#i do have a very specific sorta visualization of what this looks like yet i have zero faith | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

canmom · 2 months

Text

Ping-Pong The Animation: eps 1-3

So Masaaki Yuasa [AN12, AN28, AN150] can do no wrong, right? OK, well, I'll admit Ride Your Wave was kinda mid, and Devilman Crybaby goes hard as hell at the beginning and end but sorta treads water in the middle, but... generally speaking! No-one does it like Yuasa.

For reasons I don't really remember, I didn't get very far watching Ping-Pong The Animation some years ago. It should be entirely my shit: Yuasa pulling in a gang of wildly creative animators to put their unique spin on something. However, the first episode didn't entirely hook me, and I never got round to trying the second before something else punted 'watching Ping Pong' out of my brain. ADHD, y'know.

This is a shame because even the very next episode seriously goes, as does the one after that. But also this anime isn't entirely what I was expecting (crazy sakugafest full of Yuasa weirdness). Not to say it doesn't do a lot of really unique stuff with its cinematography and animation, but these first episodes at least are more about like... dissociation! ennui!

But more on that in a mo. First I wanna continue the thread of 'how do you animate sports'.

So, ping-pong, or table tennis. Not a sport I know much about, I'll be honest. (To be fair I don't know a lot about sports in general outside of some very specific niches. The sports I've pursued so far are rather eclectic: swimming, fencing, tai chi chuan, and roller derby; I never got particularly far in any and it's been years since I've done them.)

I'll inevitably be drawing a lot of comparisons to The First Slam Dunk, the other sports anime I've watched recently. I do think it's a productive comparison though! Both of them bring something of the visual language of manga into their presentation in unique ways. I have not yet read the Ping Pong manga, but it's by Taiyō Matsumoto, otherwise known for scifi manga like Tekkonkinkreet (god tier movie, still need to read the manga) and Number Five. So that's a pretty impressive track record!

If you go take a look at some scans of Ping Pong, what will immediately jump out is the shaky, rough line style and unusual camera angles and compositions.

The stylisation is also very different from a lot of manga. Noses are fully drawn, eyes are realistically small, and in contrast, lips and mouths tend to get the emphasis - as well as hands.

Knowing this makes a lot of the creative choices in the anime make sense! It also adopts a shaky lineart style, and makes use of heavy line weights and spotting blacks to add definition. It also has a lot of crazy closeups and layouts, and it loves a visual metaphor. But most of all, the most striking element of this anime is how often it loves to split the picture up into little panels...

...which [eli]'s subs do a really good job of typesetting, incidentally, moving the dialogue to fit naturally into the split composition. And while this shot with 7 smaller shots is perhaps on the extreme end, splits of three or more are pretty frequent. It's a really interesting way to evoke the effect of seeing a whole page of manga

So, as you proooobably know, ping-pong is a game of bouncing balls off a little table and directing them into places the opponent will find it hard to hit them back. From watching this anime I picked up that there are a number of styles of holding the racket (e.g. 'penhold grip' and 'shakehand') and approaches to hitting the ball (e.g. 'chopping'). A lot of this pretty much went over my head, but honestly it didn't matter, since the narrative significance was pretty much always evident.

Compared to basketball, though, ping-pong is a pretty tricky sport to make visually interesting! Sure, you have the players running to and fro, and that can lead to some interesting poses, but how do you get the drama and tension into this?

Ping-pong additionally is all 2D, it doesn't have the sort of resources that Toei could throw at making the best looking 3DCG basketball game ever. It is limited to a TV-feasible drawing count. So it has to make use of clever limited-animation tricks to get the most impact out of fewest drawings.

Let's take an example sequence from episode 3. A minor character is about to get his ass kicked by Tsukimoto. Tsukimoto is something of a pingpong prodigy, and yet he is very emotionally closed-off and even standoffish; he doesn't particularly seem to like the game very much, and doesn't particularly feel inclined to flex on other players and get into the status games. But other players, like Wenge, have heard about him and want to see what he's got.

First we have the setup. Other characters are observing and discussing the game. Since ping-pong tends to involve very rapid exchanges, it can follow the classic shōnen model where there's a lot of talking, flashy fight sequence, more talking...

The cut happens in two steps, maintaining the vertical dividing line. This approach to cutting is used a lot in Ping-Pong, and it's quite a creative way to keep visual interest when it's using a lot of largely static shots. The panel on the right is more animated than the panel on the left, a naturalistic depiction of bouncing the ball off the table.

Things start moving faster here. A rapid pan on the image on the left disguises the fact that this anticipation pose is actually not moving at all. This then goes into a rapid, explosive moment as this guy serves.

The final pose is held for a couple of seconds while the voiceover line discussing his intended move finishes. This sort of elasticity of time is a very Osamu Dezaki type of move - it's something that Hayao Miyazaki and Isao Takahata actually really disliked.

A sound effect hits as Tsukimoto appears on the right in silhouette, anticipating his reaction, and setting up the next shot which leaves the split picture and hides the background for just a moment, as if to put us in Tsukimoto's shoes: he only sees the ball.

Tsukimoto follows through and holds this pose - the ball is the only thing moving here. The ball moves mainly on 2s while Tsukimoto moves on 3s and 2s, and he and the ball move on alternating frames. He holds the pose as the ball zips off to the right (bouncing off the corner of the table), with a speed lines-like effect. At the end of the shot, the ball freezes in the air for the moment while the sound echoes.

The actual table-tennis round lasts just seconds, and the drawing count involved is pretty minimal, but it does a lot with those drawings.

We go back to voiceovers and reactions in the next few shots, returning to the split video as Tsukimoto's opponent thinks about how he'd really rather be at the beach...

Often, these comic-like compositions will change one panel at a time, and while one panel is animated another panel will be still, naturally moving your eyes across the screen. It is an approach similar to some experiments I've seen in 'animated comics' viewed in a web browser, where the panels do not appear all at once, but enter with some animation.

So this is the sort of animation technique that Ping Pong uses. It's effective! Elsewhere the cuts are used in a less direct, continuity-editing way and more in a juxtaposition/montage way. For example, Wenge's desire to return to China is symbolised by match cutting/fading to shots of an aeroplane.

And there is a recurring image, which I'm sure will be expanded on, of Tsukimoto hiding in a cupboard and wishing for a tokusatsu hero to come save him from his isolation. As Tsukimoto's feelings about himself change, the toku hero is replaced by a robot. At this points it starts to feel like an outright Ikuhara anime.

There is occasionally a little bit of CG, mainly when Tsukimoto uses a different type of racket surface, and the way the ball and racket make contact is the crucial thing that the shot is trying to convey...

It gets the job done, but I'm glad they stuck with 2D for most of it.

So I went in the first time expecting like, crazy elaborate sakuga - and to be fair, the OP, animated by none other than Shinya Ohira, delivers on that front - but if anything what I've seen so far in Ping-Pong is actually a triumph of storyboarding and limited animation techniques. I think back then I didn't have the eyes to appreciate it in the same way.

OK, that's the film nerd stuff, but what about the story? Ping Pong follows two school friends, Makoto Tsukimoto aka "Smile" (right), and Yutaka Hoshino aka "Peco" (left). Smile is defined by a flat affect and a standoffish persona. He's just going through the motions. He's very good at ping-pong, but to him it's just a way to pass time, and he's scornful about the idea of caring all that much about it. Much like Shinji with his casette player, Tsukimoto is pretty much always staring at a handheld games console rather than make eye contact with anyone.

Peco on the other hand is the more childish one - playful, kinda arrogant, very much an 'emotions on his sleeve' kinda guy. He sulks when he loses and gloats when he wins, and is constantly seen with bubblegum or other kinds of candy. He provides a lot of our commentary when he chats with the other players.

日本語上手 readers probably noticed the tsuki (moon) vs hoshi (star) symbolism thing they've got going on here!

High-school table tennis in this story seems to be a rather 'tough love' kinda world. Most of these players tend to look down on those who can't meet their level. Going easy on someone is seen as weakness, or cultivating bad habits, by almost everyone. Tsukimoto doesn't play at his full potential because he isn't as invested in winning as all these weirdos, but it seems that might be starting to change...

The coach is interesting. He's an old man and fairly disdainful of the club at large, and prone to speaking English randomly with a heavy accent. But he gets excited at the prospect of getting Tsukimoto to unleash his full potential, in terms that are repeatedly metaphorically compared to romance/marriage.

And when Tsukimoto gets sick of it, he challenges him to a game, with the stakes as...

Cue Makima/Beatrice images here I guess.

Tsukimoto de facto wins when the coach collapses, but this episode marks a change of heart. He starts to think of himself as a robot - the affect of a robot replacing the affect of the toku hero in his fantasy. And in this way he does what people seem to want and plays ping pong with mechanical precision, expressed once again in visual metaphor (shot here from a cool transformation sequence)...

What if I just dissociate harder? This is gonna end well.

So it really is one of those kind of like 'ennui of being a teenager' kind of stories - c.f. say FLCL. 'Boy with complicated emotional landscape' is Yuasa bread and butter, but the particular variant here seems a little unusual for him - they tend to be a little more earnest. I'm curious to see how Tsukimoto develops.

I am definitely enjoying the arrogant Chinese player Kong Wenge. Dude's got a lot of screen presence, and while I'm sure he'll get shown up sooner or later, he makes for a very fun antagonist of sorts.

In comparison to Slam Dunk... one thing that's significantly different about table tennis is that it's an individual rather than a team sport, which means it's harder to have an ensemble cast all contributing to the protagonists' eventual victory - instead it's about a lot of individual arcs interweaving with each other, individual duels. Besides that, it does seem like it will be following a similar arc of a character in an emotional hole (grief for Ryota, depression for Tsukimoto) finding new meaning and purpose through sports - though I can't be sure how things are gonna go for Tsukimoto here!

The tone however is quite different. Even when it's silly, I feel like Slam Dunk is a very sincere story. There's little detachment or irony, or false consciousness - with perhaps the major exception of Ryota's mother, who lets her own grief and trauma get in the way of understanding her son. But ultimately 'why would you care this much about basketball' is not a question that anyone would ask in Slam Dunk. Even the judo guy in the manga who's trying to recruit Sakuragi is just as hot-blooded about his own sport of choice.

There's a difference in like, general affect about the players as well, which has something to do with the sport itself. Yeah, Sakuragi's superpower is his 'genius' ability to predict rebounds, and there is plenty of strategising in Slam Dunk - but basketball is still a sport that very much emphasises physical power, and as much as Slam Dunk will work hard to sell you on a clever trick pass, the visuals are also emphasising the speed that players are dashing, the height they're jumping, their physique. Table tennis by contrast seems to be a sport that's more about prediction and mind games.

That said it is equally just like Matsumoto's style being different from Inoue's. Now I know it's by the guy who wrote Tekkonkinkreet, a lot about this series falls into place! There's a sense of tension here, of being fundamentally at odds with the world. The autismfeels. This is reflected also in the drawings - the characters don't entirely seem comfortable in their embodiment.

So if that's what I'm getting from just three eps, I'm very excited to see what the remaining 8 have to offer. This series is probably too long to cram into Animation Night format, but we'll see...

#anime #manga #ping pong the animation #masaaki yuasa #animation

67 notes · View notes

muninnhuginn · 8 months

Text

Season Two Link Click Thoughts

I've put this below a cut because it gets long, but these are just my assorted thoughts on s2 in general. It's going to be waaaay more opinions than my usual speculationy kinda deal and contains spoilers for all of season two.

I hit character limit on my bullet points so I think that's my cue to leave it at that even though I have more thoughts honestly. I didn't even know that was a thing.

Pacing. I think pretty much everyone can agree that the pacing was... dubious. This series could have easily been shorter or had different meaningful content rather than repeated footage reuse for flashing back and overly extended fight scenes (episode 7? I think it was, was particularly egregious about this). I get there's presumably a fanbase for fight scenes and I won't contest that they were really nicely choreographed, but sometimes it felt like you'd take a break from actual events to spend ten minutes on a fight scene that didn't really... further anything else? I do enjoy recontextualisation and I recognise that that does require reusing some aspects of footage rather than entirely reanimating scenes when there's no need to, but at the same time, this is a series that is lowkey set up for binging. Flashing back so frequently when it's a series specifically engineered to make you binge it (hi constant cliffhangers) seems an odd recipe. I almost wonder how much of this was for production reasons, though maybe I'm overreaching here.

Linked to this is the overuse of cliffhangers. Season 1 had some cliffhangers, yeah, but it at least had breaks between arcs and more importantly, didn't repeatedly move the chronology of scenes purely to service an artificial cliffhanger.

Art and animation was mostly very nice. There were two episodes that did suffer art-wise (episodes three and eleven) with various off-model faces, but for the most part it was all pretty solid and I don't have any complaints about the animation. My favourite part of the art is still the almost rainbow outlines you get around objects. It made scenes like the Lu Guang speedboat one look gorgeous with the lights and colour on the water.

Mystery. Okay, so for all my qualms I genuinely think the mystery aspects were almost perfect. There were a couple of places I feel they somewhat 'cheated' but otherwise (the twin with the photo in the hospital doorway looking like tianxi in a close up shot. and then cxs/wj acting possessed in ep 6 but having their eyes appear normal at first and only having them changed the next episode. I'm fine with false negatives on the eyes when the audience isn't yet cued in on a possession, but in this case it looked like they were possessed up until the eyes showed otherwise)? Everything made total sense and tied together by the end. Even going into episode 12 we had a couple of gaps in scenes in Chen Bin and Liu Lan's death that I think it would be incredibly easy to overlook considering we "knew" what happened in them, but the hints were there in both cases that there was more to it and those hints paid off. Even Liu Xiao's identity worked just fine without the hat guy visual. All the hints were there about a younger favoured brother of the Liu family, Li Tianchen's new friend being a rich "Master Liu", him being abroad studying but stated as "soon to return" (which he then did). There are so many threads and they all tied together by the end such that even if I didn't always agree with the delivery, I do think this season is worthy of being called an excellent mystery.

Characters. So, okay, we introduced a whole host of new characters this time which was a choice. This sorta worked sorta didn't. The arcs of Qian Jin and the twins all tied together thematically and episode 9 was pretty explicit drawing the parallels together. However, we had characters like Qiao Ling not getting much new material at all despite a hopeful start with her scene about "wanting to be trusted".

Unfortunate implications (my head automatically goes to TV Tropes with this :V). Mainly surrounding the use of female characters as devices to propel the male characters. LTX is the most obvious instance (I shouldn't have to explain why), but Wang Juan was also treated as though she would be important and then largely shunted off to apply more pressure to XL; Liu Min's mum taking the hysterical role. On their own they may not be too bad, but I guess it's that it's combined with the stuff around Emma from s1 where the big 'twist' in the finale is killing her once there's a hope spot, and also added to how the mother in the Doudou episode is the one who's reverted to a younger age, whilst the dad is exhausted. Just a whole load of stuff that individually on their own don't necessarily mean anything but when put together forms a pattern I'm not super comfortable with? I do get the impression that show is well-meaning in terms of this stuff (QJ and LF especially point that way) but feel like it still fell down in a few places and could have done better with these aspects.

Lu Guang going back to save CXS confirmed. Admittedly I am incredibly biased to this type of plot, but I'm so glad they confirmed it. We haven't been given many specifics around when he went back from/to and I imagine we'll get more next season so I'm holding off judgement on all that for now (the paradox implications have me a bit worried but until we know more about the mechanics I can't judge). That said, I really liked the scene where it was comfirmed (the darkened shot of Lu Guang covered in blood my beloved) and am thinking that Qiao Ling having knowledge of Lu Guang's memories will mean she has to play a bigger role next season. There's no point in giving her that knowledge if it won't go somewhere. Relatedly, it seems like dying does pass on the powers and that's how we got LTX->QL and CXS->LG. It doesn't seem like Qiao Ling fully realises though if she has got Tianxi's powers (and it's been two months), but I suppose it's not exactly something you *would* realise if you didn't know what you were looking for or had previous experience with these powers.

I do genuinely think that this season was a case where the new characters were written around the existing ideas of the story and the themes which means they're interesting to analyse but I didn't feel like moments hit anywhere near as emotionally as season one? I think the parts where season two was able to approach season one's level of emotion were mainly around the twin's backstories. Meanwhile Qian Jin and Xiao Li's whole deal is interesting in theory but in practice I didn't have much reason to care for Xiao Li. Suffering to make the audience empathise only really "works" if there's more beyond that.

Lu Guang-Li Tianchen parallels make me sad. There are plenty of similarities in how they treat CXS and LTX respectively but I keep thinking of how their final choice in s2 is to either commit to preserving the past (Lu Guang with CXS) or to let go of the past (Li Tianchen with LTX and his mum). And how typically, clinging to the past is seen as a bad thing and letting it go a good thing. But in this case it's almost the opposite? I'm not saying it's healthy for Lu Guang to deny Cheng Xiaoshi's death, but I do think the story will eventually align behind him on this choice. And I think that Li Tianchen leaving the past behind in this case is more about trying to forget his trauma and in the process just digging himself deeper, deliberately choosing to forget the very person he fought to protect.

General s3 spec (keeping it brief). Li Tianchen confirmed that he obtained Liu Min's phone for Liu Xiao and it has info on it Liu Xiao needs but we still don't know what's on it beyond Qian Jin's comment about "family secrets". In terms of Liu Xiao himself, he didn't get much airtime but what he did have he made count. He mentioned about wanting to make "uncertainties into certainties" and the idea that there are "parallel lines". This pretty much sets him up against Lu Guang in terms of aim and seems to suggest our understanding of time travel mechanics is about to get a serious update next season. Also, the new "paranormal section of the police force" seems incredibly pointed. I don't really want it to get a huge focus honestly but with the way the scope has widened each season I don't think I'll get my wish.

#link click #link click spoilers #shiguang daili ren spoilers #long post #sorry I've just been sorta adding to this in a fugue state without checking any of the actual episodes for reference #so please forgive if my memory is blatantly lying to me. it does that.

25 notes · View notes

animehouse-moe · 9 months

Text

The Iceberg of Online Manga - A Reading List and Print Wishlist

We get a lot of manga in English, but that's only the tip of the iceberg. We get a hell of a lot of fan translated manga, but even that doesn't cover the whole thing. Separated by language and culture, the "untapped" potential of manga is foreign to a lot of readers, myself included really. But it's because of that deficiency that I decided to start taking a look at interesting fan translated titles to find series to recommend to publishers (and potentially read), so this is a sneak peek into my ever-growing list.

It's also an open request for people to share their favorites from the online manga sphere! As a single person it's impossible to find all the hidden gems, so being able to share titles between one another can really help widen horizons.

Sui and Neri of the Twilight Planet / Tasogare-Boshi No Sui To Neri

In a way, it reminds me of Girls Last Tour, a sunsetting planet that explores the oddity of a du in their life. Not quite as bittersweet or contemplative through what I've seen so far, but still very pretty and detailed. Lots and lots of hand drawn background art, and some really good layouts and paneling.

Poison Poison Forest Forest /Doku Doku Mori Mori

Mushroom on Mushroom violence, with a healthy side of grim visuals. It's got all the punch you could expect, and has a pretty novel approach to what you could consider a revenge story. Still early on so not a mountain of stuff to go off of, but at the very least what there is is good.

Captain Momo's Secret Base / Momo Kanchou No Himitsu Kichi

Tsuruta Kenji, the mastermind behind the art of Emanon (and other series), need I really say more? Regardless, with Tsuruta's art behind a lighthearted and curious series of a woman travelling through space alone with a cat, it's an undeniably enjoyable ride. Though do be warned, there is quite a bit of nudity featured as Momo prefers going commando to wearing clothes.

Every Every Night / Yona Yona Yona

An incredibly strikingly designed robin hood-esque story, Yona and her crew go on nightly missions to try and steal back art that was originally stolen by a corrupt police force. Creative, expressive, fun, and impressively detailed and unique, it's got quite a bit of potential!

The Feared Witch of Tasihou / Taishou Kitan Majo

Mixing the Western practices of Witchcraft with a Taishou-era Japan setting? A cultural combination that I'm truthfully surprised we haven't really seen yet. Add onto that the incredibly unique and sketch-like art style (and the wonderful color pages) and it's just a super easy pickup.

Welcome to Hotel Metsäpeura / Hotel Metsäpeura e Youkoso

A little hard to explain succinctly, but this is the story of a trio, two men and a teenager who they find standing outside their hotel in the Finnish wilderness in the middle of Winter. Characters with... interesting pasts, it's a story about providing not just a house, but a home to this young boy on his own.

The Ends of A Dream / Yume no Hashibashi

This is one that I'm really quite desperate to get in print. It's an emotional story of a pair as they retrace their forbidden romance through the years that have evaded them as they reach the end of their lives. A painfully beautiful concept that I really hope to see licensed someday.

Will You Clean This For Me? / Kirei Ni Shitemoraemasuka

Alright, something a little more light and fun! A story of a laundry (though it's really sorta general cleaning) shop as they go about their daily life, even offering a few tips and tricks to better cleaning things. Simple idea that has some pretty clear care put into it, and is just the right thing to relax with.

Amber Days and Golden Nights / Kohaku no Yume de Yoimashou

Let's keep the good vibes rolling! Another specific interest series, this time about craft beer. Kenzaki Nana's a burnt out employee at a Kyoto advertising firm, but happens to stumble across the Shirokuma bar. With just one night she ends up pulled into the world of craft beer, and our story begins! Very fun and light, and a really cool area to see explored by manga.

The Dragon, The Hero, and The Courier / Ryuu to Yuusha to Haitatsunin

Nothing like some good old comedy at the expense of someone else. Yoshida, a half elf, is a mail carrier for the Imperial City of Idazig that will deliver mail to anyone, anywhere. With the breadth of fantasy and middle-ages history expressed early on, there's a lot of creative potential for humor alongside the really wonderfully scratchy and sharp art.

Deep Sea Aquarium Magmell / Magmell Shinkai Suizokukan

My friend Phantom would kill me if this wasn't on the list. Anyways, it's a series about a deep sea aquarium employee in Tokyo. Very cool, very informal, and incredibly beautiful. I love how much they work with blacks and darkness in the art.

A Coffee Shop in the Unwaking Town / Samenai Machi no Kissaten

I love stories that are incredibly odd and quiet, and this is no exception. Suzume one day finds herself unable to wake up, stuck in the unwaking town Lutetia. It's in this town that she works at the coffee shop known as 'Quatre'. From the moment I laid eyes on it I knew I'd enjoy it, a unique concept paired with standout art, it has such a comfortable feeling to its experience (as well as offering a few recipes).

Living In an Antiquarian Bookstore of The Karakida Family / Karakida-ke no Kosho Gurashi

A simple story about three girls inheriting their grandfather's shop in the heart of the largest collection of used bookstores, Kanda-Jinbouchou. A very calm and borderline mundane story that is supplemented with some truly beautiful art.

And that's all this list has in it for now! Of course I've got more I can chat about, but I thought these to be the most promising in my perusing of the internet. Best of all though? All of these are available (to some degree) on MangaDex! If you want to give them a shot they're there. And really, do feel free to add to this list with your own online finds, I'd love to find all sorts of unique and creative manga that we don't get to hear about in the English sphere!

31 notes · View notes

hypnofantasma-asks-and-doodles · 9 months

Note

questions about wonder because leader of my fleet is wonder and i wonder (boooo) how some stuff works

Konrolo sits in a little warehouse underground and has monitors set up in various different places around the world- courtesty of the shadow vani, silohwu.

Does the wonder sembla have a radius? Could Konrolo look at the monitor of new york and go "hmm i would like that building to be eviscerated", and then an army of gators crawls out of the sewers and starts destroying the place--- or does she need to be in that area for it to take effect?

Does wonder have a timer? Does it happen at a random time after the user wishes it to be or does it happen instantaneously? How much control over this would the user have?

Can a wonder user just... wish for something to happen at any given time and place to anyone and have it happen? Like "i wish Ranodio would just fucking. Explode rn" while she's on the moon and he's on earth?

How much focus and willpower (as well as psionics) goes into that?? What's the limit for it (like how plasma users can't.. summon a star.)

ALSO SORRY THIS ASK IS FUCKING GARGANTUAN i just dont wanna mess up her writing cause shes such an important character and id hate to spread misinfo on a semi public project /gen

1) Radius - All psionic abilities have a ranged radius based upon visualization, which also means they can affect areas they see in live cameras. The absolute cutoff is anything on different celestial bodies- you cannot be on the moon and affect something on Earth. HOWEVER- even with the ability to affect things via camera visualization, it takes more Will strain. The effects will be weaker and/or cause more mental willpower on the user, and likewise anything that's closer and in a tangible proximity will be stronger and use less willpower.

2) Timer - This is down to energy vs matter manifestations. If psionics conjure something that requires constant application, like a fire, a bolt of lightning, or otherwise doing an effect that's an energy, it will have a "timer" in the sense that once it is cast, it is done and cannot be repeated. If Wonder conjures a physical object of matter, the object stays until someone else removes it- same goes for every other sembla that summons energy or matter

Wonder also can't fully control the effects. Whatever's summoned will be summoned and "aimed" towards the desired task, but after they've been conjured, anything can happen and they can't be redirected or controlled directly

3) Wishes - Wonder cannot control the means (only cause Some Thing to happen), and the more specific and extravagant the desired outcome, the more strain it causes the user and the more focus it'd require. also like above, the absolute range cutoff is celestial bodies, so you can't be on Big Rock 1 and affect someone on Big Rock 2

4) Willpower - The more willpower one has, the more Big Things their manifestations of wonder can be. Wonder is commonly cast in the form of sudden small weather events, animal swarms, some piece of the room warping, a freak yet realistic accident, a freak UNREALISTIC accident due to warping, clownish shenanigans (like pulling 30 fuckin miles of cloth from your pocket even though that shit wasnt there before), something in the room suddenly gushing water, etc. of course, they get WAY more dangerous and complex, but thats the general common gist

ACTUALLY for a good example of media using Wonder - think of Discord from MLP as a VERY VERY strong Wonder user! also maybe the entirety of Alice in Wonderland. that'd be a whole Wonder user get-together

Wonder is a VERY fickle and VERY hard to use sembla, which is why good Wonder users are an absolute force to be reckoned with. Average wonder users (good example of an average or bad wonder user, Shmendrick the Magician from The Last Unicorn) are just sorta seen as silly lil magicians, or are kwaiz who prefer brawn over fancy psionics; only using said psionics to give a good ol jumpscare when you least expect it

#wonder #sembla #psionics #faniwo #fani

10 notes · View notes

a-lonely-dunedain · 1 year

Text

ok sorta-crack theory for why the Black Numenoreans are called Black Numenoreans despite being Very Pale (in LOTRO specifically I mean, that's where my support for this comes from)

I mean sure it works fine if you just say they're called that because they're serving the Dark Lord or their hearts are blackened in a more metaphorical sense, but a little idea came into my head and has been rattling around in my brain (ok this ended up longer than expected, I'll need to put it under a cut)

so my thought kinda came from looking at them in LOTRO and being like "ok but why is their skin purple-grey????" and then it hit me, their blood is black! it probably has a lot to do with the evil sorceries they all seem to be so well-versed in, maybe the result of a ritual they willingly undergo to intentionally make themselves look Like That as a sort of badge of honor to them.

like a way to more clearly differentiate themselves from the other humans in Sauron's order, because if there's one thing we know about these guys it's that their incredibly prideful. they're Black Numenoreans, the favored servants of the Dark Lord, entrusted with powerful magic, and they want everyone to know that! so of course they want black blood and yellow eyes and are willing to endure physical mutilation to get it, what self-respecting servant of Sauron wouldn't?

more support for this lies in the fact that in the early game, (iirc) the only purple-ish Numenoreans we see are Mordrambor and Amarthiel's other champions, y'know really high ranking dudes, and the lower ranking unnamed ones actually have pretty normal skin-tones. it makes sense that Mr. "Horrible Dark Magic Man" Mordrambor would have these traits while the others haven't earned the right to it yet.

weirdly enough tho, later on as we get closer to Mordor every Black Numenorean you encounter seems to have it. I don't know if that's the devs retconing the idea that only higher-ranking guys have the Black-Blood™ and saying they all have it, or if the ones located within Mordor are considered More Important by default. because like, we see some labeled as "apprentice" who still have that signature purple-grey skin.

or maybe they've just been getting their character models mixed up and I'm overthinking this! (I mean that first picture of the Normal Looking Guy is actually from the Dale-Lands which is post-Mordor content sooo *shrugs*)

anyway I'm just rambling, I thought this was gonna be a short post but I guess now that I've started posting about my OC that has a Personal Connection™ to this stuff I now have Opinions and Theories about it! ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ idk I just think the visual of blackened blood is neat. yes my OC has black blood, what of it? am I not entitled to a little shameless edginess every now and then? as a treat?

(as for why Margim still bares those marks despite having never undergone any of those rituals and knowing approximately zero magic, it's probably that in some uncommon cases those traits can be passed down to their children. not often, but it happens. wow Margim is so lucky! :)))))

#lotro #lotro oc #margim #I guess? I mean she's Mentioned-#idk what else to tag this as #granted I've not been paying As Close attention to this as I probably should have #so there's a high likelihood that I've missed Important Lore at some point #do tell me your thoughts

14 notes · View notes

mauesartetc · 2 years

Note

Hi Maue! Bless you for this account, it’s helped me so much in developing as an artist… sorry for adding onto your already-stuffed askbox, but i was wondering if you could help a little with some character design stuff i’m going over?

If not thats fine👍

but uh if so there’s this family of edwardian anthro dogs i am working on. Robbie was born into the family and married Shelley to keep up appearances, and Shelley married him as she could present as a woman and be greatly elevated in financial status. they adopted susan, and robbie’s in a rather unstable relationship with Some Girl/Guy named ernie…robbie is kinda taking advantage of his status and political importance to do whatever he wants. He is not really a good person and i am kindaaaa poking fun at a few billionaires with his character. shelley is a woman who is rightfully angry at her husband being a awful guy and just wants a normal life while still trying to appease her husband so she doesn’t have to deal with the consequences of getting on the wrong side of royalty, susan’s some strange child who thinks robbie and shelley are cool but sorta starts to realize something’s a bit funky about them. anyways so i was wondering how i’d instill motifs of animals other than dogs in these dogish-creatures that relate to their personality whilst still keeping them a canine species, and also how if you have any tips on conveying info through clothing in character design..or any other thing you think i could change with their designs for the better…

sorry if this was rambly and have a good day👍

Ooh fun! To start with, it’d help to figure out which breed of dog each character is based on and work from there. Once you put a specific name to the appearance you’re looking for, it gets so much easier to find visual references for it. (And yes, visual references will very much be your friends, especially in the early stages of character design.) Judging by these character sheets, we’ll want to link Susan with reptiles and amphibians, Robbie with barn owls, and Shelley with shelled creatures. But first, some general notes:

I’ll admit I straight up forgot cereal was a thing in the Edwardian era (which covered the period from 1901-1910 for anyone unfamiliar), so the fact that Robbie inherited a cereal company kinda threw me for a loop. But yes, cereal had existed for decades by that point, though based on my research (see above), they didn’t advertise with animal mascots like the owl in Robbie’s ref. A lot of ads just had illustrations of consumers enjoying the food or holding up the package, along with a paragraph or two explaining why this brand is the best choice. (And yeah, I know Cream of Wheat’s not cereal, but it’s breakfast food so I’m counting it.) If you want to be historically accurate, understand that companies back then had very different approaches to branding from how they handle it today.

Speaking of accuracy, I’m no historian but I’m pretty sure Edwardian folks wouldn’t use the terms “asexual” or “transgender” to describe themselves. Not sure if you’ve written these labels into your story’s dialogue, but it’s worth mentioning just in case. Also, I’m not sure what the blue and white flag represents-? I searched all over for it but didn’t get any results. The placement next to the ace flag led me to believe it was some kind of pride thing, but even the more exhaustive lists didn’t include it. Some clarification would be nice.

Robbie’s description says he’s “very gender conforming” yet he squeals when he’s pleased? Wouldn’t that be considered a pretty effeminate thing to do? I’ve never heard of a single “man’s man” who’d (voluntarily) raise his voice to such a high pitch on a regular basis. Just sayin’, you’ll want to be sure your descriptions are consistent. I also did a double take at the fact that he’s nearly a full foot taller than Shaq, but depending on the average height for this species in this time period, it might be easier to buy. (Fyi, the average height for men who turned 18 in the Edwardian era was around 5′4″, and even shorter in previous years.)

Now for the redlines:

Something I noticed consistently in these drawings was a lack of body structure, as if the character’s outlines were drawn first without an understanding of internal volume or how things fit together. There’s also a tendency to draw characters’ eyes on the sides of their heads, as if they’re fish rather than dogs. A carnivorous land mammal would have front-facing eyes that resemble wedges in profile. If the characters have a solid construction, it’ll be easier to build on it when dealing with symbolic motifs and such.

About those motifs, it helps to gather photo reference of whatever you’re trying to represent in the design, and get a sense of the shapes and colors that comprise it.

It also really helps to get specific. We already know Robbie’s associated with barn owls, but Shelley and Susan are more open ended. If each of them had to pick one (maybe two) species of amphibian/lizard or shelled creature as their favorite, which would it be? Or, which species most closely resemble their own personalities? Narrowing the field to one or two animals will help focus your research.

The next step is figuring out which elements you want to use, and where. This depends on how subtle or overt you want the symbolism to be.

Basically, the more cells you check off in a chart like the one above, the more noticeable the symbolism will be. If you want to use only shapes or only colors, or only use symbolism in the accessories and body, for example, you’re free to do so. It’s also important to note that symbolism in certain locations in the design will be more noticeable than in others. Let’s say you wanted to use a crablike orange for Shelley. If you used it to color a small accessory (like her bracelet), the tie-in would be pretty subtle. But if you used it to color her face, the place on a character our eyes are most drawn to, it’d stand out like a neon sign.

There’s a sliding scale of subtlety in individual parts, as well. It’s up to you to decide how closely you want them to resemble the original source. Here’s what happened when I experimented with the doggos’ ears, with the resemblance ranging from subtle to overt:

It’s all relative to what feels right for the character. Hope this helps!

#ask #stolasgeotiahater #character design #dogs #anthro #redline #critique #art critique #research #symbolism #long post

25 notes · View notes

quantum27 · 2 years

Text

Tron 2.0 and Straying from Humanity.

I really wanna talk about a certain itch 2.0 scratches that the rest of the series really doesn't as much. 82 does a little but uhhh yea. So 2.0 really questions how far you can stray from humanity before you're no longer human, sort of. One of the whole big points of 82 is saying ayyy there's people in my computer. 2.0 goes. Okay but what do you consider as humans. Most of this is done visually but it does touch up on this in the story a bit.

Now the specifics-

Regular programs- your run of the mill programs are just like. Average guys. They look like people persons. aside from the circuits and the grayscale they're just People. Some of them have crystalline hair/head pieces and some other unique features but mostly they're just. Yeah. They're as close to mirrors of their users as you can get, really.

Viruses/ZLOTs: they're essentially the Tron equivalent of zombies in a lot of ways. Evolution touched on this with abraxas but I wouldn't be surprised if they took visual cues from 2.0. their forms are crackled, splintering. Like something is trying to abrupt from the inside of them and their minds only have one thing they want to do. Attack. as enemies in the game it really makes you feel bad because they're close to the other npcs you save but....you can't save them. 2.0 doesn't have a kill or save mechanic at all. While that would be cool it's not really a priority. jet is really just trying to figure things out and get home and maybe save the day in the process.

The ICPS: they're interesting because the game clearly establishes that they're still people. They have personality, they place bets, they experience pain. However they're just armor. Their insides are hollow and you can literally see through them. To me this invokes perhaps copying the same program over and over, removing them from their user. Or perhaps a main program that spawns them? Either way, they're sort of like Tron, they just want to protect their systems, but unfortunately they also want to kill you in the process. They're just dudes doing their jobs, really. They may not have bodies but they're still people.

Seekers: WORM. Enough said.

Rector Scripts: these technically are also viruses but they're a higher level enemy. Their designs invoke imagery of the grim reaper. It's very possible they were never regular programs to begin with, considering their strength and they can literally spawn ZLOTs. Their only purpose is to spread the virus and death.

Datawraiths: they're different than all the others on this list. Sorta spoilery if you want to skip. Instead of being a program that's changed they are users that have been changed by our big bad guys in the realm of the users. They're changed before they're even digitized and the implications are not good. Unlike the ICPs they don't ever actually talk I think which is strange. They're supposed to be the human ones, right ? And yet they're arguably one of the least human ones in the game.

Specific Character Spoilers Now

Ma3a: One of the most obvious ones, she's a floating basketball with a face slapped on it. Lmao. But to be serious the game basically implies hey there's part of Lora that's digitized into her!! however she was digitized/killed while working on Ma2a. So the thing is we're one update removed from Lora's untimely end. So technically Ma3a has a literal piece of humanity as part of her programming but is....also one of the least human looking ones. She's not Lora but if she hadn't been updated and stayed as Ma2a...could she have kept a stronger visual resemblance to her? I don't know. Speculation. There's also the Legacy code which transforms her into, as friends say, the robot milf. This also has awful implications that the ever missing from his own media, Tron, was changed into something he didn't want to be. Rather than a protector of the users he became something that had a bloodlust for users, overriding his personality and his own choices. In a way it's very similar to the viruses.

Thorne: speaking of viruses. This man WAS human. But he's been in the system long enough and let himself become so corrupted it really makes you go. What the Fuck. He doesn't properly resemble a human and it really goes to show that hey. Maybe the longer you stay in a computer the less human you are and the more program you are. And programs are humans but they're not. Anyway. Legacy really missed out on making Flynn a lil not human, you get my drift ? Hes just.... He needs computer therapy. I also genuinely believe it's all his personal choices that led him to this in a way because it is pretty clear he still has freewill. So even if he did get virus'd by accident he didn't have to let himself be corrupted and also start a minor zombie apocalypse. I can't exactly remember how he originally gets changed my bad. Sorry oops.

the FCON Monster: holy shit I still remember the shock I had of this. This is the closest thing to uhhh proper body horror I guess in the game with just the implications. A digitization gone wrong. Three people mashed together unwillingly into this awful monster. You have to shoot at their fucking heads to kill it! Really, are they even a person/s anymore? Consumed with a rage to just kill this computer nerd who got in their way? And the end of the game is awful with how quick it is like oh yeah we'll fix it but it's like. Did Jet kill them dead type thing....? And also! The Datawraiths? They're human too! So like! Jet is a murderer ! What the Fuck! Like! Thorne still had more of a clear head in general than these guys. Even if they did get undigitized.... What would they be undigitizing...? A mess of human flesh ?, ,,,, Like. Anyway yea.

I'm not going into ghost in the machine cause that is a rabbit hole in itself. (Get it. Rabbit hole? Ba dum tis.)

#thoughts on the matter #Tron #Tron 2.0 #Analysis

19 notes · View notes

simpsonsnight · 11 months

Text

Episode #709

Treehouse of Horror XXXII Season 33, Episode 2 | October 10, 2021

Welcome back to "the blog I refuse to proofread"

Opening: A parody Bambi with Bart as Bambi and Marge as Bambi's mother. This specifically spoofs the scene where Bambi's mother gets her head cut off with a chainsaw. In this version, Homer is a deer who gores the hunter, played by Mr. Burns. It's only edgy on it's surface level, but the satiric point is that Disney sometimes makes scary stuff for kids. It's a soft ribbing of their parent company at best.

Story #1: A parody of Parasite, which I never saw. This one's okay, but it's just not leftist enough! Rainier Wolfcastle is the rich guy's house. I really do think the Simpsons writers, who probably all own houses exactly like his, do sorta seem to have more of an interest in dunking on the working class. See, I wasn't even kidding when I said it wasn't leftist enough. YOU THOUGHT I WAS DOING IRONY, BUT I ACTUALLY FEEL THAT WAY AND BELIEVE THE STUFF I'M SAYING ABOUT THIS. AAAAUUUUUGHHHHH

Story #2: In the second story, Bart scares Lisa and Maggie with a spooky story on Halloween, causing them to interrupt Homer and Marge's love-making sessions. Homer sets his sights on the tree-house, and decides to chop down the tree in the backyard, citing it as the cause for his woes. Every year is the same thing, "three scary stories. Two of them good, with a lame one in the middle". Hey, I smiled.

The tree gets zapped by lightening and comes to life, pulling it's roots out of the ground and going on a rampage. It can somehow zap alive other trees, who form a posse against the humans. This one is dumb but fun visually, so I like it fine. And ya gotta respect the fact that it contains their least offensive trans joke yet, when Audrey II from Little Shop of Horrors says he identifies as a tree, because he's a "transplant". Not the most incredible joke in the world, and it's maybe a little hubristic of the Simpsons writers to think they can pull off non-alienating trans jokes. But it's worth noting, I guess.

Story #2.5: OH! They did a short! Because of their weird-ass four-act structure where the third act is very very short. It was Vincent Price reading a rude story in the style of Edward Gorey. One of couplets is a recreation of Bart the Lover.

Story #3: "Dead Ringer" is a parody of The Ring, which I literally watched last Halloween for the first time. Good idea, Simpsons, to parody a thing I know about. Anyway, I found this one to be the weakest.

And that's this one. I'm back, baby! (I am probably going to abandon this blog again right after this post)

MAIL BAG

Aw. AW HELL NO.

People say "The Last Exit to Springfield" is one of the greatest it's not its one of the worst why The Big Book of British Smiles we do not have those teeth. I know Americans need to have theirs cosmetically whitened. It makes no sense the book.

I'm starting to think that no book in the whole world makes sense. I look at those things and I'm just, like, "what is this". You know what I mean? This guy gets it.

I know fans and former fans like to trash the show and even think the show will last forever and ever and ever. But if you have some common sense the show will end if either Matt or a voice actor passes away. Everything comes to an end sometime.

I would not put it past the corporate entities that own the show to have bullied the cast into signing away artificial intelligence rights to their voices in the events of their deaths. It's just a hunch that I have. It was probably the only reason they were able to reach a deal in the last strike or whatever.

How dumb was Marge in the soap box racer episode agreeing with her sisters giving Homer the father test didn't she get it was probably to break them up.

Marge loves her family and is inherently trusting. These are good qualities, unless you live in a world where everyone around you has refused god's grace. She inherited a terrible world that is not suited for her. In other words... can you blame her?

The real reason on why Springfield Stem Academy was a failure was because the idea was from Marge Simpson and the episode had the name Lisa Simpson The Miseducation of Lisa Simpson. Both of them females.

Many in the community will argue that it is canon that "Man smart. Woman Smarter" as sung by Our Favourite Family, but many forget that was a Halloween episode, and thus not canon. Man Smart. Homer/Bart.

Homer a jerkass suppose he didn't know that the word was jackass? Also Homer has always been an ass when he was supposed to get Lisa a new saxophone reed. But went for a beer first. Then it caused the pony incident Lisa always wanted one but it was an incident with ponies being too expensive.

Ponies can be very expensive. Just ask my friend BING CROSBY! HAHAHA GOT 'IM. Nah, I think Homer got it from online. I get all my stuff from online.

#simpsons #season 33

3 notes · View notes

gillytweed · 3 years

Text

Y’all wanna hear about the baby superhero team my brain decided needed to exist?

Yeah you do!

So, I’ve been on a superhero kick lately, specifically DC characters cause I’m kinda tired of Marvel, and my brain decided “what’s the harm in making a superhero OC?” Turns out the answer to that is making an entire team, side characters, a whole world, and lore.

So far, I have the team solidly figured out. Said team lives in a world where superheroes have been around for while (think Young Justice cartoon timeframe in the grand scheme of superhero timelines). People with superpowers aren’t uncommon, so of course a superhero profession surfaced.

On the team, we have Witchboy, a “magic” user, Nightbolt, an unpowered archer/tech hero, Karma, Damage Enhancement ability, aka can take damage and send it back at their opponent even stronger, Ibis, presumably a teleporter, Frost, Iceman but spikier, and Saber, an unpowered sword user.

Nightbolt, Frost and Saber are Legacy Heroes. Aka, they got into heroing through family or personal connections. Meanwhile, Witchboy, Karma and Ibis all have their own reasons for joining a superhero team.

Putting stuff below the cut so I don’t get people shakin’ their canes at me.

General Character profiles

Witchboy Civilian name: Howl Melas (Not their birthname. They chose to have go by a different name for reasons) Ethnicity: Very White, with ancestry all over Europe. Basically a European smoothie Pronouns: They/Them Mentor: Mystic (Sometimes Nightwatcher)

Powers: If I have to choose an already existing hero, I’d say their powers are the most like Raven’s from Teen Titans at a glance. Their powers are based on something I call Kinetic Algorithms, which is basically intense mental visualization paired with specific movements/muscle memory to channel energy into different effects. A list of their basic abilities at their introduction would be short distance teleportation, force fields, levitation, and a basic force blast.

Description: Civilian attire usually consists of a hoodie and workout pants, or dark jeans, T-shirt, light jacket and a beanie to hide their silver hair (it was originally brown, but turned silver as their abilities surfaced). Their Hero suit is black/dark indigo with silver trim, and resembles a sleeveless hoodie (with the hood having a bit more structure so it doesn’t flap everywhere and get in the way) and fitted pants. Both padded for basic protection. They also have fingerless glove/gauntlet sort of things that contain a small communicator and basic GPS system.

Personality: Comes off as dark and brooding, but in reality is having an internal anxiety attack. They want to do their best to help, but often gets tripped up by overthinking, thus they default to not doing anything so they don’t make things worse.

Nightbolt Civilian Name: Edana “Eddie” Cochran Ethnicity: Scottish Pronouns: She/Her Mentor: Broadhead

Powers: Got none but kicks ass anyway. Her primary weapon is the bow and arrow, but she’s also proficient in hand to hand and a few other melee weapons. She’s also the tech wiz of the group, and the only one who’s passed the simulator to be allowed to pilot the dropship. A decent acrobat as well.

Description: Civilian attire is usually jeans, and one of those leather jackets that are also a hoodie sort of deal. Her hair is red, and cut short into an undercut. Her Hero suit is black with red accents. It’s similar to Witchboy’s in that it’s also sleeveless, but it’s more of an armoured vest. No hood, as she prefers a domino mask.

Personality: Easily the leader of the team, as she’s the most mature, despite not being the oldest. Being a Legacy Hero, she’s very aware of how her performance reflects on her mentor, so she does her best at all times, even when it’s clearly leading to burn out.

Karma Civilian Name: Ethnicity: Not sure yet, but def white passing Pronouns: She/Her Mentor: Peacebringer (sorta)

Powers: Damage Empowerment. She takes damage then amplifies it and sends it back several times stronger.

Description: Loves muscle T’s and booty shorts, cause when you worked for the muscles she’s got, you deserve to show them off. Has long blond hair that’s usually pulled up into a ponytail. Hero suit is basically full body armour, as she needs to get hit to hit back. Colours are blue and a yellowish gold.

Personality: A Himbo, but with Street Smarts. At first comes off as cocky, flirtatious, and extremely self confident almost to the point of arrogance, she’s actually quiet sweet and thoughtful when it comes to her friends. She will also drop kick you into the sun if you’re a dick. Shares a braincell with Saber.

Ibis Civilian Name: Kymani “Ky” Lukman Ethnicity: African Egyptian Pronouns: He/Him Mentor: Phase

Powers: Supposedly a teleporter :p

Description: The most handsome black man y’all have ever seen. Too bad for y’all he’s an aroace king and loves it. Civilian attire is nice Henley's and jeans. His Hero suit is black with gold accents that resemble ancient Egyptian jewelry, like the Usekh collar and the gold cuff like bracelets.

Personality: This dudes just vibing. Probably the only one of the group who can process his emotions in a healthy manner. He’s calm, relaxed, and usually unbothered with what’s happening around him. This can turn into apathy in some cases, however.

Frost Civilian Name: Andri Bylur Ethnicity: Nordic descent, primarily Sweden and Norway Pronouns: He/They Mentor: Cryon

Powers: Is basically Iceman but spikier. Can create, manipulate and cover himself in ice. Has the ability to consciously regulate his temperature as well.

Description: Looks like an extremely average dude with brown hair. Usually wears tshirts and plaid with jeans. His Hero suit is rarely seen, as it’s basically a thermal suit to aid in temperature regulation when he covers himself in ice. When covered in ice, they appear to be wearing spikey armour of some kind. In time the design becomes smoother and more streamlined as they get a better handle on their abilites.

Personality: Probably the most empathetic of the group, they took on the responsibility of getting more in depth medical training, so they’re the team medic that never runs out of icepacks. Best friends with Ibis, they’re usually decently calm, but their overwhelming ability to care can bite them in the ass sometimes.

Saber Civilian name: Chenzi “Shenzi” Young Ethnicity: Chinese Pronouns: She/They Mentor: Dynasty

Powers: Got none but is very good with anything sharp. Primary weapon is a sword, but also proficient in hand to hand, and essentially any bladed weapon. Like Nightbolt, is also a decent acrobat.

Description: Gets cold easily, so often wears oversized hoodies and sweatpants (is often told to put on “real” pants when going out in public). Hero suit resembles a lighter, more fitted, and streamlined interpretation of heavy Tang Dynasty era armour. Colours are primarily red and white.

Personality: A gremlin but in a lovable way. She’s convinced she and Karma are the only ones with a sense of humour. Would be a prankster if it didn’t take so much work, so instead goofs off with Karma. Is actually very intelligent and good at what they do, they just manage their stress through shenanigans and can’t focus to save their life (ADHD for the win folks). Shares a braincell with Karma.

#mun mumbles #my writing #Superbabies #original character #i love them your honor

9 notes · View notes

felassan · 4 years

Text

Dragon Age development insights from David Gaider - PART 4

This information came from DG on a recent SummerfallStudios Twitch stream where he gave developer commentary while Liam Esler continued playing DAO from where they had left off in Part 1, 2 and 3. I transcribed it in case there’s anyone who can’t watch the stream (for example due to connection/tech limitations, data, time constraints, personal accessibility reasons, etc). A lot of it is centered on DAO, but there’s also insights into other parts of the franchise. Some of it is info which is known having been put out there in the past, and some of it is new. There’s a bit of overlap or repetition with topics covered in Parts 1-3. This post leaps from topic to topic as it’s a transcript of a conversational format. It’s under a cut due to length.

The stream can currently be watched back here. Next week LE will be streaming a different DAO playthrough with commentary from another guest. Two weeks from now LE and DG will return to continue this playthrough for another stream session like this one.

(Part 5, Part 6)

[wording and opinions DG’s, occasionally LE’s; paraphrased]

The Loghain sequences, where it jumps out of the HoF’s point of view to let the player see what Loghain is up to, were added quite late on in development. Some of the dream sequences (like the HoF’s dream of the Archdemon) were also probably added quite late. Those sequences were added as they felt that they needed to have more indication of the larger goings-on in terms of what Loghain was up to, since they had cut some stuff that was meant to have shown this. Cutting things can be funny like that as you’re then left trying to explain the holes.

An original Archdemon concept drawing had them as a lot more demonic as opposed to draconic, with blank all-black faces, a giant ornate crown, smoke, tentacles and a Cthulhu-esque feel. Things change a lot during the concept phase however. At the time, DG wasn’t sure if he liked the changing of the ‘demon’ into a ‘dragon’, but over time he digs it - it sorta implies some things about the nature of dragons in the world that they later decided “yes, that is probably the case”. They then worked that more into the lore so that dragons weren’t just there to be huge lizards. Given the difficulty the team had modelling things like tentacles and snakes, the original Archdemon concept would probably have been iterated on and would’ve had to become something else eventually anyway.

Having the party camp was probably always part of James Ohlen’s plan. Originally, there was going to be different camps in specific places around the map. They then made it a sort of ‘pocket area’ that the player always ‘took with them’, but here they had problems figuring out things like what would happen if the player rested while in an interior location as opposed to somewhere out in the wilderness, “like, does that change it?” For a while there was a complicated system where the party members would do things in camp that would give the player items and help out in such ways - like a party member who made potions, ones that could be interacted with and asked to craft, a whole crafting system relating to that, etc (this all got cut). This was supposed to act as a reason for the player to return to camp and have more interactions at camp; they didn’t want the camp just to be ‘the place you go just to talk to followers’. A good portion of the team considered dialogue to be boring and not an activity that was engaged in.

As soon as hair/beard hair came past the ‘clipping plane’ of the neck, they had real trouble getting it to move due to lack of proper cloth physics and the troubles they had with hair. Beards were rectangular strips that dangled from the chin with the beard texture attached to it. Sometimes certain points were connected to the chest which is why there’s the weird stretching if models move in certain ways. This happens with robes as well. The reason they did this is so that there’s no clipping. For some reason the BW animation team was so averse to clipping compared to other games from elsewhere which sometimes have a bit of clipping that they’re actually not fussed about. At one point they had a big fight on the DA team because the art team said “We need to make every entrance and doorway [including tents] about twice the size that it is, about Shale-size specifically, because of Shale” because they were worried that there would be scenes where Shale would clip through the wall, and about how this would look to players. Others responded that it’d be rare where Shale would be seen going through a door and also that nobody really cares (as in it’s not a big deal). DG half-seriously suggested that instead of making every door bigger, have it so that after entering the door’s texture at the sides and above it would look cracked and have an outline of Shale’s arms and head as if she’d just barreled her way through the stonework. In the end Shale’s size was reduced as a solution to this (so Shale was originally intended to be a lot larger). This is an example of a place where different parts of the team had different priorities in development. It was pointed out that in the end having giant doors may not have made much difference, as every interior in DA is massive in terms of floor and ceiling-space, as well as items (huge jugs of ale etc) anyway.

Weapons and staves hover on characters’ backs due to the team’s aforementioned aversion to clipping. Originally there were plans for scabbards and straps, but they didn’t have the resources for these and they were also concerned about staves clipping through straps, especially when being ‘drawn’ for combat, even though that would just be a second or so. So this is why we instead have floating magnetically-attached-looking weapons.

DG wrote Nature of the Beast including all of the Brecilian Forest, it’s possibly his favorite plot/questline out of the ones he wrote for DAO. It’s one of the plots that survived best from first inception to final result. One of the prominent cultural features of Ferelden is the werewolves, and so DG had to make ‘the werewolf plot’. All the initial plots were split up like that (the werewolf plot, the dwarf plot, etc). Originally there was a separate ‘elf plot’ but it got joined together with the werewolf one. DG had an idea for a being that was like male and female, terrible and kind, beautiful and horrible and so forth - both at once, like the way nature is. This was the vague initial idea from which this plot grew. The nature spirit encountered is the flipside of the being. The spirit of the forest is both male and female, or something akin to being bigender (both rather than neither). There’s not much difference between the Lady and Witherfang. DG finds it so weird hearing the DAO Dalish elves’ American accents (since their accents were changed for the next game). The American Dalish elf accents bugged DG enough that when they got to DA2, he said to Caroline Livingstone “can we just retcon this” and she was like “yeah”. “I think we underestimated how weird prevalent American accents in the game alongside the British ones would be”. Zathrian is voiced by Tim Russ (Tuvok from Star Trek).

The Cammen-Gheyna plot is a fairly ‘nothing-y’ sidequest relatively speaking, but is so complex in terms of how many options and paths through it that it has that DG got a big of a finger-wagging for it and some people were not happy. LE commented that this quest is “an extremely Gaider plot”, as the player can ruin everyone’s lives in it. Gheyna’s pronunciation of Andaran atish'an is incorrect. This phrase is one of the ones that got mixed up in the pronunciation guide and one of the ones that when they got to DA2, DG was like “ignore what we did before, here’s the new pronunciation files”. One of the first ‘images’ the team had of the Dalish was that they had reindeer-like creatures that pulled the aravels. In DAO aravels look more like standard wagons than the ones in the ‘images’, and they weren’t shown properly. Aravels are wagons but they’re supposed to have big sails (not naval-style sails on top) all over the place to catch the wind, so that they look like a bunch of ships being drawn across a field. They got closer to how they’re supposed to be in DAI. At one point the artists sat DG down and asked him what should set the Dalish apart visually. “Funny you should ask, I have some very specific ideas about what the Dalish should look like that have just never been done”. [I think here he meant hadn’t yet been implemented in the franchise] “Oh, we just thought they were ‘people with wagons’.” “Nobody reads documentation...”

The lamps in the Brecilian Forest are a bit random. They put light sources everywhere and it seems like the Brecilian lamp thing was art-asset use that boiled down to “guess it’s an elven forest?”. The Deep Roads were supposed to be properly dark. The team had a lot of conversations over how dark they could or should make the Deep Roads. They constantly had beams of light coming from above and it was like “this is supposed to be like a mile underground, why are there sunbeams coming through cracks in the ceiling” - the answer is it looks good and they didn’t want to do proper darkness. By DAI, they got closer to the ‘look’ the Deep Roads are supposed to have. This is a recurring theme in the DA franchise lol. “This was a weakness in our team and processes, that it took two titles before we got on board with each other and with the vision.” But they had plenty of good strengths too! DG wishes they had iterated a bit more on the werewolves’ look.

“Evil options” was always one of the big conversations that they had. DG wasn’t a fan of the evil options because they mostly boiled down to being a big jerk. The reason for this is a lengthy design discussion that relies on interface - proper, smart evil usually implies some kind of deception, and how do you indicate to the player that the option they’re about to take has a more cleverly-sinister aspect to it (as opposed to simple Intimidate options)? They didn’t really enjoy just letting the player run around being an asshole to people, “do we have to service this hyuk-hyuk-hyuk, particular type of enjoyment?” DG wishes they had figured out how to do the evil stuff a little better (feeling that in a game, doing good has less merit unless there’s temptation to do evil, and that evil paths should be more materially rewarding).

DG wrote The Dawn Will Come with some help from PW and Karin Weekes. It was the first song he wrote. Trevor Morris sent him the tune and he listened to it many times and wrote out the lyrics. PW and KW helped him make it “less awkward and cringey”. “They’re very good at that”. PW is good at poetry, KW is more musical and knows more about music. “If you get something which is as ridiculous as it is memorable, it’s probably Sheryl. If you get something that’s beautiful prose, it’s probably Mary. Something in-between is probably PW.” The DAI bardsongs were written by an external party brought in specially to do so. This required a fair bit of review and revision to make sure they followed DA lore. “It’s a problem we’ve always had trying to work with third parties, they tend to think that anything that falls under the umbrella of ‘medieval fantasy’ would fit in DA”. (Here DG groaned a bit thinking about Orson Scott Card.)

On the Grand Oak and co: “After I finished writing this I totally regretted it. It’s a big dialogue and there’s a lot involved in this quest. Do you know how hard it is to make somebody rhyme in a way that’s not completely cringey for the entire dialogue? I was three quarters into it and I so wanted to stop but I was past the point of no return. But I did it! And it worked out.” The Grand Oak should have been a LotR-style ent-like being in terms of animations and presence. When DG sees the Oak’s stationary pose he’s reminded of Silence of the Lambs. When he finished the Grand Oak and hermit quest he was like “I make way more trouble for myself than I should”. The Hermit cycles through random animations outside of conversation because he’s supposed to be twitchy and weird.

The haunted empty camp side encounter was a pain for the tech designers to make work because there’s no NPC to talk to. It was a pain whenever companions had to offer critical information like in these sorts of parts in fact, as they had to write 9 versions of each ‘line’ (1 for each companion).

There are certain spells/abilities in D&D that can make a GM’s life frustrating, such as teleportation, telling the future, resurrection. The fact that death is not permanent, for instance, should be a huge thing that affects society and how the people in it view death. This is why they were thinking stuff like “If every low-level mage in the setting had a skill like ‘Charm Person’, what would non-mages make of that?” This ties back to discussions in previous part/s where there are lore rules like no teleportation. DA was originally envisioned as a low-magic setting, but this didn’t last long [this subject is also covered in previous part/s]. The rules of magic didn’t really change though, they just weren’t really communicated that well to the other teams in the early days. They slowly realized that it was incumbent on the design team to explain and sell to the other teams the vision, not just expect them to read documentation. They were also constantly fighting against their own presuppositions of “DA is like D&D”.

Desire demons were supposed to be genderless. DG isn’t a fan of how the Fade turned out in DAO. The quests themselves were too long; they couldn’t do all the original plans they had for them so there was a lot of iteration, “then we ended up settling for something not very exciting”. Another big fight the team had was about whether they should have permanent death since DA was a more realistic world? One side’s argument was that ‘if you don’t allow for resurrection then we can’t have death in combat’. DG wondered if there was a different dichotomy they could get to but didn’t want to dictate how combat should work or tell combat designers how to do their job, as he wasn’t the one doing that work.

One of the best moves they made when working on DAI was the concept artist consulting cosplayers. This was good work not only in a fashion sense but also in that it led to making outfits for characters that someone could actually wear (contrast those with Sebastian’s outfit, which DG remembers cosplayers having trouble making functional/wearable and putting together). DG really wasn’t keen at all on Cole’s hat. When designing the clothing-clothing in DAO, the artists were trying to get the most variation for clothing out of assembling pieces. For the sake of variation they allowed pieces to go together that really shouldn’t go together. This allowed for a larger number of clothing options to be made out of a smaller number of clothing models/textures.

In Neverwinter Nights they added a “jiggle mesh” to the engine, it was used in only one place (Aribeth’s cleavage).

Writers are the first ones that jump onto a project, so when last touches and polish is being added to a game they’re often not aware of it. Once the writing is more or less locked down for a game, they start working on the next project. On every project at some point they had to have what they called the “profanity meeting”, where they decide what types of profanity exist in that world, what level of profanity they’re accepting, establishing the standard on this front, etc. This leads to fun meetings where they go through every profanity that they know and try to create new ones. “Maker’s breath!” and “Void take you!” are some of these kinds of things. They needed exclamations akin to “Goddamnit” but which made sense in this fantasy setting (“Goddamnit” implies the context of God, and the concept of damning, for example, so it doesn’t hold up) and weren’t just word substitution like “frack” instead of fuck or something.

The Grey Wardens gained their trademark blue and silver uniformed look for DA2. When the new art director Matt Goldman came on before DA2, he wanted to re-approach a number of things such as the darkspawn (mentioned in previous parts) and the Wardens. He wanted factions like the Wardens to be more uniform and easily identifiable at a distance by silhouettes and colors. He wanted factions to be more visually distinct and to introduce more color in general, as DAO was very brown and muddy. This was something of a standing mission of his when he came onto the project. He disliked the idea that there wasn’t anything unifying or distinct or ‘easily identifiable as a DAO screenshot’ about DAO screenshots, other than that brown muddiness.

Deciding how to design the Lady of the Forest was a long conversation due to the potential nsfw elements. It was a long haul to get her to look a certain way.

The thing DG found easiest/least painful to write was probably Zevran’s dialogue. He felt less pressure about it and had a bit more fun with it. Zevran has a certain story about trust that DG found pleasurable to build on; Zevran had grown up with a certain expectation of deceit and trauma, and when confronted with earnest feelings, that was the more puzzling part for [Zevran] to process. “When you expect everyone around you to deceive you, you’re kinda like, okay, this is life. But then to figure out, ‘oh, I guess it doesn’t need to be that way’, well how do you even... not?” DG remembers straight male players complaining on the forum after accepting Zevran’s massage tent-invite and not clocking that that was an invite of a certain nature. Overall Zevran was a more relaxed piece of writing for him. Shale came later but writing Shale was also a lot of fun. Like HK-47, “you can string together a few quirks that you find amusing and people will still treat that like a character and love it”.

In DA2 there was an entire subplot centered around the Carta and Varric. It spanned all three Acts. Mary Kirby had written it to completion and it was good. DG had to tell her it was among the cuts they needed to do because it was written a bit later relative to other stuff and because cutting it offered the most return according to the schedule and resources/subsequent downstream work. In cases like these they sometimes take the cut plotbeats and put it in a ‘box’, in the hopes that they may be able to use it for DLC or something later on. In practise this doesn’t happen very often at all. On DAO it did happen once with Shale. Shale was cut from DAO and had to be moved to become Day 1 DLC. Work on Shale therefore took place after most of the game had been finished. If they hadn’t done this, she would have been cut completely. It also sort of happened on DAO with Loghain. It originally had a whole plotline in Denerim involving him which had the player figuring out his background, motivations and interacting more with Anora. All of that got cut (requiring the cutscenes mentioned at the start of this post being added), and this is where the idea came of writing a novel (The Stolen Throne). This occurred in the period when the game had been delayed and DG particularly regretted that particular cut. He thought, “I could take this story that you were going to learn about the history of Loghain and his relationship with Cailan, and rescue it in a way.” [source]

[Part 1]

[Part 2]

[Part 3]

[Part 5]

[Part 6]

[‘Insights into DA dev from the Gamers For Groceries stream’ transcript]

#dragon age #bioware #video games #cole #spirit boy

70 notes · View notes

kingstylesdaily · 4 years

Text

Harry Styles’ “Adore You” Is Everything a Music Video Should Be (Including Underappreciated by The VMAs)

youtube

KSD NOTE: there is a mention of suicide in regards to the beginning of Adore You.

On November 18, 2019, a website promoting a mysterious place called Eroda (“No Land Quite Like It”) arrived on the internet. Two days later, the official Twitter account for this fictional frown-shaped island began teasing local seaside attractions. You may have missed it, depending on which corners of the internet you choose to lurk, but not if you were a Harry Styles fan, a group that went into pure overdrive trying to figure out what it all meant.

I, for one, missed it at the time. I was unaware this account was cryptically quote tweeting fans as they tried to piece together what was happening, what it meant, and what it could be connected to (Greek Mythology and Lost were a couple of theories posed in comments, Twitter threads, and Reddit). Meanwhile, the Columbia Records marketing department had been hard at work for months, devising this specific and highly-detailed campaign around the music video for Styles’ second single, “Adore You” from his second solo album, Fine Line, ever since he shot the video in Scotland in August 2019 (Eroda = Adore backwards — clever!).

But it was all leading up to the morning of Friday, December 6 when the video was released, one week before the full-length album arrived. Up until that point, I had never seen an entire Harry Styles music video, but what happened next was inevitable. Somehow, as a self-proclaimed boy band scholar, I had never paid much attention to One Direction. I kept a distant eye on Styles since they disbanded, intrigued by the decisions he was making in his solo career. But I hadn’t yet realized I’d been in the ring all throughout the fall of 2019, fighting to resist the inevitable fascination that awaited. First came the jab of Rob Sheffield’s Rolling Stone profile, followed by the cross of “Lights Up”, a song that cracked my Top 20 most listened to songs of the year despite being released just two months before Spotify so thoughtfully compiled that personalized playlist. Then there was the hook of his SNL hosting stint in November (and bless you Bowen Yang for that Sara Lee sketch), which then leads us to the “Adore You” video, the uppercut and ultimate TKO. I surrendered in what felt like a near instant. I was now a Harry Styles fan. (If we’re following this analogy, I sat up to spit out some blood after seeing that cover of “Juice” before my head quickly hit the mat again with a loud thud).

Maybe it’s not quite remarkable that I took time out of a Friday morning to watch a music video, but that I sat at my desk, in an office, with other people around (back when we did those kinds of things) and proceeded to wipe away a few tiny tears from under my eyes by the end of it, was an experience I had not been through… maybe ever? In a world of lyric videos and TikToks, actual, thoughtful, impactful music videos with a full (and sweet!) story are about as rare as a glowing and growing fish these days.

Ultimately, “Adore You” does everything a music video should do. In nearly eight minutes, this video uses excellent visual effects in a cool and interesting way, tells a compelling and heartfelt story, is anchored by an irresistible leading man and an adorable sidekick, is backed up by the catchiest song you could ever dream of, and culminates with a touching and hopeful ending. It’s a treat for the eyes and the ears and the soul. It’s innovative and the kind of thing that begs you to watch it more than once to catch all the details (and yes, I do tear up every time).

So one would think that an award show with the specific purpose of celebrating this type of creativity would be extra sure to nominate such a charming and effective clip, but alas, “Adore You” was overlooked in the MTV Video Music Awards main categories this year. Of course, some could argue that that fact only adds to the video’s credibility but I’ll do my best to not be that petty as I’m still rooting for it to win in the three technical categories where it picked up nominations: Best Visual Effects by Mathematic, Best Art Direction by Laura Ellis Cricks, and Best Direction by Dave Meyers, who remains one of the most inventive and influential directors of all time and whose videos with artists such as Missy Elliot, Pink, and Kendrick Lamar have been racking up nominations for nearly 20 years now. He also saw four other videos he directed get recognized this year: Normani’s “Motivation” (Best Chorography), Travis Scott’s “Highest in the Room” (Best Hop Hop and Best Visual Effects), Anderson .Paak’s “Lockdown” (Video For Good), and Camila Cabello feat. DaBaby’s “My Oh My” (Best Cinematography).

But I reached out to Meyers to specifically ask about the intricate details of “Adore You” and how it all came to be; how he captured such a vibe with the overcast and dreary weather, mixed so wonderfully with the charming oddities of the people that make up this world of Eroda. In addition to directing the video, he also co-wrote the story with Chris Shafer and said, “It’s the first idea that popped to mind after the first listen to the song, and the first idea I pitched to Harry. It was a story that underscored my understanding of what Harry stood for and felt it was necessary to tell it as a narrative to convey his optimism.”

The extended version of the video starts with a two-and-a-half-minute introduction to the world of Eroda, narrated by Rosalia. This includes the “peculiar” people and their professions on the island, meeting The Boy (Styles) and his glowing smile that most people try to avoid, and the quirky superstitions these people continue to live by. “It all served a purpose,” Meyers said of the details. “The superstitions were a set up for how society generally reacts to different things. They fear change or oddity, even if it’s what’s best for them.”

Meyers, however, did not share in that fear, as much of this video provided for interesting and new opportunities he had yet to experience throughout his decades-long career, which he listed off: ”Compelling narrative, CG character, remote location, Scottish crew (nothing phased them),” also noting that all of the other characters in the video were locals as well. So perhaps they were less fazed by the atmosphere across the four-day shoot in Scotland, but as Meyers recalled, the “weather was nuts. It rained every 20 minutes, then the sun, then cloud over.”

However, it’s likely that Mother Nature is also a Styles fan, as Meyers recalled, “I seem to remember going up on the hill for Harry’s picnic with the fish and being worried that it was so gloomy. By the time we came to shoot, the sun came out. And then the sun went away as soon as the scene was over. Similarly, we had the worst storm when Harry was contemplating suicide at the start. Pouring rain, drenching him. So I guess in that sense it was fun watching how Scotland provided a backdrop for the emotions we were after.”

And hey, at least they had the weather on their side to add to the mood while shooting the video, as one of their main characters, well, didn’t exist. “It was very odd shooting with no fish,” Meyers admitted. “But was quite rewarding later seeing it dropped in and making empathic sense to the story we were after.”

Of course, the main character they did have on hand is an awfully useful and appealing one at that. Fans became enamored with the moment Styles uses the back of his hand to check the temperature of a coffee pot before dumping the fish inside the water so it could stay alive. I asked Meyers about this particular moment and he said, “The problem we had was apparent when Harry ran in and threw the fish in the pot. We all sorta felt — well, what if it was hot? So I believe Harry improvised that as a solution and we felt it was perfect for the character’s sensitivity and consideration for this poor fish.” And that’s not the only nice thing he does for his fish friend — he also serves him a tiny taco! “The taco was a whimsical way to express friendship between Harry and the fish,” Meyers offered. It looked pretty tasty, too.

The entire video serves as a showcase for what Styles does best and what makes him such a unique artist: his music, his acting, and his charisma, which Meyers knew would offer him a lot to work with. “Harry is a leading man. I felt that from my first meeting and wanted to play with his wonderful range of emotions. So finding a story with a real character arc was part of my focus in building this world.” Meyers described working on “Adore You” as an “all-around memorable shoot: awesome location, lovely Harry, compelling story, great effects, and… it worked.”

It did. And it was a risk: a video this complex and detailed (and one has to assume, costly), attached to a marketing campaign that proved to be even more involved, still came with no guarantee that the fans wouldn’t shrug it off. But as Manos Xanthogeorgis, SVP of Digital Marketing & Media at Columbia Records told Billboard last year, “When you have a video and a piece of art at such a level, it’s an incredible challenge for the rest of the team to build a campaign at that same level of artistry and creativity.” Oh, and that was only step one, as the marketing team engaged in “real-time marketing” with fans online, ensuring they would continue to remain engaged by dropping clues and clips in the lead-up to the video premiere and subsequently the album. “This whole campaign was around mystery and sometimes mystery is more powerful than knowledge,” Xanthogeorgis said. The Twitter handle has remained active throughout 2020, used as a continual marketing tool for Styles’ next videos including the Meyers-directed “Falling” and this summer’s hit, “Watermelon Sugar.”

With that kind of fan engagement, “Adore You” seemed like a no-brainer for the fan-voted categories of the VMAs this year, as they surely would’ve turned out to vote just as feverishly for this video as they did when searching for clues (about a made-up island, at that!). But hey, maybe MTV was just not interested in massive fan engagement this year — after all, it’s not like everything Styles does, including growing freakin’ facial hair, has the internet in a tizzy for weeks. Ultimately, as the impact of music videos (and certainly the ceremony celebrating them) continues to lose relevance, the disregard of this specific project simply feels like a missed opportunity to acknowledge a rare achievement in the art form.

While Meyers was sure to describe his inclusion in the VMA nominations this year as “lovely and flattering” (and he better have a moonperson in his possession this time next week, MTV!) it’s still puzzling why “Adore You” wouldn’t be included in the big categories, considering Styles is squarely within their demo, at the very least. That “Adore You” is also a technical and storytelling masterpiece, as well as a full moment that was used as inspiration both for the experience online and in-person at the Fine Line Spotify listening party last December, that also comes packed with one of the most enthusiastic groups of fans around, well, that should have had the entire network drooling.

Of course, some of this can simply be chalked up to a perfect storm. As far as his singles go, “Lights Up” was a nice appetizer, but “Adore You” remains the delicious entree (you already know what’s for dessert). “Adore You” is a perfect pop record if I’ve ever heard one (and I have) and deserved a special video. A Chris Isaak “Wicked Game” sexy vibe wasn’t going to work here. The song tells the story of such passionate, pure, and heartachingly naive and innocent love that it almost had to be directed toward a non-human being. Instead, Styles chose to inject those same carefree, sweaty, sticky, delicious, whimsical beach vibes into the “Watermelon Sugar” clip, which was the right choice, and not just for the summertime season (MTV has since added the Song of Summer category to the VMAs and included “Watermelon Sugar”).

But it’s “Adore You” that has melodies that bring a smile to the faces of babies, get your toes tapping even when you hear it in the dentist’s chair, and likely has my neighbors rolling their eyes when I sing along to it in the shower. The song is so simple it’s deep, a theme reflected in the video, as is the central reminder to help and care for others, a thoroughly 2020 message.

However, not all is lost. Both “Adore You” and “Watermelon Sugar” continue to rack up major spins at radio with the latter hitting number one on the Billboard charts earlier this month. Grammy voting kicks off at the end of September and Academy members should take note. Not only is Fine Line more than worthy of being acknowledged, but having Styles on hand to potentially collect trophies and perform is in your best interest when it comes to viewers and online chatter. Do not wait to take him seriously. This is the album, this is the time. Prove that you aren’t a bunch of stodgy old white men who think he’s just for teen (and um, thirty-something) girls, but that you understand the music he enjoys, is inspired by, and subsequently makes, is the same rock music you appreciate as well. An artist like Styles can be both of those things at the same time, and really, the best of both worlds. Give the album a listen, and then one more to let it all sink in. If you have not yet succumbed to the force that is Harry Styles fandom, I truly can’t recommend it enough — and please know that it will get you eventually.

Source: Decider.com

#kingstylesdaily #Harry Styles #hs: news #hs: adore you #August 2020 #Decider

114 notes · View notes

hlupdate · 4 years

Link

I, for one, missed it at the time. I was unaware this account was cryptically quote tweeting fans as they tried to piece together what was happening, what it meant, and what it could be connected to (Greek Mythology and Lostwere a couple of theories posed in comments, Twitter threads, and Reddit). Meanwhile, the Columbia Records marketing department had been hard at work for months, devising this specific and highly-detailed campaign around the music video for Styles’ second single, “Adore You” from his second solo album, Fine Line, ever since he shot the video in Scotland in August 2019 (Eroda = Adore backwards — clever!).

But it was all leading up to the morning of Friday, December 6 when the video was released, one week before the full-length album arrived. Up until that point, I had never seen an entire Harry Styles music video, but what happened next was inevitable. Somehow, as a self-proclaimed boy band scholar, I had never paid much attention to One Direction. I kept a distant eye on Styles since they disbanded, intrigued by the decisions he was making in his solo career. But I hadn’t yet realized I’d been in the ring all throughout the fall of 2019, fighting to resist the inevitable fascination that awaited. First came the jab of Rob Sheffield’s Rolling Stoneprofile, followed by the cross of “Lights Up”, a song that cracked my Top 20 most listened to songs of the year despite being released just two months before Spotify so thoughtfully compiled that personalized playlist. Then there was the hook of his SNL hosting stint in November (and bless you Bowen Yang for that Sara Lee sketch), which then leads us to the “Adore You” video, the uppercut and ultimate TKO. I surrendered in what felt like a near instant. I was now a Harry Styles fan. (If we’re following this analogy, I sat up to spit out some blood after seeing that cover of “Juice” before my head quickly hit the mat again with a loud thud).

Meyers, however, did not share in that fear, as much of this video provided for interesting and new opportunities he had yet to experience throughout his decades-long career, which he listed off: ”Compelling narrative, CG character, remote location, Scottish crew (nothing fazed them),” also noting that all of the other characters in the video were locals as well. So perhaps they were less fazed by the atmosphere across the four-day shoot in Scotland, but as Meyers recalled, the “weather was nuts. It rained every 20 minutes, then the sun, then cloud over.”

#harry styles #articles #270820 #tw suicide mention

112 notes · View notes

banhchao · 3 years

Note

omg that blackpink self insert vid you recommend in the tag!! while i'm aware idols images are essentially marketing tools (idk how to word it sorry 🤧😗, it never crossed my mind that it also has smtg to do with fans using them as OC material lolol

hi anon! i just got off of work lol so i’m ready for dive into this ask! thanks for sending hehe ~

i’m not sure if you have already watched the video but i’ll mention some brief points i-spy made that sorta stuck out to me as they explained the “blackpink as a self-insert character” phenomenon. you explained it perfectly; idol images are carefully crafted and curated marketing tools to sell the idea of their “persona” and “tropes”. members follow specific aesthetics, behaviours, styles etc. to fit their persona, most likely hiding their complete true selves (as all human beings really are incredibly nuanced and complex) and selling these “characters” along with the music. as we see idols as characters most of the time (as this is what we are usually shown) it’s not surprising that fans fall into the phenomenon of projecting themselves onto idols and turning them into self-inserts and their own personal Y/Ns, Lisa being notably the most popular for girls, Jimin from BTS for men & Jungkook from BTS as the most famous love-interest insert (hence the popularity of the liskook & jikook ships). fans will choose either the idols with the persona they want to be or relate to most as their self-insert.

funny confession: when i was 12 years old, i was guilty of this self-insert phenomenon! i used to write fanfic of snsd & 2pm (lol old stuff) where jessica jung was my personal self-insert & yuri & tiffany were inserts of my two closest friends. at the time, i related to jessica a lot as her persona was “ice princess”; someone cold, violent, standoffish, hot-tempered. i was a particularly aggressive person (i still am tbh lol) so i channeled her as me & wrote the story loosely based on my own life events. it’s interesting because it wasn’t as if i couldn’t write my own OCs; it was that i was attracted to jessica’s looks & personality & was able to curate a life that was like mine but much more interesting & exciting. 12 years old was actually one of the best years of my life lol so it wasn’t a factor of feeling lonely and unsatisfied but reveling in the bond i had with my friends thru the vessel of kpop. it was really just me being young and aspiring to be like these idols who i looked up to and saw as my role models (i still love snsd with my whole heart lol).

nowadays, Lisa is the most popular self-insert option especially for international fans; she’s pretty, thin and conventionally attractive, she’s foreign in Korea thus seen as “exotic” (from other’s pov not mine lol... exotic is not a compliment tho many believe it is), she’s talented, she’s branded as the group’s personal badass (and who wouldn’t want that?) thru the use of aesthetics from black culture (we will not dive into this tho lol) whilst simultaneously using her aegyo on variety shows (multi-faceted) and yet she’s quite a private person despite her popularity (as we can see from her instagram, everything is very vague). she’s the perfect self-insert for international fans; pretty & skinny, foreign in korea like them, a “badass”, private and mysterious and naturally gifted, hardworking and talented, wears nice clothes and presents visually-appealing aesthetics so they are able to project whatever they want onto her. she’s the main character - in the end she will get the guy (or girl), win the competition, solve the mystery etc. hell, if Lisa were an idol when I was 12 I probably would have used her as my self-insert cause she’s also se Asian lol. and it doesn’t stop at Lisa or even blackpink; we know so little of idols’ actual selves and only of what they share, all of which is pre-curated as marketing tools that they are perfect character material. in blackpink’s case we can actually pinpoint why their stans can be quite... obsessive and protective lol; as they see the girls as themselves, any sort of criticism is seen as an attack on themselves.

main character syndrome is actually something i’ve been watching videos on lol where basically ppl aspire to take on a mindset of being the “main character” of their own story or film so as to take control of their lives and live their lives to the fullest. it has its pros and has its cons but relatively it’s harmless so long as it’s not taken too seriously or deeply (cause that can breed into selfishness and narcissism lol). as nowadays we have become invested in being the “main character” or “y/n” and start applying these tropes to ourselves whether it be thru labels, fashion, aesthetics or activities we do to build up our main character profiles... it’s no surprise that with Kpop idols being at our disposal with carefully crafted personas in place, fans will project onto them and use them as self-inserts as a form of escapism when life is feeling mundane, dull and not worthy of the “main character” title.

i-spy mentions that this is most likely to happen when ppl feel lonely and unsatisfied with their lives that they can escape and take form in the idols they look up to. young girls are especially vulnerable as they are more subject to developing insecurities growing up. if they can’t be the conventionally attractive confident badass in real life, they can be lisa who’s persona encapsulates that. much of my life, I’ve been... empty and unsatisfied lol (sometimes I still am) so I understand these ppl’s attraction to projecting on idols. I think so long as it’s not too deep or taken too seriously, doing so (especially for young girls) won’t cause any harm and may actually direct their paths in life. these idols are like... their vessel into discovering themselves - what they like, don’t like etc. the reason why many ppl write fanfic or participate in role plays is because they admire qualities in these ppl and find them to be the perfect characters as they are still figuring out themselves and what they want in a significant other. i think so long as ppl acknowledge the bigger picture as they embark on these journeys & don’t sink too deeply as to lose their identities or deepen any insecurities (or fall into toxic behaviours or unhealthy habits), I think self-inserts are relatively harmless. it’s only when ppl aspire to be these idols (who are not even themselves really) and latch onto unhealthy practices to look like them, act like them etc. that self-insert behaviour becomes dangerous.

anyways idk why i went on a tangent lol but thanks for the ask! blackpink is quite fascinating especially it’s grasp on its fans.

here is the video if you guys haven’t checked it out! (ED MENTION TW)

youtube

#ed mention #reply

4 notes · View notes

stylesnews · 4 years

Link

Meyers, however, did not share in that fear, as much of this video provided for interesting and new opportunities he had yet to experience throughout his decades-long career, which he listed off: ”Compelling narrative, CG character, remote location, Scottish crew (nothing fazed them),” also noting that all of the other characters in the video were locals as well. So perhaps they were less fazed by the atmosphere across the four-day shoot in Scotland, but as Meyers recalled, the “weather was nuts. It rained every 20 minutes, then the sun, then cloud over.”

#harry styles #aug20 #adore you #decider #suicide tw

64 notes · View notes

codenamesazanka · 4 years

Text

A meta about Dabi! I surprise myself; but HUGE DISCLAIMER: Dabi is still not a favorite character at all, and I am biased as hell. This is my interpretation of events. I will not be reading his behavior as if he is without doubt Touya Todoroki - that’s not at all confirmed - and so I will be less sympathetic due to not coming from that perspective. Also, extremely long meta.

First up: I’ll take Dabi for his word that he doesn’t gave a crap about the League.

I’m not saying he absolutely does not have a single milligram of care for the League - he does seem to rely on and intend for them to provide support for his goal; but he’s very much detached from everyone else, and haven’t demonstrated much empathy for any member of the League. Not quite part of the ‘Found Family’.

It’s very possible that he could be lying, trying look tough in front of the Hero.

But the evidence from the past chapters kinda shows that he means his words. Here’s him burning away Twice clones and barely avoid hitting Real!Twice:

“He never actually hit Twice,” “He had no choice cuz Hawks was right there,’ ‘He knew those aren’t the real Twice, and what do you expect? He’s a villain, and he expects his teammates to take care of themselves.”(*1)

All fair! Still, I’ll say this attack is pretty careless; and moreover, it took away some of their much needed manpower. Two Twice clones could’ve created four more Twices and so on; and at the very least might have interfered with Hawks targeting the real Twice.

And here’s him attacking Hawks in a way that would’ve burned Twice badly.

Images are out of order, my apologies, but these panels show that 1) Dabi had really intended to hit Hawks (and Twice), what with him being shocked that Hawks had been able to evade the attack; 2) Dabi’s fire output was very strong, and so 3) as Hawks points out, he nearly burned up Twice.

Even if he thought that Hawks would protect Twice, that’s still quite a risky move that would’ve badly injure a fellow League Member.

Here’s a comparison of Dabi and Mr. Compress during the battle in Deika:

In the first image, after Mr. Compress ask for help, Dabi dismisses him. Sure, he does point out the Twice clones shortly after, but it cold enough that Mr. Compress even asks, ‘Are you so unfeeling?!’.

Meanwhile, when it’s Dabi in danger, Mr. Compress is concerned for him, wishes to help, and yeah, that ‘Poor Dabi!’

All throughout My Villain Academia, he’s been pretty rude and aloof from everyone:

Refusing to help fight Gigantomachia (to go recruit a Hero that he never trusted in the first place) when everyone is ready to eat cold dirt for a month and a half with Shigaraki.

And:

Dismissing everyone’s effort, and insulting them.

In fact, in comparison to everyone else in the League, Dabi is really lacking. We all know Twice is a total sweetheart who would do anything for the League; Spinner is canonically in love with Shigaraki explicitly stated that his goal is to help Shigaraki realize his vision (Chapter 233). Toga showed her care for Twice during the Overhaul mess (Chapter 148). And Mr. Compress, again, was worried for Dabi (Chapter 230), wanted the Doc to help Shigaraki (238), and is in general genial towards his teammates.

I think, overall, narratively in both writing and visuals, Dabi is written to be rather unlikeable to the reader (or at least neutral).

My Villain Academia is the arc where the League are the protagonists, the Point-of-View characters: we hear their thoughts, and we learn their backstories.

A huge messy image! I’m sorry! But from the silly faces, to the little actions (Mr. Compress whispering, complete with ‘psst psst’), to the asides (Mr Compress, again, “Where did you pull that phone out of?”), these give us a bit of funny moments that kinda endears the League to us. (Even Giran gets a moment or two.)

Not quite Dabi though. We get a glimpse of his thoughts at the beginning of Chapter 228 when he encounters Geten, we have some interactions with Twice that are humorous (though it’s Twice carrying out the majority of it), and... that’s it.

“What about Mr. Compress? We got no backstory.”; “What about Toga? We don’t really hear her thoughts either?” Yes to all those points, but these were made up for: as shown above, Mr. Compress having those little moments; and Toga, who already demonstrated her care for Twice in the Overhaul Arc, and we’re reminded of that directly when Twice brings out the handkerchief she gave him.

There, of course, is that moment that he goes to attack Hawks and help Twice in Chapters 264-266. Good of him, right? Heroic, even.

Except that 'rescue’ doesn’t really give it a feeling of ‘The Calvary Has Arrived!’. IMO. For one thing, he almost burned Twice. For another, the reaction from Twice is more desperate than relief or joy. Compare with Toga and Mr. Compress’s clear utter joy at being saved by Twice.

(And no could forget those amazing spreads of Twice overcoming his trauma and unleashing Sad Man’s Parade? Those evokes such a feeling of “THE CALVARY IS HERE”, omg. Dabi’s flame entrance is not quite. *To me* )

I would even go as far to say as Dabi is being portrayed as a possible “third party” antagonist.

Yes, the League are already the main antagonists in the overall story, but they’re quite sympathetic-- Dabi, in relation to the League, although being a member, is the odd one out in many aspects.

I think the recent chapters with Twice and Hawks and Dabi illustrates this really well-- Because we go from [Twice vs Hawks] with Hawks as the POV ‘bad guy’; and now we have [Hawks vs Dabi], Dabi as the bad guy. The story writing and the art shifts immediately to portray that, aimed at directing our empathy, at the character Horikoshi wants us to root for.

In Chapter 264 and 265, no doubt we’re to root for Twice. All those flashbacks! Him cowering on the ground. His heart breaking because he trusted Hawks. We feel for him. And so Hawks is portrayed as the ‘Villain’-- but not completely.

For Hawks, we go from dark and menacing, him being looming and scary...then immediately move to seeing Hawks expression of remorse. Horikoshi wants us to understand Hawks is conflicted. And he’s not doing this for fun. And finally, they’re shown as equals in the fight: Twice and Hawk’s faces aligned at even levels.

Chapter 266, we finally have the three together. Most definitely, Dabi is on Twice’s side - but like I said, it’s not actually showing Dabi as a reliable backup.

Then we get to Chapter 267. We first start off with that cute image if the Fataxi. It’s adorable. Then Tokoyami notices the flames, the flying, putting two and two together. This positions them as sorta the main focus. We’re back in the Heroes’ POV.

Moving onto the fight, I do sense anger from Dabi: the flames, the stomping, the stomping flames. But it’s more portrayed as manic, sadistic anger, instead of grief, vengeful anger. And that smile!

It’s a true villain smile. The stretching of the corners of the mouth, and the way the eyes are curved. Joyful smiles tightens up the eyes. And sure, you can have a contradictory smile while angry and in grief, a grimace, but there’s other things to cue at that - tears, sweat drops, the eyes again - usually big and triangular.

Do I think it’s possible he’s smiling contradictory? That he’s feeling real sadness and anger at Twice’s death? Yeah, it’s possible. But it’s also possible he isn’t - and I feel that’s the more likely option, given all he says about Twice being useful and about Stain’s philosophy (*remember Stain didn’t like Shigaraki! he didn’t like Villains either. He was going to purge the world of both.)

Anyways, Hawks is right there, on the ground, trying to shield himself. It’s a pitiful look. He’s clearly drawn as the victim we’re to emphasize with, because this doesn’t look like a fight between equals. Just one guy playing with the other, having the ability to incinerate him immediately, but dragging it out.

(True, Dabi’s a villain, and-- “Didn’t Shigaraki do the same thing? With Overhaul? Dude chopped off limbs and laughed.” Yes! Absolutely. But Chapter 160 was from the League’s POV, and everything about it was to position the League as winners, badasses, ‘The Next’.)

(My god, we even get a Baby Hawks flashback for us to fawn over.)

Here, it’s Hawk’s POV and Dabi is full Villain imagery. Hawks has to looking up from a protective pose - at a very menacing Dabi, looming over, stepping on him. The panels with the outside fighting and the city, linked with Dabi smiling - that’s classic {‘I’m going to target and hurt the world’ evil mastermind monologue, insert evil laughter}.

Once Tokoyami enters the scene, there’s no more argument. A likeable Hero student? Arriving to protect his mentor? He’s the clear Hero we’re to cheer for, against Dabi, (who we never even get to bond with during MVA... unlike Twice).

All in All, Dabi rejects the Heroes... and he also rejects the League.

The thing that confuses me most about this whole arc so far is “Why the fuck did Dabi recruit Hawks?” He said he knew Hawks was lying from the start, but he still let a Hero into the club. Moreover, if Dabi noticed and knew enough to guess where Twice and Hawks is the moment the Hero attack started; if he knew enough to even think “This isn’t your fault, Twice,” then why didn’t Dabi do anything sooner?

We don’t know his specific goal yet. Did Hawks factor into it in an important way? He’s willing to kill Hawks right now. It could be that Hawks, by now, is more dangerous than he is worth as a trap for the heroes, say, so it’s time to cut some losses.

But Hawks had pretty much only brought bad luck for Villains: Made Endeavor look good; found out about the MLA and discovered their plot; discovered the hospital; set up this attack. None of it furthers Dabi’s stated goal to Kill All Heroes, and none of it helps the League either.

Until we get his gameplan, I can honestly regard him as dumb. What is this series of events???

(Even if the other League Members were to be dumb and fuck up like Dabi, we know they did it with good intentions for Shigaraki, for the League.

Toga, doing risky things: Literally said, “I’m sure [retrieving Deku’s blood, betraying the Hassaikai] will make Tomura happy.”

Twice, the sweetheart: recruited Overhaul cuz he thought he was a good guy. Befriended Hawks because he thought Hawks believed in the cause.

Mr. Compress: Kinda ruined the ‘kidnap Bakugou’ thing; but since then he hasn’t done anything. And we’re sure of his sincerity because: Lost an arm, still stayed with the League, fought for a month+ with a broken prosthetic.

Spinner: Was a Stain fanboy, but has stopped.)

“This isn’t your fault, Twice,” and it’s true. It’s not Twice’s fault at all. It’s Dabi’s. The blame has to be on Dabi.

So. Dabi. Looking more and more to be on neither side, and now having wronged both. What’s gonna happen to him?

Not sure, but I’ve got a theory he might actually be killed by Shigaraki, to develop Shigaraki and the League. But that’s for another post.

(*1) “...what do you expect? He’s a villain, and he expects his teammates to take care of themselves.” Also true. And I am aware that Shigaraki did the same thing when he decayed that tower no knowing whether Giran got rescued yet or not, so there was some callousness there. But consider: one guy had been so sleep-deprived for one and a half months that he had hallucinated slightly and was wobbling with each movement; and the other has not.

All this is my opinion and impressions. Sorry if it’s unclear at points. Thanks for reading!!!!! And thank you so much to friends that helped me brainstorm and discuss this! Your contributions are invaluable.

#Dabi #League of Villains #bnha #mha #meta #nalslastworkingbraincell

116 notes · View notes