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corvosdaughter · 4 months

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curious about your doto thoughts. i only played it once and reasonably enjoyed it (if anything, i had more issues w dh2) so im interested to read about your experience

sure thing!

first off i want to be absolutely clear that this rant is 100% petty. doto didn't, like, burn down my crops or (to my knowledge) influence any kind of shitty trend or real world harm. i don't have issues with gameplay, art etc which are ultimately bigger draws in the series. and the story was straightforward and mostly internally consistent, so ignoring the prior games, even that could be worse. but despite arkane claiming it worked as a standalone, much of the narrative's weight DOES rely on previous games. so i think it is fair to measure it up against previously established aspects of the series, and find it wanting.

when i saw promo material i thought the concept was... flawed. to be exact, i mean the idea of a) daud and billie going to b) kill the outsider because c) he's responsible for the awful shit in the world. any one or two of those points wouldn't have given me pause, but all three together seemed pretty contradictory to what we knew about the setting and the characters.

the outsider isn't responsible for the awful shit in the world. he just isn't. i do not think the previous games could possibly have emphasised this more. his direct actions are giving a handful of people magic powers and some hints, but what those are and how they are used (IF they are used) are shown to be completely reflective of the individuals both in story and gameplay. the average person in the empire is not affected by the existence of the marked at all. there is no evil magocracy. the closest thing, delilah's reign, is a takeover of the entrenched power structure and it can be defeated with the protagonist's own outsider-given abilities.

gangs, corruption, police states, religious control, wealth inequality, spreading of disease - these are the real issues that the citizens of dunwall and karnaca face daily, and they are completely independent of the outsider. time and time again we see that casting him as the source of society's ills is a hollow excuse for the perpetrators; it's exactly what the abbey does as it kidnaps children and murders "heretics". as a player, why would i think about killing the outsider when there are so many rotten institutions right there? it's even worse when dh2 portrays him as a historical murder victim himself, who seems to prefer it when people don't abuse their powers, even if he cynically expects they will.

and no one should know more about human choice than daud, post his dlcs. like, his entire character arc was realising that whatever the outsider gave him, he alone was responsible for his actions, so he must bear the consequences. it all comes down to his canonical low-chaos speech in dh1, after seeing corvo deliberately NOT slaughter his way through life: "you took a path i could have followed, but did not... you choose mercy. extraordinary." we are given every reason to believe his desire to retire peacefully is earnest and something he follows through on. the story's premise would be cheapened if he didn't.

as i see it, the key theme of dh1, its dlcs and dh2 is that, while privilege may blind and power may corrupt, there is always the choice to do better, and it is often the harder choice. and look, i think the doto writers may have been trying to expand on that. what about the root causes of privilege and power? who draws the lines? who can best try to take the system down, and what happens when they do? fair questions! but doto looks for the answers in all the wrong places, and so is at odds with the other games instead of in conversation with them.

it's kind of perfect that doto is so resolute in downplaying agency, really. if you're going to ignore the details of the stories you're building on, why not go the whole hog and make your message completely antithetical to theirs.

billie is the player character, but she is not in charge. she pretty much just goes along with whatever daud says, though she's not his young protegee anymore, and she had plenty of autonomy back when she was. there's so much focus on what daud's done and his mission and his angst about how he turned her into a killer and she's the one who has to carry out this job because he's dying etc. when they first reunite he asserts that he knew she'd come find him. because her life is supposed to revolve around him, i guess? ugh. a sprinkle of sentimentality is fine and even heartwarming, like the writers intended it to be, but to have it as The Story in this way just gives the impression that she's little more than an extension of him.

sure, you CAN technically question daud's idea of the outsider's culpability at the end, but 1) daud's dead and 2) the conversation goes straight back to whether the outsider should die for what it's asserted he's done. anyway, one argument in favour of saving him is "this wasn't his choice, he never asked for this power" lmao. it's just like how billie's void powers are forced on her (in an awfully uncharacteristic fashion by the outsider, i might add) and we're not supposed to worry too much about any carnage she causes with them.

the chaos system was one of the most interesting ways to deal with the violence = bad problem in violent video games. in doing away with it, doto pays lip service to the idea by having daud and billie wallow in guilt about their pasts, but there are no external consequences that might prompt actual introspection and a change in behaviour for them and the player. this means if you slaughter entire buildings of people, it's no biggie, nothing changes, never mind the fact that the story is trying to pose some ethical questions about murder. it also means daud is extremely annoying the whole way through. but hey - it's totally compatible with the theme that choices don't matter that much.

yet for something that's trying to be so different from its predecessors, i do think that doto relies a little heavily on nostalgia. if you aren't attached to the characters at the start, i doubt the game comes close to the emotional peaks it does otherwise. the narrated splashes aren't gonna do it alone - imagine if dh1's prologue didn't let you play with emily and simply told us that corvo looked after the empress' daughter - and there's not much character development throughout. i was definitely moved at times, i'm not going to pretend i wasn't! but often i felt it was despite the execution, not because of it.

also, "black-eyed bastard" was said way too much.

another issue was that i felt a lot of the script was written and delivered in a manner that wants to make you go "hmm, how thought-provoking", but the questions raised are never explored or answered meaningfully. even the ending is a stubbornly vague "i don't know..." i got a little sad when i noticed just how often potentially meaty bits of dialogue were redirected. it made those moments come across as insincere and non-committal even if they sounded good on their own. as an example, mid-game billie asks "is the outsider to blame for what we did? does corruption come from the void or from our own hearts?" then keeps talking about her plans to kill him. if she'd instead reflected on who was responsible for her current actions, even if there was no firm conclusion, i could believe that the story was trying to have a genuine discussion about the blame game that we could learn something from. but it's not that deep :(

overall i just feel like doto tried to take Cool parts of dishonored without always considering all the details that made them Good. a gruff assassin who has beef with god is a cool character, but he's a good character because of the specific arc he went through, and the version that shows up in doto is even less self aware than the one at the start of dh1; billie is cool because of her badass checkered past, but she is complex because her desire to be part of something bigger often conflicts with her independence and businesslike practicality, characteristics that doto doesn't really touch on; the outsider is cool as the powerful inhabitant of a supernatural dimension, but it's the distance from his devilish portrayal in the empire that makes him unique and interesting.

on a meta level, i've never seen anyone indicate a dislike of the outsider as a character, and to me the implications of his existence in the void is the most iconic part of the worldbuilding. killing OR removing him means arkane gives up the easiest, most sensible way to make a future dh game feel like Dishonored. it might never happen, but why close that particular door?* there was lots of speculation that the game was tying up the series for the forseeable future, which was probably true, but simply closing off the kaldwin era would have been enough for that. plus a smaller scope would also have been better for a small game. cosmic upheaval really deserves more gravity than doto was able to give.

what alternatives do i think might have worked? well, going back to the three points i mentioned earlier:

not centred on daud and billie, aim is still to kill the outsider who is believed to be responsible for everything - maybe a particularly zealous young overseer tries to actually do something about the outsider

centred on daud and billie, aim is not to kill the outsider, who is believed to be responsible for everything - maybe they can bring about the downfall of the abbey for good

centred on daud and billie, aim is to kill the outsider, who is not believed to be responsible for everything - maybe they have to reluctantly mercy kill the outsider for some void-related reason, or save him from someone else trying to assassinate him.

could work with any concept (i.e. i totally thought this would happen) - either billie or daud replaces the outsider in the void.

i did have issues with dh2 as well, and honestly they laid the groundwork for much of what i didn't like about doto. while i think the series always has fantastic incidental writing (whatever the collective word is for audiographs, journals etc.) the main stories have never been masterpieces, and dh2's attempt to lean more into character study wasn't super successful imo. to make some characters more sympathetic they sanded off some awesome unpleasant edges - why sokolov of all people got sad-dadified i'm still puzzled by. there's a lot more exposition. i preferred the more detached outsider from dh1. some references to dh1 and the dlcs were too fanservicey for my taste. but i think the biggest hint of things to come was the time travel mechanic - the focus was clearly "this will be really cool to play" and not "this is going to open a huge can of worms on the narrative level which we should try to address thoughtfully", the same way priorities probably were when it came to doto's "kill a god" setup. i get it, they're video games, not books. but this is how you get the insanity that IS the dishonored books. lol.

* i'm not counting deathloop as a dh game, and i haven't played it, but i read that the connections to the dh universe are more than just a couple of easter eggs. imo that does neither any favours - the dh timeline gets boxed in, and it makes deathloop look like its developers don't have faith in it as a standalone ip.

#sorry for the wait!#dishonored #zann talks #ask #tl;dr: He Would Not Fucking Say That

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banavalope · 1 year

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Really apropos of nothing - from your perspective, anyway - but I do wish it were. Easier? Less open for exploitation? For artists to be able to explore the concept of shared / collaborative universes more often in the pursuit of creating original art.

(more discussion of topic under cut in the event no one cares lol)

I'll note first that I'm having a different conversation here than the ad nauseam one about an artist's right to own and profit off their intellectual property. We do not disagree on this point, I am staunchly in favor, always, of independent artists staking claim on what is theirs and protecting themselves with ownership and copyright. What I'm against is corporate abuse of this protection, because literally what do they need it for, they are billionaires. Eat my ass, my life has only been made worse learning that Disney tried to fucking copyright the names Thor and Loki. So, let's digress.

I'm coming at this from a background of having grown up on adoptables RPG forums circa Gaiaonline, it was a large portion of my internet community life; the concept of an adoptables RPG is tangentially related to shared universes. They have similar DNA: a collection of people all flocking to a concept and, through communal effort, build the canon together. It's non-commital, it's more than just you and some friends creating a story, it's a little like an open RPG except you get to keep whatever you made up if you decide you're jumping ship from Gaia to Deviantart because let's say you got into a weird internet fight once with a 22 year old over a PNG you paid fake money for, and have decided you really just don't need that kind of drama in your life now that you've turned 17.

Where they differ is in the most important aspect of one being open source by permission, and the other by design.

Collaborative works like Orion's Arm, or SCP for a more mainstream example, are fascinating examples of what I mean. The dedication to building open source fictional backdrops anyone can use for anything, for profit or not, that nobody can solely own. Of course, I feel like these examples exist so perfectly because the sci-fi genre has itself always been this way. D&D is also this way. Those are nice points of inspirational reference, but they're only two genres. Very specific genres, at that.

Because you have to sometimes consider, there exist people who want to write, or want to create, who are likely very good at these things, but struggle to come up with an """""original""""" idea within their topic of interest. Maybe their interest is so niche it's impossible to separate it from the original point of inspiration (see: every time someone calls out typing quirks as homestuck derivative) Alternatively are the people good at coming up with a multitude of ideas based on one topic, but no good at stringing them together into some kind of cohesive idea, or maybe just lack the motivation to do it. Not everything has to be a thing, sometimes you just want to share an idea in a way that matters without it being your magnum opus. Yeah, you could post them into the screaming void of the social media abyss, though it's hardly a satisfying compromise.

Imagine the work that could be created if there were genres upon genres of open source worldbuilding projects, and the safety of knowing the idea you're riffing off of hurts no one to use, as being riffed off of is its intended purpose for existing. Nobody owns it! We all agreed to that at the start! Go nuts! Sell it, if you want to!

"You're just describing fandom AU", yes, dear reader, astute observation. Shared universes are, to me, the natural evolution of a fandom. Instead of only joking about how, after a point, an AU is just an original story, or a certain amount of headcanons creates a whole new character, you take that joke to its logical conclusion. Maybe it goes under recognized as the next step up because we're all so focused on making fun of people for it, but to say so risks sounding spicy.

Anyway, I love collaborative storytelling, I love shared universes and open source material, so much so that I want to bake it into my own art projects. I want there to be more free art created and curated by independent artists, ensuring struggling independent artists who can't afford to be free are able to make their living. I want art to be more accessible beyond just access to products. I have exhausted the SCP wiki, and hunger.

#bana stop talking #just me thinking out loud in a very altruistic manner #got fucking hyped up for Little Reason over shared universes the other day and decided to go on a tangent #bc sometimes you remember you have the power to just do that on a blog

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hazuki-no-yume · 7 years

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Hi! I have been a fan of Hazumi no yume and youtaites for a while now . The recent drama has torn me to bits. I don't think either side is innocent in what has happened. I do believe that people should credit the translator's lyrics, but I also think it is hard to judge if someone used their translation especially if it is close or is a direct translation, sometimes when translating translator's will change the lyrics to give off a different vibe. More in part 2

Part 2) When using those lyrics that have been changed to give a different feeling is used for a translyric and doesn’t give the name of the translator that is a problem. But I don’t see a reason to go after someone who used a basic straightforward translation to sing. I hope this drama will end and both sides can learn from this experience!

Sorry I forgot to put something in my previous ask(s). Even though someone uses a straightforward close to the original or just use someone else’s translation in general should still put down the original translator in the citation for their covers.

————–

I’m going to assume all of these are together!! If anything, if you want to send a big chunk of text or a string of anons, either send it via Submit and mention you want to be Anonymous or try to put a nickname in each ask so I can group them together!

In any case, yeah, this is the biggest issue about the whole “translation and credit” thing.

The thing about Vocaloid songs (and songs in general!!!) is that they’re finite. If a line in Britney Spears’ Toxic goes “With a taste of your lips I’m on a ride”, you can’t really debate and say something wildly different; you have to stick true to translation and meaning of the song! So no one can really make “original translations” because the song is still going to be the same song no matter who deciphers it. No one can take Britney’s song and claim it says “Your lips make me want to ride away” or “With a taste of your hips I wanna sway”; songs are finite whereas writing, art, anything else doesn’t really have these borders, you know?

But even so!! Interpretation, word arrangement, the hours spent hearing the song and listening and going from subs to translation is very personal to the translator! You can’t just take these babies and run them into Google Translate, because then you get something like “Paper Jam” turned into “marmelada de papel” in Spanish (which literally means jam made out of paper, like, as if it was grape jelly. But paper. Paper jelly. Ew.). Translators do their best to come up with the same emotions and expressions that play throughout the song and then put them in a format that one can easily read and digest.

[ Update: An Anon explains it much better in this post! I don’t really edit my stuff nor delete it for the sake of integrity and admitting that I was wrong, but please refer to this submission on about how distinct translations can be! ]

That’s why when it comes to “it’s hard to judge who’s using who’s translation”, it’s best to just be honest about it. Maybe so and so didn’t use HnY’s translation, and that’s cool! They could use someone else’s, but it’s really fishy that like, unless they’ve established themselves as both a translator and cover artist, that they come up with similar lyrics, you know? It’s all about honestly.

Bottom line, unless you yourself hand-crafted your own translation from a song and adapted it into your own, you should credit whatever resource you use that helped you get your final product. Otherwise it is plagiarizing and then stuff like this happens where content makers feel shafted. Even if you think it’s a little thing!!! Especially if you decide to use said content despite not liking the person!!!

Like even on a professional level, you can’t just willy-nilly pluck translations from god knows where and then belt your heart out if you’re selling yourself based on voice, accuracy, and performance. Would people want to pay a youtaite for selling them an incorrect cover of a song? No, so then they should cite their sources for their translations unless they did it 100% themselves and if they were truthful about it. Like if you HAVE to throw basic morality out of the window, then you need to at least consider that credit is the PROFESSIONAL thing to do, and that if you don’t like a certain translator, then you find another one or you learn the language yourself!

That way when confronted you don’t say “uhm, no? this pisses me off that you’re accusing me” and then crack and say “well, I diiiiiiid kinda use their work” right after. That way translators don’t have to start witch hunts and hunt down lyrics that are vaguely similar to theirs. It’s communication!! It’s all about communication and honesty as a community. ; w;

I got suuuuuuper long winded there. ; o; I’m sorry. I felt the need to get this off of my chest in hopes that people can understand this decade-long issue.

#Anonymous #asks

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luninosity · 7 years

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Hi Luni, I just wanted to say that I love your kitten!Sebastian series!! I feel like the criticism of it being out of character (I don't agree) can't really be applied here because it's not something that would ever happen our world, so how can we know how someone would react, and also, you've said that when you write RPF, it's based on the actor's public personas/images, because we can't really know them. (I'm the person who commented lots on each chapter of AC recently)

Yeah, without getting into a Big Discussion™, I feel like OOC critique is a really odd one for a fic that is both RPF and AU, for exactly those reasons - like, I’ve never claimed that this is the ‘true them’, and they’re facing entirely new SF-future challenges anyway, so they’ve been shaped by that in different ways?

I mean, in general, yes, you want characters to have recognizable core traits that make them ‘Chris’ or ‘Seb’ or ‘Steve’ or ‘Bucky’ as opposed to a random Tom or Jerry, because we’re here for stories about the characters we already love. Obviously that’s the case. But our individual head-canons for those characters will always differ, especially in AU settings - maybe I think Chris would react this way, maybe you think he’d react this other way, and hey, guess what, those are both perfectly fine interpretations! (Assuming there’s at least some extrapolation from what we know about the character and his established values - for instance, I don’t think you could write a believable Chris Evans who - without any explanation of altered circumstances in order to justify it in-text; if that groundwork’s done, that’s okay too, if someone wanted to explore that story - didn’t love his family.)

I think the part that is making me disillusioned with fandom in general (I was saying this to a couple people after the comments popped up) is this weird cultural shift from ‘this thing wasn’t the kind of thing I like so I’m just gonna go find something that’s more my thing instead’ to ‘this thing wasn’t the kind of thing I like so therefore it is BAD and I must TELL THE CREATOR THAT IT IS BAD AND THEY ARE BAD AND THEY SHOULD NOT CREATE ANY MORE’. Like, what?!

Fan creators do their work for free, out of love and affection (or sometimes burning frustration + affection regarding source texts), and fanworks are not measures of a person’s being ‘good’ or ‘bad,’ and you (meaning random anons etc, like mine) do not have any authority to police ‘good’ or ‘bad’ content or whether someone should be allowed to create more works. We can (and should) talk about structural hierarchies and inequalities in fandom culture, don’t get me wrong, but one of the fundamental tenets of fan culture as I understand it (or as it used to be) is that we welcome people who love what we love and who want to create things to share with other lovers.

And maybe we learn and get better as creators; maybe a first fic or art IS out of character, or maybe even a later one is, because the creator’s trying something new. So what? The creator still tried something new and was brave enough and generous enough to share it for free. (Fan works are not pro works, so the only compensation for our labor is emotional compensation, which is why this matters so much more in fandom spaces, and there’s a whole other essay here about how fan culture functions, because of this, necessarily differently from the whole ‘you put it on the internet, deal with it’ argument that sometimes gets made; but moving on for now….)

Ahem. I sort of got into a Big Discussion anyway. My point is, I’ve been talking to a couple people ( @viperbranium, @hitlikehammers )about gradually moving away from writing fic (not any time soon! I have a LOT of WIPs to finish! I still love all my OTPs!), because this culture is starting to…not feel like the fan culture I fell in love with, way back when, where people were welcomed (and I remember the first time I shyly wrote a comment!fic for a serious BNF in Supernatural fandom because she’d made an LJ post wanting a coda to an episode, and I tried, and it probably wasn’t very good because it was my first fic - but you know what? she REPLIED AND POINTED OUT BITS SHE LOVED AND GOT ALL EXCITED OVER MY LITTLE NERVOUS NEWBIE EFFORT, AND OH MY GOD I FELT LIKE I COULD MAYBE BELONG) - and where if you didn’t like a thing (and let’s be clear that I’m talking about likes/dislikes, not something like deliberate malicious misrepresentation) you’d just shrug and move on, where you’d never dream of telling someone to stop creating because you personally felt that one fic of theirs was OOC.

And, to be clear, it’s not about feeling personally hurt if someone simply doesn’t like my fic. Sure. There are many fics I don’t like, sometimes for no other reason than the writing style rubs me the wrong way. You know what I do? I close the tab and move on. And I’m starting to wonder whether (especially given my tiring circumstances at the moment, with Evil Demon Cat likely not going to make it to 2018, and daily vet visits, and so on) I have the emotional energy to devote to something that’s another source of stress: even if I just laugh and delete obnoxious messages, I still have to read them. I still have to see them. I don’t want to write and post a fic wondering how many nasty ‘you should stop writing this pairing forever and go write OC’s since you obviously want to anyway’ (yes, that’s a quote from one of my anons) notes are about to appear this time. (Maybe I will just go write original fic, anon. I have sold some already. Thanks.)

Anyway, that became more of a…thing…than I meant it to. Um, thanks for letting me vent? *laughs* I still have a lot of fic to finish writing, so I’m not going anywhere any time soon. Those are just thoughts. Swirling cranky thundercloud-colored thoughts, probably also colored by my own tiredness. (I am so very tired. We’ve been keeping Kitty locked in the bedroom at night because he’s started trying to hide in the weirdest places and we don’t have the time to hunt him down and then medicate him in the mornings, but he HATES being locked up and screams all night. And daily vet visits. And also it is finals week so I am GRADING ALL THE THINGS and I have an Obnoxious Entitled Male Student this semester who tried to argue his paper grade “because all English grades are subjective and opinion-based anyway right?” OH WOW I GUESS ALL THOSE YEARS OF BECOMING AN EXPERT IN MY FIELD AND DOING TEACHER TRAINING AND GRADE STANDARDIZATION AND NORMING SHOULD BOW DOWN BEFORE YOUR EIGHTEEN-YEAR-OLD SELF, YES, ABSOLUTELY, BY WHICH I MEAN NO YOU ARE WRONG).

Like I said: tired.

I’m going to go and have lunch now.

Oh! But also I didn’t say thank you for YOU being awesome, and all the lovely support in your message, because that’s awfully nice to hear! YOU ARE AWESOME AND I ADORE YOU AND YOU HAVE MADE ME SMILE AND I HOPE YOU KNOW HOW MUCH BETTER YOU HAVE MADE MY DAY.

#anon #replies #fandom #wow #guess i had a lot of feels #ignore me #i am very tired #Anonymous

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incorrectmidc · 7 years

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DON'T WANT TO READ MY 4 AM BS, GO SKIP.

THIS IS THE LAST TIME I TALK OF THIS HERE, I SWEAR.

I’LL BE BACK BY VALENTINES TO CONTRIBUTE TO THE MIDC FANDOM. :3

OKAY, ON TO MY LAST RANT:

the thing is, reposting people’s art (of any form) happens every day. it happens on individual accounts, fanpages and/or private groups. no one can keep track of it and we all know it.

it’s also borderline illegal tbh but we usually don’t bother w that.

you give credits to the op whenever you can and you are (sort of) excused when you honestly, for the life of you, does not know the original source of it (since google images proves to be a lot of help these days).

fortunately, there are people who does help you know the source. bless them.

the issue lies w (kinda or hinted? i dunno the right word) actually taking credit of someone else’s work. for example, blatantly saying the work’s yours. another example is when people comment on such post (complimenting and discussing the post further) that one does not even bother to announce that it wasn’t their work at all.

ergo indirectly claiming the work’s theirs.

it might be a careless act or deliberate omission but that is one hell of an annoyance.

and saying that if people does not want their works to be reposted anywhere (W/O THEIR PERMISSION BTW) that they should just make a fanbook or something and not post it online is waaaayyyy too insensitive. Duuuuddddeee, i swear, if all people online are like you, no one’s gonna create anything anymore.

Be a little sensitive will you.

You’re hurting feelings here and taking for granted the hours spent by artists to create those masterpieces.

(Not talking about me cos i just sit here and bullshit my way w words. I mean those artists who make really really good art! ❤)

am i ranting again? maybe i am. sorry. it’s 4:41 AM in here and all i see are negative reactions around.

and im not even an artist yet i already feel this way! think of what the actual artist/s would feel about it.

bless those people who patiently explained stuff to them tho. and im really sorry if you are, in any way, antagonized or something. (*/\*)

im not good at articulating my thoughts (my head’s always a mess) but i hope people understood what i want to say?

bye bye

–miele

#this is unedited #go figure #random #not so random rant rly #midnight cinderella #incorrectmidc

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