how to treat him. The novel simulated a battle between historic Europe and modern Britain, and somehow America won, which nobody realised was an option and so the whole thing folded in on itself and erased the cowboy from our collective consciousness.

#dracula daily #quincey morris favourite weird guy #animate-mush

146 notes · View notes

bimboficationblues · 4 months

Note

i haven't read that molly smith book but just from my knowledge of marx your analysis looks wrong to me. i'm aware of two places where marx claims that wage labor is forced labor: the 1844 manuscripts and capital volume 3. i'm going to assume you don't care about the former, so for the latter: "We saw also that capital -- and the capitalist is merely capital personified and functions in the process of production solely as the agent of capital -- in its corresponding social process of production, pumps a definite quantity of surplus-labour out of the direct producers, or labourers; capital obtains this surplus-labour without an equivalent, and in essence it always remains forced labour -- no matter how much it may seem to result from free contractual agreement."

by my count, you are actually succumbing to the appearance that wage labor is the "result of free contractual agreement". marx uses the word "seem" here, and when he does that it tends to mean that it is appearance and not reality. so he's explicitly saying that wage labor is not consensual ("the result of free contractual agreement") but forced labor. as far as i'm aware, we just refer to forced sexual labor as rape. you claimed in your post that this isn't the case so please elaborate

"it’s a framework that can’t distinguish between tricks that were okay or fine to deal with and times where you were physically assaulted or actively manipulated" i don't find this persuasive because, as a student of republican theory, you should know that it's perfectly possible to even have *literal slavery* where the master is benevolent and labor under him is fine compared to labor under a harsher slavemaster. yes, slavery and wage labor are different, but they share the trait of being forced labor, which i think is what matters here. when marx talks about the formal freedom of the wage laborer, that's clearly meant to show that bourgeois notions of freedom (which, it seems to me, is what's being alluded to in the previous quote to distinguish good and bad tricks) are impoverished, the "double freedom" is obviously supposed to be sarcastic/seething and implicitly contrasted to some sort of a real freedom to be realized in communism

obviously, marx didn't want to criminalize sex work, but i'm not seeing how the inference that sex work (or at least FSSW - stuff like pornography is something else i guess, whatever we would want to call forced picture taking/video taping) is rape isn't accurate under his analysis. he and engels regularly disparaginly reffered to prostitution as the "community of women" and they disparagingly compared marriage to it, in both cases making a point about how the normalization of it causes people to have instrumental views of women. marx calls prostitution just one instance of the "general prostitution of the wage laborer", which isn't meant to imply that prostitution is nonproblematic but rather make other wage labor look problematic

I don't really agree with a lot of the assumptions you're bringing to the table here (your interpretation of Marx or that quote, the necessity of being in agreement with Marx or Engels [lol] on all things, the relevance of these points to what I'm talking about, the presumption of my intellectual obligations to anonymous people) and I think maybe reading that Smith & Mac book (or even something more in-depth/less targeted for a popular audience) would be a worthwhile use of time.

again, it's not like it's impossible to use more effective and clear language on this - there's nothing that obligates us to talk in the terms you're defending. is it "violence" for me to have to go to work? did it transform into "sexual violence" when I was doing sex work (or did it lose the sexual because it was virtual, as your parenthetical implies)? maybe! (though probably not, imo.) but I think talking about the weight of money and the market on our reasoning using moral-juridical shorthand has significant costs analytically (clarity, precision), politically (the entire trajectory of this idea as applied in the history of prostitution law), and ethically (in terms of evaluating and taking stock of our actions and harms). in fact the whole reference to pornography sort of troubles this particular narrative (paid sexual labor is rape when it's in-person but not when it's virtual or filmed, despite being produced by the same incentives?), which I think relies on the same idea of sexual labor as unique/mystified compared to other labor that I was criticizing. I'm not pushing a "sex work as empowerment" line here and never have; most other current or former sex workers I know wouldn't. but this is a framework that doesn't clarify, it obscures by reinforcing criminalization and stigmatization, and makes it actively more difficult for sex workers to talk about the range and depth of their experiences in the context of their needs and demands as laborers, both in their own struggle and as part of a larger struggle. it is ethically and politically worthless as a line of thought.

anyway I think this is all quite condescending and in poor taste.

10 notes · View notes

deathsmallcaps · 1 year

Text

(USA based sorry)

I’m definitely speaking into an echo chamber but like.

Nearly every algebra student I tutor ends up with a word problem involving the gender wage gap. And they’re all confounded by it and have no clue.

And a guy in my fucking Calc 3 class was like “wait you guys were serious? That’s real?” When it came up. BRO YOU’RE ABOUT OLD ENOUGH TO DRINK???

It’s amazing what is and isn’t common knowledge. Feminist history isn’t taught past “and then women got their right to vote :)))))).” With occasional mentions of Title IX and the late 1900s waves of feminism. Of course only in in-depth history classes, not general Ed. Wow.

I am not in training to be a historian or a history teacher, but by all that is right in the world I hope it becomes more normalized and common to speak about shit that is LESS than 100 years ago in depth when it comes to American History & culture. Wtf. I swear even when I took AP history* the professor was afraid to touch on that stuff. For some reason (happily) my English teachers were a lot more willing to teach about modern history & minority stories.

And this is just what affects my white anglo cishetallo abled-passing housed female life personally. I cannot truly imagine the feeling of personal erasure & irritation one of comes to other identities & issues that have only relatively recently been resolved, addressed, acknowledged or even only pointedly ignored. I am fucking angry FOR you and can’t wait for things to change. You ALL deserve better. Don’t forget that.

It’s not your job to educate these people or their children (unless you’re literally a history teacher or something) but I want to shake the people who decide these what gets taught until the cowardice & insecurity & thoughtlessness & malice & election-based anxiety shits out of their assholes and leaves their hearts hungering for intelligent, thoughtful & interested discussions on modern issues and genuine history that should not be squeezed into the last pages of textbooks out of fear of offending paper white & paper thin pride.

Human rights deserve attention. Human rights should not have to be a radical talking point. It should be both as natural and expected as breathing clean air & as ingrained and knowable as to be accessible in math problems.

There is so much to be done. And it is exhausting. But please know that you are not alone.

*interesting tidbit below but basically irrelevant to the above post

I took AP america history to learn about the parts of American history that are never, or barely, covered in history classes throughout the grades. Basically, if it happened outside of the Puritans-WWII, it’s got a poor chance chance of in-depth coverage. And while the class did teach me good analysis skills and some interesting facts, it mostly covered the exact fucking periods I mentioned above.

And you know what? Literally right before we took the AP test, our teacher told us “study up on periods 2-7” (im pretty sure there are 9 periods of American history, forgive me it’s been like 5 years) “they never test on 1, 8 or 9”. Guess what the essay questions were on. And guess what time periods 1,8 & 9 are? If you posited precolonial america, the mid 1900s and modern day, ding ding ding you’re the winner! :))))))

(AP classes are worth it if you’re bored and/or trying to cut down on the amount of classes you’ll take in college & thus save money. But a lot (not all) of the AP certified teachers will try to convince you it’s the be all, end all of learning in high school. Also the weighted GPAs are a scam. No one looks at those. If you’re worried about keeping a good average, stick to the class level that fits within both circles of ‘not boring’ and ‘not going to wreck your life’. You can take an AP test and have it count and not take the class. Just be warned it is genuinely difficult.)

#idk where this is went but I am feeling passionate #context: I’m in the middle of getting a Math Education degree and am avoiding homework

32 notes · View notes

mkaroy · 22 days

Text

guys guess what JEREMIKE SONG ANALYSIS

today on the chopping block is 🥁🥁🥁🥁

yeah i’m breaking hearts today i cried when i first thought of this to jeremike

“Turn away, if you could get me a drink of water 'cause my lips are chapped and faded” OKAY SO post bite post scoop jeremike, literally right before pizza sim, the idea of being the manager there is enticing to mike, and by this point he’s basically planned his su*cide and hasn’t exactly told jeremy because he knows that he would get in his way and he wants his last week to be happy and such, but hes so suspicious about it, like jeremy notices how sappy he’s being and i think mike just shys away from the conversation because it hurts too bad LOL

“My sisters and my brothers, still” do you. do you just think about how excited he’ll be to see his siblings again… cuz i do…

“I will not kiss you 'cause the hardest part of this is leaving you.” michael pushing jeremy away more and more often because he doesn’t want jeremy to get in his way of “doing the right thing”

“Now turn away, 'cause I'm awful just to see. 'Cause all my hair's abandoned all my body” Michael doesn’t understand how someone can love a “monster” like him, like physically and emotionally he thinks he’s a monster and it makes him feel bad that jeremy has to look at that, giving him more reason to yknow, kill himself.

“…know that I will never marry” Holy shit. HOLY SHIT. BEING GAY IN THE 80S?? OKAY THATS THE FIRST PART BUT LIKE, MICHAEL IS REJECTING A HAPPY LONG LIFE WITH SOMEONE WHO LOVES HIM UNCONDITIONALLY??? JUST BECAUSE HE FEEL STHAT THATS RIGHT??? THIS LIKE TEARS ME APART.

“Baby I'm just soggy from the chemo, but counting down the days to go” I imagine this line as michael making up excuses to jeremy on why he’s acting so weird (like oh i’m just soggy and sad because of so and so) but secretly he’s counting how many days he has left before his entire life that he and jeremy have built up crumbles, especially because right before this line he literally drops one of the most soul crushing emotions ever (i will never marry) just to be like “aha don’t worry jeremy im so fine rn” (he ain’t)

“It just ain't living” he literally cant deal with living with all the trauma he has. jeremy does want him to get better but mike is an impatient man with that kinda stuff. he’s convinced he’ll never be able to live properly which like, yknow fair, BUT STILL MAN DONT KYS

“…and I just hope you know that if you say goodbye today I'd ask you to be true” OH. MY. GOD???? this is like okay pov it’s his last morning and the last time he sees jeremy, jeremy has an inkling that somethings going on but he doesn’t know this is his last time seeing mike. so when he says goodbye to mike and gives him a little kith mike nearly breaks down because oh god. he is dying today, this is the last time he’s gonna see this man.

“'Cause the hardest part of this is leaving you” SELF EXPLAINITORY. headcanon that michael second guesses a lot about the plan. but he never backs out because he’s so in his head that it would be best, but good god does he miss jeremy. holy shit this chorus has me in a chokehold. guys you don’t understand i just listened to the song again ACTUAL TEARS THE ANIMATIC IN MY HEAD HURTS

#jeremike #jeremike fnaf #this barely even fnaf anymore #making up my OWN lore #still #fnaf #Spotify

6 notes · View notes

cursedvibes · 10 months

Text

Fanfic Writer Bingo

Tagged by @voxofthevoid Thank you!

Mine:

About the unchecked ones:

I started reading fic on ff.net and also read some stuff on livejournal (mostly manga analysis tho), but I never made an account there

I've only glimpsed at Wattpad a few times and thought it was very difficult to navigate and I think for most fics you also needed to create an account to view them and that too much of a hassle for me

roleplaying never really appealed to me

I proofread my fic while I'm writing them, usually for the simple reason that when I don't write everything in one sitting, starting to read what I wrote from the beggining or the previous section helps me get into the right mindset for the story. Although I guess it counts if we use "beta" as another person reading my fic. I have technically a beta reader, but she doesn't have the stomach for the more bloody stuff I write...

I usually try to organize my thoughts more when I write comments and pick out specific scenes or lines I liked the most because I also always like knowing what exactly my readers liked about a fic

I like fluff, but it depends a lot on my mood and it's not my favourite trope

same as what vox said, fanfics aren't a genre, they're a medium, a form of writing like you wouldn't call a novella a genre

I want to write for Naruto too at some point, but I haven't gotten around to it yet, so it's just jjk

I've not had the courage to commission artist for my fic (I also don't have PayPal)

Since I proofread while writing, all I have to do at the end is read it all as one coherent story and see if it checks out. However, it is very tedious to remove the empty spaces between paragraphs in ao3. By now I got a rhythm tho.

I don't get drunk that often and if I do, I don't have the mind to write anything

I like having something to drink next to me, but I don't drink coffee and tea only if I write in the morning

Blank:

Tagging: @hxhhasmysoul @urostakako and whoever else wants to do this

#'wrote a self-indulgent fic' is funny because all my fic are self-indulgent

9 notes · View notes

offbrand-deltatraveler · 2 years

Text

You ever wonder why fan content of Deltarune’s future Chapters never really hits the same way as the real thing?

Like, no matter how accurate it can get to how things could go down in the original game, it always feels like something that you just can’t put your finger on is missing?

Or is that just me

If you are like me and do wonder why you feel that way, you’re in luck. Because what you’ve stumbled upon today an analysis post about it

Spoiler Alert: It’s not because of the ideas present in the Chapter 3+ take in question, nor is it because none of us are Toby Fox (Not directly, anyway)

It’s because we don’t add anything

—————————————————————————————————————

Not in the sense that we add nothing to the game’s story, considering we literally hand-craft the entire hypothetical story by ourselves. I’m talking about the… Revealed stuff, I guess

You know how in Chapter 1, when you check Asriel’s bed, the game console under it has two controllers? One official and one knockoff?

Originally, people thought the knockoff controller was used by Kris, and that this interaction was meant to further symbolize how the game frames them as a bit of a loser compared to Asriel. But it was actually revealed in Chapter 2 that this wasn’t the case. The knockoff controller was instead used by Asriel so Kris could have the real one

And you know how prior to Chapter 2, we didn’t have as much of an idea that Dark World food didn’t actually count as real food? We had that one Susie line to work with about nothing she eats there mattering, but it was more solidified once we saw that Kris ripped their Soul out to eat a pie because they were starving from how little they had eaten that day (And didn’t want us going outside to harass people in the middle of the night)

Or how, again, prior to Chapter 2, we had no clue that Berdly could’ve ever been into gaming? All we knew is that he was an asshole smart kid that likes to put Kris down about how much of a loser they are. He could never BALLIN’. Or so we thought

And or so we no longer think, now that 2 years later we’ve discovered not only that he and Kris are actually speedrunning rivals and that was just lighthearted banter, but also that he really was BALLIN’ after all, and that he and Noelle are a lot more than just one-time project partners

Something about Sans

You probably get the point by now, but in case you didn’t:

We don’t just add things

It’s because while we do do a lot of building in terms of Dark World stuff, that’s because it’s an unexplored Dark World. It’s new inherently, you can put literally anything you want in it as long as it follows the theme of that Dark World’s room. Unlike adding new Dark World characters, going wild as we explore the completely uncharted territory in front of us, everything we do with the characters we already have, Darkner or not, is ultimately based solely on that which we already know

Takes on future Chapters don’t have things like Catti & Kris’s occult studies, or Jockington’s zine. Or Noelle’s fear of mice or love for scary things. Or Queen sipping battery acid to the beat of the music after every text box (As well as Rouxls being her lamp). Third Dark World example (Hold On It Will Come To Me)

For whatever the reason may be, we don’t just make stuff up the way Toby does. We always either recycle old stuff or add references that are way too modern to be included in the real thing. And that’s why we don’t have that same “Literally anything could happen at any time” flair. Because anything can’t happen at any time, anything only happens in the times we know they’re supposed to happen

Not that you can really blame the makers of this fan content though, to be fair. It’s not something we really think about immediately and I’d imagine there are some concerns about how poorly some things might age, especially after what happened with Mike

Though I think the biggest contributor to that is how in the scene of future content, there’s just generally a lot of “This person is barely a character. Get outta here with that shit” instead of “Is there a reason this character would have a Dark World or fill this role?”. When talking about the future of a game who’s creator is famous for pulling complete 180’s, we can’t be shooting down ideas left and right because “Lmao this dumbass thinks Jockington will have a serious story”. We can’t be telling each other certain ideas are unlikely based on stupid things like “This character can’t be important! They don’t even have a unique text sound!!” or “This is a single door. Dark Worlds don’t appear behind single doors”. This kind of limiting logic just isn’t something the creator of the real thing would adhere to

Unless the person in question thinks that like. A character or version of a character that originates from UT’s universe affects DR in any way, or Rouxls is secretly Gaster and will betray you, assassinating Seam (who actually turned out to be the real Queen of Spades) as he transforms into The Angel in the secret 8th Chapter. Or anything else that either goes back on something Toby said previously or is just bad storytelling

But yeah, that’s why. With limited information comes limited results. Who’d’ve guessed /lh

And nobody’s to blame for that, it just is. That being said though, I’d hope reading this post has inspired at least one person to go crazy. Go out and like. Find this really insignificant detail and just add the shit out of that

Like be that one guy who made that theory that the kitchen could end up being an Undertale throwback in the Dark World. Unironically have Rouxls make Mac & Cheese in such a manner that nobody can stop him. Make the Yoshi Kris sacrificed for an extra jump a Secret Boss. Give Napstablook a tragic backstory. Include your wildest headcanon. The possibilities are almost endless

“I am cringe but I am free” and so forth

—————————————————————————————————————

I actually forgot I was terrible at ending posts for a sec

#utdr analysis post #deltarune #utdr #deltarune chapter 3 #useful

43 notes · View notes

2hoothoots · 1 year

Note

I was wondering what if anything you thought of B-mask's P2 analysis on youtube! he brings up points of thematic dissonance about the way the maliks were handed (as well as wishing the interns/the P1 gang were better included which I think we all concur on)

ooh, LOVE a good video essay! i hadn't seen this one before but it was great to have on while i was sculpting this morning. i'm gonna link it here for anyone who hasn't seen it, if you've got the time it's a good watch:

youtube

i'd say i broadly agree with it, although i think the analysis loses me at the end. imo he tries to read in much too literally to the parallels between the Maliks and the real-life case of Tsar Nicholas II/the Romanov family. to me that's always been a much more allegorical reference, and i'd actually specifically point to '60s-era Cold War tensions between the USA and the USSR as a much closer thematic parallel to the whole Maligula thing, which is mentioned but not really dug into properly in the video. (in fact, i think that comparison makes the themes of propaganda in the game much clearer, especially given how the Psychonauts are so clearly American in all but name.) it's a shame, because i think everything else is pretty good stuff, but the last 20-or-so minutes feel pretty weak to me.

the video kind of pulls double-duty as an analysis of PN2's themes, and also a comparison and in some ways a critique of it versus the first game. that's something that i've been chewing over since... basically the moment it came out, haha, because i'm in the exact same boat of someone who's absolutely in love with the first game and doesn't quite feel like the sequel was as good (although it's a fantastic game in its own right and i love it a whole lot). so i'm gonna take this as an opportunity to dump my own thoughts on it! this is gonna get long so i'm putting it under a cut: tl;dr, the conclusion that i've basically come to on the game is that while it's not perfect, Psychonauts 2 is, in my opinion, probably the best possible version of what it is, given the circumstances around it and the nature of it as a crowdfunded sequel to a 2000s cult classic and a clear passion project by everyone involved.

the video brings up three main points of comparison/critique: the visuals, the structure/novelty of the gameplay, and the depth of the ensemble cast. i'm gonna borrow that structure, and then go into a little more of why i think certain decisions and compromises were made. overall, i think there were a lot of difficult decisions that had to be made during the development of PN2, and the more i dig into each one the more it seems like a lot of these decisions were made the only way they could be.

in terms of visuals: i can't disagree that the new game looks absolutely great, although i personally wish they'd gone just a little weirder with it. the stylized ugliness of the first game is one of my favourite things about it, and i know that part of that was due to the low poly count... but i dunno, i think there was still the opportunity to make the designs in PN2 a little less cute and a little more grotesque. it feels like the edge has been filed off, pun intended, and a little of the gloomy gothic feel of the first game is gone. i do love the look of the second game, but i can't help but feel that a little something was lost from moving from the deliberate asymmetry and exaggeration of the first game to something a little more... i guess i'd say 'clean' and palatable.

i can't lie, i think that's kind of a shame! but i also definitely get it, especially from a marketing standpoint. the style of PN1 is deeply mid-2000s, calling to mind properties like The Nightmare Before Christmas (which was cited by Tim as a direct inspiration for the game's artstyle) or Invader Zim (iirc, Jhonen Vasquez is a friend of the studio). there's definitely an argument to be made that that kind of angularity would feel dated in a modern game, and certainly similar games that have recently gotten refreshes (take Spyro, or Ratchet and Clank) have also moved towards a cleaner, cuter, more doe-eyed look. maybe that's just the aesthetic upgrade needed to make the game more appealing to a modern audience. (similarly, i think a lot of the tone shift between the games also has to do with being a product of their time. the first game feels a lot meaner, and the second more sincere, in a way that i think is in service to the shifting conversation around mental health. i think it's appropriate, but i do also miss some of the zingers from PN1, hahaha.)

gameplay: yeah, the lack of innovation in the structure of the mental levels is something i absolutely agree with. PN1 did a fantastic job of making every level feel deeply unique, and tying that into the themes of each level as well (ludonarrative!). even when these levels were a little frustrating to actually play, it always felt in service to what the game was trying to do. take how the Milkman Conspiracy is confusing and convoluted and even a little nauseating to navigate, all deliberately designed to create that uneasy atmosphere; or how Black Velvetopia literally traps players in a loop, constantly being forced backwards and only able to make forward progress in little steps before it all comes crashing back down again, as a reflection of Edgar's anger issues. in comparison, other than the noteworthy exception of Compton's Cookoff, most of the PN2 levels are just 'big platforming area that branches off from a hub'.

but i think the video stops short of diving into what i feel is the reason why some of these levels are less innovative. imo it comes down to the shifting market. 3D collect-a-thon platformers aren't really a thing any more, not like they used to be. the genre feels like it's stagnated in a lot of ways; it's not being innovated upon or moved forward, and it's also not something players are really used to any more. again, i think there's an argument to be made that designing a level that's unique but a little obtuse and clunky (take Gloria's Theater - which is great, but by god does it seriously suck to play the first time round) would be a huge turn-off to a lot of players. i sympathise with the devs feeling like they needed to prioritise a smoother platforming gameplay experience, rather than getting a little weirder with it.

story and ensemble cast - yeah, it probably won't surprise anyone to hear that i really wish the interns had gotten more screentime and depth hahaha. i know not everyone loved them, but also, anyone who didn't love them is wrong. they're the best. give me one million new intern voice lines please now

anyway, i think my biggest critique of PN2 (esp. storywise) has always been that it feels like it has one more cast of characters than it knows what to do with. it introduces the interns and the Aquato family and the psychic 6, and between everything it feels like no individual group is given quite enough focus and screentime and room to breathe to really make them shine. so the obvious answer becomes, hey, why not just cut some of the characters?

but on the other hand, like... think about what this game is. this is a sequel from a studio that really doesn't do sequels (and afaik is never planning on doing another one, certainly not a PN3). this is a passion project 16 years in the making. it's a follow-up to a beloved cult classic, and it's something Tim and the others were only going to get the chance to do once, and from that perspective i absolutely can't blame them for wanting to put everything in it. it's clear the team were bursting with ideas and themes they wanted to touch on and plot threads to resolve and cool new characters to introduce, and this was their only opportunity to do so. in their position? i would've done the exact same thing every single time.

a related point that i see brought up a lot, and that i also agree with, is depth - something that's there in spades in PN1, but feels a little lacking in PN2. i think comparing the interns to the campers from PN1 is a pretty obvious way to compare the two games, and yeah, i'll wholly admit that they're one of my favourite things about the first game. they just make the whole summer camp setting feel so alive. there's a huge amount of depth and care given to them; each one has their own little drama that plays out, and while i think there are a few obvious standouts each of them is still interesting and compelling in their own way. that's the kind of depth that has fans coming back a decade after the came first came out. Tim famously got super sidetracked making MySpace pages for all the campers over the space of a few days so that he could really get into their heads and understand their characters. it's great.

most people who play the first game casually will never see any of that. heck, i barely saw anything from the campers on my first playthrough. it was only on subsequent plays, when i went digging and started diving into the fandom and the discussions, that i realised how much there was. i still find new cutscenes and bits of dialogue and interactions every time i play. hell, the fandom is still digging up cutting-room-floor stuff that suggests there was going to be even more interaction with them. i love that depth, i really do. but is it worth putting that much dev time into something that most players will never see? especially in a game when something as fundamental as the boss fights was nearly cut for lack of time and budget?

actually, cut content is something that's pretty interesting to talk about in itself. there's a ton of stuff that's been discovered through datamining: sidequests (like finding Nona in the forest), stuff from early story beats (like the whole Mentathlon - an early version of Hollis' mind?), a whole Gruloky minigame (which presumably would have helped flesh out the Aquato family), and new mechanics (like Otto's bottled emotions - the lines related to which give what is, to me, vitally important insight into some of the characters. i'm not kidding when i say that Norma's bottled sadness line is load-bearing for like 80% of the way i characterise her, it drives me nuts i swear.) in this cutting-room floor content are glimpses of a game that was even more ambitious - dare i say overambitious - than the final product ended up being. we'll never know how much of it actually had a chance of ending up in the game, and how much was cut early due to various reasons, but...

games are made differently now than they were in the 2000s. an AA title like Psychonauts 2 takes more hours, more manpower, and a lot more money than the original. (this isn't adjusted for inflation, but PN1's budget ended up being $11.5mil; in 2012 a projected Psychonauts sequel was ball-parked at $18mil, and i can only imagine that number's gone up.) like i said, i deeply love the depth of interactivity in PN1. but is something like that really feasible, or worthwhile, in the current climate? PN1 was made on some pretty serious crunch. it was a passion project from a small, dedicated team who worked themselves to the bone on it, and due to a number of factors it ended up being a commercial flop that almost ruined them. for PN2, the team were committed to eliminating crunch, which i think is really laudable, especially given the wider state of the industry. in terms of the scope and the cast, PN2 is broader in just about every way than its predecessor. if that was the decision made in favour of added depth to character interactions that only a small number of players would see, was that the right decision to make?

when i look at PN2, what i see, above everything else, is a series of compromises that were made in order to bring a game that a lot of people really cared about to life as best they could. in a lot of ways, it's nothing short of a marvel that the game exists at all. seriously, before the whole campaign dropped if you'd asked me whether i thought Psychonauts could ever get a sequel, i'd have thought you were playing a practical joke. it was a one-in-a-million shot, and they made it, and i kind of think that given everything Psychonauts 2 is actually a hell of a lot better than it has any right to be. there's a lot of factors to the story of its development - it's a sequel, it's a collect-a-thon platformer that released in 2021, it was crowdfunded, it's a passion project through and through, oh yeah and there was a global pandemic midway through development - and i don't think any of those things necessarily hold it back, but they definitely shape it in ways that i don't think can be ignored if you're talking about the game as a whole.

i don't think it's a perfect game. i don't think there is such a thing as a perfect game. but the more time passes and the more i think about it, i think this is... maybe the only version of Psychonauts 2 we could have gotten? i dunno if it's the best game it could have been, but i do think it's the best Psychonauts 2 it could have been, if that makes sense. and the game that it is is, in my opinion, really damn good.

#psychonauts #psychonauts 2 #we had a power cut while i was trying to post this but it's back now #so everybody gets to see my essay on my favourite video game and its sequel! unsurprisingly i have Thoughts #but yeah the video essay's definitely good. i might make a separate post that goes into more of what i see as the Themes of PN2 #because i agree w a lot of the video's points but i also think it misses the mark a few times #also would love to hear other peoples' thoughts on this!

45 notes · View notes

frozen-fountain · 6 months

Text

I pinched this list of writer asks from @runicmagitek, and would love to read everyone else's answers if you have a few minutes to kill.

How many works do you have on AO3? 17

What's your total AO3 word count? 281,634. Not bad for three years!

What fandoms do you write for? Final Fantasies VI, VII OG, and X once when I was briefly possessed and wrote a fic from Anima's point of view.

What are your top 5 fics by kudos? Into the Night Uncharted (Vincent character study exploring his relationships with all the other mains) You Grow the Flowers Yourself (Elmyra's time in Shinra captivity and the point at which the canon diverged) Prints (a series of four flash fics about FFVII couples post-canon and their pets; not that fluffy) Penitent (the abovementioned screed from Anima's point of view) Negative Space (brief flash fic about Relm painting, well, guess)

The top two are what you'd expect, but I love that some of my more out-there ideas were (relatively) well-received.

Do you respond to comments? Why or why not? Every single one. I wouldn't if it was hate, but if you've stopped by to wish me well and tell me you enjoyed something I created? Of course I'm going to respond. I write these for me, but I post them in the hope of finding those brief moments of connection.

What's the fic you wrote with the angstiest ending? Hard to say! Penitent is a miserable story about a woman stumbling from one nightmare to another and only finding relief when she's allowed to die; I intended for its ending to be salt in the wound, but a lot of people found it heartening, and I like that both options are there! My other foray into horror, Clownfish (the beginning of Jenova's influence on the Cetra), features the certain death of a child and imminent collapse of a civilization, so you can't get much bigger than that in terms of downers.

What's the fic you wrote with the happiest ending? My FFVII fics end on lighter notes of momentary resolution, even if there's always an element of bittersweetness and it's all building to something that's quite different. You could probably pick any one of the longer pieces.

Do you get hate on fics? Not regarding the fics themselves, no. I am on the mod team of r/FanFiction, though, and I think all of us have had a few nasty responses left on our fics when someone didn't like our decisions. But I don't take that sort of thing to heart, and it actually happens way less often than I expected when I took up the position.

Do you write smut? If so, what kind? Sometimes! I've written F/F, M/M, and M/F scenes, and something I'm chipping away at now also involves threesomes and group sex. What I've written is not purely vanilla but it's also nothing extreme. It's always there as another facet of a character study and contributes something I feel is important and powerful to the text, but I'm also not not trying to turn people on at the same time. To me a good sex scene is like a good horror – it's a good story even if it doesn't produce a particular kind of excitement in you.

Do you write crossovers? What's the craziest one you've written? Not really a crossover person. It's fun to have a long conversation about characters from different FFs hanging out, for example, but I don't feel inspired to actually make a story of it.

Have you ever had a fic stolen? Not to my knowledge.

Have you ever had a fic translated? As above.

Have you ever co-written a fic before? Kind of! My partner beta reads all my stuff, but we're both on this Final Fantasy kick together and a lot of my analysis and headcanons have been built out of talks we've had and ideas we've grown together. I've even lifted things she's said and put them straight into the story (with permission and credit, of course). Even if the actual writing is done by me, she definitely deserves an extra special credit for much she's given to helping me.

What's your all-time favorite ship? I don't have a definitive one I'd single out.

What's the WIP you want to finish but doubt you ever will? I don't know if I'll see the FFVII series all the way through to the end, but I'd like to surprise myself! At the very least I want to finish the pieces I've actually started.

What are your writing strengths? General prose craftsmanship, having a distinct voice and style to all I do, being able to vary it up enough to characterise a protagonist through their narrative voice, creating evocative and immersive atmosphere and settings (and using a POV character's way of relating and observing their surroundings to say something about them), inner monologue, little human worldbuilding touches like Meteor truthers and the post-Meteor baby boom.

What are your writing weaknesses? Pacing, tension, trusting myself with what I have to say and whether or not it's worth saying at all, keeping it in the damn subtext.

Thoughts on writing dialogue in another language for a fic? I can understand why some readers would find this jarring or distracting, so that's something to bear in mind as an author, but I love it! Some languages just have words and phrases that convey a particular nuance better than anything in English, I always think it's neat when an author pours some of their own knowledge and interests into a fic, and I like having the chance to learn. Recently I read a friend's fic that features for a protagonist a detective who needs to be a polyglot by nature of his work, and when she included lines in languages other than English, she provided translations and links back and forth at the bottom. I found that, rather than breaking my immersion, it added to it – putting me in the head of someone who has to quickly and readjust to different ways of speaking.

First fandom you wrote for? I'll never tell!

Favorite fic you've ever written? I'm proud of each of them for their own strengths and unique attributes, but I'm going to single out the four drabbles I wrote this year. I'm a maximalist writer by nature, so it was a serious challenge to pare down anything to a mere hundred words; nonetheless, I think each of them manages to suggest characters and relationships, create an atmosphere, and communicate a conflict and resolution (or deliberate lack thereof) in the limited space allowed. Makes me feel like maybe I'm not so bad at the storytelling thing after all.

#froze fics #writing

4 notes · View notes

secretgamergirl · 1 year

Text

The Entire Plot of Final Fantasy 14, with all the expansions, and some serious analysis of how good it actually is. (Part 9 - Endwalker)

Last time, we had a lot of fun in a raid chain where our adopted daughter had some nice dates with her forgetful new girlfriend and helped us fight her sleaker, sometimes hornier reimaginings of old boss fights. Oh and we also spent a ton of time setting things up for this expansion, just clearing the traditional problems of political infighting, racism, and a seemingly endless cycle of responding to violence with religious zealotry and kidnappings. And this annoying turbo-dweeb Fandaniel doing poorly explained overpowered derivative crap.

Now before I get started, I feel I should just lay it out there a super strong theme of this whole expansion is suicidal thoughts, and I’m not planning to really dwell on it, but personally I found there’s a lot of stuff in here where just quickly and sort of lightly bringing up a particular flavor thereof got me into some real bad memories, so be ready for even briefer mentions I guess. The other two major thematic elements we have going on here are worshipful love letters from the whole staff to takeout food, and what has to be an intentional pattern of setting up exciting tension and then just completely defusing it. Plus the pacing’s kinda shot from trying to squeeze two expansions worth of plot into one. If only there were an in-game vista that summed this up...

Let’s see if I can get all this into a halfway reasonable word count. First order of business, we’re headed to Nerd Town, AKA Old Sharlayan, in hopes of working out why a bunch of eggheads aren’t willing to help the guy publicly announcing his plan to kill everyone in the world, or barring that, at least get access to their pretty impressive library. Nerd Town kinda sucks. Super bureaucratic. First thing when you show up you have to get processed and get your green card. Plan is everyone’s an assistant working for Krile who’s still very much a member of a respected research group, they aren’t terribly amused by the ridiculous things you can state when they ask for your name and occupation. Also while things look very Mediterranean it is firmly and repeatedly established that this place has just the worst, blandest food in the world. Oh and on the boat ride over you get a vision of a human-shaped Hydaelyn showing up to confirm that yeah, she and Zodiark are just summoned god like all the others, nothing special, and also she’s been weakening as more and more shard-worlds get reabsorbed via apocalypses and strengthening Zodiark... which doesn’t especially make sense since the whole reason she exists was to punch him hard enough to break things up in the first place. Maybe she got the drop or something.

Anyway, you get stonewalled by stubborn nerds like immediately, and have two leads to follow up on, so you split up and get a choice which to do first. Thancred Urianger and Estinein are going to test an experimental teleporter that doesn’t require you to personally unlock the destination crystal first to get to Thavnair, with its capital Radz-at-Han, which is just India, straight up. Everyone else is going to stick around here and try to sneak into Labrynthos, a whole underground archive/nature preserve/site for top secret experiments by researchers who aren’t beholden to the normal high council of nerds. This mostly involves helping a bunny boy carry crates and a brief foray with Y’shtola testing out the toad spell on you and the twins. You don’t really make a ton of progress. Krile gets kinda spacey, ends up briefly possessed by Hydaelyn to tell you this one mood ring flower they have growing down there is gonna be the key to everything and you should keep one on you, and then you’re all arrested by the science police for snooping around a high security research black site and put on trial. Mostly your party uses the trial to call these dumb jerk nerds out for being dumb jerk nerds, point out you totally are just legitimately working on your own research project, and G’raha points out some historical records marking when they shifted from just being a bunch of nerds learning cool stuff to improve society to a bunch of nerds totally restructuring their society to be isolationist weirdos archiving all the world’s knowledge in their creepy underground bunker.

It’s pretty clear that an archaeological team some years back found something. Like say a god who brainwashed everyone into fanatics or something, and they end up admitting to having this all-important “great work” where everyone has to submit to partial memory wiping and magical compulsion not to speak about it to preserve the important secret, and we are just absolutely setting things up where the nerd high council and who or whatever they’re serving as the real villains of this expansion. But like I said we are all about setting up big things and completely deflating them. Eventually it’ll turn out the thing they’re working on is actually totally benign, nobody’s evil, and they’re just a bunch of arbitrarily obstructionist bureaucrats who suck but are on your side. One member of their high council is enough of a reasonable person to have your back though so you don’t get expelled or anything. You’re still not allowed in the top secret lab though so it’s all kind of a wash.

So, experimental teleport to India because I guess they got sick of having so many expansion locations you reach by hopping a boat from Limsa or just taking an airship or something. Everyone’s super dizzy and nautious from the trip and staggering around, and has the terrible realization that Estinein is wandering around on his own in a big outdoor market desperate for tourist money. You’ve gotta get everyone a nice lassi to settle their stomach and stop that idiot before he blows all his money on kitschy knickknacks! Before you catch up he does manage to blow a couple thousand on a hair band to give himself a nice ponytail. I still don’t like how he looks without his helmet though.

The local population is all au ra and big elephant people.The elephant people have big Tribe Quest vibes, and you do eventually help some out in this sort of ridiculous setup where a bunch of delinquent elephant people using hippo-pulled chariots to drag race get into hot water for being a public menace, and turn over a new leaf opening a delivery service. Mostly it’s delivering takeout, but there’s also quests where you go around throwing Gulal at people, one where you are clearly conducting a drug deal (the second time this comes up at that, Heavensward has you helping cool bug pals harvest marijuana and sell joints to the other locals), and there’s one really unfortunate one where you’re asked to put on a ridiculous mascot elephant head and shout at some random person that you’re his god because people are sick of him praying constantly. All of this is actually post-Endwalker though, because we just arbitrarily gate all the tribe quests back there this expansion. What we’re actually here for now is helping some other elephant people who are actually doing very serious government-approved reseach on these big evil towers. Presumably since the first “tribe” unlocked are full citizens of a friendly nation, when these first went live they quietly went through the whole UI replacing “Beast Tribe” with just “Tribe.” Interesting that this didn’t happen earlier with the dwarves getting drunk and building tanks or something.

Anyway, their leader Nidhana, who’s just a real nice friendly nerd hanging out any time you’re in the area, has been working on these special “warding scales” that should in theory make anyone carrying one immune to godly mind alteration, not only letting random NPC military forces approach these towers safely, but also let the other Scions or any other noteworthy friends canonically tag along for future boss fights and so on. And they do in fact work perfectly. But oh no! There’s this weird creepy little kid showing up to deliver a fresh load of the secret ingredient they need. A huge pile of scales clearly ripped away from the belly of a dragon! Estinein, who’s come a long way on this sort of thing, is way sympathetic to dragons now (probably helps that he straight up turned into one for a bit) and confronts him, but again, we aren’t paying tension off. The Satrap who rules the country and his entire family line before them have just always had this big cool dragon friend Vrtra and he’s happy to help with stuff like this. Anyway, Nidhana decides to test one of these scales personally and heads off to the local tower, which people are locally calling the Tower of Zot, and while it does work, the second the door opens she gets hauled inside with huge chains, her scale gets lost, and she’s stuck in one of those torture walls.

We also get some attempt to retroactively make Fandaniel a character by establishing that before he was made into, let’s be honest, a fake Ascian, he was Amon, yeah like the optional FF3 boss who’s also in this, who we’re retconning into a clone of this guy, a horribly evil Allagan mad scientist who’s personally responsible for any sort of humanoid monsters walking around. Minotaurs, snake gals, nerdy bird people, all him just messing around. Also big into cloning. Hence everyone in the Crystal Tower raid. I don’t care, he’s still just the absolute worst and shallowest character.

You head off to give the Satrap a good news bad news report, and not long into the conversation Estinein gets annoyed and demands we pull back the big Wizard of Oz curtain and just directly talk to the secret ruler of the nation. Oh no! The Satrap and his whole family line are just political puppets and this country has actually been run by Vrtra the huge dragon and heretofore unmentioned additional child of Midgardsormr all along! Which... is fine actually. With the notable exception of Nidhogg every named dragon, especially the elder wyrm siblings here, has just been the absolute chillest nicest most understanding person, and Vrtra is no exception.Super nice even! And the creepy kid is just one of Vrtra’s eyes stuck into a totally indistinguishable from a normal au ra child android the local alchemists whipped up. Seems like the fact they can do that should be more of a big deal but it just never comes up elsewhere. Anyway you still need to keep this a secret from the general populace, because if they found out this cool friendly dragon who’s been known to be a trusted ally to the whole nation since it was first founded is actually the ruler, uh... everyone would be totally fine with that actually. I’m getting a little out of order but the next time you’re in the area the fake Satrap dies and Vrtra has to personally step up and for real not one single person has a problem with this, and really why should they? There’s a similar bit incidentally late in the last expansion where G’raha finally goes public with how the fabled Warrior of Darkness restoring the night sky is actually the protagonist, and this confused crowd of onlookers is just like, “yeah, obviously? This mysterious old friend of yours from where you’re originally from shows up, you’re ecstatic, and every time they take a trip somewhere we hear about the local Lightwarden being killed and the sky being fixed. This isn’t hard to piece together.”

So OK, big Tower of Zot rescue time. We just need to make a quick hop back to Nerd Town to merge these split progression options and catch everyone up. We’ve had too much lavish fan service for 5 and 6 so far, so now it’s really FF4′s turn to get some love. Inside the Tower of Zot we fight the three Magus Sisters, as the local gods being summoned by torturing elephant people in the walls. Who’d you expect them to worship in India, Shiva? Rama? No no no those were a historical white lady and a big beardo worshipped by plant-faeries. Clearly in India they worship that boss trio with the delta attack. Keep it straight. We even have Dr. Lugae and Barnabus for a sub-boss on the way! Oh and there’s a bit teased at the end about a severed hand in the core of the tower that feels like we’re setting up some sort of Golbez thing, but no.

What it actually is is that they kinda used the emperor’s corpse as a summoning base for the whole get people to worship Garlemald itself (have I actually ever mentioned that’s the official name of the Empire? I feel like I just keep saying “the Empire” since it’s just easier). It also makes for a convenient weakpoint for Estinien to jump up and stab, causing the whole tower to poof. Fortunately G’raha’s around and he knows float. Also fortunately Alisae’s around and she whips her hog out to start deprogramming tortured nerds, starting with Nidhana who notices the mood ring flower and talks about this obscure scientific study where not literally everything in the world is just aether related technobabble. There’s a secondary natural force/subatomic thing she calls Akasha and everyone else calls Dynamis later (and I think came up in the Sri Lakshmi fight as orbs of “vril” you need to grab before the big dance number). It’s basically impossible to measure so it’s an obscure thing, but yeah, mood ring flower. Anyway everyone heads back to Nerd Town as those scale talismans get distributed to your allies, which again at this point basically means like... 80% of the world give or take. And then you get woken up in the middle of the night because your friends are all sick of terrible Sharlayan food and decided to surprise you with takeout. Look at this cutscene. Watch G’raha make sweet passionate love to this enormous cheeseburger.

youtube

The next order of business involves taking an airship and heading into the heart of the empire. Not because we’re back to the invasion though. At this point the empire is just straight up dead. All it really took was you proving they weren’t invincible in Stormblood and the extra unrest of the emperor himself being killed by his back from the dead deeply messed up son, and they just completely self-destructed on their own. This might actually be my favorite plot point in the entirety of FF14. They have this empire very clearly modeled after the nazis, and basically as soon as they lose their morale and momentum in a big way, they immediately collapse into infighting and tear themselves to pieces. As always happens in the real world. I’m less keen on how this, like so many other things, has nazi scientists actually making ridiculous cool stuff though. In reality nazi scientists have never actually existed, just a bunch of absolute suckers so hopped up on their stupid BS that they ask other people to do wacky comic book science for them and convince themselves the results are amazing. Here though, yeah, we get a ruined imperial capital crawling with death robots, demons called forth from hell, and freaky mutant monsters just crawling through the streets while a few desperate stragglers are huddled around space heaters starving to death by the time you show up, on what is explicitly a pure good will mission to help struggling refugees of their terrible civil war.

youtube

It’s really visually striking, but kind of weird that the Imperial capital is (or really was) just straight up a major 20th century city with all the implied infrastructure. It’s not as shocking as the whole Evangelion thing from the dumbest side quest, but again, people use maps that are half cloud-cover and build stone fortresses guarded by archers all around here. There’s a bit of fighting against what’s left of their military forces when you show up, but you come in with a big huge international coalition that includes Sadu and I guess other people but for real Sadu has the rocks fall everyone dies spell so on the rare occasion you’re teamed up with her for a big plot fight she’s a win button you just stall to help. Resistance crushed, you head out with the twins to try and find some survivors to give supplies and good will to. After a while you find one group, they’re super paranoid and terrified, threaten you, and when your back is turned one of them just grabs her sick little sister and books it into a snowfield, because she’s so hopped up on imperial propaganda about you being dangerous savages they’d rather take their chances running into a snow storm with no supplies, and they absolutely freeze to death before you find them again.

The other major pocket of survivors you find are under the watch of what’s left of one of two surviving military units, holed up in a subway tunnel. You really try your best to just give them the supplies they need to live, but they insist on taking you hostage, putting shock collars on the twins, and forcing you to run around the ruined city to scrape up what little fantasy gasoline (ceruleum) you can syphon out of dead robots and the heater in a no longer functioning muck filled park fountain, and then their commander still kinda just decides the best plan is to attack your refugee aid party and seize everything, since reinforcements are totally coming from the only other surviving legion as soon as they get their radios working, honest. Speaking of, rather than embracing traditional linkpearl technology, the empire has straight up AM radios, and in what really is one of the sloppiest handwaves I’ve seen, turns out the reason there’s any survivors at all is that they were all clustered around their radios listening to news reports and the crackly vocal version of the Imperial theme currently playing on a loop. Anyway you’re about to go “OK screw humoring these idiots” and deal with that when you suddenly black out and we get one of these scenes where I really have to show before I tell so you know I’m not just writing weird slash fiction here.

youtube

We hereby have to wave the right to make any future “at least buy a girl dinner first” jokes regarding Zenos’ whole kill-bang-die confusion. But yeah, this is the point in the plot of FF14 where the wormy little terrible new villain sucks your soul out of your body and sticks it in the body of some random imperial goon, so that you can have a nice dinner date with Zenos, and then he puts on your body, complete with whatever ridiculous gear you have on to go cause trouble and lure you into another date-fight. When I actually did this, tallest most musclebound possible orc gal in this outfit here, which made the whole thing extra kinky on his end.

Of course first you have to get to him in what’s actually kind of one of the most interesting set pieces gameplay wise. You’re still in this borrowed body, which is pretty low level, a fixed class, and has no natural regeneration of any kind, not access to your inventory, and you are just plopped kind of dead center in the middle of these horrible ruins and half to stealth/fight/scrounge your way out with no clear goal markers and a time limit. It’s actually fairly challenging and by the end you’re caught in an explosion so you’re literally crawling home to warn your friends that hey, that’s not you, it’s an undead murderous kinkster stealing your body for his elavorate sex fantasy, but you recover enough to tackle him at the last moment and then also the timer on all this and you’re restored.

So, I am just really conflicted. I maintain that bringing Zenos back from the dead was an absolutely terrible idea. He worked really well as a villain whose motivations take a bit to come into focus and eventually kinda make your skin crawl, the whole thing caps off with a truly excellent death scene that robs you of a nice celebratory vibe for your big victory, the resurrection is some really sloppy writing, especially given how the whole point is he was officially done with life, and they pretty clearly don’t know what to do with him while he’s back. He is literally just sitting there in the background bored out of his mind and actively ignoring the annoying main villain we actually have and his efforts to get him in on the evil scheming. AND YET, every interaction you have with him in this expansion is just such an entertaining scene and gives another fun glimpse into his really... unique frame of mind.

Anyway, that big attack fails, and the leader behind it finally gets word on the radio from his buddy’s unit that... they’ve actually surrendered and his like dozen surviving soldiers are kind of all that’s left of the big evil empire. Hearing this, he decides to go ahead and become the one good nazi we have in this whole thing. Yes that is a euphemism. Yes it does involve him putting down the mic on his radio, picking up a gun, and leaving a nice stain on the imperial flag he has in his little subway car makeshift office. I’m not going to post a screenshot, but seriously, 10/10, no notes. The whole Garlemald chapter of this expansion is great. Love seeing nazis literally being too stupid and racist to live. What little population is left then finally accepts defeat and lets you provide them with the free food, water, heat, and emergency shelter they need to survive. It’s finally time to head into that big menacing Imperial monster palace, AKA the Towel of Babel, find the bit of it that qualifies as a god, and kill it. Specifically what’s left of the old Emperor in the form of a rare FF10 tribute.

Then Fandaniel just kinda grabs Zenos gives a pathetic little speech and uses a big teleporter to flee to the moon. Which is... a bit abrupt but you follow. And uh... the moon sucks, actually? Like we have all this buildup and foreshadowing like it’s going to be this big enemy base and we’re going to do the whole Lunar Subterrane thing but no. Grey dust, annoying to navigate map, clear signs of cut content. You meet a palette swap of Emet-Selch’s recreated pre-fall Ascian ghosts who is... not some sort of phantom but a minion of Hydaelyn’s here to act as prison warden for what’s left of Zodiark, trapped inside the moon like it’s a giant prison (much like the other moon was for Bahamut). There’s this whole business with a ring of gargantuan swords scattered around to act as seals, one of which Fandaniel just destroyed because the whole bit with the towers was powering up a big death star laser to smash these, and you have to go around and pacify the ghosts of sacrifices made to summon Zodiark back in the day to power up the rest, with this helpful golden furred elegant moon dog ferrying you around as needed. Parthway through this though the whole thing gets cut short via Fandaniel’s BS sloppy writing powers, all the remaining towers get smashed, Zodiark is revived, do not pass go, go directly to big epic boss battle against basically Satan, and Fandaniel himself, believing everyone is now going to die, jumps into the big sort of chasm down to the center of the moon unleashing horrible magic energies to kill himself.That’s the end of that. Thank goodness villains always stay dead in this, right?

Anyway you kill Zodiark. Not even all that hard of a boss. But uh... oh right, you kind of weren’t supposed to do that, were you. He was kinda load-bearing. Summoned to avert an apocalypse and all. Which turns out was an ongoing thing not a one-time deal. As your friends catch up, you’re getting informed that The Final Days are now resuming, big ominous meteor showers, death of everyone in the world shortly. And as later exposition confirms, not just this version of this world. All those splintered off versions like the one we JUST saved from an apocalypse last expansion are doomed too. All because you, the main character here, have this legitimate self control issue where you just can’t not kill any god you see on the spot. But the chill moon dog, Argos, then leads you to a giant door to this massive high tech underground city with uh...

They’re called lopporits. They’re based on Namingway from FF4. The look like the sort of little figurines your great grandmother might collect, and they are here because the entire moon doubles as an emergency escape system to load the whole population of the world onto in the event that some idiot comes along, kills Zodiark, and dooms everyone. They’re also so distractingly adorable your whole party just kinda goes slack-jawed, forgets everything they were doing, and the plot just stops dead in its tracks while you spend kind of a weirdly long time just humoring them and trying to give positive feedback to all the amenities they start showing off. They’ve got all your food needs covered with, and this is the official quest item name, obscenely long carrots, described in detail as being particularly girthy. They’ve build everything to perfect human scale... based on an assumption that the average person is still like 30 feet tall like they were back in Ascian times, similarly all just assuming your whole party is a bunch of unsupervised children sent up in the first wave of evacuations. They have to improvise on clothing when it turns out universal dumb black robes are out of fashion, and have some really interesting ideas.

Once again we tease the idea that they actually have super sinister motives and are trying to trap you here with constant distractions, but then no, turns out they’re just really horrified because they’re pretty good at reading people and can clearly see that none of you are actually impressed with any of their stuff. Except Urianger. Urianger loves cute little weirdos and dressing eccentrically. This leads to a big speech to cheer them up, talking about how their self-chosen names all convey their strength of character. Like Mappingway, wanting to chart out all the unexplored secrets of the world, and Livingway just wanting to keep life going for everyone. And then turns out one is named Puddingway, but, you know, everyone likes pudding? And I guess I have to link the comic don’t I.

Anyway, checking back in on things on things down on the planet, which only NOW are we formally establishing is called Aetherys, ending years of confusion where people thought the whole world was either called Hydaelyn or Eorzea. Side note a checked and “Eorzea” is officially the term for the westernmost continent, Aldenard, if and only if you are also counting in the nearby islands. But yeah things are going bad. Especially over in Thavnair, AKA India, where the sky is stock on apocalyptic red with constant meteor showers, and seemingly at random people are turning into rad palette swaps of the freakiest looking monsters we already had models lying around for, which we’re arbitrarily calling blasphemies. There’s reports of this happening in other places too, and a lot of people seem to turn into these things just from the pure terror of seeing them. Y’shtola’s weird vision deal also reveals that rather than similar stuff where someone’s soul/aether gets tainted with some element or other, here it’s just literally rotting and crumbling away to nothing so when these monsters die and leave a sickly black splash on the floor, that’s it, do not go to afterlife, do not pass go, you are done. Sucks for them. Especially since unlike the whole becoming a sin eater deal we are so painfully cribbing from with this, it seems totally arbitrary who it happens to and why.

Anyway they kinda dance around this and kind of offer up extreme fear or hate as alternate causes but by the end of the expansion it’s abundantly clear that you turn into a monster from suicidal ideation... which makes a lot of the panicking crowds popping in the ensuing panic scenes feel really clumsy, writing wise. Also there’s this whole bit where a guy’s worried about his wife and new born baby in the chaos, gets chased by a monster and injured, turns into one himself, tries to kill his wife, she panics and jumps off a high ledge with her baby and dies on impact with the water, forcing you to dive in after to rescue this now orphan baby and hand them off to someone. Here’s the thing though, this doesn’t happen in some instanced thing. This is just your standard, on the overworld, here’s someone giving you your current active quest, here’s where you go to do the next step chain. So you could totally like, wander off with this baby at the bottom of the well, go do sidequests, maybe some that mention “days later” in them, before rescuing this baby. Or do the rescue, but not the hand-off, and just have this inventory baby for a good long while It’s paced excitingly enough this only stuck me after, but it amuses me that it’s technically possible.

This is where the fake Satrap dies, and eventually where we set up our fresh set of Role quests. Each of the five basic combat class types has a lead about a big blasphemy in a different part of the world to look into... and none of these really go anywhere interesting. Healer is probably the most interesting, since it involves checking in on Fordola who is having a very hard time keeping it together and not turning into one of these. The rest are just kinda whatever. Gosetsu shows up again briefly to call out a charlatan medium in the ranged attacker one. Offensive magic has the one that hurts my suspension of disbelief because you deal with the ONE blasphemy in Ishgard and like... it’s Ishgard. The whole place should be a crater right away. As is though yeah there’s like... five people suicidal enough in the rest of the world combined to become blasphemies, and then like half the population of Thavnair. Hell a little later you go back to Garlemald and have to deal with a bunch more of this, but it’s because Thavnairian refugees are coming through on the way to somewhere less terrifying as the red sky spreads to the area and a bunch of them lose it at the thought of nowhere being safe. These people are just kind of this game’s punching bag. My best guess between that and the way there’s no real connection on the map, which is also a bit less filled with interesting details than most, is a lot more was planned for the region but there were cuts and/or delays and the focus of all this ended up there just to flesh things out, but still.

Oh yeah and while dealing with the attack in the Imperial ruins, Zenos shows up randomly to take a big blasphemy down with his cool new scythe... and complain about how bored he is and ask if you can pretty please fight him to the death again soon as soon as you stop getting distracted by this whole thing. He was also pretty polite about this on the moon, but Alisaie wasn’t there to call him out. Another really fun scene here.

youtube

I love how he gets called out for being a weird hedonistic kinkster here, and I love how he responds to Jullus the one Imperial soldier who grew a clue before successfully getting himself killed, barely, with this “wait would you seriously be OK with me destroying the whole country here if I was doing it for some kind of good reason? That is seriously messed up dude, get help.” And then that eye roll at the end.

So turns out the big secret of the Nerd Council is they found the actual embodied true form of Hydaelyn in a cave and she broke down all the details on Zodiark being a load-bearing boss someone would probably eventually kill, and they should really coordinate with these moon rabbits on a plan to evacuate the whole world just in case. And like, OK, but A- they’re really terrible at this. Didn’t even communicate the physical needs of people or population estimates. B- this is really the sort of thing where being less coy and explaining things to the protagonist in particular would maybe help avoid the whole problem because who else do you even have to worry about accidentally killing a god in the heat of the moment? Maybe Estinien? Tell him too. Oh and C- the nihilistic weirdo wanting to end all life and largely doing so by covering the world in mind-control towers kinda seems like a barrier to getting everyone out safely. Same with the deadly biochemical weapons from earlier. Point is the twins’ dad really sucks. Their mom is cool though. She helps Alphinaud switch classes to Sage, the healer that gets a set of flying laser cannons. Also it eventually turns out she’s quietly been THE source of funding for the Scions forever through anonymous donations. Who’s gonna tell these kids their parents are probably getting a divorce?

Getting things back on track, your only real lead is the cryptic hint about the flower. It doesn’t go much of anywhere, except a name for it that dates back to Ascian times. So with all the rest very dead, you go check in with Elidibus who’s not technically dead, just, you know, soul trapped in the crystal tower. Which is also essentially a giant database of Allagan science notes. Turns out while he’s been in there he’s mellowed out a lot and is willing to rework things and send your soul back in time to get info from before anything of note on the whole millennia long timeline happened. Specifically to a research facility called Elpis where people used to send the dangerous monster designs they came up with because they’re bored weirdos with world shaping powers to test and make sure they’re viable and would fit in an ecologic niche somewhere. Problem is you come through all ghostly and also I wasn’t kidding about the 30 foot giants. Fortunately someone eventually notices the weird tiny ghost and convinces his boyfriend to shove some aether into you so you’re solid and properly sized.

If it isn’t our old friend from a few thousand years from now Emet-Selch and his boyfriend we’re at least on good terms with some kinda recreated imaginary semi-ghost version of Hythlodaeus. They looked real dorky back forever ago. Anyway they assume from the matching color of your soul that you’re the familiar of their friend Azem, which, sure, technically distant future reincarnation of slightly more than 50% of said but close enough. So they let you hang out on this business trip. They’re here to offer the position of Fandaniel to this guy here whose real name is Hermes since the previous one just retired, and he’s all mopey about it because when people retire they kill themselves so they can get reincarnated. Except for the previous Azem, she just figured she’d keep hanging out. It’s totally a voluntary thing, not an enforced Logan’s Run sort of thing but there’s still a weird social stigma if you don’t do it so like, hey, Emet-Selch, I feel like you were overselling this place. Everyone’s a workaholic nerd who off themselves when they’re out of ideas for new research grants, and things are looking decidedly more ancient Greece and less extra art deco New York than previously suggested.

Turns out this Hermes kid is really depressed and fixated on death in general. Which is kinda weird when everyone is officially immortal. He’s particularly bummed about how it’s literally his job to snap his fingers and reduce terrible terrible monsters that would like end all life if allowed to exist in the world to their component elements, and fair enough. Maybe work on getting people to stop making horrible ravenous death beasts in the first place though? Anyway he’s proud of himself for making this weird little psychic bird girl who much like these mood ring flowers is also super empathic and gets all sad and mopey with him whenever he gets sad and mopey, which is a lot. In fact, he made a whole bunch. They’re psychically networked, and all called Meteion. Like meteor. Because he’s sending them all out to explore space and try to find some kind of meaning of life thing out. Also they’re based on this Dynamis stuff. Apparently 60% of the mass of the universe is made up of Dynamis. It’s just kinda weaker than Aether so nobody cares, but he’s pretty sure he’ll be able to untap its potential and activate it all like, as he says, a river breaking free of a dam. You can totally see where all of this is going here, right? It’s exactly as blunt as I’m making it sound.

Anyway you hang out a while dealing with this depressed kid and his weird bird girl, and eventually she gets an update that hey, the rest of her sisters have finished that task Hermes sent them out on forever ago after making them apparently some time ago and never formally submitting the design or the plan he had for him to any of his superiors. Specifically the plan was to take his super empathic socially needy bird girls, have them all fly through the supernaturally soul crushing void of space, find whatever aliens might exist and ask them what to him is the ultimate question, apparently some variation on “if everybody just dies in the end what’s even the point of going on living!?” and like... hey, I get it. Someone explained heat death to me when I was like 12. I had a similar breakdown about it. But as Emet-Selch starts tearing into him about as the report comes in, it is really just a terrible idea for all sorts of reasons to try and establish first contact with alien races by having a bunch of depressed bird girls show up and start trauma dumping on them out of the blue.

The results are pretty grim too. They just start going through planet by planet with these little stories about finding formerly inhabited planets where literally everyone is dead, and researching all the various ways this happened. These people had a apocalyptic war. These people got all spiritually enlightened, ended all suffering, and got too bored to keep going. These people had a godlike ruler who got in a bad mood and killed everyone, and hey, talking to us made him suicidal and he killed himself on the spot. This also happened when we contacted this planet where two factions were in this tense cold war setup... Everyone including Meteion really wants to cut the feed on this depressing stuff but Hermes insists on hearing the whole thing and goes off with her to do so.

In the middle of all this though, that aforementioned retired Azem shows up. Her name’s Venat. She’s more on to your weird deal than these others, mostly because she notices you have magic wards on you that seem to have been put there by her, plus she’s visibly that human form of Hydaelyn you got a quick vision of, so, yeah. Pre-deity Hydaelyn here. And she’s nice enough. Eventually the others kinda work out that you two have some weird secret thing going and you end up explaining the deal to the others and Emet-Selch basically responds with, “hey, screw you? Assuming you’re not just making all this up, you’re telling me I just become an absolute melodramatic flouncing asshole in the future, and I refuse to believe that. Like especially the part about me recreating the whole city and everyone in it to mope in? There is no way I would ever become such an over the top drama queen” and like, he keeps going for a WHILE with this. It’s great.

So you all go to confront him about the whole thing, and he arranges the showdown to be at this uh... big computer clock thing on hand that can do time warp things and also erase people’s memories and give them new ones. Seems like a bad thing to have around! Very easily abused! He totally supports his depressed bird daughters in the conclusion they draw that all life in the universe should be eliminated so there’s nobody left to be sad and die, so he’s going to wipe everyone’s memories and just play dumb about the pending bird-girl driven psychic suicidal apocalypse. Your past pals play some head games and Emet-Selch in particular pulls a big switcheroo so you and Venat get teleported out at the last minute. She goes on to become Hydaelin eventually and avoids technically having a villain turn by way of doing the whole Shiva style transformation, there’s precedent, but let’s be real she still kinda sucks and turned the worst Scion into a hand puppet for a bit in there. Anyway, now you know why the world’s ending. A depressed bird girl out in space somewhere. Oh and it’s not like the Fandaniel you know and hate has the memories of this Hermes loser, just his soul, the memories of the main reason Allagan was awful, and the body of the genocidal viceroy’s somehow even worse villain. Just a turducken of guys who really suck.

Back in the present you go find Hydaelyn in the magical god flesh to compare notes on your big stable time loop here, and she’s polite enough to challenge you to a fight to make sure you’re prepared to face some horribly depressed bird girl. And really goes all out so you “tragically” have to kill her. And definitely don’t feel super smug and relieved that in the end you really did get to go and kill literally every god anyone ever summoned. That you know of anyway.

You talk all the nerds in Nerd Town into letting you borrow their secret evacuation spaceship if you can find nerds able to increase the engines’ efficiency because as is, even the moon evacuation plan would take too long. That bits easy because you know a ton of nerds and a ton of people willing to drag over chunks of Dalamud, the whole Bahamut prison moon which are all over the place and make good scrap for this. Then the only problem is loading in enough Aether as fuel to get to the far edge of the universe. If only there was a really good way to condense a whole massive pile of crystals into something nice and compact. Say the size of a boss fight. Oh right summoning gods! The lopporits, who totally ended up coming down with Urianger to get firsthand knowledge of day to day planet life to build better stuff for people and also just dig it, just so happen to know an alternate summon ritual that bypasses all the greedy syphoning of all the world’s aether and mind controlling everyone in the area. That’s... absurdly convenient. So you get a bunch of reformed priests to resummon every god up through Stormblood with the safety on, and just... load them into the fuel tank of this spaceship you kinda low key stole from some terrible nerds. Actually at the very last minute Cid shows up to “help” and honestly the work is all done literally all the guy does is add a coat of paint with his logo on it, and insist on naming the thing. Kind of a dick move, Cid. So he kinda steals it from them and you steal it from him.

So... I feel like I’m due to break text up with something and the end of the universe, AKA Ultima Thule, or as I like to call it, Space Hell, is super visually interesting but it photographs terribly so have this but honestly this dorky power ballad is NOT playing when you show up here. Nor are silly mounts until you’re done with the plot, like every area basically.

youtube

Space hell is built out of the random chunks of various dead worlds Meteion found just kinda brought together into a depressing collage. Technically some of these still have inhabitants, kind of. One is the dragon homeworld, and as we know dragons don’t really die properly, so, they’re all dead, but still hanging out being super depressed about the intense pollution not letting them have kids who aren’t monster freaks. We’ve got people who became beings of pure thought and then got depressed about heat death, and then realized they need to have bodies again to kill themselves, we’ve got the race of horrible death robots who destroyed dragon planet, and honestly a hell of a lot of other planets. Backstory is they were really wimpy and paranoid about being killed by space horrors, so they built death robots and also went full cyborg and transfered their minds into death robot bodies and upgraded those further and built Omega and kinda got real carried away on the proactive defense and realized they kind of had killed like half the life in the universe and could totally take the other half in a fight even all at once. So then they had a big existential crisis because what were they doing before going to war again?

So again, this is after the credits roll and you come back here in the patches, but after you finish this whole existential threat to the universe thing you come back here with a now retired lopporit and they’re still all what do we even do now, so you just toss it out there that one of the other worldlets was this like coffee shop from a planet where the bird girls couldn’t even work out how everyone died it looks like they just got raptured or whatever, so why don’t the death robots just like, move in and open a nice little cafe. Make coffee and soup and stuff for all the other last survivors of civilizations. And they go for it and it’s probably my favorite of all the tribe quests.

But we’re not here to help death robots research soup recipes YET. We’re here to recreate the original first season Sailor Moon finale. Marching across a horrible field of total desolation where all of our friends make big heroic sacrifices one by one so we can continue. And honestly the framing is weird because basically it’s a chain of finding a nihilistic alien representative, hear why they think life’s not worth living, someone steps up with a counter argument, they sort of explode and form a bridge to the next area. It’s all about the emotional arguments because this is all made of Dynamis, so everything operates on pure vibes. These are vibe-ranium bridges if you will. Anyway what I initially thought was going on here is you land in like pure depression land and people keep vanishing because they talk themselves into better head spaces and are ejected. I feel like that’d make way more sense, but no, all your friends are in fact explaining reasons to go on living then promptly dying.

Eventually you run out of friends as you hit the cafe here, and can only advance by talking to the depressed bird girl herself about all your personal trauma and stuff and how you get past it, which creates a very long stairwell to the surface of the dead sun she’s keeping everyone’s souls in so they can’t reincarnate, and THAT’S when the power ballad in that earlier clip kicks in, as you walk up to have a boss fight. And you know, it’s a pretty good JRPG final boss fight. Big weird woman, lots of wings jutting out all over, really over the top throwing planets at you attacks. The classic stuff. And then halfway through the fight freaking Zenos just literally comes crashing through the 4th wall and goes “hey, this who you’re fighting? She doesn’t actually seem tough, you want to hurry it up? I stopped by the bar you scions hang out at and someone said you were here, so I turned myself into a dragon again so we can finally have that proper rematch as soon as you’re done here. Do you need help or anything to finish up faster?”

Tumblr’s not letting me add any more movies but NO REALLY THIS ACTUALLY HAPPENS it’s hilarious. And here’s the comic version.

I have a line I really want to go out on here, so, again, here’s my Patreon. I hope I’ve entertained and educated you with all this over the course of the month. And here’s what I have to say on what post-game currently exists for this.

The ghost of Emet-Selch and his boyfriend show up for a last minute sappy pep talk, and to remind you that while it might seem like we’ve literally wrapped up every single loose end, there’s some islands you’ve never been to. A whole southern continent to explore. The rest of those dimensional shards. You never got around to fighting The Twelve. So yeah title cards and NPCs and E-S narrating this expansion have been saying the whole time this is the end of the story, but we’re not DONE done. So you beat this bird girl down, the dead sun hatches and blue sun yolk drips out restoring life to the universe, your friends all get to come back, you activate their emergency teleporters and chuck yours so you can go in for the finishing blow, and then well, here you are. Just alone at the edge of the universe in a big empty space behind a random diner. Zenos just finally got the message and came and did something good to help you out, and he’s really giving you those puppy dog eyes. So after a set of dialog choices for exactly how you want to begrudgingly admit you honestly do also enjoy a really over the top boss fight, you begrudgingly agree to have a big duel with him, you know, just this once, fully aware he gets off on these, and it honestly goes on for a really long time, including a bit where he flat out kills you and teaches you the boss encounter trick to just pulling out a second health bar through sheer force of will, and the whole thing ends with you just tossing your weapon aside and running up to give him a big ol’ punch right between those weird never quite focused eyes of his while he has this blissed out grin.

So the conclusion, for now, of the whole long epic story of Final Fantasy 14 which I have explained to you this month is, I swear before this whole mountain of dead gods, that you make sure none of your friends are looking and give Zenos a pity handjob in the back lot behind a diner in the middle of nowhere.

#mic drop #final fantasy 14 #ff14 #final fantasy xiv #ffxiv #there's flying and humanoid sharks in elpis and hythlodaeus says they're big now and I know I know plenty of furry artists don't tell me...

7 notes · View notes

pdamndiabolical · 11 months

Note

commiseration, not advice: i think the struggle regarding fanfic and plot is that, even more than in regular fiction writing, you start out with a fully-formed idea and interpretation that's really interesting and exciting and important to you and that doesn't really REQUIRE you to write a plot to express it - or any fiction at all! fiction is just what makes it tangible.

so it's essentially a matter of delayed gratification to go, ok, how can i write AROUND this idea? what if i absolutely COULDN'T give it to you straight, through narration or dialogue, at least not until it's hanging so heavy in the air that the thread's just begging to be cut? how does it materially manifest in the world if i can't just come out and say it? only then does writing plot, imagery, setting become necessary and exciting to me.

of course the fact of the matter is that usually this writing-around-the-point is what CANON is doing, intentionally or not, which only heightens the urge to get it all out there. this is the perspective that imo perfectly justifies analysis-based fic writing, after all it's always gonna be a paratext situation. but i do think think you've been "materialising" your internal character stuff, and i honestly think developing that sensibility is enough to lead to plotting abilities.

the alternate direction is to think of events and settings FIRST and then see what themes and ideas you can find in them, and i think that's more common for original fiction, but for me that only happens if i'm applying a framework i already know, like oh, time travel au, wrestling au, i know what's in there, i only have to see how it interacts with the characters. but then it usually ends up with too big a scope for me to ever realistically write it at all lol

True I guess in some ways a plot for fanfic is vestigial, depending on what you want for you and your audience. And with the last thing you said there, I’m always compelled by emotion or theme first and then aesthetics and location and plot second. So far at least. It could change if I wrote more than a couple times a year, lol

For me I was enjoying writing but wanted to tell a story where the story was more than internal and small scale interpersonal. All of my early one-shots are like “two people talk in a room”, “two people argue on a rooftop”, “two people argue in an alleyway” etc. I’m proud of all of those and I think they’re satisfying enough for both me and my audience but I wanted to do more. So it becomes “two people are separated into a parallel dimension and have to find each other, and they have to try to resolve the conflict between their mirror selves, and they have to figure out how to get home, and to do this they have to figure out the why and who of how they got sent there” which is about 1000x more challenging and not inherently more fun to write. In fact it’s less satisfying cause I can’t just write 3k words then post it lol. I kind of miss it being just dense psychoanalytical stuff BUT it’s like a sandwich where the bread is plot and all the toppings are emotion and theme and character analysis, and it’s so long it becomes like a scooby doo sandwich, even if I never write a fic like this again it’s pretty satisfying for me at least. Story, feelings, story, theme, story, etc, feels more watered down in some ways vs turbo dense psychoanalytical prose but I’m getting better at it and it’s fun to weave in and out and ideally build to something REALLY big.

I’ve been listening to the audiobook for Wired for Story and while a lot of it is borderline cringey and I’d even call some of it anti-intellectual (there is this whole segment where she just shits on any experimental art and talks about how nobody could ever like reading Ulysses(????)) it’s making me think a lot more about plot and character supporting each other as a more cohesive whole. As a neurotic who is very self-critical about making every word and moment in a story count that stuff is fun to think about for me

Thanks for such a thoughtful ask and for indulging me asking about big brain writing stuff!!

3 notes · View notes

everythingispirates · 1 year

Note

im not v good at media analysis but ive had some thoughts bouncing around in my head that i need to outlet somehow so just, bear with me okay lmfao

anyway i think that at least in the first 3 movies death is meant to be synonymous with love, and it drives me batshit insane (affectionate). like ok first there was that post that went around a few years ago that rightfully pointed out that every man elizabeth kissed has both been in love/lust with her and also has died. (i am also including jack in this, because although i dont think they were ever "in love", they're practically obsessed with each other in a strange toxic sort of way that weaponizes affection so it counts lol. i could go on about this too bc it makes me insane too)

not to mention, like, davy jones' entire story being a tragic love story, the man literally cannot die because of calypso... i mean its not that simple obv but from his perspective at least he believes calypso does not return his affection for her even though she DOES, just not in the way he can really anticipate or comprehend. which to me i think means that while death = unrequited love, undeath or coming back to life (like will does as well) is a sign of love that is actually returned

like i could go on but ANYWAY, this all in mind, the fact that jack and barbossa then are both responsible for not only killing each other but that barbossa led the charge to bring jack back to life is crazy like?????? are we seeing this

I really really like this anon!! I might personally not go so far as to say they're synonymous but I'd absolutely agree that they go hand in hand, like it's sort of hard at least for me to draw direct symbolic parallels but so much of the death we see is definitely tied super closely to love just like you say!! the elizabeth thing is like an observed phenomenon and I esp find it interesting that the captain of the dutchman curse has this strong connection to love where I'd argue love is sirt of what's supposed to keep the captain tied to the mortal world in a sense?? also really neat that barbossa's curse has the "I feel nothing" aspect to it in combination with the unable to die, as well as love and death having a certain connection in media like historically there's really so much to be done with this concept so I'd love to hear more from you regarding it!! I like just woke up so sorry for rambling but anon you say you're no good w media analysis and I just wanna take this moment to say that a) you obviously have a sense for it and b) this is how you get better at it like do exactly this find a reoccurring motif and inspect it, see where it leads you!! I really value media literacy and I'd argue it's definitely a learned skill so I just wanna like encourage you and anyone who reads this who might find analysis a bit daunting to give it a shot. I think potc especially is really good as a starting point if you wanna get into it because it's not The most complex thing in the world like it's still a kids movie but it does have a lot of stuff going on without it being like overwhelming I guess the word is???

#ask #sorry for turning this into a rant in my defense i did like i said literally just wake up #i just. i heart media analysis and i think it's not as impossible as some people make it out to be #like it's really a process of learning to identify the different parts of the machine #anyway anon i love you and i believe in you do great things like this really is a really good observation!!!

9 notes · View notes

cchapsticck · 1 year

Note

Hi! So, I don’t have a prompt for you, but if you’re in the mood for a question I’d love to know more about your writing process. Do you do a lot of plotting work before you start writing, or do you get an idea and just run? Do you use any particular software or apps? Any tips you’d like to share? Thank you! 😊

Thank you for asking! Happy to answer a question! I will surely will write a TED Talk no one asked for.

Easy quick part first; I’m not fancy when it comes to my tech set up. It's just me and the google doc. Music is kind of the necessary element for me, I make playlists for everything.

As far as planning and structure goes: I am what I will generously refer to as a Narrative Structural Anarchist when it comes to my writing lol. I genuinely really struggle to write things with linear narratives or things that are tremendously plot heavy - some of that might be because I’m impatient and I’m just a little unwilling to do the necessary work to mark out story beats and build tension or conflict in ways that are satisfying to me personally, but definitely I find my interests really lie in character analysis/study and, I guess, the nebulous concept of “themes”. What makes people tick and why people do what they do has always been interesting to me in the scope of fiction. But I really do just get an idea about a character, or find some granular detail about them compelling and run and it goes where it goes. It's all very stream of consciousness.

So for example, the fandom has had a lot of great and interesting discussion about Eddie’s queer coding so UNTITLED was kind of born of me wanting acknowledge that while also unpacking what all that could mean and look like in the late 80s, in the American Midwest, in that particular music scene because those things feel very vital in the way he’s to be understood in canon and it’s something I grew up very close to. And I, apparently, ended up having a lot to say about that as thoughts I had about it all would sort of unfold out from each other and I would add more chapters and I didn’t really have an “end goal” in mind when I started writing it out.

METALHEAD is definitely emblematic of all of the above, the vignette structure of it allowed me to forgo the “connective tissue” of Point A to Point B narrative and just kind of imply the between stuff while being able to get into these smaller things about what’s interesting to me about the character. Like, I only had to write “the good parts”, for me, and let the point of view character make a point to emphasize or deemphasize those implied events as another element of characterization.

To that end, if I had to give a piece of advice, I think it would really be; give yourself permission to change your mind. No idea is precious, sometimes you have to kill your darlings. You can always revert back to an old draft you can always try again. Like you may have a huge word count sunk into one concept and if you feel like you’re forcing your way forward, just try something else. Just to try. It might knock something loose about the old concept or maybe the new idea has more momentum. But like, don’t make your concept An Obligation. I think anyone who makes art likes to complain about making art at least a little bit but it shouldn’t feel like a punishment. Y’know?

I hope any of that is what you’re looking for? Thank you for asking!

#asks #dreamwatch

3 notes · View notes

trashcanwithsprinkles · 1 year

Note

before i go on another ramble, i am not here to counter what clothing anon ask 2 was saying about music (that would be silly and ??? why would i anyway), but as soon as i saw talk about it i really wanted to share my perspective,, so please excuse me if i ramble a bit (or a lot; i'll still try to keep it pretty brief as far as actual analysis and such goes because to talk more on that would get Super Lengthy. though i'll probably still ramble on it a bit so it'll probably still be really long haha,, whoops. this is a musical infodump now i guess?)

(also before i dive in i'm not. uh. im not a professional or anything although i do know a little bit about music. i play the piano, at a not-baby-grade level how do i say not-baby-but-also-far from-professional-level without stating the actual grade,, it's one of the last few before university/more professional level stuff i guess?? so. kind of have been brought up with learning about music and nurtured being sensitive to its meaning from childhood, so uh- yeah. i hope i can say my thoughts are hopefully less wild guesses and more... educated guesses. anyway-)

ok, so i tend to think of the music in specific groups: battle, cutscene, and character theme, according to the length and style of the music and its use in-game. for me, never-ending performance, wrath of monoceros caeli, and all-conquering tide are the battle themes related to childe, although the latter, I'm guessing, is likely not usually associated with him anywhere near as much as the first two, and that's fair enough, tbh. but i'll get to my reason for counting it too in a minute, and i do think it's important bc it broadens the musical representation of childe. anyway. cutscene themes are pretty self explanatory; rapture of the chaos and the uh the one during that one scene in his story quest. i didn't even know that had a name but then again the ost things on youtube are my only source of info for that haha,,, and of course for his character theme, letter from ajax and from snezhnaya with boldness.

now i can talk about why i included all-conquering tide in the list. if you don't recognise it by its name, it's most commonly heard as the battle theme that plays on dragonspine. however, its original use was in the domain in childe's story quest. since that, i believe, was released in 1.1 and dragonspine in 1.2, that would make his story quest the "origin" of it, so it's reasonable to assume it's actually supposed to be connected to him. and then there's the name- i mean, doesn't get much more fitting than all-conquering tide, right? i actually used to wonder "why that name?" because cool name, but how did it fit to dragonspine? but if we think about it as being related to childe.... it makes perfect sense. but, i do still think that would be a bit of a stretch to fully consider it as connected to him, so i went looking at the music itself. the first thing that stood out to me is how similarly structured it is to childe's character theme, in a way. the most noticeable thing being the beginning is the piano solo and in a very similar pattern, too, as well as the soft resolution at the end, again in an actually near-identical or just straight up identical style to his character theme. i could also argue about everything between those two points having a similarly styled structure as well, but, uh, something made as a shorter length character theme and a longer battle theme will inevitably have their differences when it comes to that. although it's hard for me to tell with certainty at this point, i believe his character theme and all-conquering tide may also share the exact same key/key signature musically, which is again very interesting since it's a possible connection point. finally, there is the music's context. when i listened closely to it, the tone of the music is really fitting if you think about it and the point where it played in childe's story quest. the entire track is filled with a strong sense of determination and at certain points there's even a subtle hint of distress and anxiety that seeps through. but there's also moments of clarity. and overall, it's a very.... "from the pov of The Hero" style music, for lack of a better way of putting it. and while yes yes, from the player's perspective i mean that's. that's what job they have in the story. it's not unusual for us to hear that tone. but thinking about it from childe's perspective? it becomes interesting, especially considering how much care is put into the tone and meaning of genshin's music literally everywhere else. i won't be taking anything for granted so i examine it all to take note of the meaning. also it does things to my feelings bc they really took that tone and style for the guy who wanted to be one, basically, and it's like- that's still who he is, even after all this time, even though it's more complicated than that now- the simplest way i can put it is probably that the difference between the battle themes is... never-ending performance and wrath of monoceros caeli are tartaglia, but all-conquering tide... it's ajax. and that is significant, when it comes to his character, i think.

anyway, the reason i find such significance in all-conquering tide being one of childe's battle themes, and a much more personal one at that is, as i mentioned before, how it broadens his musical representation. people tend to only really talk analytically about his boss battle themes. but those, as i mentioned, while really cool (and i could talk a lot about them too), are clearly showing him as the fatui's 11th harbinger - the tone of it aside, the fatui/harbinger motif is present in both never-ending performance and wrath of monoceros caeli, which musically shows that during that battle he is acting as the 11th harbinger. it's all about the "identity" connected to it. whereas for a battle theme, all-conquering tide is much, much more personal (and i don't know if it needs saying, but there isn't a single trace of the fatui motif in it, which further shows that yes- it's a much more personal one). this also makes sense when you think about it since you don't hear anything that properly matches his character theme in his boss battle themes, but the similarity between it and all conquering tide is quite striking, and that is why i examined it so closely in the first place - to find out if i could safely say they were related or not or to see if i was just imagining stuff and making it up in my head (i even asked my sibling who keeps a really objective view and hasn't played genshin to compare the two, and they saw it, too, so....). as a side note, i am glad they reused all-conquering tide as dragonspine's battle theme, the tone is fitting enough (i mean, the most fitting we could get at that time; snowy freezing cold place and all that is sufficiently relevant to childe, after all, so it's a suitable re-use option in terms of association), but that made its likely connection to childe far less obvious, especially to newer players, huh? i heard it on dragonspine first, and first impressions can stick for a long time... it makes me kind of sad at the same time though. people could listen to it and not even think about it. how all-conquering tide, unlike the other two battle themes, shows a "better" (perhaps more likable to some) side of childe. after all, music can show raw feelings; if its purpose is to show someone's perspective, it can be nothing but honest from that perspective, and it can convey a lot. but how many people don't even realise it's probably connected to him? that if it's showing anyone's perspective specifically, it'd be his? if they did realise and had a very fixed view on his character at that time, I wonder if their view of him would change at all? for some people i doubt it; but for others... who knows... and either way, it's just really interesting and enlightening, or at least i felt that way about it when i first tried to see what evidence there was for that being the case.

anyway, i've talked quite a bit now, and i think i covered the main points, so uhh maybe i should stop here? i still find it all super interesting to think about, whenever it comes up. at any rate, once again hope you are having a good day and don't mind me spouting words in here (at least this time at the end here i can also say art progress is a thing which is happening :D ehe)

wait no that explains so much. i joined genshin at the tail-end of 1.2 but avoided dragonspine until well after i had finished the liyue archon quest (the lawachurl by the frostbearing tree had me doing a 180 and getting out of there until i had more decent characters,,). so i played childe's story quest before i ever did any considerable fighting in dragonspine. i had no idea the theme of his domain was the same as the battle track there! i knew it sounded familiar when i did hear it later on in the mountain (the start is very obviously the start of letter from ajax), but i was never able to put my finger on why exactly it reminded me of something else while i tried not to die in dragonspine lmao;;

and by the time i added letter from ajax to my ost playlist and began listening to it more regularly (along with the rest of genshin's ost), i had long since stopped going to dragonspine. so i never really made the connection between the two. but now that i listen to all-conquering tide, it's so obvious!

also i really like your take of all-conquering tide being ajax' battle theme. i always saw never-ending performance as childe's battle theme while wrath of monoceros caeli was tartaglia's. it's so nice to finally have one to give to ajax that isn't just- letter from ajax. which never really sat with me as ajax' battle theme, that always felt more like.... a theme for the entire character instead of for one specific facet of him;;;

thank you so much for pointing it out! such a cool detail, very happy i get to learn it today

#thank you <3

3 notes · View notes