My Thoughts on Tears of the Kingdom

Disclaimer: Please note there are many, many, many spoilers about the world, gameplay, and story of Tears of the Kingdom here. Don’t read any further if you want to avoid them.

Let me get this out of the way right off the bat. I went into this game with a lot of mixed feelings. I’ve been hyped up about this game for years now. From the moment it was labelled the “Sequel to Breath of the Wild” in a Nintendo Direct, I was intrigued. The last time we’d seen something like this was with A Link Between Worlds, which is largely a sequel or spiritual successor to A Link to the Past. Both A Link to the Past and A Link Between Worlds are games I hold dear to me. The former was the first Zelda game I first played and was a formative game that would go on to define my expectations for video games at large for the rest of my life. Suffice it to say, when A Link Between Worlds knocked my expectations out of the park, I was more than pleased and relieved.

It's this precedent that drew a lot of expectations from me when it came time to play Breath of the Wild’s eventually titled sequel, Tears of the Kingdom.

But where my mixed feelings come in is with how Nintendo has been acting as a company over the past few years (and perhaps longer if I deigned to look further back). As much hype as I had for Tears of the Kingdom, I found these feelings drained by my reservations about supporting a company that seems antagonistic towards its most passionate fans.

But I resolved to look at the game a different way, perhaps somewhat selfishly, to rationalize wanting to play it. I decided I wanted to support the hard-working and passionate developers who likely have no say in the company’s decisions versus the management who are responsible for all the legal decision-making that’s been making me eye Nintendo more stringently.

So, with those thoughts and some health problems hampering me as the game’s launch finally came upon us, I picked up the game and tried to go into it with even expectations. When it comes to pieces of media, I try to evaluate them independently of their publishers or even authors/contributors/developers, judging the piece on its own merits. Sometimes, that’s impossible, but I hope I’ve done that here. In any case, take this as a declaration of my biases toward the game before we dive into my thoughts on it.

So, without further ado, let’s talk about the actual game and my experience with it.

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Approaching Tears

In playing this, I took in the expanded world Tears of the Kingdom offered. I closed myself off from anything Zelda-related on the internet to avoid spoilers for over three weeks because I truly wanted to experience this game at my own pace and not have to rush through it. Through this, I managed to complete all the main quests, all but two side adventures (one I hadn’t discovered, and the other being the compendium), all the shrines and shrine quests, and only missed 30 or so of the 139 side quests. I collected all but 12 Bubbulfrogs, collected just over 300 Korok Seeds, and fully mapped out all three layers of the world map. All this, from the moment I first turned on the game until I stood triumphant at the end, took me a little over 150 hours. Perhaps a little obscene of an investment within three or so weeks, but I wanted to push through in my weird, exploratory form of gaming while still managing to get through the game unspoiled.

From the perspective of someone who did all this, let me break down each aspect of the game and how I felt about it.

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A World of Tears

A big point of debate online was the idea of this game being a glorified expansion or DLC for Breath of the Wild. Yes, it is set in the same world, but that world has changed in ways both subtle and substantial, making for a fresh experience on a map that’ll still bring a twinge of nostalgia to Breath of the Wild veterans. Many surprises await players new and old to this franchise, including caves that take you beneath familiar landscapes and connect places in ways that make you say, “Oh wow. That makes a lot of sense, actually.” For example, I’d always headcanoned that an underground river connected the Lanaryu Wetlands to a river south of Kakariko Village. And guess what: there is one now!

The general landscape of Breath of the Wild’s Hyrule will appear very familiar at a distance, barring a few major landmark changes. Of course, Hyrule Castle is one of the easiest to spot, as is Death Mountain. But the changes stack up as you travel around Hyrule and see it up close. Some of the physical landscape has changed due to the event in the game known as the “Upheaval,” something we’ll come back to later when I discuss the game’s story. But there are also changes thanks to continuing development of Hyrule’s populace, both its citizens and the monsters threatening it.

On the side of Hyrule’s citizenry, one of the biggest landmarks is the newly established outpost of Lookout Landing just south of Hyrule Castle. It’s nice to see that there’s been some attempt at re-establishing a foothold in central Hyrule. That said, this seems to be only a first step, as there hasn’t been much else done around the rest of Hyrule in terms of trying to resettle formerly held territories. It’s hard for me to critique this because the timeline for the gap between this game and the last is vague at best. It could’ve been a single year, or it could’ve been a few. What’s more, there’s another theoretical time gap between the game’s prologue and when you actually get into the meat of the game. And I’m not talking about the meat you shoot when fusing your arrows to items in your inventory.

I was hoping for a little more development of Hyrule from the kingdom’s population. Breath of the Wild was great for fostering a post-apocalyptic world for you to wander through and discover. In Tears of the Kingdom, I was hoping for more evidence that people were trying to reclaim these wilds. We certainly see the first steps of it, but it didn’t quite meet my expectations on that front.

With the Upheaval came the return of monsters in Hyrule who established new outposts throughout the land. To my recollection, they haven’t reoccupied any old ones, though you can certainly find remains of them here and there. Some have vanished entirely though, strangely enough. An example is the Bottomless Swamp in eastern Hyrule Field, once a pit of quicksand-esque muck, giant bones, and a plethora of monsters. Now it’s a simple pond atop a hill, one that you’ll likely fall into without realizing it after falling from the tutorial sky islands. I know I shouldn’t be asking too many questions about why certain things happen in a world ruled by magic and magical machines, but I still wouldn’t mind an explanation of why they vanished.

But on the note of magical machines… the biggest question and criticism I have is regarding the notable absence of the guardian wreckage present all over Hyrule. Once strewn from corner to corner of Hyrule’s map in Breath of the Wild, Tears of the Kingdom doesn’t seem to boast a single piece of the Sheikah’s ancient technology, despite how prominently it featured in the game’s prequel. Towers, shrines, wrecked guardians, and even the Divine Beasts have vanished without a trace and, as far as I saw, without an explanation.

This feels strange to me, as though the developers simply decided to ignore the presence of these very important pieces of Hyrule’s history. It’s likely for the sake of avoiding confusion between Sheikah tech and Zonai tech, especially for players new to the franchise (or at least for those who skipped playing Breath of the Wild), but some acknowledgement would be appreciated. All we truly get in the sense of Sheikah technology is their modern adaptations. In the place of the Sheikah Slate, we get the Purah Pad (co-developed with Robbie, as the name might have you forget) and the new Skyview Towers which seem to be modern Sheikah takes on the old Sheikah Towers present in Breath of the Wild. And when referring to Breath of the Wild’s old plot, there are only a few cursory mentions in the early game, the character profiles, and in some odd side quests here and there. At this point, it feels somewhat like Breath of the Wild erasure, which doesn’t sit well with me.

But on the note of things forgotten—in-game that is—are the two other layers of the map that you’ll have the chance to explore: the Sky Islands and the Depths.

The Sky Islands are a smattering of Zonai-enchanted landmasses that dot the Hyrulean sky. I can only imagine these islands evaded detection by people for so long because they might’ve been up even higher in the sky or obscured by Zonai magic of some kind. The upheaval not only affected the land but also began to bring parts of these islands down too. I imagine they all descended somewhat during this, with a great many pieces of them falling, and continuing to fall, to the earth. The landed sky island pieces have done their part in effecting changes in the surface landscape, giving the familiar Hyrule some new variety. But travelling up to those still aloft gives you not only some interesting traversal conundrums using ancient Zonai tech and some classic Zelda puzzle-solving wit but also some fantastic vistas. Some of the best sequences in the game’s main quest also involve climbing to absurd heights on these sky islands, leaving you with an amazing sense of accomplishment when you realize that few, if any other living beings—even winged ones like the Rito, have been as far up as you have. And the best part is that these, along with the Skyview Towers that shoot you up to a fair altitude, give you the chance to skydive and paraglide all over Hyrule for easy mobility.

On the other end of the altitude spectrum are the anxiety-inducing Depths.

These aren’t your usual pithy little caves that you can go into, spend ten or twenty minutes plundering, and then return to the light of day without batting an eye. The depths are reached through noxious chasms that have opened up all around Hyrule that you have to skydive down through until you reach a massive underground that sprawls in all directions, spanning the entire map of Hyrule in a dark, horrific inverse. Yes, this is Tears of the Kingdom’s take on a Dark World that’s been seen in other games, though a bit less literal.

Swathed in patches of a nasty substance called Gloom, something that you and the populace of Hyrule cannot endure for long, traversing the Depths is a challenge in and of itself. You’ll have to use your resources to not only make your way but also light your way through it. Thankfully, you’ll find inert landmarks in the Depths called Lightroots that you can activate to create beacons to light this dismal landscape. And as you light more and more, you’ll come to recognize that the Depths really are an inverted reflection of the Hyrule you know and love above. Its topography is a reflection of Hyrule’s. Mountains on the surface are treacherously deep ravines in the Depths, often containing abandoned Zonai mining facilities. Landmarks such as towns have formerly occupied Zonai forges beneath them in the Depths, and even the Lightroots connect back up to shrine locations above (and even the names of the Lightroots are inverted from the names of their surface-world counterparts). A skilled navigator will either be able to use the surface map to guide them to new light beacons below based on shrines they visited or find hidden shrines on the surface thanks to Lightroots they’ve already seen below. The connection between the Depths and the surface is amazing and adds so much more to it.

That said, I felt like I often went point-to-point through the Depths because I didn’t feel there was much to it besides a few notable landmarks. Aside from some bosses hanging around in designated places, a few Yiga Clan bases, some mines where I could farm Zonaite ore, and a few story-driven locations, the Depths lost a lot of its charm to me in the latter half of the game since I could easily tell from revealed maps whether a place had anything of note or not. While this and the sky nearly tripled the space you could explore in-game, most of the Depth’s appeal came from your initial, blind, bewildered, and terrified explorations of it. Once this veil was lifted, the Depths began to feel a lot emptier, with its only trials being its many difficult-to-traverse cliffs and Gloom-filled expanses. The sky avoided this pitfall by having only sparse landmasses above Hyrule, leaving each sporadic encounter up there segmented between portions of the game as I travelled about and left me looking forward to each time I’d ascend to those heights.

But one thing that all three layers of this map do is make Hyrule feel like a cohesive whole, despite being three separate sections. The borders between the sky and Hyrule is only limited by your tools and what assets you have on the surface (i.e. the Skyview Towers or fallen islands you can recall back upward), and your passage to the Depths is facilitated by many chasms available to you. Despite the very contrasting tones between the sky islands, the surface, and the Depths, they all still feel very much linked, giving variety to a massive world that I enjoyed exploring every corner of.

Thank the goddesses there aren’t Koroks in the Depths though…

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Playing with Tears

One of Tears of the Kingdom’s main accomplishments is expanding on gameplay already found in Breath of the Wild and making it fresh and new once again. The Sheikah runes are gone with the Sheikah slate (save for the camera and teleportation functionality in the new Purah Pad… and amiibos if you want to use them), replaced with your strange new arm’s powers of Recall, Ultrahand, Fuse, and Ascend. It’s not an exaggeration to say that these things turn how you approach challenges in this world on their head.

The world encourages you to take interesting or unique approaches to tackle challenges. How were you going to scale a mountain? How are you going to raid that Bokoblin camp? Do you want to send a Korok to space? Now you can answer all of these questions that plagued you in Breath of the Wild—maybe not that last one, but the internet seems to have latched on that last one with this sequel—in entirely new ways in Tears of the Kingdom.

In quick summation, the Recall power turns back time for objects you target. Ultrahand allows you to pick up, move, and attach anything to just about anything, letting folks make those ridiculous mechas that you’ve probably seen online. Fuse lets you fuse weapons with various things in your inventory or in the world to good, great, or comical effect. And Ascend is the godsend to those who wanted to climb mountains in the rain by letting you travel upward through objects to their peaks in a fraction of the time.

Me? I preferred breaking puzzles in shrines and elsewhere by combinations of Ultrahand and Recall. I also found it particularly helpful for getting a decent launch for my flying machines when I didn’t have a nice runway: just Ultrahand the plane into the air, hold it there for a moment, bring it back down, get on board, recall it up into the air, start your machine, end the recall, and presto, you’re already flying!

I’ve heard and seen so many more ways people have been creatively using—and abusing—these abilities. The fact the game fosters so much creativity through these abilities is fantastic, and the fact they’re so often used in conjunction for puzzle solving, conventional or otherwise, is very satisfying. At least, until one puzzle comes along that makes me feel like a complete dumbass. But that’s usually followed up by another puzzle I completely break that makes me feel like a genius. This game continuously bounced back and forth along that spectrum.

I do have a couple of complaints about these abilities. The first of these is that, compounded with other new and existing abilities and actions, there are so many features and actions you perform that you must learn the button combinations for. Maybe it’s a combination of the facts that I played Breath of the Wild on the WiiU or that I’m getting old, but I felt like it nearly took me twenty hours to finally master the controls. All that time leading up to it, I felt like I was becoming inordinately frustrated with accessing Link’s abilities, especially in tense combat or tightly timed scenarios. My other complaints are far more minor: I felt like the range of Ultrahand was woefully short on the vertical axis compared to the horizontal axes, and I often felt like Ascend’s targeting was very touchy and had its range deliberately altered in certain places to keep it from working in certain shrines and the like. That last complaint is a bit iffy and might just be a matter of biased perspective on my part though.

Combat and conventional travel (i.e. climbing, running, etc.) is effectively the same as Breath of the Wild’s, though you’ll certainly be doing a lot more flying and skydiving thanks to the aforementioned Sheikah towers, which is quite convenient. The other main differences in travel came through the use of vehicles (which were fun, but I still tended to prefer exploring on foot or on horseback when possible to avoid missing features and secrets) and a few special low-gravity areas in the sky—places where I, even having finished the game, still cannot estimate proper jump distance if my life depended on it.

Comparatively, the main differences in combat come from how you fuse weapons and how you use them in combat. As well, weapons now have classes that come with certain special bonuses or features (improved flurry rushes, quicker spin attacks, extra damage at low durability, etc.). While I never made much use of these weapon class features, I’m sure those much more resourceful and into the combat side of the game will be much better at manipulating these concepts to great effect. It’s an addition of depth that didn’t benefit me, but it’s good that something was added in that sense.

Just as I did in Breath of the Wild, I found early-game combat difficult with how enemies could easily one-shot me. While I know enemies scale depending on how many you kill, there appeared (at least to my reckoning) to be areas where higher-scaled enemies appeared. This was most apparent to me when was when I was dealing with Red and Blue Bokoblins on Hyrule Field, only to find hordes of Black Bokoblins waiting for me on the Great Plateau. I found myself having to rush the Great Fairy quests so I could upgrade my armour sooner rather than later. Nothing is more frustrating to me than having to fight enemies perfectly, or else suffer one attack that puts me down for good. Sure, I could stick to the game’s encouraged path with easier enemies, but this game is designed to be an open world to encourage exploring. I love doing just that, but I felt like I was being punished for doing so.

Of course, I could’ve avoided that by building a mecha or an orbital death laser with the new Zonai tech, but I didn’t get around to that in my playthrough. It’s something I look forward to experimenting with in the future.

Regarding the foes you face, one of my biggest complaints about Breath of the Wild was a lack of enemy diversity. Thankfully, that’s been improved upon in Tears of the Kingdom with the addition of monsters like Like Likes, Gibdos, and Gleeoks. I still think it’s a bit of a thin roster compared to many other Zelda games, but I appreciate that we get to see new takes on classic Zelda enemies. Like Likes fixing themselves on walls waiting for prey to come nearby, and being so damn animated about it when they do, was a great touch—even they are a bit gross. Gibdos’ new format as walking corpses meshed with a vaguely insectoid nature was highly unnerving, especially when they start skittering on the ground—or goddesses forbid, gain wings. (As a side note, I found out about the existence of Winged Gibdos before meeting any Gibdos by upgrading my armour at a Great Fairy when I saw “Gibdo Wings” as a required item. Suffice it to say, not only was foreshadowing of one of my most feared enemies being in the game enough to unsettle me, but the fact they were implied to have wings also had me wondering what actual hell was awaiting me later in the game.) Gleeoks were always intense fights in this game, especially in the last phase whenever they decided to ascend high into the sky and do their massive area-of-effect attacks. Fights like those will be among the most memorable parts of Tears of the Kingdom for me.

Fuck Horriblins, though. They’re weird, annoying, I hate the noises they make, and they fucked me up with rocks when I was doing an early-game exploration of Hyrule Castle’s lower ruins. That said, I’m totally going to use them against my Zelda D&D group when I DM. Also, the Gloom Hands jumpscared me the first time I saw them. And my stomach dropped when I defeated them for the first time, only to find out they turned into Phantom Ganon.

Temples made a return in this game, but not quite in the way I expected. The sections leading up to them, especially the ones in the Gerudo and Hebra regions, were fantastic. And those same two temples, the Lightning and Wind Temples respectively, were stellar dungeons. The Fire Temple boasted some brain-breaking puzzles for me, but I managed to figure them out after some pondering. Conversely, the Water Temple was fairly simple, and perhaps the weakest of the set for me.

Aesthetically, however, all the temples were unique and well-defined, making them all memorable. It should be noted that you also travel into each one with a companion, each of which is essential for you to traverse and complete the dungeon in some way. Ever since the introduction of companion dungeons in Wind Waker, I’ve always found have always them to be a great twist on the dungeon formula, and I’m glad they were prominent in this game. However, one part of the formula present in these dungeons that I didn’t care for was carried over from the Divine Beasts of Breath of the Wild: objective points. Having to find and access all these different terminals made sense in the Divine Beasts, given their mechanical nature.

Some of these temples managed to integrate this concept better than others. The Wind Temple was essentially a ship with a massive door on its deck that you needed to align gears to open. Activating all the objective points made sense there. Since it was the first dungeon I completed, I didn’t pay this much mind. But as soon as I saw the gongs and the gate in the Fire Temple, I knew this was going to be a trend, and I found myself groaning because this meant the gameplay was going to become predictable in dungeons.

One of the things I love about Zelda dungeons, historically, is that each one had its own niche or feature that made it unique from the others. The Forest Temple in Ocarina of Time had the poe sisters stealing the fire from torches you needed to reach the boss. The Temple of Time in Twilight Princess had you controlling a statue to navigate a route you already traversed, completely recontextualizing an otherwise linear dungeon. Eagle’s Tower in Link’s Awakening had you crush an entire floor with another floor by knocking out its supports. Dungeons with unique features and progression give great variety within the games and even the dungeons themselves.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t help but feel like each dungeon in Tears of the Kingdom began with the same “hit x objectives” concept and was built from there. Certainly, the puzzles you solved, the bosses you fought, and the aesthetics of all the dungeons are unique between each, but the experience of unfurling the logic of a dungeon is one of the biggest appeals to me in Zelda games. If all it boils down to is activating X number of switches and then heading to the boss, then I feel that takes away a lot from the dungeon-delving experience. I think part of it—and this is something of a recurring theme that I’ll also touch on in the story-section of this reflection—is due to the fact this is an open-world game that allows you to tackle the dungeons in any order. Thus, some level of uniformity in terms of both execution and difficulty is expected. This means the open-world model takes away from the potential the dungeons have to offer.

Even with all of that, some dungeons did scratch itches that I found lacking in the last game. The biggest example for me is the Lightning Temple, my clear favourite of all four major dungeons. It had that amazing Indiana Jones/The Mummy vibe associated with a desert dungeon that I absolutely loved. While the objective-based gameplay was on full display here, I liked how there was a sort of “prologue” to the dungeon through a first encounter with the boss before we even set foot inside, followed up by traversing a dark, trap-filled basement, before finally ascending to a tall central chamber where our exploration went from linear to open. It was a very well-narrated dungeon in that sense, especially with it concluding with a rematch with the dungeon’s boss who we couldn’t finish off at the beginning.

Beyond the game’s main dungeons, the game re-used the concept of shrines to fill in the gap left by the game’s fewer number of dungeons compared to other games in the series, much like Breath of the Wild did. While I didn’t mind shrines in either this game or Breath of the Wild, this felt to me like another re-used concept from Breath of the Wild that had me wondering if the developers could’ve taken a different direction to challenge players when providing them opportunities to upgrade their health/stamina. Could we have gotten additional full dungeons, even if they were optional ones not in line with the game’s plot, or could the caves introduced into this game world have been expanded into more complex, developed dungeons themselves with similar puzzles and rewards? Could the Depths have been filled with their own dungeons (aside from the Spirit Temple that was essentially just a boss fight room)? I feel like there were possibilities that could’ve been explored but weren’t since they decided to default back to shrines. While I didn’t necessarily tire of shrines, I feel like I could’ve easily, were it not for the great decision to make a lot more shrines of the “blessing” variety simply for completing a challenge to either reveal or reach it. I appreciated the unique challenges the world put before you for shrines that were the reward rather than the challenge. This was especially satisfying in how the many crystal shrine quests rewarded you by having the crystal turn into the shrine—a brilliant touch, honestly.

In terms of the game’s technical performance, I did witness a few framerate slowdowns and witnessed some distant moving objects moving at slow framerates. However, these issues were generally few and far between, confirming for me my suspicions for critiques I made on other open-world games like Legends Arceus and Pokemon Scarlet & Violet: that the Switch can render such vast games beautifully and with decent framerates if the devs are given ample time to properly polish and optimize their games. Further, I never encountered a single glitch, contrasting the few I did see in the two aforementioned games.

Overall, Tears of the Kingdom’s gameplay soared high overhead of Breath of the Wild’s. It’s not perfect, but it’s a great accomplishment overall. It took me some time to get used to the abilities (and the controls), but once it went smoothly and I got some upgrades to my armour, I felt I could very expertly navigate and fight my way through Hyrule. That late-game feeling where you are armed and armoured to the teeth and ready to go mess up Ganondorf and his toughest minions is definitely one I enjoyed in Tears of the Kingdom. Not to mention the fact you can accrue companions to fight alongside you in regular gameplay. It wasn’t until this game that I realized I wanted a Zelda party RPG.

But for all the innovations that came with this game, is letting us pet the dogs at the stables so difficult?

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The Kingdom’s Tearful Music

Tears of the Kingdom follows faithfully in the footsteps of its predecessor when it comes to its musical style. Considering it’s a sequel with many of the same themes and expands on the already existing world, it makes sense the music follows suit too. This means that, until you get yourself into some intense situations and story-driven sections, you’ll be soothed with familiar tunes as you explore this still very untamed iteration of Hyrule. However, when the stakes are high, the music drives that tension up even further, making for some catchy compositions and enhancing those memorable moments in the game.

I will say, at the onset, that I was a bit disappointed that the general world themes are exactly as they were in Hyrule. Just as I critiqued the lack of Hyrule’s reclamation by its people, the world’s ambient music hasn’t advanced much, if at all. Your foot and horseback travel music in regions of comfortable climates is that same, pause-filled, broken-up sets of piano notes that, while evocative of the setting, don’t drive a lot of excitement. Similarly, the music pieces for areas of extreme heat and cold use the same music as Breath of the Wild, which I’ve always found to be a bit understated and repetitive.

That isn’t to say that having musical connections back to Breath of the Wild isn’t always a bad thing, music-wise. In fact, some of the best compositions in Tears of the Kingdom are best served with little doses of musical nostalgia. In the game, for each major settlement threatened by some variation of Ganondorf’s corruption, there’s a subdued, off-putting, downtrodden variation of its theme. The frozen Rito Village is tinged by echoing, icy sounds. Zora’s Domain’s pristine, elegant piano song fades in and out discordantly between the ambient sounds of muck. Goron City’s percussive tune is downplayed with worried notes left as unresolved as their plight. Gerudo Town’s catchy, desert tunes are lost to sombre tones between the sandy winds like the ghost town it’s become. Once you resolve these region’s dilemmas, you’ll find yourself returning to the familiar, reassuring musical suites of these settings that you know well from Breath of the Wild. I could critique it for not having these old compositions be iterated upon further in this game to differentiate it from their Breath of the Wild counterparts, but I think the goal was a restoration of the status quo that you managed to attain in Breath of the Wild. If that was the developers’ goal, they suitably accomplished it.

Returning from Breath of the Wild is its evolving, dynamic soundtrack as you progress through its dungeons. While I might’ve complained earlier about the objective-based gameplay of the dungeons, the music serves the heighten feelings of accomplishment as you progress from point to point. The dungeons’ music, as far as I can tell, have wholly original themes at the start, but soon bring in tones and musical phrases that will have you recognizing themes affiliated with the people of the region, your dungeon companion treading its dangers alongside you, and even the divine beasts of Breath of the Wild. These nostalgia hits, twined with new musical ideas, are one of the most potent parts of Tears of the Kingdom’s musical arsenal.

And, as Zelda games are no stranger to doing, the game’s music sets the mood of the scenes extraordinarily well. A haunting, droning sting as you descend into Depths through a chasm, truly prepares you for the terrifying experience of making your way through a dark, hostile domain. But if you want to talk about the cyclical connection of mood and setting in this game, one needs look no further than the game’s prologue to feel the dread the music intones as you descend into the lair of the imprisoned Ganondorf. Compare that to the end of the game when you find yourself returning to that same place while a haunting reprise of that song fills the air, confirming that you’ve found that dreadful place once again. And that same tone only evolves further and more intensely as you proceed beyond that chamber to find Ganondorf awaiting you.

But most unnerving and haunting are those strange, musical notes and phrases that almost feel like they’re vocalizations being played backwards (though I can’t confirm this as a fact, it just might be some sort of synthesized sound made to sound unnerving in that way), most of which are affiliated with the depths beneath the castle and with minions particularly connected to Ganondorf (namely the Gloom Hands, Phantom Ganon, and some small references in some of the major boss themes). I’m still wondering if it’s referring more to Ganondorf, to the Zonai because of the secret stone that Ganondorf stole, or to Rauru since that music first began playing when Rauru sealed Ganondorf with that fateful strike of his arm.

While not all the music in the game embodies the musical evolution I spoke of earlier, the overall soundtrack of this game is stellar and memorable. I love the connections it forges with Breath of the Wild through its music, though it certainly makes me wish the same parallel held in the setting regarding references to Sheikah tech, divine beasts, and other staples from the last game. Even so, Tears of the Kingdom’s haunting soundtrack will be one I’ll be revisiting often, perhaps more so than the game itself.

By the way, the Wind Temple has the best theme, hands down. And the music playing while you climb up the ascending sky islands toward it serves as the perfect intro. But for mood, nothing hits like the Descending into Gloom’s Lair track just before you fight an army Ganondorf sends at you before finally getting a crack at the man himself.

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A Tear-Wrenching Story

Don’t let this section’s title fool you: I mean this in the best way possible. Tears of the Kingdom’s story will not just tug at your heartstrings but strum them like an acoustic guitar.

While I certainly hoped and dreamed this game would let us play with Link and Zelda as a team (or even just as Zelda, if only for a bit), I knew not to expect anything so wonderful. Even so, I didn’t expect how strongly I would resonate with Zelda’s epic. In a way, I think hers was the more prominent plot in the story over the one you played with Link, despite them being entwined quite gracefully at the beginning and the end.

We began the story with Link and Zelda exploring the depths beneath Hyrule Castle, only to stumble upon an awakening Ganondorf who already seemed to know them. Only moments later, he unleashed his power, destroying the Master Sword, grievously wounding Link’s arm, and sending Zelda plummeting into the darkness along with him. Link makes a desperate bid to grab her with his corrupted arm, but can’t quite make it in time before she vanishes with the new stone she’s attained from the arm that was previously holding Ganondorf at bay. Said arm is the only reason Link doesn’t fall to his own death, leaving us to wake up an unspecified amount of time later with that new arm replacing our old, corrupted one. Meanwhile, on the world below, the Upheaval has taken place, leaving Hyrule changed yet again and opening routes to the Depths and the sky islands.

On these first sky islands, we’re guided by Rauru, a Zonai and the apparent first King of Hyrule, on our tutorial sky islands after a fantastic opening cut of the title. My immediate response to this was to comment on the parallels between this scenario and the Great Plateau tutorial in Breath of the Wild. We’re even guided by a king of old through it all. This initially led me to worry if the game would simply be retreading the steps of Breath of the Wild and wouldn’t break any new ground. In some ways, my fears were validated by how we were directed to four regions of the map to address problems, just as we had to address the matters of the divine beasts in Breath of the Wild. To further those concerns, we also found out about the geoglyphs and had to collect memories for those, just as we had to visit certain locations for memories in Breath of the Wild. While I was confident the gameplay was evolving at this early point in the game, I was worried the formula of storytelling was going to be delivering a rehash of what we’d seen in the prequel to Tears of the Kingdom.

While the method of story delivery turned out to be similar, I was glad to find out the story itself was anything but.

What we got was a heartbreaking vision into the distant past of the fledgling kingdom of Hyrule in its infancy and the origin of the Ganondorf threat through Zelda’s memories. After being flung back into the past, Zelda found herself in the care of Rauru and Sonia, the first King and Queen of Hyrule respectively. While a stranger in time, Princess Zelda found, what I believe, to be a new father and mother figure in them, as they were both kind and nurturing while taking Zelda into their care. They did everything they could to help her find a way home, but that effort fell by the wayside as Ganondorf treacherously slew Sonia and stole her secret stone, a Zonai relic capable of amplifying a person’s existing power. From there, Ganondorf became a menacing, world-ending threat. It was only by Rauru’s sacrifice after the collaboration of six sages that Ganondorf was sealed away. I couldn’t help but feel for Zelda in both these losses she suffered, as it felt much like her losing yet another set of parental figures.

But of course, even that sacrifice wouldn’t be enough, as Zelda knew well that Ganondorf would awaken, having seen it before she was cast back into the past. She gleaned her purpose once she received the broken Master Sword Link sent her from the future near the beginning of the game, and realized that she had to capitalize on its potential to absorb her holy power through the millennia. And for that, she had to make a sacrifice that likely broke the heart of every Zelda fan far and wide: she had to swallow her secret stone, cast away her very sense of self, and become an immortal dragon.

This is where we connect back to the story in the present. Now, here’s the part where things get tricky because of the open-world nature of the game. The pacing of the storytelling, and the order in which you learn parts of the story, are determined by the player. Make no mistake, this story is intricately and beautifully told. But if you find the glyphs in the wrong order as I did, it betrays some of the plot earlier than it should and lessens the impact somewhat. I still had my heart crushed, thankfully—weird to say, but yes, I am thankful about it—by the scene where Zelda made her sacrifice, but I found out about it far sooner than I should’ve, in my opinion, because I was collecting glyphs faster than I needed to and out of chronological order. Moreover, I had only completed three of the four regional phenomena by the time I finished the glyph-based memories (only the Gerudo left to go). It feels like, based on dialogue from Mineru (the Spirit Sage and the fifth you find), that the revelation of the Master Sword, and its reclamation, should’ve come after you helped her. I certainly think that learning about Zelda’s sacrifice at that moment would’ve had the best impact from a storytelling perspective. Don’t get me wrong, climbing, step by step, up Zelda’s long, draconic back to find the Master Sword completely revitalized atop her head was a stunning moment. But I feel like it could’ve happened at a better time in my playthrough for the best potential catharsis.

But that’s the pitfall that comes with open-world games trying to tell a compelling story. And, to return to my earlier critique about this game’s recycled story delivery method, this is why the plot is divided between what we do in the present and what Zelda does in the past. This is why the game has us search around for memories and why these regional phenomena are delivered to us in the same way as before Breath of the Wild’s divine beast quests. Don’t get me wrong, they adapt this method of telling Zelda’s story very well. Creating a compelling story with a time loop without making it convoluted or confusing is a difficult task at best and a foolhardy one at worst. But they executed it beautifully. Unfortunately, the developers have to rely on the player to see it in a particular way for the best impact.

This also impacts the story and gameplay of Link’s journey in the present too. We’re encouraged to go to Hebra first, Eldin second, Zora’s Domain third, and the Gerudo Desert last. This doesn’t necessarily affect any major storytelling issues, but the enemy scaling issues I mentioned earlier in this reflection end up coming into play, potentially hindering player experience if they choose to go to another of the regions first, and especially if they wanted to do the Gerudo first. What’s more, the biggest flaw in storytelling in this regional-phenomena, open-world approach is that each cutscene after a dungeon with your companion essentially retold the same story over and over, making it feel much less impactful after the first sage you empowered. If the game were more linear, each sage could add a new detail that slowly unveils the true nature of that battle with Ganondorf, or potentially other moments in the past with Zelda.

Further, while I think splitting the journeys of Zelda and Link works well for this game’s story since it was explicitly built around the concept of time travel, the split between perspectives of Zelda and Link in the past and future respectively does create a feeling of non-involvement for the player—or it did for me at least. This is only a minor issue for me in Tears of the Kingdom because of how the story is framed, but I felt this in Breath of the Wild too, since it felt like all the major, exciting events took place in the past, while I was cleaning up after it in the future. I do wonder if I would have these reservations in Tears of the Kingdom if we didn’t already have to do that in Breath of the Wild. It would feel like a fresher, novel experience that the story was curated around in this newer game. While the story does feel curated around it now, I’m still dealing with the lingering sense of repetition due to Tears of the Kingdom’s story delivery matching that of Breath of the Wild.

But these are minor complaints in an otherwise fantastically told story. It just leaves me wondering how much more involved in the story I would be if it were a more linearly-oriented game. How much harder would Zelda’s sacrifice hit me if I didn’t see a particular memory first that tipped me off on what was happening? I’ll never truly know. All I know is that, while Breath of the Wild’s open-world gameplay is wonderful, it does have an impact on how these stories are told. After two of these games, I feel like I may want to go back to a more traditional method of experiencing a Zelda story: one where Link is more directly involved with events with Zelda and where the story unfolds at a set pace with events in order.

There are a few gaps in the story I wished were filled in too. The time gap between Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom remains unclear, as does the time gap between when the Upheaval starts on Ganondorf’s release and when we awaken with our new arm and begin the game properly. I would also love to know more about the ancient sages who help us awaken their counterparts in our time. They each wear a helmet resembling one of the divine beasts—again, why this connection to the previous game without any evidence of the divine beasts or guardians in the sequel’s world—and not much is told about them beyond their duty. Considering the King is named Rauru, I wonder if their names would line up with the names of other sages to match the divine beasts’ names: Medli for Vah Medoh, Darunia for Vah Rudania, Ruto for Vah Ruta, and Nabooru for Vah Naboris. I also wonder if this decision to keep them shrouded in mystery was to keep the focus on the modern sages since I feel like the new champions were overshadowed by their predecessors in Breath of the Wild (tell me how many of you think of Revali or Teba first, for example). Or maybe there will be DLC to expand on these sages in the future. There are plenty of other small questions I wished were answered, but that’s me being detailed-oriented and fussy, so I can’t complain too much about it.

But even with all my reservations and concerns, I still have to say, this story was one of the most compelling Zelda stories to date. And, to be perfectly honest, its ending dethroned my longstanding favourite from The Wind Waker. I thought that nothing would be able to upstage Link driving the Master Sword into Ganondorf’s head and sealing him beneath an ocean while the King of Red Lions decides to die with his kingdom once and for all, leaving Link and Zelda to make their own kingdom free of the past.

But…

The cyclical ending of Tears of the Kingdom cannot be ignored. Zelda being flung to the past, enduring the ages to bring us the revitalized Master Sword. Ganondorf eating his own stone in a desperate bid to defeat Link, whereas Zelda ate hers in devotion to Link and their cause to defeat Ganondorf ages before. The battle of dragons in the skies above Hyrule after our duel with him in the deepest reaches of the earth. Crawling up the back of Ganondorf’s demonic dragon form to strike him down in contrast to the tender nature with which Link strode up Zelda’s draconic back to find the Master Sword on her head. And then finally, once he’s defeated, Link skydiving to catch the now undraconified Zelda falling to earth—all while the game’s main theme plays, transitioning to a triumphant reprise of Zelda’s lullaby—before catching and saving her after we failed to at the beginning of the game. And at last, seeing Zelda’s sweet smile, reminiscent of the one she gave at the end of Breath of the Wild, as she tells us she’s home. The cycle is complete. The ouroboros of the title logo is fulfilled. I even got my wish, in a small sense, for Link and Zelda to work as a team during this game, thanks to that final fight.

I haven’t yelled at a video game in such excitement in a long time as I did when I was desperately diving toward Zelda to catch her. It was an iconic moment in gaming for me that I won’t forget for a long, long time.

--

A Reflection on Tears

So, given the good, the bad, and the confusing, what did I think of Tears of the Kingdom overall?

Well, its good facets certainly outweigh any critiques I can make about it. I explained at the beginning of this reflection that I may have some feelings towards Nintendo now that may lead me to be more critical of their products, even though I try to divorce those feelings from the work of art that is this game. It’s not something that I can do easily or perfectly. I wonder if I’d be able to overlook the game’s issues otherwise, or if these criticisms are a result of the person I am now compared to how I once looked at games like A Link to the Past back when I first played them as a starry-eyed child.

Regardless, no matter what I can say about it, there’s no denying that so much love and hard work went into Tears of the Kingdom. It was built on the foundation that Breath of the Wild lay first, but it undoubtedly surpassed and expanded on it in ways that cannot be quantified. I had my frustrations with it, sure, but there was so much more that sucked me into it, made me smile, made me gasp, made me hold my breath, made me shout, and made me laugh.

This world you see, the way you travel through it, the way you hear it through its sounds and music, and the story it tells, are nothing short of astonishing. Not perfect but astonishing all the same.

I look forward to continuing my journey in Tears of the Kingdom, discovering those last 12 Bubbulfrogs—hell no to the Koroks though—and their elusive caves, finding the last few bits of armour I’m missing, and wishing I could put a roof on my house near Tarrey Town.

And yes, this game did make me shed a tear or two. It would’ve been a travesty if Tears of the Kingdom didn’t live up to its name.

On this day ten years ago, in a glitzy media space in New York, the world was introduced to Sonic Boom, a brand new branch of the long-running Sonic the Hedgehog franchise. With branded games, comics, cartoons, many merchandising and licensing deals and a lot of marketing budget behind it, this was intended to be an all-encompassing cross-media initiative that sought to revitalise the blue blur for a new generation of kids.

The 6 Feb 2014 event was billed as a “renaissance” that would kick off the “Year of Sonic” - but instead it would become the day that marked the beginning of a long, lost decade for the franchise.

The colossal failure of Wii U exclusive ‘Rise of Lyric’ left fans with next-to-nothing to play for several years, as SEGA scrambled to rescue its most-treasured IP with rushed projects and outsourced works that leant heavily on the brand’s “legacy” - something that the company had just tried so desperately to move away from.

But, we’re getting ahead of ourselves here. At this time, ten years ago, there was no such panic within SEGA, and not nearly as much consternation from the fanbase. The community reaction, in fact, was one of stunned curiosity. The reveal of Sonic Boom was incredibly surprising at the time - not least because of the unique redesigns that Sonic and friends were rocking. Sonic, Tails, Knuckles and Amy all came with brand new kicks and accessories (including an industrial amount of sports tape), and proportions were tweaked to varying degrees (Sonic got taller, while Knuckles got… bigger? In the… chest?) in order to make them look contemporary for a Western (read: US) audience.

Also fascinating was the gung-ho effort by SEGA America to fully commit to a trans-media offering for the Sonic franchise. The blue blur has made - and will continue to make - appearances across all manner of different media, obviously, but Sonic Boom would be the first time that a consistent universe would carry across branded games, comics, TV and potentially even movies.

US developers Big Red Button and Sanzaru Games were tapped by SEGA to develop the first set of video games in this new world, and no expense was spared in getting these projects off the ground - with headliner ‘Rise of Lyric’ reportedly assigned some $20 million in budget. While fans were having a time trying to adjust to this bold new direction for the franchise, it at least could be said that the Wii U exclusive was looking incredibly good in its initial reveal, with the game reportedly running a version of CryEngine 3 specifically made for Nintendo’s cursed console.

On the very same day, a trailer for a branded TV series was also revealed (and it would be this arm of the sub-franchise that would ultimately stand the test of time, with a successful comedy angle for the show and writing that got increasingly great [and weird] across the two seasons that followed) as well as a range of tie-in merchandise in partnership with TOMY. Indeed, Sonic Boom was ripe for the licensing, with SEGA America fully intending to rightfully milk that cow until the end of time with many, many more partnerships confirmed over the course of the next year.

Of course, as we all know now, during the rather chaotic year that was 2014 things started to quickly fall apart. Impressions of Rise of Lyric at E3 were not super positive, with the realisation that Sonic’s design wasn’t the only factor where Boom had deviated from its SEGASonic (or “legacy”) counterpart. Gameplay appeared to follow a rather generic ‘Western action-platformer’ formula, with weird ‘Enerbeam’ swinging gimmicks in place of a traditional Sonic moveset and a focus on character-swapping and puzzles over high-speed action. It later transpired that the Wii U was not quite powerful enough to onboard the aforementioned CryEngine 3 tech either, so graphics and game features ended up taking a nosedive over the months leading up to release.

The game, which was a key factor in Sonic Boom’s overall brand success, crashed and burned by the time the review embargoes lifted (you can read our review on our archive site here, but other media outlets were much less kind to it). Add to that an associated title on Nintendo 3DS, ‘Shattered Crystal’, that suffered similar negative feedback, and you had a verified disaster in the midst of a new IP’s flagship year. The fallout was so bad that in the fiscal quarter that followed, SEGA sheepishly reported to investors that the Sonic Boom games were among the worst-selling Sonic titles in the entire franchise’s history.

Unfortunately, once the games themselves proved to be duds, the rest of the cross-media initiative came crumbling down. An Archie Comics book was announced in July 2014, and ran for only eleven issues before being cancelled. The toys would continue for a little while longer - likely owing to licensing contractual obligations - but it never reached the heights that SEGA America intended, with in-store concepts discovered in 2015 that suggested a complete Sonic takeover of toy stores had the Sonic Boom series become successful. 

About the only thing that remained by the end of it all was the Sonic Boom CG animated series, which was beloved by the community and won itself a second season before its time was up. That premiered in late 2016, alongside the third and final video game in the Sonic Boom franchise (if you don’t count the branded Sonic Dash sequel that SEGA HARDlight released a year prior), titled “Fire & Ice” (which itself was delayed a full year from its original intended release of 2015).

It was a sad run for an ambitious “sub-franchise”. But, while SEGA reps went to great lengths back in 2014 to insist that Sonic Boom was not intended to ‘replace’ the old Sonic continuity, there were signs that in practice this may not have been entirely true. For the three years that followed, the Sonic Team studio took a back seat from practically all association with Sonic the Hedgehog, with its release schedule limited to mobile spinoff Sonic Runners (which, while interesting, only lasted a year with SEGA calling the project a total failure).

The lack of any viable options from the “other branches” of the Sonic franchise, coupled with the share of voice Sonic Boom enjoyed, meant that SEGA America’s pet project was inevitably the de-facto “new face” of the IP, despite comments to the contrary. In reality, Sonic Boom was not just “a new direction” as told by producer Stephen Frost, but “the new direction”, with non-Sonic Boom branches openly considered as part of the franchise's “heritage” instead.

Perhaps most telling of this point of view came from comments made by then-SEGA producer Omar Woodley back in mid-2015:

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"Sonic Boom is meant to branch away from the classic/legacy Sonic. Our plan is to go forward with both the modern Sonic and the legacy Sonic, but the Sonic Team will handle the legacy side of things in Japan.”

Indeed, until 2017 if you weren’t interested in Sonic Boom there was simply nothing interesting to play. In the gaming world, Sonic was in the doldrums. In fact, for years the Sonic social media team had the unenviable task of carrying the entire marketing for the brand, distracting a bored community with nothing but memes (a frankly herculean task that was nonetheless executed so masterfully that the Twitter account ended up growing to millions of followers) until SEGA could action a fallback strategy.

The focus on Sonic Boom (along with the subsequent lack of high profile Sonic Team projects in tandem) and its resulting failure led to SEGA America taking the unfortunate decision to downsize, restructure and relocate its Western business, and the company did not showcase or announce any new titles at E3 in 2015.

Later that year, SEGA Games CEO Haruki Satomi even stated that the company had "betrayed" its fans:

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“We did our best to build a relationship of mutual trust with older fans of Sega, but looking back, there’ve been some titles that have partially betrayed that [trust] in the past 10 years.”

SEGA Europe’s Jon Rooke added that; “SEGA has publicly apologised to the fans as the quality of console games in the Sonic franchise hasn’t been acceptable over recent years.” Whatever was going on, it clearly seemed that SEGA felt like it needed to engage in damage control.

In 2016, Takashi Iizuka spoke up about the future of the franchise, and talked up the possibility of Sonic Team making a comeback.

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“Because [Rise of Lyric] tried a different take on Sonic from the norm — and considering the results — this made Sonic Team feel that we want to build a Sonic title which represents the evolution of the Sonic series over the last 20 years.”

The years that followed brought us Sonic Forces - which despite a reported long development time gave the impression that it was rushed to fill a void left by the collapse of Sonic Boom - and Sonic Mania, a critically-acclaimed title that in spite of its honors was a project outsourced to indie developers.

Arguably, it would not be until 2020 - six years after the announcement of Sonic Boom - that the Sonic franchise would start to pick itself back up. The advent of the surprisingly-fantastic Sonic the Hedgehog feature film from Paramount Pictures restored a lot of energy and good will for the IP and within the community, and ironically brought Sonic to the new and extended audiences that SEGA America originally intended to reach with Sonic Boom.

In 2022, nearly nine years on from the New York reveal, Sonic Team returned to the fore with a new concept in Sonic Frontiers. And the consensus on this seems to be that, while it is rough around the edges, its approach has great potential and could flourish in a follow-up with the right design direction.

It truly feels that now, a full ten years on - and thanks to a lot of hard work from SEGA, Sonic Team and the Sonic Brand team - there is a lot to be positive about with this franchise, with plenty of interesting and exciting new games and projects on the way.

But with all that said, is it right to say that Sonic Boom was a complete and total failure? No, I don’t think so. For all of its faults, the sub-brand did do a number of things right. For one thing, the Sonic Boom cartoon remains a favourite for many this day, with fans often mourning the casual and quiet non-renewal of the series. Producer Stephen Frost also concluded that Sonic Boom in general was a success from a licensing and brand awareness perspective, which cannot really be argued when you remember the long-lasting line of toys and merchandise that kept Sonic in the mainstream’s consciousness.

And it was ahead of its time in terms of helping SEGA understand Sonic’s prominence in the West as opposed to Japan, with Iizuka moving to the US in 2016 and establishing the Sonic Brand team out of SEGA America’s offices, where a good majority of brand decisions are now made.

A lot has been written about how Sonic Boom fared and where it may have gone wrong over the years, but one thing is for certain - its reveal and its ambition was most definitely interesting. How do you feel about the overall series, ten years on? And what are your fondest/"fondest" memories of Sonic Boom?

Happy 10th Anniversary, Sonic Boom (the franchise)!

what is your favorite and LEAST favorite element of each era? (OG, UAF, OV, and the reboot). if you don't care to do them all, feel free to just choose a specific era.

Favorite:

OS- Of course the vast alien/creature designs made by Dave Johnson and Tom Perkins. The eerie, weird vibe the show has with odd things always going on in the background, something that makes you feel like the world is more expanded. Always something bubbling under the surface. Fun villains, arcs, and finale that just blew me away as a kid.

UAF- Pretty strong start, wanting to introduce "darker" elements to the world around (both figuratively and literally) and inject different perspectives both on the characters and the story as a whole, asking what would happen to these characters when they're older and how they've changed (for better or worse). Very neat work done by Glenn Murakami and Glen Wong. Undeniably gave the franchise as a whole its mark.

OV- A fun return to form that also isn't afraid to go weird, both in terms of writing and art. Genuinely funny at times. Lots of great character designs from Derrick J. Wyatt. Appreciative of bringing back tons of old characters/aliens when they were allowed to. really great Voice Acting as well!

Reboot- More tolerable version of Ben and Gwen. Neat design choices here and there. Honestly has a really great interpretation of Vilgax! Honestly happy that a younger generation got to experience anything Ben 10 related despite it not being the version I grew up with.

Least Favorite:

OS- Needless bickering between Ben and Gwen. Small things that don't exactly add up story-wise unless you look into pop up trivia that are partially just lost to time or crew statements after the fact. Very dated dialogue/insults.

UAF- Setting is WAY too dark or way too bland. Too many humanoid aliens that should DEFINIETLY be clothed to some degree. Completely bizarre character rewrites or "expansions" that either didn't need them or were just presented poorly for arcs that abruptly end. Weird, wooden acting and odd voice direction. Some lien abilities that are just total ass-pulls. Clunky gimmick that they don't even use that much. Fluctuating regression of the main protagonist awful to deal with at best or borderlines character assassination at worst.

OV- Too reliant on comedy that either runs too long, undercuts emotional moments, or just isn't that funny. Attempts to rectify their past mistakes from previous show but unfortunately makes a larger mess than need be. Certain character designs sacrifice too many original details in favor of references to other media, which can be fun but almost too distracting at times. Much like the other shows, introduces neat concepts that could be very deep and earnest but either don't follow through or just aren't executed well.

Reboot- Shorter runtime makes it feel too rushed and makes their overarching stories suffer. Toy mandates making needless gimmicks part of the story to sell action figures makes for boring character designs and less engaging stories (not blaming the crew itself for that). Attempts to separate itself from old continuity yet still tries to satiate older fans by loosely putting in references/specific characters for making a crossover special that the younger generation wouldn't know about. Inconsistent character design choices by ripping from old model sheets rather than making new designs that fit within the show's style. Not the best take on Grandpa Max. Overall just not my cup of tea, but hey it's not meant for me so Eh

woozymitts

The same shit happened in The Witcher fandom, people got sooooo fucking upset when the show came out because "Ew these people are into the SHOW and not the BOOKS/GAMES they're doing Fandom wrong >:(" instead of like. Being happy that people discovered something they like and there's new people to be friends with and talk about TW with.

I missed a lot of that because I am a Games Fan from the time of The First Game and initially tried to engage with the fandom back when Wild Hunt came out because I was so fucking pumped to not only be returning to the Witcher but also because it was such a significant jump in game quality and then. And Then. I realized that the Witcher fandom was filled with a bunch of racist, sexist assholes who were more interested in spitting on any POC or queer person going “hey... um...” as well as any woman who was at least mildly uncomfortable with the implications of some of the romance options throughout the series as well as the gratuitous sexual violence within the universe spoken about so casually.

By the time the series came out, I’d heard a bunch of the same stupid whining “but POC don’t make sense here” “I can’t believe [female character] is a girlboss now” “the costumes” “the dialogue” “the lore changes” “make it fail” and resolved to simply not interact with the fandom outside of reading a few fics of my favs every now and again. I bought the books because the show reminded me that I’d been waiting for them all to be officially translated, and I want absolutely nothing to do with the Witcher fandom because of what I saw, despite having been in it for almost as long as it’s been available to US audiences.

moddeydhoo

There's a lottttt of snobbery in fandom. "Ew, new people! They can't be REAL fans because of several reasons I'll now think up and then use interchangeably! And all older adaptations are better because objective facts and definitely not because of the nostalgia halo effect! (also anyone who got into  the fandom earlier than me is a disgusting old who's also doing it wrong, because very valid reasons such as: adults are icky)"

Yes, I saw this when the Hobbit movies came out too, and was fairly frustrated about that (and hilariously, those movies are now being upheld as great when the same complaints were happening regarding them...) and it just really bothers me to see it again and again.

Did I like the Hobbit movies? They were alright for what they were. Not my favorite. Never going to match the feeling I had when I sat down to watch LOTR the first time. Made a lot of annoying changes to the lore. Screwed over their female elf OC’s actor. Good for a rewatch marathon with the OG but outside of specific scenes I don’t really find much interest in it.

Do I like the Hobbit-movies-era subset of the fandom? No, actually, most of the time I avoid anything to do with that because I feel the source of their interest has a much different tone and take than the actual book and surrounding materials. There’s only so many times one can see party-king Thranduil memes before being kind of annoyed that that was the takeaway when you’ve invested as much time as I have in learning this universe. I don’t read any fics written by folks who are going based off that trilogy’s version of events. I’m incredibly choosey with my Tolkien fan-created material and because I’m coming from an era where the OG trilogy movies were somewhat sacrilegious due to their changes, often it’s simply not Tolkien enough for me.

But I don’t go bother those fans about it. Let them have their fun. They’re not hurting anyone? If I want to experience the parts of the franchise I like again, they sit on my bookshelf and I can revisit them whenever I want. What’s the point of being so sanctimonious about whether people are interested in a piece of media because of the right adaption when the truth of the matter is that they’re all adaptions and thus will all be different from the source material as well as each other? I still reblog Hobbit gifsets to my main and I still own those movies. I’m happy just to be back in Middle Earth again when I watch them, even though certain aspects make me twitch.

I just hate to see people being so cruel. We’re all Tolkien fans in the end. If a different adaption really threatens (general) your ability to enjoy (general) your favorite adaption, then what are you actually a fan of?

Movie Review: Scream VI

When the first Scream was released in 1996, it  resurrected the horror genre, which had been a little stale for a while there. Between a smart, funny and clever screenplay from newcomer Kevin Williamson and legendary horror director Wes Craven, it was almost a comedy disguised as a horror film (or vise versa). It was a horror film where horror movies exist. Where characters make reference to horror movie characters and joke about “Wes Carpenter” films.  After the terrific opening in which Drew Barrymore is killed by the sadistic phone caller, the whole movie is keeping the viewer guessing about who did it in this whodunit. Exactly one year after the original was released, Scream 2 was a meta self-referential approach to the horror genre. There’s a film-within-the-film Stab, based on the events of the first movie and a copycat murderer begins striking. I’d rank Scream 2 among the best horror sequels ever made. Craven and writer Williamson really tried to make something as smart and clever as the original. Williamson didn’t write Scream 3, which felt like much of the cast and crew were phoning it in. Over a decade later, both Craven and Williamson reunited for Scream 4, which was slightly better than 3 and had something to say about social media and reality TV. After Craven died in 2015, it didn’t seem like a good idea to continue this series...but last year directors Matt Bettinelli-Opin and Tyler Gillett did Scream (I’m calling it Scream 5 to avoid confusion and I hate this recent trend of sequels with the same name as the originals). It brought back some of the original cast and introduced new ones. While there was a cool commentary about elevated horror, it was kind of a letdown IMHO. Now the team of Matt B-O and Tyler G are back for Scream VI, opening today.

movie poster

Taking place a year after the last movie, the survivors of that film have left Woodsboro for NYC: Tara (Jenna Ortega, horror’s IT Girl right now) and her half-sister Sam, and Randy’s niece and nephews Chad and Mindy. Sam followed to keep an eye on Tara as she and the others went to college at Blackmore University. Suddenly some copycat murders start happening with someone emulating the Ghostface mask killer from the previous films. From the previous Scream films (1-4 that is), returning characters include Gale Weathers (Courteney Cox) and Kirby Reed (Hayden Panettiere).

the star of the Scream movies

I had a lot of  issues with this six-quel. Where to begin? First off, this was filmed in Montreal for NYC. While there were a few scenes where one could suspend disbelief and say “that could possibly be an area around Columbia University”, most of it didn’t look like NYC at all. I mean there is police station with perfect greenery outside!?! Last year, Neve Campbell made headlines in the trade papers that she would not be returning to this Scream movie as the studio was not going to pay her fairly. There is a separate conversation to be had from here about fair salaries in Hollywood, but in this instance, Campbell not being in it hurt the film. Even the last one she had a supporting role and you had this strong connection to the first movie. Here we just had Gale and a brief reference to “Sidney left town with her family” when the copycat murders started again. Next issue - almost everything about this movie was digging from the well of Scream 2: main characters leave Woodsboro for college, copycat murders emulating the Stab movies, meta references to the previous films, and ironic jokes. In the middle of this film one of the characters starts talking about the rules of a successful franchise and breaks down all of the friends’ possible motives. All I could think was how awesome that almost plagiarized scene was originally in Scream 2 when Dewey and Randy are talking about the rules of surviving a horror sequel and who all the suspects are. I’m going to try my best to avoid spoilers (which I hate in movie reviews), but the big reveal was a letdown. For all of my complaints, I will say this: there were a few set pieces that I really liked, including the bodega scene. The opening also got my attention too as it had some solid surprises. But this series has truly lost steam. I say this as a disappointed fan of the series. Someone calls and asks me my favorite scary movie? Well, not Scream VI!

For info on Scream VI: https://www.screammovie.com/

2 out of 5 stars

All right, I got to say something,

.

You can buy a game used.

That is an option,

if somebody wants to play a video game but not support a company.

Even if you are playing on PC

.

For years these game companies have despised the idea of used game markets because it means that people can purchase games without giving money directly to them, and have been trying to figure out ways to prevent that. A couple of companies have even tried suing people for selling their used games. It seems like some of their propaganda has worked because in game boycotts people no longer have the language to even remember that used games exist?

.

With the Harry Potter game, Ubisoft games, and whatever else has been boycotted recently, people seem to think that there are only three options:

.

Buy the game,

don't buy the game,

or pirate it.

.

Pirating it is also a good option, but you can literally just buy a used copy of THIS GAME for nearly every single video game console in existence right now

.

I don't know, maybe this is a silly point to get hung up on , but to me this seems like a fucking nightmare that companies have controlled the windows of our perception so much that we've completely forgotten about the consumer rights allotted to us through phyiscal media, physical PC editions, and Steam keys

.

If somebody wanted to play this game but not support JK Rowling they could go to their game store or eBay, buy a used copy and just play it quietly in private.

That would not support the Harry Potter franchise or the equally disgusting Warner brothers company (joking joking obviously she's worse)

.

My Facebook feed has been full of nothing but people arguing about whether or not it's ethical to BUY THIS VIDEOGAME NEW FROM WB as though that's the only option. People aren't even talking about piracy anymore. This is the argument that Warner Brothers wants us to have, they wanted to be framed as "buy the game or not" because they know that if people think those are the only two options long time Harry Potter fans will cave and purchase the game new no matter how bad they feel about it.

.

There's an unproblematic decision here , SUPPORT YOUR LOCAL USED GAME STORE, and play the game quietly at home

.

Now, the only group of people that don't have this option are the people who bought the digital-only edition of a next-gen console. and to those people, I don't blame you for not spending the extra $100 or $200 to get the normal Edition because of how our economic system is, but good God that was a horrible choice in your part I'm so sorry 😅 this is mostly unrelated to the topic at hand, sort of, but not only do you have to buy all of your games directly from these companies, but there was a controversy earlier last year where if you don't connect your PlayStation 3 to the internet within a certain amount of time they lock you out of playing all of your digitally downloaded games

No means No! Even in the world of sports

Consent is something considered important no matter the context. Channon & Matthews (2022) describe it as ‘a vital moral principle underpinning much of the everyday regulation and negotiation of social life’.

Whether it is informed consent for a minor to participate in a school trip, sexual consent between two adults, or something as simple as 'borrowing' food from a flatmates fridge in your student accommodation. So where in the rule books does it say 'once you become an elite athlete, you can’t really say no?', Imagine a world where paid professionals say "No", to attending practice/games, it almost sounds insane...or does it? 

"Practice? I’m supposed to be the franchise player and we sitting in here talking about practice? not a game, not a game that I go out there and die for, the game I go out there and give my all, play like it’s my last game, but we talking bout practice.." (Allen Iverson). 

This quote above, came from one of the most famous, most influential Basketball players of all time. For context, his team was on a small losing streak, and he missed not eight, not eleven but he missed one practice and the public were itching to know why.

We all get days off work in the regular working world, whether it's a sick day, holiday or just a struggling to get out of bed day. So why when an athlete demonstrates exceptional talent does that same right get stripped? When did it become that once you achieve elite status as an athlete, do you sacrifice being a human, giving up that freedom? If it was a regular roster player, hardly anyone would care whether they even started.

So why is it that when an athlete demonstrates exceptional talent does whatever organisation/franchise make the decision that the athlete belongs to them. 

It's not new news to hear of an athlete sacrificing their bodies for the franchise that they play for. Many viewers would argue "it’s the life they chose" or "they signed the contract", almost implying for the next years to come, if the season is on, due to this God-given talent, they don't deserve a day off. 

For those who don’t watch basketball, let me break it down. There are 82 games in a season, usually running from Oct-April. This is a minimum of 6 months of basketball, sometimes playing at least 2/3 times a week and if the team is on the road, they are travelling all over the country (occasionally even going to Canada). Then when you think that’s done, there’s the playoff period which maintains a similar kind of routine.

So what happens when they are faced with days which we all do when they just don't feel like going in to shoot that basketball, or they don't feel like taking punches to the head from their boxing partner. How come we are allowed to take days off for our "mental health" but as soon as a player misses practice/a game, they are labelled ungrateful or even a coward and you don't need me to come here and tell you how cruel social media can be sometimes. 

At the start of this blog, I mentioned a quote from Allen Iverson, where his missing of one practice caused a little uproar as people tried to link it to the poor run in games the 76ers were having (despite him still turning up to the game and playing), everyone is aware of that part of the rant, but very few speak about how he links his absence to him taking time to cope with the death of his best friend. 

It is a common trope within sport that sportspeople are expected to make considerable sacrifices to be elite. But what happens when you have a player who is great at the sport, enjoys playing the sport enough to invest some time but doesn't care about chasing the mantle of being the greatest of all time.

If you are one of the people reading this thinking to yourself "why wouldn't anyone want to be the greatest at their sport?" I’m going to need you to go outside and touch grass because there’s way more to life than putting a ball in the back of the net. 

People put their health (believe it or not), families, views/beliefs and that’s just to name a few ahead of their chosen occupation. Recently, we had Kyrie Irving who gave up a huge contract that would have guaranteed him generational health and potentially risking his future in the NBA due to him refusing the vaccine.

You can read the full report here: https://www.nba.com/news/kyrie-irving-addresses-not-getting-covid-19-vaccine-on-instagram-live

Considered as one of the greatest in his position, when questioned on the situation, Kyrie has remained limited to statements such as, “it’s my body", "I think its what’s best for me" and "it’s not about the money". For some reason, these are viewed as 'not good enough' reasons by the vast majority. But imagine if Kyrie was just a regular player, would the uproar for him choosing something other than the sport be this big? I don't think so, even if you do, you are reading this blog to see what I think. The situation grew so much out of hand that Kyrie was suspended for his decisions, which caused some commotion, triggering debates about whether health care decisions should solely be personal decisions.

I believe the equation for this answer is simple: players like Kyrie and Allen Iverson don't play, the organisation loses out on money. Sizeable numbers of viewers are lost because they know this one player is not playing and that could seriously affect the franchise's income. This leads me to believe that in the world of sports, there is very little consent if you are up there. You hardly have a choice and it's more about what would please the majority.

The NBA includes procedures such as load management. Although, whenever players like Kawhi Leonard took advantage of those, he would be labelled as "lazy”, or people would attempt to say he feared the upcoming opponent. However, since doing some research it was neither of those things - Kawhi Leonard during his career for the LA Clippers, suffered a partially torn ACL injury. Due to the Clippers roster not being incredibly in-depth, those in charge didn't feel like they could afford to completely rest their star man, so in result decided to give him regular rest in the form of 'load management'. 

You can read more in this article: https://www.nba.com/news/kawhi-leonard-load-management-bucks 

It is easy to point out that with the players being professional they are duty bound to stick to their contracts, competing in every game they can as well as the minutes they are required to play in.

But playing an 82-game season can’t be easy, spending days on the road, travelling to different states on a different night which by itself can have a huge toll on the body. But to have to do all of this as well as play games, there’s no amount of cardio that can prepare you for this kind of thing. 

A lot of these popular sports are businesses, meaning that if that business decides that you are no longer needed, or that someone else would be a better fit in your position, you may find you and your family being transferred somewhere else and guess what... you get little or no say in it at all. 

So if you're an aspiring pro athlete or up there right now, my advice is don't die for your sport. At the end of the day, your franchise needs you, and as impossible as it seems to say no to what they request, once you’re established and once they realise you really are the captain of your ship, they will begin to work round you. 

Kyrie was eventually offered an alternative of only playing away games (as he wasn’t vaccinated) to eventually him being allowed to play to all games permitting he was fined a sum of compared to what he makes...almost nothing. 

Read more here: https://www.complex.com/sports/kyrie-irving-could-play-home-games-nets-pay-fine

Unfortunately, Kawhi picked up a season ending injury when playing more and is yet to return to the court. 

Read more here: https://www.espn.co.uk/nba/story/_/id/32271529/no-one-knows-frame-kawhi-leonard-return-acl-injury-say-la-clippers

Take that as you will.

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Come find me for a chat on Tumblr- Kayctalks

Below are some good reads that I would recommend:

Channon, A., & Matthews, C. R. (2022). Communicating consent in sport: A typological model of athletes’ consent practices within combat sports. International Review for the Sociology of Sport, 57(6), 899-917.

Sreedhar, A., & Gopal, A. (2021). Behind low vaccination rates lurks a more profound social weakness. New York Times.

Gabbett, T. J. (2020). Load management in basketball. In Basketball sports medicine and science (pp. 815-822). Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg.

Something I want to talk about regarding my writing is that I’m currently writing a story about media designed to sell toys to children, but the basis of the worldbuilding is mostly from the system that produces these things and the meta narratives and the weird How It’s Made elements and the broad trends in storytelling and character building more than any specific particular franchise. And I hope people keep that in mind if I finally release it.

The other thing I want to write about is that Monster High and The Witch from Mercury have been kind of making me doubt the sturdiness of the worldbuilding, because in their own ways they are pretty notable ‘exceptions’ to some points I tried to make in the story. And while I am trying to think about them, maybe ultimately I don’t have to address every single thing that ever exists within a single genre to write about it. And I should just get on with it and write the story first. It’s fine if I just want to just tell a specific story and all. It’s fine if I just want to write about something very broad while only drawing on one or two specific sources. It’s fine to draw on other things and have multiple conversations. This is how creativity works, after all.

My main worry about the last one is alienating an audience, coming off as a ‘poser’ for writing about something I am no grade A expert in (only got Bs and Cs lol). Yet it’s not just a story about media designed to sell toys to children, isn’t it. It’s actually about capitalism; it’s about gender; it’s about commodification of people and of ideology and of art; it’s about the hope of creating something new. I should stop worrying about an audience that isn’t even there yet, and just write.

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Transformers Analysis: Folklore and Folk Magic in the Mines of Kaon

thinking about Miner Megatron again, as always. here we goooo 

So I've been doing some folk magic, as I usually do, and it got me thinking:

Surely, the lower class/caste bots wouldn’t feel welcomed into the more organised Cybertronian temples etc., or might even be outright banned from joining in shared spiritual spaces or rituals. 

So it’s time to teach y’all some working class magic history and how we can apply that to Cybertronian spirituality: 

Working Class History: Casting Spells on the Job (Just Call it Prayer so the Boss Doesn't Find Out)

Here's a quick history of rural Appalachian folk magic, for some context:

1) The Christian Bible has been used for spellcasting all up and down the rural East Coast in the USA from day one of colonisation.

In Pennsylvania you have Hexenmeisters and the Pennsylvania Dutch practices, for a well-documented example.

2) The working class has done spellcasting with the Bible from the very first day shitty bosses started

This is for several reasons, but primarily because Bibles were common and cheap, you didn't have to know how to read in order to follow along with or change the lyrics of popular hymns and prayers to fit your own needs, and it was very easy to sneak what is essentially localised witchcraft under the radar when it just looks like you're reading the Bible to everyone else.

Catholic materials were used a lot for this, because they were often provided for free by any local churches, and a lot of working class people in Appalachia were Italian (Roman Catholic) or Eastern European (Eastern Orthodox Catholic), which meant there was no shortage of all sorts of votive candles and the like to utilise for what we would now identify as spellcasting.

It's important to note that it wasn't called spellcasting outright by anybody; Sometimes it was called "hexing" or "sweet talking", among other terms, but if you called it spellcasting it was heavily frowned upon.

A lot of people were uncomfortable (and are still uncomfortable) with verbalising it or identifying it as such due to stigma from the more mainstream religious communities or their own religious backgrounds, and of course, historically if the boss found out that all the workers hated their jobs so much they were doing fucking witchcraft about it, it would not have ended well for the workers.

So, stealth it is. And that's why there are so many specific folk practices in a lot of historically working class rural regions/communities-- Not just in Appalachia, but similar things happen in similar communities around the world.

What does this have to do with Megatron?

Everything we know about the lower classes on Cybertron, the lower caste members, and the mines/industrial regions in Tarn and Kaon suggest that a similar folklore likely existed within these working communities.

And any local folk practices likely developed for the exact same reasons that this type of folk practice developed in the real world:

Workers are fucking miserable, "mainstream" religion isn't satisfying their spiritual/emotional/social/material needs or concerns, and close-knit people in small communities spending most of their time together naturally start to sort of do their own thing based on their collective situation.

People get desperate, there's nowhere to turn and nothing to do, so spirituality becomes a lifeline in that it builds solidarity and creates a more appropriate sort of support system.

For example: If we aren't allowed time off work to mourn our friend who was killed by heavy machinery, and we aren't allowed any time to process that or deal with it or take care of each other, then we will invent a ritual that allows us to grieve on the job.

This was, and still is, a common thing.

Which brings us to...

St. Barbara and the Mines + Solus Prime

St. Barbara's backstory can be summarised, roughly, as such (based on the version of this story that I know; keep in mind the details can vary):

She was kept isolated from others by her father, who became furious that she refused an arranged marriage. When she fled, he chased her; She ran into two people working in a field, the first who helped her, and the second who gave her path away to her father.

She was captured, and brought to a prominent local figure (the title varies based on different versions of this story), who had her tortured for escaping and disobeying her father.

However, when imprisoned, they tried to kill her again and again, and every morning she was healed. Fire intended to be used to burn her would cool the second it got near her skin, and daggers used to cut her would go dull when brought near her.

Snakes thrown into her room intended to bite her would then die the instant they went to approach her, and ropes intended to be used to bind and choke her would spontaneously fray and snap before they could be tied.

Eventually, she was condemned to beheading, and a special sword was used to cut her head off, which finally killed her.

Her father is the one who beheaded her, and as divine punishment, he was hit by lightning-- A single bolt that lasted so long that his entire body went up into flames, and his ashes disappeared.

Her gravesite became a place of veneration, where people prayed for protection and safety.

She became known as the patron saint of all people with dangerous jobs or jobs where the bosses don't care about the worker's wellbeing or safety, for obvious reasons: Nothing but the hands of her own father could ever harm her.  

(The imagery of St. Barbara being slain only by a special sword is very reminiscent of Solus Prime being slain only by a special sword...)

Workers, especially those with particularly dangerous or shitty jobs but also just anyone working class in general, can interpret this story in several ways which can make it additionally relatable:

Her father = A controlling and aggressive boss who abuses or neglects their workers to death.

The field workers = A pro-union worker (a helper) and an anti-union worker or scab (a betrayer).

So you can see how St. Barbara became immediately adopted as a common worker's saint, and was used in a lot of regional working class folk magic practices (where such folk magic developed within local working communities).

And this is still going strong as a tradition; Crossrail tunnel borers in London consecrated the drilling site in the name of St. Barbara in 2013:

"Several hundred contractors and senior management attended the St Barbara's Day ceremony at the Thames Tunnel (pictured) which will link Plumstead and North Woolwich when completed. The site was so large, that sound engineers put in place an amplification system for the ceremony." - Article here. 

"As a long-standing tradition, one of the first tasks for each new tunnelling projects is to establish a small shrine to Santa Barbara at the tunnel portal or at the underground junction into long tunnel headings. This is often followed with a dedication and an invocation to Santa Barbara for protection of all who work on the project during the construction period." - Article here. 

And here's a related example of a worker's prayer for St. Barbara, from here: 

So this is very much a tradition that is still going strong, and it isn't just Catholic workers who engage with these types of things!

To accommodate more diverse groups and communities of workers, folk practices (including what eventually becomes folk magic) increasingly develop even further away from any one specific religious origin, in order to become more inclusive for the majority of people who can be from all kinds of different spiritual or cultural backgrounds.

Hence, more folk magic is made-- And I believe something like this could absolutely have evolved in a similar way in working communities on Cybertron.

Cybertronian Spirituality: The Primes, The Knights, The Titans

My personal theory/headcanon, and there is not much in canon to support this particularly so please keep that in mind, is that given the average type of manual labour working environment in Tarn and Kaon (dangerous, dark, and deep), it would make sense for the legendary Titans to become worked into some kind of folk practice.

We have this concept of the Titans as these giant and very particular beings, which reminds me somewhat of the Jewish Golem of Prague, in that the Titans are made from raw materials in some kind of mystical or cosmically spiritual manner, then eventually ally themselves to at least one respective Prime who then acts as a director of their actions to achieve victory over cosmic evil(s).

The Titans then go forward and act as guardians of Cybertronian life by combating the origins of these cosmic evil(s) as protectors of their respective polities and regions and eventually colony worlds, called into action by what is essentially a metaphysical and possibly outright spiritual pull of the need of their Prime(s) and later on the needs of the Cybertronian and colony world populations in times of threat or desperation.

These details are peppered throughout canon and vary based on media/franchise, but most recently Titan lore was covered again in IDW’s Optimus Prime series, issue 10, literally titled Origin Myths. 

What is interesting is that while the Golem association could be reasonably made, you could also reasonably say that the Three Original Titans (Metroplex, Chela, and Metrotitan) could be associated just as easily with the Catholic concept of the Holy Trinity. 

Lots of different interpretations could be applied to this stuff!

Class Stratification Within Cybertronian Religious Institutions

No matter how you may interpret it, we know that the Titans have a similar mystical presence in Cybertronian history and cultural lore to that of the Primes and Knights, and it would make sense for those spurned and disparaged by "mainstream" spiritual practices (which were likely just as stratified by class and caste as everything else was on Cybertron during Megatron's youth) to go ahead and create a folk practice based more around Titans.

This is because the Primes would like be associated directly with their oppressive rulers and upper classes, and the Knights, who are said to be the first Cybertronians to come from the Well, thusly represent a very high class onto their own which may have repelled working class bots who were very likely sick of essentially worshipping those venerated in their class stratified society solely due to the conditions of their creation; The Knights were "born with silver spoons", essentially, and it's hard to sell that to people who suffered due to the conditions of their own creation.

Therefore, the Titans are the other most likely Cybertronian figures of historical lore that could reasonably be adapted into a sort of folk religion for the working classes and lower social caste bots.

The imagery is strong, and relatable: In Megatron's case, the manual labourers and miners all have large frames compared to the average Cybertronian, they all toil invisibly and in relative silence, and they are kept away from the end products of their labour and yet without them, Cybertron planet wide would instantly struggle to sustain their raw material demands. 

They are critical workers, yet many of them have no names/designations; It is noted at least once in canon that some Titans are so old or so little known that their designations are not recorded. Yet without these unseen/unknown Titans, it could be the case that cosmic evil could have achieved victory.

While the Titans are critical, they are largely a mystery and unknown in any real detail. They do not normally engage with average Cybertronians, and when they do, it is usually indirectly-- Even though their actions actively impact the lives of nearly everyone.

And though the Primes and Knights are generally never physically present, at least not within living memory, there is real and physical proof of Titans. I feel like that aspect alone may well appeal more to people who are very physically oriented; We also see a stark realist mentality from many of the lower class/caste bots, who are sometimes realistic to the point of nihilism (which is part of why Megatron's writings were so revolutionary, in that they re-introduced hope to people who had previously concluded that there was no realistic possibility of ever rising up).

The Titans being a known, tangible physical reality may well have endeared them as a more interesting folkloric or spiritual focus to this particular cohort of bots.

Just like with St. Barbara in real life, you can see how the Titans may have been interpreted in certain ways by the lower class/caste working bots which may have made them more appealing or more easy to structure into a framework of sorts for their own practices within their local cultures.

A Little Meta: There's a Lot of Various Religious Imagery in Transformers

Like with all media, especially Western media, inevitably some Jesus sneaks in there.

Which usually sucks, because it can be alienating for literally anyone who isn't familiar with Christianity in some way (as some references or parallels are inevitably not going to be as obvious or even detectable at all to people who didn't grow up with all this sometimes very specific shit, resulting in missed thematic elements and so on due to no fault of the viewers but rather the tendency for Western shows to overwhelmingly be written and designed by primarily Western white middle aged cis straight men who tend to throw some Jesus in there when there should not necessarily be any Jesus in there, but I could yell about this all night).

Transformers as a franchise altogether is not immune to this; As with all media, it is made by people, and people are influenced by their social/cultural upbringing, and that includes religious influences.

We could read some of this into the TFP/Aligned Continuity, in regards to the idea of the Thirteen Primes and how that concept is interpreted in TFP.

Transformers Prime: Alpha Trion is Essentially Paul the Apostle

The TFP Primes resemble both the Apostles as well as various Saints, and especially the Fourteen Holy Helpers; These fourteen Saints in particular are elevated above the others in many cases and contexts-- Similar to how the Primes are held up as elevated over other Cybertronians and other figures in Cybertronian history and presumably within certain Cybertronian spiritual practices as well. 

For example, Alpha Trion is strongly reminiscent of the Christian figure Paul the Apostle, who was a writer/scribe known for documenting early Christian concerns of faith in his letters, which became extremely important to theological historians in regards to determining early Christian discourse and attempting to create a timeline of early Christianity.

His letters are included the New Testament in thirteen (!) sections called epistles, which are archived forever in various iterations within the Christian Bible. 

Now, let’s take a look at the symbolism, using the TFP main illustration of Alpha Trion as featured in the Covenant, and a popular Icon image of Paul the Apostle: 

Beard, cloak, book-- Even the pose they are in here is very similar, look at the feet and the way they are both standing. Even the halo of Cybertronian glyphs around Alpha Trion’s head resembles the gold filament of Paul’s halo. 

And much like Alpha Trion's questionable ability to write/re-write history and determine events through some kind of cosmically divine power of foresight, the timeline of Paul's letters will likely never be fully verifiable, and of course, there are so many translations and interpretations of these letters along with the rest of the New Testament that while key points remain fairly consistent, there is still no "true" version or exact outline of events or discussions as recorded by Paul-- Primarily because in at least a few cases, Paul's letters are the only allusion to certain events or conversations.

This is extremely similar to how Alpha Trion states outright in the Covenant that he himself doesn't know if what he writes is actually factual anymore, or if he has changed things so many times to try to construct a more favourable narrative of actions and events that reality itself may have been warped by his Quill, either forwards or backwards in time...

You could also argue that Alpha Trion is presented as a God-like figure in TFP (especially when he appears to Optimus in the form of an echoing voice and shimmering spectral figure in a vision caused by what is essentially the equivalent of a holy relic), and Orion Pax would then be comparable to Jesus pre-Crucifixion, with his reformatting into Optimus Prime post-Matrix heavily resembling Jesus in the eyes of his followers post-Resurrection.

The main cast of Autobots in this comparison would then roughly correspond to the Apostles, of whom there were twelve, with Optimus then making Thirteen... And of course, canonically, Optimus is the resurrection of the Thirteenth Prime. 

You can also see visual similarities in the depiction of Thirteen in the Covenant; It reminds me heavily of the Divine Mercy image of Jesus: 

Both have their right hands raised, their chests emitting a holy/cosmic light. 

I'm just saying, it is totally possible to make connections between fictional lore/spiritual figures and real world ones, and TF is loaded with content that can be re-contextualised in this way. 

(I also want to point out at this time that it is not my intention to offend anyone with any of this analysis; I am writing from the point of view of someone who grew up with folk spirituality, and I am also a Quaker Attender, just so you are aware of my own personal background. I would love to hear any other interpretations of any spiritual imagery in Transformers media, because there’s a ton of possible ways to read into this stuff!) 

In Conclusion: Cast a Hex on Your Boss by Calling Upon the Titans

Just for fun, as someone who has actually done folk magic for my entire life, I've adapted a hex against bad bosses to fit this headcanon. I think this is something that lower class/caste bots would absolutely engage in; It's common in real life as well.

The original I'm basing this off of was actually something I found in one of our old family Bibles before I moved out, and was written in Girard, Pennsylvania sometime between 1920-1930. I believe it was written by a relative of mine who worked either on the farm or on the railways.

Remember that folk magic like this is for and by working class people, so there are no fancy supplies needed; Don't ever buy shit to do magic, you can do it with anything laying around you. No need to spend money.

If you have a shitty boss, please let me know if you hex your boss with this. I always encourage witchcraft, fictional or otherwise.

Here's what you do, if you want to actually try this:

1) Using any old paper that you have lying around, cut it roughly into a square (doesn't need to be perfect.) It doesn't matter what type of paper it is.

2) Grab any pen you like, it can be any type of pen, any type of ink.

3) Draw a square outline on the paper, making a border on the page. This can be big or small as you like, and you can decorate it if you want; Just leave enough space to write inside the square.

4) Fold this paper into a square, any way you'd like as long as it's a square, and take this paper while it's still blank to work in your pocket.

Carry the paper with you for at least one full day at work. If you can, place it in a chest pocket or a pocket where the paper will be fairly close to your body.

It doesn't matter if the paper gets dirty or smudged or torn; In fact, that's even better.

(Some people who do variations of this spell in real life even use the paper to wipe dirt off their hands etc. throughout the day, to really get the energy of a work day settled into the paper. As long as it can still be written on, you can do this if you'd like.)

5) At the end of the work day, take the paper out, and write the following:

Where I have put [X], the word "Lord" was in the original version of this hex which was in my family Bible, but to contextualise it within the fictional headcanon lore here, you can replace this with the word "Titan". (Or you can replace it with anything else that may be appropriate as well, if you would like to actually use this hex!)

"Give us pay for our work, or the poor will plea to the [X] against you, and you will be struck down, cast down.  

If you do not give to those who give to you, you will be cursed coming in, and going out.

Just as the [X] can raise you up and lead you to prosper, so too can the [X] turn away from you, and you will be left to have your walls destroyed, your fortress ruined.

Us servants will rejoice, but you will cry out in anguish, you will be put to shame.

Without the toilers, the land is made desolate, the haunt of jackals.

[X], turn your gaze to us, we labourers of all kinds, see our tears and our sweat.

Lay curses upon those who use their hands to hold us down; Kept below water, our tears lost in the flood.

Raise the waters, and surge the shores of their ill-owned kingdom; Bring forth to their memory that the [X] stewards the land, and that all among the land are equal in spirit.

The [X] will cast fury upon the unrighteous and conniving, cast rage and stand among us mightily, each motion casting winds against the oppressor who weakens like fractured stone under the onslaught of rain.

The [X] will make a storm from our anguish, which brings us higher, raises us from desolation. Our tears, become the rain that withers the false tower looming high above us.

Our hands will raise from our tools and duties, and offer high praise to the [X], who guards the disparaged and lowly, who enacts justice against those who have done wrong against us.

Let us be brought high, and those who revel in our struggle, may they be cast down."

6) You may flip the paper over once the ink is dry, and on the back, put three Xs in the upper corners of the paper. You may also add three more XXXs to the centre of the paper, where the crease in the paper is from folding it.

7) Re-fold the paper, and put it in the bottom of your right shoe. If this is too uncomfortable, carry it in any pocket on your right side.

You can also place it in your wallet for safe keeping, as your wallet contains money and possibly a work ID or something similar, which are all tied to work and working.

And there you have it! Fuck shitty bosses, both fictional ones and real ones. Join a union, do some witchcraft. 

This post was long as always, but I hope it's interesting to someone out there! <3 Thank you to anyone who actually reads through all of this! <3

Star Wars: Visions - Episode 3: The Twins

Continuing the Visions responses. I love them for releasing all the episodes at once, but my poor weary fingers. I think I’ll only do about three of these for now and the rest later, though stay tuned in case I change my mind. For now, however:

Episode 3: The Twins Developed By: Trigger DIrected By: Hiroyuki Imaishi Whereas the previous two shorts were written to fit stories within the narrative of Star Wars, this one is very clearly more of a love letter to the franchise. Most of the most spectacular tropes we know and love are here. Loved ones separated by light and dark. Twins. Planet cracking superweapons. Giant space carriers - two of them (sort of). Swordfights. Amusing droids. Twin suns, and heroic resolve.

But this short doesn’t just use those - it amps them up. You want a lightsaber duel for the fate of the galaxy? Well, how about a duel in the vacuum of space where one side is using power armor and wielding eight lightsabers that double as whips against a massive big friggin’ beam saber POWERED BY THE HYPERDRIVE OF A SPACESHIP!?

It’s not exactly concerned with subtlety, is what I’m saying. It’s absolutely intended to be a visual celebration of all the epic aspects of Star Wars. Things are exaggerated to the maximum to make everything that much more spectacular, that much more huge. As a result, it feels like the kind of thing you might expect when you hear the words “Star Wars anime.” Something wild, explosive with characters that push past the boundaries of power with animation to match. This is Star Wars shounen, people. It gets pretty crazy. The plot concerns two twins in an indeterminate era after the Original Trilogy. They were both born to be agents of the dark side, but one made the choice to rebel - for reasons, unlike the previous review, I won’t spoil. Last time, what I had to say about the episode was wrapped up in how it chose to end itself, but not so much this time. One twin forces a confrontation, and the both undertake a massive duel that takes up the majority of the short film, which gets increasingly destructive as they reach levels of force destruction not seen since The Force Unleashed, taking apart the ship they’re fighting on as each pulls out bigger and bigger weapons. The visual of this one are thus, unsurprisingly, stellar. The thematic focus on twos is very strong touch that recurs throughout the short (the hero’s droid is even named R-DUO): there’s sequence towards the beginning following the antagonist where everything is symmetrical, from the ships to the hallways to the people within them, in a way that only changes once we are introduced to our second character - that is, our protagonist, who is both literally and thematically breaking out of that symmetry.

As I noted before, this short is something of a Star Wars kitchen sink. It’s got Vader outfits, R2 and C-3PO likenesses, an dashing hero dressed like Han with an X-Wing like Luke’s, and the whole battle takes place over a Khyber crystal. The dialogue is playfully and intentionally referential. It tries to pay homage to everything it can, and doesn’t have same hang-up that The Force Awakens had in trying to be a whole story reference while also trying to be something new within the universe: The Twins can commit wholeheartedly to its bombastic throwback intentions, and it shows. They do not hold back in this short. Watch the previous two for the narrative, watch this one for the purely epic display.

As a random note, with two episodes thus far featuring one, Visions is really starting to draw attention to how few major female villains there are in the current visual media. There’s Ventress and Aurra Sing, maybe, but they’ve always been more of a secondary villain. Meanwhile, we still haven’t even seen Rae Sloane in a film or tv show, only just now seeing her in Squadrons. I don’t entirely miss the Old EU, but there was a lot more to find in that sense there. But I digress. The short is good, but different from the ones that came before it. This one is all about collecting everything all at once. So, like the others, I’m going to look at it in terms of future canon potential. All of Visions is non-canon, but with enough support for individual characters and enough of a matching concept, some of them might might one day get the Harley Quinn treatment and become canon after all. But first, we have to see if they fit into the universe itself. And does The Twins fit into the universe? Oh My, No. It’s very clearly not trying to, either, which you could probably tell the moment you see the two Star Destroyers mashed together, let alone when they start breathing in space. What we have in The Twins is an extreme faced paced amalgamation of all things Star Wars with zero interest in fitting in anywhere: it’s a tribute, an ode. It doesn’t really work as an installment, and its not supposed to. It’s just supposed to be fun. A delight for the eyes, and the nerd inside.

i watched red vs blue: zero with my dear friends today and i was asked to “post” my “thoughts” on the subject. Please do not click this readmore unless, for some reason, you want to read three thousand words on the subject of red vs blue: zero critical analysis. i highly doubt that’s the reason anyone is following me, but hey. 

anyway. here you have it. 

Here are my opinions on RVB0 as someone who has quite literally no nostalgia for any older RVB content. I’ve seen seasons 1-13 once and bits and pieces of it more than once here and there, but I only saw it for the first time within the past couple of months. I’ve literally never seen any other RT/AH content. I can name a few people who worked on OG Red vs. Blue but other than Mounty Oum I have NO idea who is responsible for what, really, or what anything else they’ve ever worked on is, or whether or not they’re awful people. I know even less about the people making RVB0 - All I know is that the main writer is named Torrian but I honestly don’t even know if that’s a first name, a last name, or a moniker. All this to say; nothing about my criticism is rooted in any perceived slight against the franchise or branding by the new staff members, because I don’t know or care about any of it. In fact, I’m going to try and avoid any direct comparison between RVB0 and earlier seasons of RVB as a means of critique until the very end, where I’ll look at that relationship specifically.

So here is my opinion of RVB0 as it stands right now:

1. The Writing

Everything about RVB0 feels as if it was written by a first-time writer who hasn’t learned to kill his darlings. The narrative is both simultaneously far too full, leaving very little breathing room for character interaction, and oddly sparse, with a story that lacks any meaningful takeaway, interesting ideas, or genuine emotional connection. It also feels like it’s for a very much younger audience - I don’t mean this as a negative at all. I love tv for kids. I watch more TV for kids than I do for adults, mostly, but I think it’s important to address this because a lot of the time ‘this is for kids’ is used to act like you’re not allowed to critique a narrative thoroughly. It definitely changes the way you critique it, but the critique can still be in good faith.  I watched the entirety of RVB0 only after it was finished, in one sitting, and I was giving it my full attention, essentially like it was a movie. I’m going to assume it was much better to watch in chunks, because as it stood, there was literally no time built into the narrative to process the events that had just transpired, or try and predict what events might be coming in the future. When there’s no time to think about the narrative as you’re watching it, the narrative ends up as being something that happens to the audience, not something they engage with. It’s like the difference between taking notes during a lecture or just sitting and listening. If you’re making no attempt to actively process what’s happening, it doesn’t stick in your mind well. I found myself struggling to recall the events and explanations that had immediately transpired because as soon as one thing had happened, another thing was already happening, and it was like a mental juggling act to try and figure out which information was important enough to dwell on in the time we were given to dwell on it.

Which brings me to another point - pacing. Every event in the show, whether a character moment, a plot moment, or a fight scene, felt like it was supposed to land with almost the exact same amount of emotional weight. It all felt like The Most Important Thing that had Yet Happened. And I understand that this is done as an attempt to squeeze as much as possible out of a rather short runtime, but it fundamentally fails. When everything is the most important thing happening, it all fades into static. That’s what most of 0’s narrative was to me: static. It’s only been a few hours since I watched it but I had to go step by step and type out all of the story beats I could remember and run it by my friends who are much more enthusiastic RVB fans than I am to make sure I hadn’t missed or forgotten anything. I hadn’t, apparently, but the fact that my takeaway from the show was pretty accurate and also disappointingly lackluster says a lot. Strangely enough, the most interesting thing the show alluded to - a holo echo, or whatever the term they used was - was one of the things least extrapolated upon in the show’s incredibly bulky exposition. Benefit of the doubt says that’s something they’ll explore in future seasons (are they getting more? Is that planned? I just realized I don’t actually know.)

And bulky it was! I have quite honestly never seen such flagrant disregard for the rule of “show, don’t tell.” There was not a single ounce of subtlety or implication involved in the storytelling of RVB0. Something was either told to you explicitly, or almost entirely absent from the narrative. Essentially zilch in between. We are told the dynamic the characters have with each other, and their personality pros and cons are listed for us conveniently by Carolina. The plot develops in exposition dumps. This is partially due to the series’ short runtime, but is also very much a result of how that runtime was then used by the writers. They sacrificed a massive chunk of their show for the sake of cramming in a ton of fight scenes, and if they wanted to keep all of those fight scenes, it would have been necessary to pare down their story and characters proportionally in comparison, but they didn’t do that either. They wanted to have it both ways and there simply wasn’t enough time for it. 

The story itself is… uninteresting. It plays out more like the flimsy premise of a video game quest rather than a piece of media to be meaningfully engaged with. RVB0 is I think something I would be pitched by a guy who thinks the MCU and BNHA are the best storytelling to come out of the past decade. It is nothing but tropes. And I hate having to use this as an insult! I love tropes. The worst thing about RVB0 is that nothing it does is wholly unforgivable in its own right. Hunter x Hunter, a phenomenal shonen, is notoriously filled with pages upon pages of detailed exposition and explanations of things, and I absolutely love it. Leverage, my favorite TV show of all time, is literally nothing but a five man band who has to learn to work as a team while seemingly systematically hitting a checklist of every relevant trope in the book. Pacific Rim is an incredibly straightforward good guys vs giant monsters blockbuster to show off some cool fight scenes such as a big robot cutting an alien in half with a giant sword, and it’s some of the most fun I ever have watching a movie. Something being derivative, clunky, poorly executed in some specific areas, narratively weak, or any single one of these flaws, is perfectly fine assuming it’s done with the intention and care that’s necessary to make the good parts shine more. I’ll forgive literally any crime a piece of media commits as long as it’s interesting and/or enjoyable to consume. RVB0 is not that. I’m not sure what the main point of RVB0 was supposed to be, because it seemingly succeeds at nothing. It has absolutely nothing new or innovative to justify its lack of concern for traditional storytelling conventions. Based solely on the amount of screentime things were given, I’d be inclined to say the narrative existed mostly to give flimsy pretense for the fight scenes, but that’s an entire other can of worms.

2. The Visuals + Fights

I have no qualms with things that are all style and no substance. Sometimes you just want to see pretty colors moving on the screen for a while or watch some cool bad guys and monsters or whatever get punched. RVB0 was not this either. The show fundamentally lacked a coherent aesthetic vision. Much of the show had a rather generic sci-fi feel to it with the biggest standouts to this being the very noir looking cityscape, which my friends and I all immediately joked looked like something from a batman game, or the temple, which my friends and I all immediately joked looked like a world of warcraft raid. They were obviously attempting to get variety in their environment design, which I appreciate, but they did this without having a coherent enough visual language to feel like it was all part of the same world. In general, there was also just a lack of visual clarity or strong shots. The value range in any given scene was poor, the compositions and framing were functional at best, and the character animation was unpleasantly exaggerated. It just doesn’t really look that good beyond fancy rendering techniques.

The fight scenes are their entire own beast. Since ‘FIGHT SCENE’ is the largest single category of scenes in the show, they definitely feel worth looking at with a genuine critical eye. Or, at least, I’d like to, but honestly half the time I found myself almost unable to look at them. The camera is rarely still long enough to really enjoy what you’re watching - tracking the motion of the character AND the camera at such constant breakneck high speeds left little time to appreciate any nuances that might have been present in the choreography or character animation. I tried, believe me, I really did, but the fight scenes leave one with the same sort of dizzy convoluted spectacle as a Michael Bay transformers movie. They also really lacked the impact fight scenes are supposed to have.

It’s hard to have a good, memorable fight scene without it doing one of three things: 1. Showing off innovative or creative fighting styles and choreography 2. Making use of the fight’s setting or environment in an engaging and visually interesting way or 3. Further exploring a character’s personality or actions by the way they fight. It’s also hard to do one of these things on its own without at least touching a bit on the other two. For the most part, I find RVB0’s fight scenes fail to do this. Other than rather surface level insubstantial factors, there was little to visually distinguish any of RVB0’s fight scenes from each other. Not only did I find a lot of them difficult to watch and unappealing, I found them all difficult to watch and unappealing in an almost identical way. They felt incredibly interchangeable and very generic. If you could take a fight scene and change the location it was set and also change which characters were participating and have very little change, it’s probably not a good fight scene. 

I think “generic” is really just the defining word of RVB0 and I think that’s also why it falls short in the humor department  as well.

3. The Comedy

Funny shit is hard to write and humor is also incredibly subjective but I definitely got almost no laughs out of RVB0. I think a total of three. By far the best joke was Carolina having a cast on top of her armor, which, I must stress, is an incredibly funny gag and I love it. But overall I think the humor fell short because it felt like it was tacked on more than a natural and intentional part of this world and these characters. A lot of the jokes felt like they were just thrown in wherever they’d fit, without any build up to punchlines and with little regard for what sort of joke each character would make. Like, there was some, obviously Raymond’s sense of humor had the most character to it, but the character-oriented humor still felt very weak. When focusing on character-driven humor, there’s a LOT you can establish about characters based on what sort of jokes they choose to make, who they’re picking as the punchlines of these jokes, and who their in-universe audience for the jokes is. In RVB0, the jokes all felt very immersion-breaking and self aware, directed wholly towards the audience rather than occurring as a natural result of interplay between the characters. This is partially due to how lackluster the character writing was overall, and the previously stated tight timing, but also definitely due to a lack of a real understanding about what makes a joke land. 

A rule of thumb I personally hold for comedy is that, when push comes to shove, more specific is always going to be more funny. The example I gave when trying to explain this was this:

saying two characters had awkward sex in a movie theater: funny

saying two characters had an awkward handjob in a cinemark: even funnier

saying two characters spent 54 minutes of 11:14's 1:26 runtime trying out some uncomfortably-angled hand stuff in the back of a dilapidated cinemark that lost funding halfway through retrofitting into a dinner theater: the funniest

The more specific a joke is, the more it relies on an in-depth understanding of the characters and world you’re dealing with and the more ‘realistic’ it feels within the context of your media. Especially with this kind of humor. When you’re joking with your friends, you don’t go for stock-humor that could be pulled out of a joke book, you go for the specific. You aim for the weak spots. If a set of jokes could be blindly transplanted into another world, onto another cast of characters, then it’s far too generic to be truly funny or memorable. I don’t think there’s a single joke in RVB0 where the humor of it hinged upon the characters or the setting.

Then there’s the issue of situational comedy and physical comedy. This is really where the humor being ‘tacked on’ shows the most. Once again, part of what makes actually solid comedy land properly is it feeling like a natural result of the world you have established. Real life is absurd and comical situations can be found even in the midst of some pretty grim context, and that’s why black comedy is successful, and why comedy shows are allowed to dip into heavier subject matter from time to time, or why dramas often search for levity in humor. It’s a natural part of being human to find humor in almost any situation. The key thing, though, once again, is finding it in the situation. Many of RVB0’s attempts at humor, once again, feel like they would be the exact same jokes when stripped from their context, and that’s almost never good. A pretty fundamental concept in both storytelling in general but particularly comedy writing is ‘setup and payoff’. No joke in RVB0 is a reward for a seemingly innocuous event in an earlier scene or for an overlooked piece of environmental design. The jokes pop in when there’s time for them in between all the exposition and fighting, and are gone as soon as they’re done. There’s no long term, underlying comedic throughline to give any sense of coherence or intent to the sense of humor the show is trying to establish. Every joke is an isolated one-off quip or one-liner, and it fails to engage the audience in a meaningful way.

All together, each individual component of RVB0 feels like it was conjured up independently, without any concern to how it interacted with the larger product they were creating. And I think this is really where it all falls apart. RVB0 feels criminally generic in a way reminiscent of mass-market media which at least has the luxury of attributing these flaws, this complete and total watering down of anything unique, to heavy oversight and large teams with competing visions. But I don’t think that’s the case for RVB0. I don’t know much about what the pipeline is like for this show, but I feel like the fundamental problem it suffers from is a lack of heart.

In comparison to Red vs. Blue

Let's face it. This is a terrible successor to Red vs. Blue. I wouldn’t care if NONE of the old characters were in it - that’s not my problem. I haven’t seen past season 13 because from what I heard the show already jumped the shark a bit and then some. That’s not what makes it a poor follow up. What makes it a bad successor is that it fundamentally lacks any of the aspects of the OG RVB that made it unique or appealing at all. I find myself wondering what Torrian is trying to say with RVB0 and quite literally the only answer I find myself falling back onto is that he isn’t trying to say anything at all. Regardless of what you feel about the original RVB, it undeniably had things to say. The opening “why are we here” speech does an excellent job at establishing that this is a show intended to poke fun at the misery of bureaucracy and subservience to nonsensical systems, not just in the context of military life, but in a very broad-strokes way almost any middle-class worker can relate to. At the end of the day, fiction is at its best when it resonates with some aspect of its audience’s life. I know instantly which parts of the original Red vs Blue I’m supposed to relate to. I can’t say anything even close to that about 0.

RVB is an absurdist parody that heavily satirizes aspects of the military and life as a low-on-the-food-chain worker in general that almost it’s entire target audience will be familiar with. The most significant draw of the show to me was how the dialogue felt like listening to my friends bicker with each other in our group chats. It required no effort for me to connect with and although the narrative never outright looked to the camera and explained ‘we are critiquing the military’s stupid red tape and self-fullfilling eternal conflict’ they didn’t need to, because the writing trusted itself and its audience enough to believe this could be conveyed. It is, in a way, the complete antithesis to the badass superhero macho military man protagonist that we all know so well. RVB was saying something, and it was saying it in a rather novel format.

Nothing about RVB0 is novel. Nothing about RVB0 says anything. Nothing about it compels me to relate to any of these characters or their situations. RVB0 doesn’t feel like absurdism, or satire. RVB0 feels like it is, completely uncritically, the exact media that RVB itself was riffing off of. Both RVB0 and RVB when you watch them give you the feeling that what you’re seeing here is kids on a playground larping with toy soldiers. It’s all ridiculous and over the top cliche stupid garbage where each side is trying to one-up the other. The critical difference is, in RVB, we’re supposed to look at this and laugh at how ridiculous this is. In RVB0 we’re supposed to unironically think this is all pretty badass. 

The PFL arc of the original RVB existed to show us that setting up an elite team of supersoldiers with special powers was something done in bad faith, with poor outcomes, that left everyone involved either cruel, damaged, or dead. It was a bad thing. And what we’re seeing in RVB0 is the same premise, except, this time it’s good. We’re supposed to root for this format. RVB0 feels much more like a demo reel, cutscenes from a video game that doesn’t exist, or a shonen anime fanboy’s journal scribbling than it feels like a piece of media with any objective value in any area.  In every area that RVB was anti-establishment, RVB0 is pure undiluted establishment through and through.  

Why "Alien X-Tinction" Was The Best Possible Conclusion

(To The Ben 10 Franchise as a whole, as of Right Now)

In short, while the Ben 10 Reboot isn't without faults, "Alien X-Tinction" did everything it could to pay tribute to what came before it, and why the Ben 10 Reboot could even be anywhere near successful for it's intended audience and for modern age of Cartoon Network.

*Obvious spoiler warning ahead.*

Main Reasons

To begin with the obvious, emphasis being made on the existence of the Omniverse (something I feel like the majority hadn't paid enough attention to during and after the last iteration) was important for several reasons. For instance, confirming what I've been saying all this time! And effectively knocking down certain misconceptions about unfinished or uncertain topics left behind in the previous show. So I really appreciated that.

It gave, at least me, a sense of closure, even though I feel Omniverse's final episode, "A New Dawn", had tried to do that, as well.

Anyway, in doing that, they brought back the original continuity, in honor of what the fans wanted, but the main focus was still on the three main characters (Ben, Gwen, and Max) - something that I've heard a lot of the fandom say was their favourite thing about the series when it first started: going on a family road trip with the occasion alien adventure.

Again, giving the people what they want, while remaining within the confines of what Cartoon Network or the higher ups probably directed them to do with the new series.

It's a compromise that satisfies everyone.

I also can't help but notice they included a limited amount of characters. I'd even say specifically the "fan favourites."

I bring this up because a lot of newer characters and character dynamics introduced in the later installations of the series weren't always well received. AKA, characters like Kai Green (especially her relationship with Ben), or even the way Gwen and Kevin were portrayed in everything following the OS (including their eventual romance).

As such, the special stuck to its roots and gave us something purely "Ben 10": action-packed and focusing on family bonds. Rather than including any other side themes people are divided on. Media like this is made for the people who will watch it, after all.

Notable Mentions

I don't know if anyone else picked up on this, but - characterization consistency with the previous shows! AF Ben was written decently serious like his "mature" self (as the fandom loves to praise him for being). And, UA Ben came in obviously much more sure of himself, which is also consistent with the transition from season three of Alien Force to his rise to fame during Ultimate Alien.

Speaking of characterization, this was AF Ben's reaction to Alternate Max's criticism of reboot Ben, calling him out for being, as he said, "a stubborn brat." Personally I think that's a little harsh, but regardless, it's almost as if he knows what that's like, or something. Interesting touch on the producers' part.

Even if they didn't use a whole lot of aliens, the animators did also go the extra mile in recreating the previous designs for the each of the aliens the alternate Bens used. And, some of the transformation scenes from the previous shows too, as a call back for those who might remember.

Things like this make it clear to me that the producers did their research in the production of new Ben 10 content.

Responding to Criticism

Since the reboot is what it is, I'll expect it to get a whole lot of criticism anyway. But the most common complaints I've heard so far are regarding UA Ben not turning into any ultimate aliens, and the use of Alien X's powers being underwhelming.

In the interest of trying to see what the producers might have had in mind, I thought that, since a younger version of himself was present, UA Ben using the ultimate feature would spoil the near future for AF Ben, and therefore might change the path he takes moving forward. Hence him using aliens from the UA era, like Amphibian, but not ultimates.

I would argue it was done to maintain consistency in the original continuity, as well as the way the Omniverse was set up to work.

As for the alternate evil Ben's "nerfed" use of Alien X, well, I've got a theory about that too. First of all, he's not Ben Prime. He's clearly been through a lot of hardship, and it's taken a toll on his mental state, outlook on the hero life, moral compass, and general wellbeing.

His whole plan was created out of revenge and anger. He wasn't thinking straight. How can you expect him to ultimately defeat everyone with that kind of handicap? Even if he had god powers - he was using them though a cloud of negative human emotions.

Powerscaling isn't really my thing, but I'm sure there was something more he could do if he was seriously set on accomplishing his goal without clouded judgement.

As for myself, my only criticism is regarding why they couldn't just draw the UAF jacket and the Ultimatrix right. It's upside down for...seemingly no reason, lol. But I can look past it, I guess. It was just cool to see Ben Prime again.

All three of him, that is.

Movie Review... The Matrix Resurrections

(2/5) Watched this twice in the last two days. The 2nd time took a lot longer because I had to keep pausing and taking notes. In a nutshell, in a flash summary...this is the Matrix for Gen Z'ers. The generation that can be summed in some instances as taking something that has already been done and calling it there own (for example countless dances and songs from the 80s and 90s redone, rediscovered on social media). That's what this movie feels like. It tries to do what three films did and then finish with something new and it fails and is bland.

Questions and plot holes are not foreign to the matrix franchise but when those questions are spread and explained in three films vs one; it's hard to process. There was more that I disliked than I liked.

The action was lackluster compared to its predecessors. I am not sure if this was done purposely for this new story or was this something due to COVID. Either way the final product did not reach the standard. I hated the shooting sequence too. Literally all at close range but no one got shot? I didn't like them breaking the 3rd wall too. That is always a key give away of a money grab Hollywood sequel. It was disguised as the comedic element of the film but was delivered as a load of cheese.

Lastly, the vagueness in the explanations about the returning of certain characters, terminology and settings. Zion's demise was unclear to me as well as the return of Smith. Niobe's return was good to see but then for her grow old to be just like Captain Roland doesn't make sense for what the character went through in the older films. There was a lot more too question but it's not worth it (check out my film notes at the bottom).

There were a few things I liked. The scene where Trinity yelled Neo's name gave me chills and the result of Neo going to the machine city (no spoiler). But that is about it.

This doesn't necessarily tarnish the other films but it’s definitely not needed either.

To find out if his reality is a physical or mental construct, Mr. Anderson, aka Neo, will have to choose to follow the white rabbit once more. If he's learned anything, it's that choice, while an illusion, is still the only way out of -- or into -- the Matrix. Neo already knows what he has to do, but what he doesn't yet know is that the Matrix is stronger, more secure and far more dangerous than ever before (rottentomatoes.com).

Notes and Questions (Things I Wrote on my Second Trip)...

Modal - Simulation used to Evolve programs Programs = Digital Sentience?

Rehashing of older films

Morpheus referred to bugs as a sentient and she did not correct him? But she isn't

Morpheus is a program that has to find Neo

Shoot at point blank range and missing?

Are the modal and game the same thing?

Neo is trapped within a new matrix with trinity and they can't remember anything.  Neo is a game creator in the new matrix and the game he creates is of his memories.  Basically the first 3 films.  The game is popular in the new matrix. In the game neo has created a new morpheus a program to free him.  

Constantly referring to the themes of the original films, breaking that 3rd wall was not done "smartly" Matrix 4 video game = matrix 4 movie.  Pitch meeting...matrix for Gen Z

Agent Smith Neo boss?

Analysts is the new Architect

Fighting and action sequences are subpar to predecessors (unsure if that was done purposely or due to COVID)

Battle in the office? Real...next game/modal. Agent Smith?

Bots vs Agents?

Mod morpheus was created to free him but Smith was also involved in the coding of Mod morpheus

Synthients?

Zion was always set up by machines...IO set up by people?

Very vague what happened to zion... during the purge, creation of new matrix, did Zion get destroyed

Smith explains his arrival being that from the analysts...but morpheus spoke of something different?

Analysts slow down mode?

New analysts wants to harness emotional distress instead using logic and equations as control like the architect

Niobe grew old just become Captain Roland

Tati?

Agent smith turning into that random guy?

How does trinity access skills neo once had?

Too many memories, two many occupants

Description: The game is over, and someone has to answer for how it played out. Tsumugi's the obvious answer, as perfectly so as her cosplay. Features VR AU and postgame spoilers. Word Count:  3591 Read on AO3 here

Chapter 1: Beyond Notice

During the trial it had been a lot easier. Having an opposition, having a role, having a part to stick to. There was the audience, there were the fans. There were her brilliant cosplays! There was the vote. She had known what she’d press. She knew where it would get her.

Waving her last, she knew what it really meant. But something within her still grew quiet. Something mourned. The triumphant grin of despair wouldn’t surface, no matter how hard she tried. Her contestants. Her classmates. Her victims. Her cast. They had sentenced her… themselves… to this.

Even though she knew better, she felt numb. Her feet were heavy, rooted to the spot. The others were out of sight. Her executioner flew around above, raining his destruction down on them while she retreated inwards, her vision narrowing. Waving, as her cosplay fell away, as the school crumbled, she should feel the heat of the explosions, but none of that reached her.

She saw the rock. She made no move. Part of her was ready. Part of her was resigned.

It went dark.

Even though Tsumugi knew better she was almost relieved.

Until it was time to wake up.

---

Coming to feels hazy, disorienting. Her limbs jerk awkwardly, as if starting awake from a nightmare, eyes still seeing darkness but hands brushing against cords, glass and consoles. A pair of hands brush her cheek as they remove her headset, and she flinches involuntarily. One of her own hands goes to her face, tugging at its electrical tethers, still taped to her in various nerve points.

She’s not wearing her glasses. Panic washes over her just as the blinding light of the room that refuses to adjust for her does, and her other hand frantically reaches around the pod for where they must have fallen. She’d never leave her glasses. Without her glasses she’s not… she’s…

The light becomes less intense as she blinks, and she can make out the blurry silhouettes of three people in front of her, standing at attention, waiting patiently. One holds a hand outstretched with something silver clasped in it.

Shakily she takes it, unfolding the arms and sliding them carefully onto her face. The unfocused world comes back into sharp clarity. She half recognizes the faces of those who are in front of her. The silence remains. Is she supposed to say something? Eventually the one who returned her glasses clears her throat, and gestures to the others. They begin to remove the wires quickly and efficiently. Tsumugi crosses her arms and rubs at them idly as the rest are secured, feeling like this should be a more private process. As the last wire is removed the one who’s clearly in charge clears her throat again and nods to her.

“The Board would like to see you.”

Slowly, Tsumugi pushes herself out of the seat, wobbling on her feet as she does so, gripping the side of the chair shaped pod, carefully avoiding the lit LCD consoles lining the edges. The trio before her make no moves to help, nor does she request it. The legs beneath her quiver a few times, threatening to fold before her knees lock with some promise of support. Her hand gripping the side betrays the truth though, trembling with effort.

“Alright, take me to them.”

---

They aren’t happy.

There’s some general gratitude that an ending was guaranteed through her actions, but thanks for it are brisk and short lived. There are bigger problems now.

Lost footage was bad enough, but a protest live on air? Sure, there were tons of supportive fans out there with a continued commitment to the brand, but the vocal few were making themselves heard. Sponsors were pulling their funding. Team DanganRonpa needed to make a statement. They refused to take fault, they had the consent waivers, despite the impassioned display on screen. They needed a scapegoat to take the fall, and who better than the face of the disaster? It was for the good of their franchise, and their only chance to hang onto enough profit to keep the company running.

They are firing her.

The show must go on, but they would make a good faith decision to change their methods for the next season. With a brand new production team.They were advancing their technologies still and R&D was indispensable right now, so the focus went towards the writing talent. It was her failure, anyways, they posited. The simulation hadn’t flickered once, even when the jig was up.

Tsumugi is silent and numb as she is told this. Turmoil brews as a debate begins around her about when to release the announcement.

How dare they do this to me? I worked so hard for them! Without me this season would have never got off the ground! Who else had the brilliant idea to move into a space epic? To introduce new worlds for the future of the story? Who risked their life to bring down every last obstacle? Who gave up their classmates? Was chased down for this mad show and they care more about sponsors? How dare they place the blame on a highschooler, when I-

Wait, no, she’s not…

She runs her fingers over her temples gingerly, swaying slightly on her feet. The discussion in front of her ebbs, attention back on her, and some expressions exchanged before they agree to resume once she’s more aware. Perhaps they were too prompt in calling her here, but they had assumed she wouldn’t need long to adjust, since she knew the truth.

They didn’t realize knowing the truth was the crux of her dilemma.

---

Deleting memories when a consciousness was plugged directly into a simulation was very simple. The centers of the brain known to store them were easily targeted without physical intervention, leaving common sense and learned skills. Untethered knowledge, learned without recalling how. The amnesia effect here was valuable. Recalling this knowledge caused a disconnect, and when memories were implanted the brain would do something extraordinary. It would map a route from the presented memory to the knowledge, all on it’s own. Connecting the neural dots and repairing the damage as though it were never there, without guidance or supervision. The human mind was a brilliantly sophisticated device.

Every cast member had been selected with some semblance of knowledge or aptitude for their assigned talent, even if it was utterly average. The knowledge was filled out for each, with painstaking researchers drafting long memories of ancient tomes, infidelity cases, star charts, blueprints, masked faces, island maps and coastal vistas. They filled in as much as possible, but even if they missed something, the mind was resilient, and would work out the holes on its own.

It wasn’t the same for her however.

There was a perk to being the ringleader for the whole affair. The person in charge had to know some of the infrastructure that was keeping them there, some of the motivations. Lest the show fall apart, or even worse be boring. So the game master went into the simulation without memory deletion.

That wasn’t to say that there weren’t memories implanted. That would be too simple. They had to provide some true evidence of their talent to back up the enhancement of their skills and knowledge. Without a sturdy foundation built on confidence any additions would crumble and refuse to attach. Having worked in the costume department for a few seasons before her promotion, her suggestion of cosplayer had been approved almost instantly. Soon the research team was looking up Cosplay Masquerade winners from years past and the details of every prized piece of workmanship, photography and character acting they could find, and drafting it into a light for her as well. Tsumugi had been excited, and had even helped pick her absolute favourites to be remembered as costumes she made.

Ideally, this booster pack of memories for her talent would supplement her own enough to use to her fullest if the time came in game. Her script outline didn’t even call for her reveal, but having been behind the scenes a few seasons, she knew a lot more was up to chance than Team Danganronpa liked to let the media know. She wanted a strong backup at her disposal, should the need arise.

However, when the game began, something hadn’t been quite right. Backstory memories were implanted as planned, but the talents were yet to be placed. Already in the simulation, she couldn’t ask The Board if this was deliberate. It could be a marketing scheme to boost audition rates for the next round. But already her concern grew.

The human mind is a fascinating thing.

The others spoke of being grabbed and taken here. The dots were already connecting, firing on all cylinders, looking for solutions to lost memories that didn’t need answering. It wasn’t as though they erased everything of course, it was impossible to work with a blank slate, so the bits remaining were playing havoc with their reactions. She alone had none missing, and merely nodded along. With the arrival of the talent light, she had an inward sigh of relief. Soon it wouldn’t matter, this would overwrite any unintended connections left by this stunt.

They received the memories.

Tsumugi had never expected them to feel so real. Every costume she had lovingly picked out, from footage and articles, she could feel in her hands, as though she touched the fabric and threaded the seams. Every pose she had seen a cosplayer photographed in, she was viewing outwardly, seeing the cameramen she never even imagined existing prior, while holding her position with careful grace. Every character, be they dramatic, loud, shy, soft or brash, came to her in vivid detail. Their tales, their backstories, their struggles, their gestures and voices.

And it clashed against her memories of Danganronpa.

All these characters, all these series, they were not the ones she grew up on. They were new and relevant, often references classics, selected for memorability, for the audience. And yet now they were intimately hers. They crowded for attention, buzzing and vying for a place as her favourite.

Her true favourites, the reason for her years of work and devotion, were shoved to the very back, not forgotten, but duller. Flatter. The Ultimate Cosplayer was vibrant! Though plain outwardly her skills were undeniable! She wasn’t some drop-out made-seamstress made-scenario writer. Why would she ever want to be?

Therefore, it couldn’t be that surprising how lost in thought she was at her introductions, she spent far too long trying to remember the lines she had written to poke a reference to the show. There were a lot more than 52 killing games to think back on now. She regretted not stocking the A/V Room with more of these shows...

----

With an escort, she goes to her office to clear it out. Memorabilia lines the desk and walls, from seasons past. She looks them over passively as she is handed a box, and begins to take each thing down one by one. Every character, name, and mascot was familiar. Security waits at the door, and she wonders why. What could she possibly do here to harm them anymore than she supposedly already had? She had not been allowed online yet to confirm anything told to her, but she had resolved that when they spoke to her again she’d make it a condition before her termination. They couldn’t plainly believe she’d take their word on it when they put her… no that wasn’t right…

They didn’t put her anywhere, she put herself somewhere.

She shakes her head slowly a moment, the numbness in her hands having returned. Before she can react the snowglobe in her grasp slips out of her clumsy unfeeling fingers and shatters on the floor. Water and glitter splash the floor as tiny Monokumas skitter outwards past her feet across the room, freed from their little round prison. Security whirls around to face her at the sharp sound she doesn’t hear. She stands there staring at the base of the glass bauble, dumbfounded.

She vaguely recollects that that had been special. A collector’s item, given to her by someone perhaps? Limited edition? But she felt nothing staring down at the wet shards remaining, her arm hanging limp at her side. Whatever it was before, it was trash now.

Tsumugi is ushered out with her box half packed, with no mention of if she could come back for the rest. Part of her wants to scream to get the rest and cling to it all! It took so long to amass! Without it, what is there to prove her efforts? A larger part of her was happy for it to be out of sight.

She unceremoniously leaves the box in the corner of her recovery room. Not one of her own things is taken out to put anywhere. She likes the room bare and plain. Like her. Just like the girl she thinks she is.

---

Unlike before the game, when the research team and writers had meetings, strategy plans and long discussions, the classroom where Tsumugi stood with the Game Master interface was lonely and cold. There were no intricacies to any of the selections, they were mere branching paths. Sure, she recalled some of the writing details for each from before the season launch, especially the ones she had chosen as her outlined route, but how simply the screen stated them to her was troubling.

The talent had been supposed to be this simple too, but it had depth she hadn’t expected. The selection hovered over the Ultimate Hunt and the mass funeral choices, the ones her writing team had OK’d. She wondered what depth she’d feel seeing fake people mourn her. Would they seem fake?

She pressed the button and waited for the light to pop out of the locker, adjusting her glasses idly and looking out the dark wire barred windows. She thought about her ‘classmates’, who had nothing in their heads remaining to help them deny these. It really was a perfect system. For them.

There was a thud in the locker. Tsumugi returned to her task, like so many all nights she’d pulled before, both real and fictional. She walked over to retrieve it, carefully tucking it into the interior pocket on her coat. Once it was placed that was their plot, no rewrites, no erasing anything. Living the story was a lot more nerve wracking than writing it.

---

Tsumugi knows her way around the building without help, but that doesn’t stop security from falling into step and walking with her whenever she leaves her room. She supposes it’s not to help her, anyways, so it’s not an issue. There’s no regimented schedule for her during recovery, though doctors have visited her room a few times and there was one impromptu check-up with an actual CT scan.

She tells them all she feels fine. Everything is fine. She’s readjusting just fine, thank you for asking. No, no abnormalities. No numbness. No confusion. She does admit to being very tired. That one is a safe answer, it usually makes them leave faster so she can rest. They aren’t very good doctors, she thinks. She wonders if they are just as poorly attentive to the other patients’ issues and lies.

Without a schedule, Tsumugi avoids the cafeteria at what she guesses would be the busier times, but even doing so she has caught glimpses of her cast.

A girl sitting with an untouched meal laid out before her. Her hands clasped in front of her in her lap, eyes hidden behind loose grey hair.

A tall silent boy gazing out one of the few windows into the courtyard. He traces his no longer ringed fingers along the surface.

A coughing bout in the hallway followed by the rush of feet and a familiar loud voice shouting them off.

Echoes of their more vibrant selves, haunting the halls.

She walks into the cafeteria and stops. There are voices but she’s already through the door before she realizes it, eyes darting to the table to the right of the door. Sitting there in what sounded like a disagreement were Shuichi and Maki, with Himiko sitting idly beside the latter cheek resting on the heel of her hand while gazing at the door. The other two don’t notice her but the small redhead locks eyes with her instantly. Her posture stiffens as her eyes widen. The two girls stare at each other for a moment, the conversation a buzz in the background as the air thickens. Shuichi, who’s back is to the door must have noticed because he stops mid-sentence and glances over his shoulder. He freezes.

It’s Maki who stands, nudging Himiko behind her, taking on that intimidating stance. She’s glaring daggers across the room at her, and Tsumugi backs up involuntarily, right into the security guard who was following her into the room. Clumsily, she stumbles forwards to step out of his way and adjusts her glasses, the other three’s eyes still locked on her. Not wanting to leave, but unsure of what to do with herself, Tsumugi steps forwards to the adjacent table and quietly takes a seat.

The eyes on her and the silence are wrong. She’s not someone who gets stared at, at least not when she’s not trying to… this isn’t what she should… what should she…

A placid smile spreads on her face and she nods her head to them. “Good morning, Harukawa-san, Yumeno-san, Saihara-kun.” Her eyes squint almost closed in the forced smile, her cheeks pushing upwards under her glasses that help mask the dark bags. Practiced. Placating. A face both of her make. Painful.

“What do you want?”

Himiko isn’t who anyone expects to talk clearly, Shuichi turning to look at her. Maki squares her shoulders, trying to seem bigger. But the smallest of them narrows her eyes and waits.

“Nothing in particular, really,” Tsumugi drawls, folding her hands in her lap. Out of sight as they clench and fidget.

“Oh sure, your goons won’t give us a moment alone, but you don’t want anything. Like we’d believe that,” Maki says before Himiko can continue, venom in every word. Himiko’s mouth hangs open in the interruption, closing again with a pout.

“My goons,” Tsumugi repeats, noting the pointed look at the security detail that followed her in. “Fortunately, they should have provided you all with your contracts by now, and you can see your rights there. Please do use them to your benefit.”

“Oh right. The contracts we don’t even remember signing,” Himiko mutters.

“That is outlined in them as well.”

“This lack of contact with the outside was not, though,” Shuichi cuts in. The sureness there is from someone who clearly read the contract over more than once. Someone looking for loopholes. The memories he received must still be working overtime. She wonders if he’s as glad to have them as he was when he was when the process was explained? Probably not.

“That’s not my area, I’m afraid the simulation and preparations were my purview, Saihara-kun. Feel free to exert your rights in your contract, though. The company has to uphold it.” The strained smile slides into a more natural one as she continues to speak. It’s easier when it’s not about her.

Shuichi raises a brow. Perhaps he had expected resistance? “So they’re breaking their agreement then, holding us here?” he continues, as if to clarify.

“If that’s what the contract promises, then I suppose that’s the case,” Tsumugi answers. They should feel fortunate they got the opportunity to sign those at all, she thinks. Her hands clench tighter. They are fortunate they don’t remember.

“Like we trust you to keep promises,” Maki spat.

“You don’t have to,” she tuts, “Just use the contract, it’s your tool.”

Maki moves so quickly that thankfully Tsumugi doesn’t have the time to flinch. Himiko grabs her by the crook of the elbow before she’s rounded the table towards her.

“Stop it, let’s just talk somewhere else.”

Himiko stands, and moments later Shuichi follows suit. Maki’s expression doesn’t show any agreement, but she leaves with them nonetheless, glaring back over her shoulder on the way out. The security officers never stray from their posts. As soon as she’s sure they’re gone, Tsumugi lets out a held breath. A few moments pass, and she finally goes to get her meal.

She hopes that they really heard her. Their contracts are so much more flexible than her own. They hadn’t bequeath their identities, their citizenships, they weren’t intellectual property of the company no matter how some of the creative team liked to spin it.Their participation was a limited matter, and she was sure her classmates could argue their way through with that fine print at their disposal. She knew that much. She’d seen them face harder things than legal jargon together of course!

...Her classmates? No. Her cast. Her co-stars. A grimace grows on her face as she returns to sit. They never once had a class together, and the game could hardly be called one… not now. Not with her. Together they could bond in their ignorance. Her contract wasn’t flexible. Her consent was different than theirs. She wasn’t new, or at least not all new.

And she couldn’t leave until they decided the best way for them to kick her out. She takes a bite of her food thoughtfully.

If they can kick me out.